Category Archives: current events

Action of one, affecting all

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Berjaya Makati Hotel Statement
January 6, 2022

The order by the Makati City Hall closing down Berjaya Makati Hotel’s operations based on the suspension order issued by the Department of Tourism is without legal basis.

For one, the DOT order is not yet final as the hotel will appeal it within the fifteen-day period it is given. Meanwhile, the suspension is not in effect. Secondly, there is no law that penalizes a hotel for not reporting a guest who jumps quarantine. There is nothing in R.A. 13322 that is applicable to the hotel. Thirdly, we must be accorded due process and be allowed to explain before any penalty is imposed. We have not been given our day in court by the Makati City Hall.

On the operations level, if we close down the hotel immediately, where do we send the 150 or so quarantine guests we have at the moment?

The whole country is on war footing in effect against the pandemic. Every quarantine hotel, just like ours, serves a strategic purpose especially with the lack of rooms while the virus rampages throughout. To close down a quarantine hotel for no legal reason is to close down a hospital just when it is helping to win the war. There is no benefit to be gained by such regulatory posturing when national interest and public health are on the line.

Berjaya press release sent to my mailbox today

One selfish/entitled act of one affects everybody. This Gwyneth Chua has wreaked havoc on a lot of businesses and families. The people whom she infected have reached La Union and have affected a restaurant that was forced to close down. (No Omicron in La Union despite Chua contact testing positive)

There are stories floating around about her parents bribing staff of the hotel so she can skip quarantine (ugh! Parents condoning selfish acts!) but are not proven.

“In fact, her friends asked why she was already out partying, instead of being in quarantine [in Berjaya Hotel], and she claimed to have ‘connections’,” according to Tourism Secretary Bernadette Romulo Puyat in an interview with this paper. She identified a bar in Poblacion, Makati, popular among millennials, as one of the venues where Chua allegedly partied with friends.”

Business Mirror

This is the problem with the third-world country like the Philippines: the small fry with money can behave like they own the country. Such small-town thinking.

So now we’re grappling with several thousands of daily cases again. I don’t know how long we can wait for the kids can get vaccinated before omicron gets us again.

I have already signed up for my girls’ vaccination and hopefully they can get the first dose before the month ends.

We just logged 17,220 new cases today with a positivity rate of almost 37%. Sigh. Here we go again.

We’re so tired of this. There should be vaccine equality now worldwide or else we will battling this virus longer than we should.

Elsewhere in the world, Japan to declare quasi-state of emergency amid rising COVID cases while EU daily virus cases top 1 million for first time.

And so it begins again

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There’s an anecdote by a guy on Twitter about being in a mall in Makati that is now almost empty and workers are waiting for customers to come so they can collect commissions enough for fare to go home later that night 😓

Lockdowns are not the answer especially when it’s the poor who are going to be hurt. We don’t have to go on lockdowns. The government just needs to speed up vaccination roll out and the boosters. Like in our barangay, we are only allotted less than 500 shots that we had to share with other barangays. The patients would have to queue at 5 am just to be able to get that slot. Since I am sick now, I would have to forgo since 1) I can’t physically have the booster shot because I’m sick; 2) I may end up endangering other people by spreading what I have (I’m not sure if this is already Covid or just plain colds). Even antigen tests are hard to obtain. My high school classmates in our chat group are asking where can we buy home test kits because none are readily available here. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Look at that high positivity rate.

This is horrible. Many people will be without work again and won’t have means to feed their families. What we need are more free or affordable tests and not checkpoints!

This government is useless.

Flu medicine shortage

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Everybody is sick right now due to the drop in temperature plus people were up and about during the holidays like the pandemic is just a distant memory. Good thing I was able to stock up a bit when the girls were battling colds, plus I had some medicines when I prepared for Delta surge last year. However, my stock is dwindling because I am down with colds as well.

But of course DOH had to say something like that to prevent panic buying. The reality on the ground is, everything is sold out now. Even Zennya has sent a message through their app that says Covid tests are fully booked that’s why they’re extending their operating hours until 11 pm to accommodate requests.

