Tuna melt on regular monay bread

"Monay" is a popular bread in the country. It has several if not so many variants including the size of the monay. It can be a small piece or a whole loaf that can be sliced like the regular bread used for sandwiches. You can buy the large monay loaves (usually sliced) in supermarkets, groceries or bakeries. The bread can be soft on the sweet side or it can be hard/firm and on the neutral side as breads go. I tried the monay to make a tuna melt sandwich for my daughter and the result was good.

Monay slices in the toaster oven with the usual tuna flakes and cheese slice. One slice has butter on it.

The slices out of the oven and before I bring them together.

Tuna melt sandwich for breakfast and baon.

I got the monay loaf from a bakery near the site of a project we are working on somewhere in Balintawak. I like checking out the local tinapayan (bakery) wherever I go; when it is possible.

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My badminton rackets

I previously posted about my tennis rackets - a Wilson Pro Staff and a Wilson Sledge Hammer. This time I thought I will write about my badminton rackets. I've been into racket sports since the late 1980s. I learned to play badminton, the street variety that had no nets before I learned to play tennis. I learned to play tennis before I pingpong despite a close buddy who played good pingpong when we were in high school. Tennis I learned from my father and his friends and as one of my PE's at university. But badminton was easy to learn as a recreational sport you played in the streets of our village in the 1980s. One of my cousins taught me to hit the shuttlecock then but it was later in the early 2000's when I started playing more seriously but more for health and wellness than to compete. Here are my badminton rackets that I still use from time to time though not as frequent as before.

My two remaining rackets - a Yonex Muscle Power 80 and a Wilson Hyper Carbon 4.0

Yonex Muscle Power 80

Wilson Hyper Carbon 4.0

I used to have a third racket, a Prince, but that has been lost many years ago. It already had a damaged frame owing to a collision of rackets in one doubles match we were playing. It finally broke and I disposed of the racket.

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Pingpong and paddles

We used to play a lot of table tennis many years back. I have two table tennis rackets or paddles - one I used when playing and another on reserve that I got as an alternate but never got to play with. The one I used when playing, which is at my office, is a Friendship paddle. The reserve is from DHS or Double Happiness. I was introduced to these brands even before I got the pingpong bug during my grad school days. That was in high school when a close friend of mine was a table tennis varsity player for our school and showed me his preferred rubbers for his customized paddles.

 

Mint Double Happiness paddle inside the box and still sealed. I bought this from Chris Sports many years ago. Check out the price tag!

 

Back of the box describing the paddle specs. I think this is somewhere in the middle in as far as specs go.

Still sealed and good as new!

At the office, we have several paddles from Butterfly. These are the same ones donated by our Japanese friends who were posted at our office as JICA Experts a couple of decades ago. I'm not sure all survived but we played a lot before so the ROI for these were achieved. How did we learn to love pingpong back in the day? Well, it helped that one visiting professor from Tokyo was a Top Five player in Japan during his younger days. He was the one who donated the pingpong equipment and even organized and played a table tennis tournament at UP where he himself played. I remember he used the pen hold that was uncommon to us for being unable to provide a backhand. He made it look easy. 

 

I still play pingpong from time to time but not as often as I would like. Perhaps we should get a table at my other office and make it available to faculty, staff and students as part of our wellness activities?

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