Weekends should be three days. First day is dedicated for chores/errands, second day for family, and third day is for rest and recovery. Since we only have Saturday and Sunday to cram those must-do (errands and family), the rest and recovery is sacrificed so we end up still exhausted when we battle our way into Monday.

My shortcut to that is to outsource what I can so I can steal moments for rest and recovery. I buy all our Sunday meals from the weekend community market while I have a cleaning lady come on Friday-Saturday to clean and do laundry for me. However, that cleaning is just surface cleaning and the real deep cleaning and cooking is still done by moi.

This weekend would have been a perfect opportunity for us to go back to Anilao but, oh well, I missed an opportunity.

I’m still debating whether I should sleep early so I can catch the World Cup finals. I don’t want to be a walking zombie on a Monday. 😶 Yesterday I did nothing but sleep. I had to recover from a week-long cooking at 5 am for my kids. I’m old. I need my sleep.

Sailing by Christopher Cross is one of the songs that I always, always had to have on my phone, mp3 player, or my cd collection. It’s one of my top 5 songs of all time and it really transports me to another place, a nostalgic place that I haven’t been to. The funny thing is that the beautiful intro was an accident, an accident won Christopher Cross “Best Arrangement” at the Grammy’s several decades ago.

And now, he plays it here and I love, love, love how it sounds.

He created that song on a kitchen table. The key change was perfection and I totally get it why Cross had to do the key change, to lift the song out of the loop of the stanza/chorus guitar.

Before the pandemic, going around Japan solo was fine. I mean, foreign tourists were not obnoxious and there were no idiot influencers/content creators like Logan Paul, who featured the body of a suicide victim in Aokigahara.

I go to Japan for work and also to find peace. Back in 2009, it was still possible to go around Kyoto during Golden Week without running into hordes of foreign tourists in major sites like the Golden Pavilion and Silver Pavilion. Most tourists during the Golden Week then were locals. In the subsequent years, I avoided Kyoto and Nara because Instagram-addict people were starting to crowd these places. Of course, I can’t avoid Tokyo since our office is right smack in the center of Otemachi. But generally, I avoid the touristy places.

These days it seems like even trips to rural areas in Hokkaido will still be blighted by unruly tourists.

Because of the influx of tourists, applying for visa is taking longer and the embassy has become stricter. My multiple entry visa expired in 2022 so… And I’m so lazy reapplying for a new one.

And I screeched while everybody is still sleeping.

Well, it did rain.

And the rain reminded me that Bavi was battering China yesterday en route to Japan.

This is literally my nightmare. What the f*ck am I going to do with 900 snakes swimming around me?!

And this, this hunger defines every Filipino athlete who comes up the world stage. Hunger. Don’t we know it in the literal and figurative sense.

Meanwhile, my bet is that the World Cup finals will be between Norway and Spain.

I cannot forget the beautiful passes made by Xavi, a half-back who paved the way for Spain to win the World Cup in 2010 against the messy Netherlands. So yes, Spain is a strong team. Imagine, the star of the cup was not a forward but a midfielder.

Norway, on the other hand, is not historically a strong team but this year, the play is centered around Erling Haaland, which allowed the team to score and score and score… He is a mean striker with a huge 6’5″ frame, which will terrify a goalkeeper like me because I wouldn’t able to see the ball! Haaland takes full advantage of that. His head can meet the ball to score a goal before anybody can reach the ball from the sky.

I’d hate that for me as a goal keeper. 🤬

What’s fun about Haaland is that he is very, very fashown, like man, he has custom Hermes HAC and Birkins.

So I will loose sleep by next week. I will be cheering for Spain because I hope I will see the precision playing I witnessed in 2010.

If there is one thing that I’ve learned in covering typhoons/disasters in the Philippines more than a decade ago, is that the clearer the eye of the storm, the stronger it is.

This freaking thing is scary because it’s still far in east Pacific but its eye is already very distinct and the cloud system is organized. PAGASA already made a forecast that it will start barelling its way into Philippine Area if Responsibility by Wed or Thurs but it still couldn’t predict which way it will go.

But one thing is sure, it will suck up the southwest monsoon, so it’s going to be a lot of rain and flood.

So far, the Japan Meteorological Agency is projecting that it is heading to Batanes. But the thing is, the southwest monsoon could pull it lower. Damn.

God bless us. Super El Nino until 2027.

@positivepredictions

Dark Predictions For Asia. Category 5 typhoon (hurricane) predicted to be going towards the Philippines, Taiwan, and China. Weather forecast prediction. #weather #darkpredictions #typhoon #philippines #taiwan

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