I ordered from Bayer’s page on Shopee several tubes of Berocca, which helped me to recover from Covid. In case we get COVID again, I still have Lianhua here but so far we only needed antihistamines and Sinupret forte for our colds and cough. Nasal sprays have done their work on the kids while I am still torturing my nostrils with it.

And oh, teas are wonderful, not just the one with caffeine though (my shrink forbids me as it will clash with my meds).

Ginger and lemon infusion tea. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Because I’m so paranoid, I’m no long going out and I’ve used my Puregold app to order groceries. My problem is fresh veggies. Let’s see if I can drive tomorrow to UP for that.

And this is what I’m talking about the localization of social marketing strategies, just like the communication of disaster mitigation and awareness on the local government level. The government and developmental workers shouldn’t use a bullet approach of one-size fits all. It’s never going to be effective. In the AKAP stages of social marketing (Awareness, Knowledge, Attitude, Practice), you need to be able to communicate well on the Awareness level and Knowledge exchange stage for Attitudes to change and push them into favorable Practices (in this case, getting their vax). If people don’t receive the message well on the Awareness stage, how can they even accept the Knowledge? They will just reject it.

Sheesh. These people should employ development communicators if they want something to happen. I remember writing some proposal for tuberculosis innoculation project of WHO though I cannot remember if I did this for graduate school or for an employment exam.

Anyway, the localization approach was the reason why the zero polio campaign was successful–until Duterte came along–because the DOH then was employing something right at that time. I miss Dr. Juan Flavier for his pro-development, proactive, and pro-poor policies at DOH and at the Senate.

DOH is such a mess right now.

On the second day

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This year’s theme is self-love.

Last year was just brutal and I couldn’t define what it was but it was an uphill battle. Thank God for supportive friends, some of whom had to literally drag me out of the house to join the living.

So as part of this year’s theme, I’m celebrating the things that made me who I am.

My gallery wall. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
My photos and my watercolors. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
When I was in high school I experimented with a Chinese paint brush. My control was dismal but at least I tried. Photo and art by CallMeCreation.com

I ran out of picture frames so I guess I would have to order online from Ikea.ph instead of going there again. I have a lot of photos I can print and hang. Or I can paint again with watercolors. But I’m super rusty. It has been 25 years since I have picked up a watercolor brush. I’m not good but at least I’m enjoying it. I’m not even aiming to have an exhibit like my sister but this is just something for my own home. Some of the better watercolors I did in high school were given away to classmates.

I’ll take photography seriously again, just like when I was in college. I didn’t invest in DSLRs because I know how time-consuming photography is as a hobby to justify the expensive equipment. And time is something I didn’t have for decades. For now I’ll use what I have–my cellphone and my Fujifilm XQ1–until I can say that I can now commit time before I step up and buy myself a mirrorless Fujifilm, which I find to be the best when it comes to low-light photography. I’ve worked with Canons, I had a Nikon, and two Olympus cameras but I find Fuji to be the best when it comes to color rendering and low light scenes. I have yet to try a Lumix. I’ve read about Hasselblads when I was still fooling around with films because those are the go-to cameras for medium formats–for book covers and posters. But those things are out of reach of the general public, especially now in digital. I’ve only seen a Hasselblad in a studio for portrait photography.

I lost all my Lomography cameras 😔 I had a Holga and I still had a black abd white film stuck in there when I left it in the old house. All that is left of my Lomo stuff is the 135 film converter. 😕

Rose tea to stave off colds. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I’ve been imbibing copious amounts of tea as I’ve been feeling under the weather. I might have contracted the girls’ colds so I took 500 mg of vitamin C, Neozep every 8 hrs, and a lot of bed rest. I slept early last night and slept some more after lunch. So far it has worked but I’m refraining from going out because this may turn out to be the dreaded omicron variant. It can’t hurt to be paranoid; look at what happened last year when I thought what the girls had was just an ordinary flu turned out to be Covid that knocked me down.

