I had to get out of the house and touch grass today. I had been playing games until 2 am and that’s not good from any standpoint.

I brought Twin A with me so she won’t be staring at the screen the whole day.

I forgot. 🤦🏻‍♀️ Summer means flowers and pollens flying around. Five minutes into our walk, mother and daughter were already sniffing and developing runny noses.

We first went to Kurimi to buy milk tea before we took our places in the field. The Kurimi shop was overlooking the university pool that I haven’t visited in over 10 or 20 years. That end there is 12 ft deep and it should be perfect for practice free dives.

We brought our drawing tools so we can enjoy the dying light, fresh air, while practicung our craft.

We packed up our stuff at 6 pm and walked to the nearest Korean grocery store to buy meat, enoki mushrooms and kimchi for barbecue. Hopped to the vegetable stall for fruits and veggies.

When we got home, I took the Lazada packages and tried my new glass teapot for my Chinese fruit tea—a TCM remedy for menstrual cramps and other women-related discomfort.

It lacks the sweetness of the berries and dates. I should add oranges tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I helped Twin I with her home-made lamp that she will be submitting on Thursday. It’s made of wooden hanger, a chopping board, a tin can and ordinary socket, wire, and switch.

Good thing Mommy is handy with power tools. 🙃

I reached my minimum quota today. I’ll worry about next month’s story quota on Wednesday. In the meantime, I’ll unhinge my brain with gaming time.

I should buy a 1TB external HDD because my mini pc is getting full because of games. My PS5 as well.

Aww dang! I had to have my WRC 9 refunded because it wouldn’t run well on my desktop. With the refund, I bought WRC 8 instead, thinking that it wouldn’t be that demanding as WRC 9…Then I figured it’s not my processor or my RAM that’s inadequate. It’s my graphics! Since my mini pc is so small, my graphics card is onboard, hence, it’s low-grade. No wonder my cars are lagging.

Awww, I shouldn’t have downgraded my WRC. 🥲 I should’ve stuck with WRC 9 and tried playing it on my laptop that has a better graphics card.

UPDATE

It finally dawned on me that I should be playing WRC 8 via the AMD Adrenaline software on my desktop.

The AMD graphics card my desktop has was scaled down because my screens were not 4k. 🤦🏻‍♀️I was the one who did it when I was setting this thing up.

Now it’s working well.

I shouldn’t have downgraded my WRC. 🥲

I should really devote time to be creative and not just doomscroll to de-stress. I should also be reading books as I have a huge stack of them here on the shelf in my room. 🙃

I finally was able to wake up and bring Twin A to the weekend community market this morning to have breakfast. They can also pick their lunch and dinner for today instead of guessing what would they want to eat.

They’re asking me when can we go back to Anilao to dive. I said our calendars are full, maybe we would be able to do it in May? This coming week, they’re busy finishing their school projects and the week after that is their 4thQ final exams. In two weeks, we would be having our staycation in a hotel in QC for their birthday so they can see their dad and also have their elementary best friends sleep over. Then they will be going with their dad to his hometown after the 14th until end of April. I would be in Vietnam by third week of April.

So I have to squeeze in an Anilao dive in early May because by the second week of that mont, I’ll be back in Singapore. A few weeks after that, I will be in Kuala Lumpur. 🤦🏻‍♀️  It seems like Anilao would have to be done in early May or late May.

The annoying thing is that their dad always changes schedules. There would be huge changes that would ruin my schedule at the last minute. He doesn’t stick to a committed timetable. I will not adjust according to his whim or lack of preparedness on his part because my plane tickets and hotels are already booked and those are work-related trips.

I remember being so stressed with him regarding this matter. To solve my problema, I just shipped out my kids to my mom’s so that there would be less things to worry about. He’s just  so unreliable. At that time, I could do that because the girls were just in prep or kinder—a few absences from school then would not have been detrimental to their learning.

