Preparation the Day Before New Year: Buying Cake, Ingredients, and Fruits, and My First HPUD of the Year

Happy New Year! Cheers for 2024 ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ.

How did you celebrate the New Year? Are you with the family? With friends? Or with both? Maybe with your partner? Or did you celebrate it alone? But whether you're with someone or not, I hope you also had a great start of the year, I hope you put a smile on your face during the celebration, and I hope that you only have tears of joy and not because of sadness ⁽⁽ଘ( ˊᵕˋ )ଓ⁾⁾.

We had a blast last night, although our ears were almost blasted because of too much noise. What's annoying is that they really stopped in front of our house and started honking like crazy. The noise from their motorcycle engines was everywhere, from left to right. One of our dogs is really shaking because of that and the fireworks. So to ease it up a bit, I played a soft song using Mom's speaker, and I closed all the windows and the door. But how's your pet, guys? I hope they are okay.

Anyhow, let me share with you our little preparation for the New Year. We are all busy early in the morning because we really just want to finish everything so that we can just chill once everything settles down. And, because it is just us again, minus my Mama Ading because she's having her vacation in Romblon, we didn't prepare that much. Just the same preparation as during Christmas.

At 7:30 am, we visit the nearby cake shop in front of our store. It's really just close - just a few steps away. And this time, Mommy F accompanied me because she suggested that we should use her senior citizen benefits. Like you know, even 5% discount is really a big help to us. So, of course, I agreed immediately. So yeah, it's called bread and butter. They are also on par with some well-known bakery shops in the Philippines and much cheaper too. Well, for me, I'm not sure about the other, but we love their cake, so it's a good shop for me.

So here they are, they are already preparing our cake. We will also bring it home because, as Mom said, we have a fridge, so we can just put that in there. At least I don't have to come back later just to get it. And they really have this thing where they will take pictures of those who buy their cake. I don't like that, so it's a good thing that Mom is with me because she gladly let them take a picture of her. And I am saved, thanks heaven, lol.

Here's the cake and the new balloon I got. Now I have two of them, haha. And moms also requested to get their pictures with this, so as a wannabe photographer, I oblige ⟵(๑¯◡¯๑). Just look how happy and beautiful their smiles are in this photo. It is just perfect ⁽⁽ଘ( ˊᵕˋ )ଓ⁾⁾.

After getting our cake, we headed to the market. Just look how busy the people are on this part. Going inside is kind of hard, we need to walk side by side so that we can fit in. This is surely a feast for the sellers here. I already wrote down those ingredients that we need, so we go to our next stop, which is the meat section.

It's busy in here too, look at the meat and fish section. We can't even move freely, and I feel like suffocating in there. But no choice, we need pork meat, so we just look around and search for a better-looking meat, you know, like the newly butcher one. You can find that here, but you can also find the old one, which is the one that didn't sell the other day.

After buying a one and a half kilo of pork and one fourth of liver, we then walk to the other side of the market, it is where the "Tiangge-an" is located. And these are the products that you can see here. There's a lot of fruit, there's kakanin, or rice cakes, and veggies too. There's a lot of choice, so you can choose and pick whatever you want.

You really need a lot of patience here, because there's a lot of people and some are just short of people to entertain all the customers. But we have that, so it's not a problem for us. And we can actually take our time choosing the product we want, so it's okay.

What we need are potatoes, carrots, and bell peppers, so we look around first, asking for their prices and also checking the product quality. You see, there's a good-quality product in here too, but it's cheap in price. You really just have to be good at choosing and fast too, lol.

Mom doesn't really have a plan to get fruits, but after getting all the veggies we need and there's still some money left, she decided to pick three apples and three oranges, just the small ones.

We stay longer in the "Tiangge-an" because we want the best ingredients for our dish later. So walking around for a long time in here was all worth it because we know we got the best quality ingredients for our caldereta and batchoy. It's batchoy tagalog, by the way, not the soupy one.

It's a tiring morning, to be honest. I carry it all and just let Mommy D carry the product with a light weight. After getting all the ingredients we needed, we proceeded to go home. I really, really want to go home that time because staying in there longer is kind of suffocating, and it's hot even though there's a few big fan on each side. Still, that's not enough.

And that's what happens the day before the New Year. How about your guys?

It's awesome because we're celebrating the New Year and, at the same time, we have Power Up Day too. Have you already powered up?

So I just powered up 14 Hive this morning. Thanks to that, I have 2600+ HP now. I earned a total of 241 HP, and that's also thanks for doing HPUM. Unfortunately, I missed one day on my HPUM. I don't know what happened or why I missed it. I always got a reminder from my phone, but I still missed one. It's sad because I couldn't complete that HPUM. So there is no badge for me for December 2023. Aigoooo!

But anyway, here's my account's progress so far. I made 21 articles last month, and I also made 603 comments, which is not bad - at least I still made a lot. You can see the rest in the screenshot. As for new subscribers, I have 13 new friends. Really low compared to last November. I need to engage more if I want it to grow. As for my savings of HBD, I didn't put any on it aside from the interest I got last week. I now have 145 HBD, I should've had more in there, but, you know, we celebrated Christmas and New Year, and I had to use some of my earnings. I'm happy to say that I put it to good use.

So, that's it. I hope you also had good progress in your account (◍•ᴗ•◍).