There is this Gwyneth Chua from US who broke her quarantine stay to party in Poblacion, Makati. She was positive for Covid and has infected 15 people whom she had dinner with or partied with. Stupid, stupid privileged asshole. And Twitter has the receipts. As it turns out, she studies at De La Salle University and Lasallians are now disowning her.

https://manilastandard.net/news/314026121/woman-cuts-quarantine-to-party-15-test-positive.html

Now, we’re back to a higher restriction due to tripling of cases in the last three days. Another lockdown to stem another Covid wave is not far behind. 😩

Solo

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My girls were just fetched by their dad and I’m home alone with the cats. It’s not a strange feeling because I was like this exactly a year ago except that then I was locked up in my room crying my eyes out. This time I will be cleaning like crazy and finishing all my DIY projects, like repainting the top closets and the closets in the next room. Maybe tomorrow I’ll start missing the girls.

I’m scared for my girls though because there’s a low pressure area building up near Guam and that may hit the Visayas again. I pray that it won’t be as severe as Typhoon Rai. But that dang thing looks massive.

Satellite image courtesy of US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

I started using NOAA when somebody taught me that surfers in the Philippines use this to monitor where and when the big waves will be. I used this when we did a vigil before Super Typhoon Haiyan made its landfall on Guian, Eastern Samar–a popular surf town. When I was on the ground doing my reporting, we were aiming to get to Guian but I was already too tired jumping from Leyte and Samar that week, driving for several hundreds of km each day. The farthest I got to in Samar was the town of Marabut, which was flattened to the ground.

Marabut’s poblacion, where homes and public buildings were left with no roofs. The people hid in caves. (2013) Photo by CallMeCreation.com

When Super Typhoon Rai made its first landfall a few days ago, it was on Dinagat Islands and Siargao, another popular surfing island-town. The video below shows how strong Typhoon Rai was, destroying the sports complex where evacuees were taking shelter.

Lord, have me mercy on us all.

I was too lazy to cook today so this is what we had for brunch. In the photo is my brunch while the girls had rice instead of yakisoba. And the soy sauce is half chili oil; the girls don’t like that. I was too lazy to cook this evening so I resorted to easy samgyupsal and veggies for me and the girls.

Lazy cook. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I don’t have the patience now to cook one-pot dishes because I was cleaning non-stop because my landlady’s handyman was fixing the regular problem of leaking roof.

I only have until 2023 to suffer this old apartment…Wheeeee!

New old books from my friend B. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Tsundoku strikes again!

My friend, who just came back from Singapore to spend the Christmas here, sent me her old books as she was cleaning their condo while in home quarantine. Of course, I welcomed the books. I would spend my free time this holiday break reading these and those that I had hoarded in the past. Tee hee!

My problem now is I have too many books to move again.

I had been spending my idle time scrolling through Pinterest and Instagram for bookshelf/office ideas to house my books. I still have a lot of them in my mom’s house and I’m afraid they would be dumped on me once I move in my flat.

Disaster fatigue

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I’m taking a break from disaster news. I know I’m very privileged to have this opportunity to tune out while millions of Filipinos are struggling without water, food, and shelter. During times like this, we miss ABS-CBN because they have the widest reach nationwide via their regional stations. They are the first in the field whenever we have calamities like this, bringing news nationwide. Now it’s like we have a news blackout and only we get live feed via FB live from VP Robredo since she has been on the ground after Typhoon Odette passed through Visayas and Mindanao. Duterte deprived the Filipinos of this link just because of his pettiness.

Chibi Rurouni Kenshin. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I received this chibi action figure for Christmas. I searched high and low in Akihabara for any Rurouni Kenshin items when I was there in 2017 but couldn’t find any. According to my colleague in our Tokyo office, stores in Akihabara sell merchandise from anime currently on air. They do have old stuff like Pokemon and Dragon Ball to cater to foreign tourists but Rurouni Kenshin is considered niche for vendors.

Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I grilled these for lunch today, part of my stash that I’ve been keeping in my new larger freezer. I have several kilos of wagyu beef that I will grill on New Year. The girls will be flying with their dad to his hometown on Wednesday so I’ll just save the grand cooking on New Year’s Eve.

After this we ran some errands and had late lunch/early dinner at Max’s.

Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Arroz caldo for me this rainy day.

Photo by CallMeCreation.com

After the girls leave tomorrow night (their flight is 6 am Wed), I may consider volunteering for relief ops in Robredo’s campaign center along Katipunan. They really need help given the devastation that the typhoon wrought in Vis-Min area.