Almost done

My house. My blood, sweat, and tears. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

It’s almost done ❤️ my tiny house not on wheels. They’re still making the new staircase but basically this area outside will be my patio/grill station and I will try to make a brick pizza oven. On the far right will be my laundry/utility area that will be covered with polycarbonate roofing.

Still a lot more to do on the outside though. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

They have to build my industrial-grade steel staircase and then set the pavers for the patio and make my laundry/utility area and install the roofing. Then landscaping.

The base for the mid-landing of the staircase. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

They finally cut the jackfruit tree. The mid-landing of my staircase is wide enough to accomodate a bistro table and chair. Or just a bench would suffice.

Closer look. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
The fire escape that I will make into a secret balcony where my cats and I will hang out. I need to put them on a leash though. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I thought we will have a telescopic ladder but this one is welded onto the perimeter wall.

Even though one tree died for my house, I still have plenty in my yard. In the mornings I hear the breeze and the birds chirping. In the evenings I hear the cicadas.

The rambutan and tamarind trees. Somewhere there is the avocado tree but the coconut tree already died and lost its leaves. Only the trunk was left, which I should have cut down because it will be a hazard during typhoon season.

I’m getting impatient now but at the same time I’m already feeling nostalgic about the apartment I’m going leave behind. That apartment is old and it has lots of vermin but I was able to make a somewhat comfortable existence in it for almost 5 years. I will miss the convenience of the place as I am flanked by two supermarkets, a laundromat across the street, a huge number of food places to try and go to. I will miss Grab Food and Grab Car. I will miss Zennya.

Anyway, it’s still midday. We are going out later to walk around the campus.


Letting go of stuff

I’m now in the room where I lived since 1992. It is where my girls first cried their lungs out for six months after staying in the NICU for 32 days in 2011. It’s a storage room for now, where things that have no place are dumped—just like me.

The closet that has been falling apart. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

The storage boxes above contain my journalism memories of the past 17 years. These are my old notebooks and newspaper copies that featured my investigative pieces that were published every Sunday by my old company. I must sift through them and throw away 90% of them. I still have my childhood crap somewhere in this house that I need to sort and throw away. My diaries since 1989. That’s a lot of crap. I only stopped writing on journals when I discovered blogging in 2003. I tried keeping handwritten journals after that but it was just too painful to write the things I needed to write…I could have saved myself from staying in a bad marriage if I allowed myself to vent out and parse through the things I’ve been through.

Oh well, what is done is done. It is what it is.

Chicken rice soup. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I’m now close to perfecting my chicken rice. I discovered that poaching the chicken first with the usual ginger, onions/scallions, a bit of sugar, and salt (or salt substitute) and then cooking it on top of the rice (with the chicken rice mix that I buy in Singapore) in the rice cooker produce a nicely done chicken. Not Tong Fong Fatt level but better than the Wee Nam Kee here.

Before leaving the apartment this afternoon, my sister asked if I have badminton rackets that I want to give away because their maid’s child needed a racket. I remember buying them a couple of years ago, when I deluded myself into thinking that my kids and I would be playing regularly in UP Diliman on weekends.

These were just stuck on top of the closets for years. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Goodbye, rackets. You didn’t have much use. I’m throwing away the memories that came with these because I bought them from Decathlon with the ex.

Exactly 3 years ago this month, the weekend before the national lockdown. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

The girls were so little then. 😊

Now they’re into this:

Knitting a vest. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Twin I is now better than I am when it comes to knitting. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I’m hormonal today. I feel melancholic. I shouldn’t let my mind wander to the past.

Crap day

I feel bad about my crappy editing today. I’m just not up to it. Another editor questioned my edits and I was like, yeah ok, I did badly today.

There were just too many things piling on top of me. Like I needed to negotiate the pay for the freelancer that we are about to hire. I never got to that because my reporters figured they needed to submit all their stories today for editing. I also drafted the business case for hiring the freelancer and but I have yet to submit the docs to the talent acquisition team. On top of that, I have three pending stories I need to write and they’re still nagging me at the back of my brain. I also farmed out coverage/leads to follow for my team. Scheduled interviews and read more stories to be abreast of the latest business news globally and took down notes.

I was supposed to go to my bank because my atm cards are soon expiring. Once I move out of this apartment, dealing with my bank physically would be too much of a chore. But nope. I was stuck with too much work.

And the thing I made last night… I could no longer improve it. I did what I could. That is that. I’ll just revisit this when I’m no longer pissed.

I tried. Art and photo by CallMeCreation.com

Because I’m pissed, wanted to vent my fury and just do freehand washes with my mopping brush. I went for pastels to calm me down.

Art and photo by CallMeCreation.com
Art and photo by CallMeCreation.com

That’s it. A quick drawing to release tension.

No entry

New World Hotel lobby. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I drove all the way from QC to Makati for this event where they were talking about the Maharlika Investment Fund a.k.a. Marcos Family Slush Fund. I was early, thinking that I would be able to talk to some people before the program starts.

Sorry, no media allowed, I was told.

Oh wow. This is the first time this organizer banned media. Banned us when they were tackling a very important topic. 🙄

Something fishy going on here.

Stalking.

So I tried to stalk people outside the ballroom, which I had been doing since 2006.

But damn it, there was no place to sit and wait. I’m getting old for this shit. After an hour, I gave up and just went to Greenbelt 5 to The Craft Central to make my trip south worthwhile.

Brushes. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
More brushes. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Mopping brush and some rounds. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Of course I had to try them.

