I was so busy trying to email people, arranging interviews here and in Singapore that I almost forgot to cook dinner. Good thing I have the InsantPot, I can cook kare-kare in under an hour. That InstantPot and Philips airfryer are the best buys I had for my kitchen. They made my life easier now that it’s just me who does all the cooking.

Speaking of interviews, I just emailed my bosses that I got a free media invite to cover a conference in Singapore in a couple of weeks. It was short notice but I hope they will approve my travel as I also clinched an interview of a CEO of a company I patronize. He agreed to an interview if I fly to Singapore and have the face-to-face interview. He even gave me his WhatsApp. 😁

Keeping my fingers crossed.

Oh ‘Murica!

You might scoff at me and ask, what do I care about the results of the elections in the US?

Well I’m not going to be directly affected by the stupidity of the US electorate but like the rest of the world, we are going to be collateral damage.

I will just write about this tomorrow when my disgust lowers a bit.

I now know the best way to avoid skirmishes with my manager: just shut up.

Whatever is asked of me/us, even if I’m asked for an opinion, just shut up. I should not give my comments, my opinions—just keep quiet. I don’t think she is used to dealing with a strong-minded, opinionated person who goes against the grain. I just have to nod my head and say I agree.

Anyway, I had a call with my manager and our APAC head last week (even if I still didn’t have power) about bonuses and contracts. I was asked if I want to transfer to Singapore. I said no, that I’m happy with the current setup. Singapore is too expensive for comfort and it will just cause me a lot of stress. I just need to fly as frequently as needed to do my job well and that’s it.

Well, they haven’t mentioned that I will be replaced as manager for my team for refusing to move to Singapore. I just hope they understand that Singapore is a hostile place financially for a solo parent with a single income stream. I am also not willing to leave my children here while I work there. I don’t want to be an OFW. I’d rather do something else than to part from my children.

Kr, our Philippines correspondent, left her side gig because it was causing her more stress than what the job was worth. The boss/owner is an asshole—a dictator who belittles everyone. She said for what it’s worth, she found that she can do other things and that in order for her to stress less about our boss, she has to channel her energies elsewhere. “The grass isn’t greener on the other side,” she said. She now has more appreciation of what we’re doing/we have now. She said our job doesn’t require us to wake up at 3 am or 4 am just to earn decently and we can have breaks—when markets are closed for the holidays, we’re also entitled to be off from work. Unlike in TV—you’re still on and you still have to wake up before the sun rises so that you would be able to arrive on time at the studio to do your morning show.

I realized that God is telling me to stay a bit more because none of the plans I’ve been hatching are going into fruition. The jobs I’ve been applying for are not panning out. 🤔 I wonder if there’s something big going to happen that’s why the message is to keep still. 🙃

I woke up at past midnight after dreaming about my father. I can’t remember what it was exactly but it might have been about him checking out something that I’ve done or DIY-ed. Was it a project? Was it my house? I can’t remember now but I have traces of warm fuzzy feelings from that encounter.

Todos los santos and dia de todas los almas (All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day) have passed and I haven’t visited my father’s columbarium. But I did buy a bouquet of flowers and extra fat/large candles for him that my mom brought. Maybe I just dreamt about him because of this guilty feeling. You see, the observation of these holidays, especially All Souls’ Day, is about praying for the souls of the loved ones who are stuck in purgatory. I don’t believe in purgatory—it’s a Catholic construct and even when I was still Catholic, I questioned this concept.

Purgatory was invented so that the church can raise money for the Crusades. The church sells indulgences so that essentially “buys out” the soul of your loved ones stuck in purgatory. Martin Luther, a monk, said this exploited the poor. The selling of indulgences is a source of so much corruption in the Catholic church and this sparked the revolt within the church, hence, the protests = protestants. The number one thesis of Luther is salvation is achieved by faith alone, not by good works, not by buying your way out of purgatory—that is not biblical anyway.

• Ephesians 2:8“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. “

But I still observe All Souls’ Day for the remembrance aspect. It’s more for my benefit—and for the benefit of my children who didn’t meet my father. I have already been comforted by the fact that people saw that he went to church the morning he died, which was unusual. After he got sick (massive heart attack that made him weak), he stopped going to church physically. He didn’t want people who knew him to pity him when they saw him in that state. So he would just hear mass by our gate since our house is literally spitting distance from church.