However, I had to time my trips during their school holidays when they were in grade school. That’s the reason why my overseas trips were limited since I had to work around the school calendar. Once they got a little older, I was able to fly more during school days since they weren’t that sickly anymore, unlike when they were younger. During those early years, one asthma attack would mean hospitalization.

Now that we’re here and my mom and sisters are just spitting distance from us, I’m more confident that they will be fine everytime I’m away since I have trustworthy people watching over my girls. Plus my brother and sis-in-law and their older cousins are just a kilometer away from us so they can also lend a hand if needed.

But again, flying out every few weeks is exhausting. I hate the long wait at airports. Plus work-related travel is stressful.

The extreme mind-bending I did the past two days rendered me useless today. I just turned into a vegetable and had a brain rot, just watching videos on my tablet or phone all day. I just wanted to be brainless.

I couldn’t tell you how much I’m carrying on my shoulders right now. I was losing my patience—and I have lots of it—with a reporter that I’m trying to save. I highly suspect that the reporter has an undiagnosed ADHD and I told our boss several times. A long-time friend with whom I had a falling out was recently diagnosed with ADHD and she told me via FB Messenger. I haven’t responded to that chat yet because I was still hurting from her treatment of me—she was callous and dismissive of me or whatever I said. She just didn’t have anything else besides herself and whatever other people say don’t register. She attributed it all to her ADHD.

Anyway, this reporter is in hot water right now because it takes too much the of editors’ energy to keep them out of trouble (forgetting compliance SOPs and being careful with details). This person already got our company into trouble last year, which caused my burnout and my desire to quit. Our regional head already lost patience last Wednesday and said this is not sustainable. So on Thursday I wrote a story that this reporter should have led but insteae I took into my hands the responsibility for this because I cannot risk mistakes. I worked until late Thursday night just to keep things in order and publish.

Yesterday I edited this reporter’s story, which took the entire afternoon until evening. I had to treat this person like a child and ask questions like I would a child like point 1, 2, 3, 4. I had to do it several times (“No no no, you are not answering my question! It only requires a yes or no. Did they or still not have a partner, yes or no?”) until I get satisfactory answers.

It was is exhausting.

Add to that the stubborness of other reporters who do not follow the strict standards we impose when we publish stories. I was editing until 9 pm last night.

I am just emotionally drained as well.

… so tired.

I’m so tired of take out food and fried food. I’m without a fridge for a month now and that fffffvcking local Panasonic service center is the worst I’ve encountered. It took them a month to say that there’s an internal leak and they had to bring my unit to Manila. I can’t move on to buy a new LG fridge because that ffffffvcking unit is just under 4 years old.

Some of my frozen goods from my last grocery shopping when I still had a freezer are in my mom’s house and I’m slowly eating them down. I took the last of the thin pork strips from my mom’s fridge yesterday and made a sort of bibimbap for my girls with what meager resources I have. I was able to make a good gojuchang sauce to go with it.

I will call Panasonic in Manila again to complain. Again.

Meanwhile, I’ve been slaving away in the past two days to be able to reach my story quota. I’m still three stories short. After two weeks of courting a local company for an interview, I got rejected. I half-expected that because the owner is very conservative and do not want investors or an IPO. 😔 Some companies’ staff are unprofessional, like they don’t respond to emails, not only here in the Philippines—this is Southeast Asia-wide. An SGX-listed company that I’ve called several times is annoying. If they don’t want to reply to a media query, then they could just say so, like this other SGX-listed firm that I chased in January.

I’m soooo done.

I was working until 10 pm, emailing people, calling India at 16:30, their local time.

I still have to call Singapore at 8 am tomorrow.

I’m so stressed. I’m doing my best to keep one reporter from being fired. I kept another one from going berserk because a company used our talking points for an interview with a competitor who had just the good luck to have their interview scheduled a day or two ahead of us. I had to quickly think of new angles and topics in a matter of minutes while our reporter was on his way to the interview.

Managing people is a lot of hard work. I’d rather chase stories.