We remain the laughingstock of the world and the Dutertes and Marcoses and the Arroyos are the clowns who manipulate the Filipinos to perpetuate their greed. What I am worried about is the complacency of the opposition as they remain in their echo chambers, thinking that the echoes are the vox populi. Not so. Talk to the street vendors, the farmers, the fishermen, the vegetable sellers in the urban and rural places. They are voting for Marcos as they lap up all the propaganda crap that radio and GMA Network have been propagating. They do not have access to Internet; if they do, they can’t spend precious pesos on data. They don’t own smart phones; if they do, they may not have the cellular signal for internet. The C, D, E markets comprise the bulk of the electorate. A-B markets are just the small percentage and we often do not reach out to the grassroots.
The fight is in the grassroots.
I finally have the butane grill that I’ve been hanging on to on Lazada. Bought during the 11.11 sale. Photo by CalMeCreation.com
I no longer have to buy and use charcoal. I’ve been polluting my neighbors’ houses for so long. Whoppeee! And it’s easier to cook. No need to spend 30 mins to an hour trying to keep the embers going.
Giant Monterey beef patties. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
To cope with the unsavory news stories that keep popping up on my newsfeeds (and I really can’t tune out because I am a journalist), I indulged again and cooked a nice dinner for all of us. The burgers were juicy and nicely smoked.
Grilled salmon. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
The burgers were for the girls and Ate C. Mine was a small salmon steak with mashed potato and basil.
It’s easy to disassemble for cleaning. It packs away nicely so this is perfect for camping, together with the other portable stove that I first bought from Sarang Mart. It’s nice to grill chicken, hotdogs and marshmallows here while outside the tent as the sun goes down. I found another camping site where we could go, probably by January or February when it’s cooler and not rainy.
The Bloc Campsite, Cavinti, Laguna. Photo from Tripadvisor.comThe BLOC.Photo from Tripadvisor.com
To cope with the negativity around me, I must do the things that I love. Travel and be with nature. Simple wants and simple needs.
My friends and I were computing how much I should demand if they force me to transfer to Singapore.
Based on this self-assessment test by the Ministry of Manpower, the minimum salary of someone with my position and profile should get at least SGD 10,000++ or around USD 7,400. That’s the minimum and does not guarantee that I would get an e-Pass. A rival company had advertised for SGD 13,000 (USD 9,000) so they would have to justify why I would only get SGD 10k and not SGD 13k.
Given that the parent company is cheap, they wouldn’t give me the SGD 13k while the SGD 10k is too tight a budget given that HDBs in SG for 2-bed (it has to be 2 bed or otherwise the apartment would be too small) is SGD 2,600 in the outskirts like Jurong West. The school around that area is OWIS, which is around SGD 20k a year but the reviews are terrible given that it’s a budget international/private school. Ok, let’s just ignore the reviews for a second there. My housing would be SGD 2,600 + SGD 400 (utilities) + SGD 400 groceries + SGD 4,000 (school fees and other expenses) = SGD 7,400. It would be SGD 2,600 for everything else–that’s SGD 10k net. So that means I need to add 15% for tax and whatever contribution to pension or whatever the government subtracts.
I don’t think this would be a happy arrangement.
I think I would win the argument and they would let me just stay here.
Kimchi ruining whatever I am working on. Such a petulant child. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I got stressed yesterday with all the drama that’s happening in national news that I was able to finish one curtain panel that I sewed by hand. Right after the 8 yards of fabric I ordered from Shopee arrived, I sewed like mad to relieve me of stress and forget that the Philippines will soon be doomed.
If only Singapore is not that expensive, I would be willing to move and forget about the idiots that will be voting for the equally idiotic people running for office.
Kinda proud of my dainty stitches. Photo by CallMeCreation.comNearly finished. It has a satiny texture to this. Photo by CallMeCreation.comEt voila! My first granny curtain panel. I intentionally made it short so the curtain wouldn’t cover the modem and the aircon unit. I need to finish the masks that I need to ship out this week so I can proceed with sewing the two panels of 3-yard curtains that I must immediately hang in this room so this 1.5 yard panel would not look out of place. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I’ll get rid of the stuffed toys on the shelf because they look so juvenile. I just put them there because the shelves were empty and looked forlorn when I sent the Gundam figures to J and I had to have something there in the interim. Now I can put books there as they started to overflow from my closet.
My daughter, Twin A, started choosing fabrics on Shopee and said I should start sewing the curtains for our future flat. I said, darling, we still don’t know how big the windows will be. That’s the reason why I’m not cutting this curtain rod because I’ll be taking this and the other the curtain rods with us.
I needed a creative outlet to escape reality for a while. So I resorted to sewing. I’m not yet brave enough to pick up the brush or charcoal. I need to watch more Domestika courses on sketching and watercolor paintings before I venture into those again.
I think I will be sewing a lot of things before I can get back into the groove and start traveling again. When I assume my new role probably by next year, I need to fly to all the cities we are covering, starting with Ho Chi Minh (I have already lined up my meetings). But Covid is coming back with a vengeance as cases start to rise again in Europe.
And as I predicted she will run as VP with Marcos Jr.
Then this:
This is just a smokescreen. To perpetuate the myth that all is not well with Sara and her dumbass father. This is their way of distancing herself from him, to woo the former DDS back and those who are still sitting on the fence.
They’re just making this a game. And all of us are the losers. All the evil and corrupt have banded together: Marcos, Arroyo, and Duterte.