But that morning was different. He scrounged through our clean laundry that were for ironing and took out his favorite red and white striped shirt, took several of our handkerchiefs, folded them, and stuffed them in his back pocket. He went to church to attend the first mass of the day at 6 am, cooked breakfast for him and my brother, took a nap and never woke up.

How did I know about what he did moments before he died? I was the second child to have arrived home and the house was still as it was when he left. The clean laundry for ironing was located in my room and I saw he rummaged through it and he didn’t put it back. When I checked his clothes that he had hung on the back of the door in his room, I saw he had worn his favorite shirt and in his back pocket were our handkerchiefs with his. He took a part of us when he went to church, maybe, to ask God for salvation because he knew it was time.

That’s how I knew my father is not in purgatory or anywhere else.

I’ve been doing laundry for three days. My cleaning lady did not come yesterday because of the Todos Los Santos holiday and my kids’ uniform needed to be washed before she ironed them today.

I have already gathered and folded several batches of clean laundry to make room for the new ones I had been hanging since midday Wednesday. I did that in-between edits, which helped me to clear my head.

I surveyed my surroundings and saw that my cleaning lady didn’t have to do any yard work anymore since everything has been taken care of after the bitch Kristine has left.

I still have fruit trees. One rambutan tree looks like it died after going bald after Typhoon Kristine. The avocado tree is leaning dangerously lower; it was almost uprooted. I must have it adjusted with some kind of support to keep it upright.

Yes, I buy 8 kg of cat food. I feed too many cats.

I had cleaned out the contents of my fridge and now I had to replenish it. I’m almost afraid of buying too much meat again in case another horrible typhoon hits us again and leave us without power for a week. And it seems like there’s another big one coming…

… when you get giddy about household items you just purchased, just like this pink kettle I bought from Lazada.

While we were without power for almost a week, I realized that I can’t continue boiling water using pots/casseroles. I already burned myself by spilling scalding water because the pots don’t have spouts. I had been dependent on my electric kettle to boil water for coffee and tea for years and I never found any use for the stovetop kettle.

Now I do. I bought a cute one so I can just leave it on the stove and not bother getting it out of sight. More frequent strong typhoons are the norm and this is not going to be the last time we will be out of power for an extended time. We have yet to recover from that bitch Kristine/Trami, and here we are, facing another disaster…

We have now a supertyphoon barreling its way to Taiwan. Signal # 5 is hoisted over Batanes and Typhoon Leon/KongRey is not even going to land in the Batanes/Babuyan group of islands.

The eye of the typhoon is big and clear—an indication of the strength and speed of the winds that KongRey is bringing. Typhoon Haiyan, which I covered for my former media outfit in 2013, had a very clear eye but KongRey’s eye is bigger.

Haiyan/Yolanda = 315 kph winds

KongRey/Leon = 240 kph winds

Now that Typhoo KongRey has made landfall in Taiwan, it has lost the eye, so likely it has slightly weakened.

We had electricity just a few minutes ago. ❤️ My corp comm friends made it possible. One of them said they kept on bugging the operations network guys to expedite the repair of whatever. She said they even escalated it to one of the officials sitting on the panel infront of us during the presscon yesterday…

The local operations team must have had a scolding because they had been calling me and updating me about the progress of the repairs. They had been asking me every now and then if we already have power. One of the guys said they will not leave the site until our power is restored. They told me they are replacing one busted transformer at the university gate but I told them the transformer near our compound needs replacing, too, as it keeps on exploding due to overcapacity during school days.

😭 I love my corp comm friends.

I am now doing the first batch of laundry. All our laundry won’t fit in our clothesline downstairs so I have to do the washing in batches.

I was creeped out by this statue that an unknown neighbor had been keeping in their yard. Because the trees were either uprooted or became bald, I can now see the formerly obscured neighbor. And their creepy statue.

So I’ve been doing the laundry and hanging them for the past 3-4 hrs because they’re all beddings. I’ve been going up and down the stairs in the middle of a very windy night. I am thankful that I don’t live an a condo or renting an apartment that doesn’t have an in-unit provision for a washing machine hook-up. When I was looking for an apartment to rent, my non-negotiables were a laundry area and a parking space. With those requirements, it’s no wonder I ended up in an old two-storey apartment because that kind of housing ticks the two boxes.

I’m glad that I’m not in New York City and struggling with transporting laundry from a laundromat to a walk-up apartment, like this couple:

If I live in such situation, my laundry will never get done. 😬