Today is The Duchess Who Wasn't Day.

For the life of me, I can't figure out who that is. Enlightenment, anyone?

Look, look!
My sister-in-law Jo (Dean's sister) has a blog, customized by me of course. It's not perfectly pretty yet, but she writes well (must run in the family...) about her experiences as a newbie in New York.

sleeping on clouds
I'm secretly decadent when it comes to linens. My bath towels, for instance, have to be big and fluffy, with threads that don't come off on your skin, unlike the skimpy scraps of terrycloth that serve as poor excuses for towels on the local market. My pillows must be both fluffy and firm, preferably those Italian ones that you cut out of vacuum-sealed packs and can then watch as they puff up miraculously before your eyes. (I dislike feather pillows because they tend to get limp in the humidity.) Even my toilet paper has to be at least two-ply, and preferably quilted. Single-ply toilet paper, in my book, is a travesty.

So it's with quiet martyrdom that I've been enduring the scratchy 180-thread-count beddings my husband and I have been sleeping on for nine years. For those of you who don't understand what I'm talking about, thread count dictates the softness of cloth. The higher the thread count, the softer and smoother the sheets. In civilized society (which excludes most department stores in the Philippines), 300 is considered the minimum thread count for comfortable bedclothes--anything lower is compared to sandpaper. 300-thread-count beddings are locally available in some specialty stores, but unfortunately, the higher the thread count, the more astronomical the price.

This week, though, I was lucky enough to find 800-thread-count bedclothes for under 800 pesos for two complete sets--in the Greenhills bazaar, of all places. It was a case of the wrong venue for a great product; as the shopkeeper lamented to me, none of their other customers could understand why sheets and pillowcases that look just like all the other sheets and pillowcases cost so much more. So they had to keep dropping and dropping the price until someone like me came along and snapped them up.

So now Dean and I sleep on beddings that are patterned with clouds and feel deliciously cloud-like as well. In fact, I'm having a harder time than usual getting up in the morning, the sheets are so damn comfy. Sometimes Sage and I just lie down on the bed and roll around, giggling with glee at the sheer decadence.

The Greenhills bazaar, by the way, has also come to the stunning realization that Philippine shoppers come in sizes other than small and smaller. I was able to pick up three tops and a cute skirt for under a thousand bucks--one of the things ya gotta love about this country is the shopping.

Trivia Quiz
Does plastic grow on trees?

answer to Wednesday's question
Everyone seems to know that cows have four stomachs: the rumen, the reticulum, the omasum, and the abomasum. What's less widely known is that cows have no upper front teeth (which is why they need all those stomachs to digest their food), and are largely responsible for the depletion of the ozone layer! Yes, after CFCs and cars, the third biggest culprits are cows, due to the roughly 100 million tons of hydrocarbons they release annually by burping. Which means that burping can be environmentally hazardous; which means that my mother, who was once hospitalized for gas because she refused to ever burp or fart, was right all along.

Cow-rect! Jonette, Rei, and Katrina And like Katrina, I, too, have a second stomach, exclusively for dessert.