I never knew that roses could be labor-intensive. Pruning leaves and deadheading flowers help in producing more bulbs and flowers. I need to check and make sure that there are no diseased leaves in any of my flowering plants. I also started pruning my vegetables as well.
Mum. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
So far so good, my flowers are still surviving weeks after I bought them. Pruning and deadheading is a daily task if I want my plants to continually produce flowers. That’s the error I committed in my previous attempts at growing plants. I just couldn’t commit time before since I was busy with a million and one things. I had too many things on my plate. Now I can devote 30 mins a day every morning watering/fertilizing, pruning, and deadheading my plants.
I see more bulbs! Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I also started making my own fertilizer. First off, I am composting my kitchen scraps. I will take a photo of my simple compost bin that I treated with my mom’s activator for rapid composting. I am doing this rapid composting in an urban setting for her since she hasn’t tried this in a household setting (she’s too busy to bother). She had been doing this on a large scale system i.e. plantation and smallholding for decades (including integrated pest management) but never in an urban/apartment setup. She told me to record my experience and get some data.
My mom is an environmental scientist and organic farming is her life’s work. She just won another award this month but the announcement will be in January next year.
Second–this has an eww factor–but I am using diluted urine to water my flowers. This has been the practice of many gardeners and farmers for centuries if not thousands of years. This only stopped with urbanization and the development of the sewage system. Good thing I no longer have a partner because my ex-partner will surely frown upon this practice.
Fresh human urine is sterile and so free from bacteria. In fact it is so sterile that it can be drunk when fresh; it’s only when it is older than 24 hours that the urea turns into ammonia, which is what causes the ‘wee’ smell. At this stage it will be too strong for use on plants, but poured neat on to the compost heap it makes a fabulous compost accelerator/activator, with the extra benefit of adding more nutrients...
During a pee, a healthy adult will release 11g nitrogen/urea, 1g phosphorus/super-phosphate and 2.5g potassium.
Basically, the inorganic fertilizer that our farmers buy is NPK–which they call the complete fertilizer. Why NPK? Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), and Potassium (K). We had agriculture courses in elementary and high school that’s why I know. We were also taught how to calculate fertilizer (NPK) weight (yes, you just do not apply inorganic NPK haphazardly or else you would end up with an imbalanced soil). But if you use organic fertilizer, you don’t have to bother with that.
I’m not bothering with the soil pH because I don’t have any pH meter to measure it. Even a Litmus paper.
So I just use powdered egg shells for added calcium, probably once every two weeks, and I haven’t used white vinegar to adjust the soil pH. So far so good. What I do is whenever we cook with eggs, we clean the inside of eggs shells (just to make sure there is no salmonella or other bacteria lurking there) and we dry it out in the sun. Then after a few days I crush them into powder using my food processor/blender.
There you go. Healthy plants. We cannot just water plants and leave them to dry out in the sun. They need fertilizers because growing in pots is a sad way to live.
Among the other things we learned in our high school agriculture courses is animal science. We were taught how to raise farm animals (except for cows) so we had goats, ducks, chickens, and rabbits in our high school compound. We also tilled the soil. I remember growing watermelons, pechay, and onions on my plot. We spent afternoons tilling our plots and weeding them. We raised chickens, slaughtered, and dressed them (yes, I can dress a chicken and even cleaned some gizzards). These are practical knowledge not taught in Singaporean primary and secondary schools (I checked some schools’ curriculum), which are important for survival. As we experienced systems breaking down during this pandemic, I think we need to go back to these important survival skills. One magnitude 8.0 earthquake here in Metro Manila will surely result to Armageddon. It’s not an “IF” situation; it’s a matter of “when” as we are in the middle of the Marikina Valley Fault that begins from Central Luzon down to Calamba, Laguna.
Computer science courses are default now and I can enroll my kids in basic and advanced programming, as Twin I wanted to so I had her take some online courses and she’s now tinkering with Linux. But the skills I mentioned above cannot just be taught off-hand. I came from a long line of farmers and trial and error is just a costly way to learn.
The silk squash grown by my mom in her backyard. Photo by ArtCaves.
The silk squash (patola) grown by mom in her backyard are huge! They’re 100% organically grown. One day that 150m plot (excluding the 100m front yard) will be mine to grow a food forest.
The other skills lost nowadays are practical home arts. I learned to sew and cook in school. My mom was too busy to teach us those (plus she wasn’t good in those–she tried though–but she’s really an academic). I learned how to repair things from my father and in school. These things are important to know. When we had shortages of masks, I made my own. I sew when we need to repair clothes; we just don’t throw them out. Or we repurpose them. I just don’t throw out things and pollute the environment–we repurpose or upcycle them.
Had a call with my APAC boss this afternoon. She told me she would lobby before our global boss to allow me to stay here in not be transferred to Singapore. She agrees with me that there is little reason for me to uproot myself and be there since–there’s nothing there really. I just have to travel in every city that we cover and that’s fine with me. And it’s a wonderful way of cultivating relationships with my contacts across Southeast Asia.
I hope things will go well before the year ends so by January I can plan my life well.
It’s like a never-ending cycle. A friend who is in Spain now says people’s attitude there is like there’s no more pandemic. No one is wearing masks there. They go about their business like it’s nothing. She still does though, as a precaution.
And now you have this. When will they ever learn???
My second dose was in May, so it has been six months. I need a booster. I don’t want to get Covid again. Hell no. Once is enough. I have this aversion now to humans in tight spaces. Or even in the open if their number is above five.
Meanwhile, we’re headed for disaster.
Ah, Gloria, the Cersei Lannister of this realm
The evil witch Gloria has her pawns playing her game of thrones.
