Highlights from 2006

Last year was supposedly just as long as any other non-leap year, but it seemed to zoom by like it was nothing. Sigh...they don't make years like they used to. Not meaning to say it as an uneventful year, of course. Here are some of the highlights of my life from 2006, in no particular order:

• After a couple of false starts, I finally got my first real job here at NCR Cebu in September, and I am happy enough with it so far. "Software development engineer", my title is. It is not perfect, but I will consider myself fortunate to have found a job in Cebu doing stuff that I'm good at and earning a relatively good salary.
• Along with getting a job at NCR Cebu, of course, I had to move to Cebu (though I still consider Valencia my home base). With that comes all sorts of adventures, like familiarizing with the city layout and jeepney routes, getting used to riding the bus/boat for weekend trips to home, being financially independent, and paying my own bills for water, electricity, cable, and rent.
• I turned 21 in April. Make no mistake, 18 is the adulthood age that really matters for all practical purposes in the Philippines, but 21 feels like the age that I can no longer keep pretending that by some obscure technicality I can still be considered a kid.
• I took the Civil Service Professional Exam in April. They say a lot of people take the exam and a large majority of them fail. I took it not really because I want to work in government, but because passing the exam would look good on my resume. Well, this indeed does look good, as I ended up placing 2nd in the Region VII. :)
• Last year's resolution was to get me some exercise, and I was actually able to sustain that habit for a few months. This culminated with me running the 5K in the Milo Marathon-- just for fun-- and finishing in about 28 minutes. Not bad. :)
• I got to take a sweet weekend vacation in Bantayan Island, a small island off the northern tip of Cebu. Beautiful place, beautiful beach, beautiful water. This brings my total number of visited Philippine islands to 7, with 7000 more to go.
• I got myself a Nintendo DS in late October, and there has not been a single day since then that it has been left unplayed. My video game life has been mellow these past few years, but the DS's touch screen unearths all new realms of gaming bliss.

I'm sure there are some milestones I'm forgetting, but those are the bullet points of 2006 I can remember off the top of my head.