I like the nylon mopping brush. The kolinsky and squirrel brushes meant some rodents had to die for my hobby. Art and photo by CallMeCreation.com
Getting close but not yet done. I’m still getting used to the white gouache and still figuring out how to blend with watercolors. The blue sky got washed out. Art and photo by CallMeCreation.com

Meanwhile, my contractor told me that we can’t avoid cutting down the jackfruit tree. It’s getting in the way of the the posts of my stairs.

Post vs tree.
Ah bye bye tree! You have served us well. I’ll just plant another fruit tree.

To sleep… and sleep some more

I don’t know what happened to me but I just slept almost the whole day today. Good thing there was only one story to edit. I have three stories to write but they can wait, except for one that I finished tonight.

Maybe my body was compensating for the uneasy sleep I had during my entire stay in Singapore. Maybe my body is recovering from colds. I still feel groggy right now.

I prepared some viands last night so these can be ready to cook in the following two days. First dish is the marinated porkchop that would become bistek tagalog. The second one was katsudon. I breaded chicken breasts and froze them for frying today.

Chopped breaded chicken breasts for katsudon. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Topped it with the katsudon sauce made from mirin, sake, dashi, Japanese soy sauce, onions, amd eggs. I let the sauce soak the breaded chicken on top of the rice instead of cooking both the sauce and chicken together because I wanted to keep the chicken crispy. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I wanted to do something with my hands but my brain is still sleepy so I just started an initial sketch. I couldn’t push myself to start painting because if the creative drive is not there, I will end up with horrendous output.

I’ll just wait for the creative bug to bite me tomorrow.

Art and photo by CallMeCreation.com

Believe it or not, I’m sleepy again…

Is it 2008 all over again?

I have seen only one bank run in my life (Orient Bank) and the debate in the newsrooms whether is it ethical to write a story that would result to a bank run goes on. Essentially, bank runs are self-fulfilling prophecies where you tell people that this bank does not have enough liquidity as buffer for all the risks it took. Of course, it would trigger withdrawals from depositors.

This is the second bank run I had witnessed and this unraveled on the same day I was listening to a hedge fund guy talk about how companies manipulate their books. How ironic.

Here’s how the second-biggest bank collapse in U.S. history happened in just 48 hours

CNBC.com

“This was a hysteria-induced bank run caused by VCs,” Ryan Falvey, a fintech investor of Restive Ventures, told CNBC.

The series of rate hikes by US Fed has created so much credit tightening that more and more companies needed liquidity to keep them afloat. VC-backed firms could not do their series fundraising so they needed to extend their runways or they die. They needed to withdraw cash. The problem is not everyone has enough cash to go around and the sin of Silicon Valley Bank is that it didn’t have enough buffer.

This is where Asian banks have proven to be resilient, as they got burned by the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-1998. Some banks here in the Philippines have complained that the Philippine central bank has been so strict with capital adequacy ratios and other capital requirements and that some of them are even way above the industry average. This saved basically the region from having the same degree of meltdown like in the West in 2008-2009. It did redound to us but securitized mortgage debts imploding in your face in Asia was not that widespread as in the US at that time. We did, however, suffer from the economic slowdown global recession that ensued.

It was just right for the BSP to be strict about capitalization because you have to have enough buffer for all the risks that you take. Especially now that interest rates have jumped so high that many borrowers may not be able to service their debts. The macroeconomic environment has become so hostile that SMEs have to look for ways to sustain themselves and at the same time they need to continue servicing their obligations. What if all these borrowers default on their loans or worse, go belly up? What would a bank do?

As the hedge fund guy told us over breakfast last week, this crisis is different from the others in the sense that it is very much tied to macroeconomics. Unlike in the GFC of 2008-2009, which was instigated by loose credit standards (as a result of very cheap money that the US Fed unleashed in prior years), this current one is tied to a very tangible metric–INFLATION–and the equally devastating tool to tame it = climbing interest rates.

The Volcker years (late 1970s to early 1980s) at the US Fed didn’t give single fuck to anybody at that time. The US Fed had hiked interest rates so much (Volcker Shock) to keep inflation down. Inflation has plagued much of the world, especially in the US, in the 1970s with the oil crisis raging on (caused by geopolitics and redounded to worsening geopolitics). So it seems like this time is no different because we had commodities price shocks and a war going on that warped everything from logistics to supplies. Then we see the seemingly unending interest rate hikes. Then, like a classic economics textbook case, stagflation will enter the picture.

During the GFC of 2008-2009, I was in the center of it all. I remember listening to a European banker who told us way back in 2006 that the US will have a housing crisis given the subprime mortgages that have become unsustainable. It was a bad time but it was the best time to be a business journalist. I had been the on the front page of my newspaper for three straight days writing about the fall of Lehman Brothers and the AIG breakup, which affected one of the country’s biggest insurance companies. The local stock market bled like it has never bled before. However, at that time I didn’t understand how the short-sellers made a big mess or how much of a genius they were. I only understood after I read The Big Short. But still, the adrenaline rush was different.

This time, I’m in the middle of it again but on a much bigger platform. I will be deep in bigger crap and I need to be smarter in picking which battles to write about. Learning about the accounting red flags during the workshops last week excited me. This time I now understand how short-sellers have started to destroy Adani (which is a separate matter from the ongoing crisis but this could be tied together in the end). It fired me up learning about the things this hedge fund guy told us about the things to watch out for now that this crisis is starting to implode.

This is terrible overall but oh my goodness, there has never been a better time to be a business journalist than at this moment.