Celebrating special occasions in absentia
Eating out with a friend in a shabu-shabu restaurant to celebrate my late father's birthday. It would have been my father's 83rd birthday last Friday had he been still with us. To celebrate, I have decided to whip up our very traditional (in our family at least) birthday fare of Filipino-style spaghetti and orange butter cake (which my father was so fond of baking in his later years) for lunch and invited a friend to eat out in a nearby shabu-shabu hotpot restaurant for dinner. The Sunday after that was coincidentally also Mother's Day …