Category Archives: living in Metro Manila

Four days left

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Whoppeeee! Four working days left before I can take my longgggg holiday.

Since traffic is horrible, I’m wondering how we can spend 17-20 Dec peacefully at home. Twin I will surely nag me about going somewhere…

I missed my cats so I made them lose their minds once again 🤣. They didn’t leave me last night and made sure they disrupted my sleep until 4 am; that’s when I threw them out of my room. Those damned cats made sure I was always awake 🤦🏻‍♀️

I conducted a one-on-one training with our new reporter the entire day. I have been making inroads in Vietnam and I hope I can fly there to touch base with my contacts and the new reporter. I have to be more hands-on now.

I remember years of not being able to have a long Christmas holiday or any kind of holiday because I had a hard time turning off the tap. I put so much value in my work that my profession has become my identity. I had a very unhealthy relationship with work. I didn’t let myself rest because news never rested. It burned me out so much that I had tried quitting the profession three times. And it keeps pulling me back.

Many of my colleagues will say that journalism feels like a natural extension of being a curious human in the world, which makes it harder yet to unlink our lives from our professions. Traits like curiosity or doggedness can correlate, or predispose us to how we decide to spend our time professionally — and in other arenas of life — rather than the other way around (i.e. our job imparting traits on us that make us who we are).

When I started realizing the distinction between who I am and what I do to earn a living, I started to draw better boundaries around the latter. I no longer work weekends or cover news. (I have two Post-it’s in my office I read every day: “I don’t have to do everything;” “I will not be at the whims of the news cycle.”) And I would argue that those boundaries haven’t made me feel any less of a journalist: I can be committed to telling accurate, illuminating stories when I put work in a box of its own.

Wudan Yan, Poynter.org

The above passages are true of me: I always filter the world through the lenses of a journalist that oftentimes I forget I am a human with feelings and not a slave to the news cycle. I remember working until 3 am because of some breaking news or events that needed to be posted. I didn’t allow myself to be human because there is always the expectation that what I was doing is public service.

Journalism fundamentally trains us to be more observant, analytical and critical of the world around us. When I first entered the field, some of my colleagues joked that journalists are great at understanding others and their problems, but are terrible at recognizing their own. What if we turned that journalistic lens inward to reflect on how we identify, and how those identifiers serve us — or not?

Wudan Yan, Poynter.org

However good I was doing analysis of events or stories, I could not analyze my own self until my world burned itself. I had to step back and disassociate myself.

Now I found the perfect way to manage this problem: Cover stories that you are not passionate about. That’s why I no longer want to cover national/political events. High finance is hardly a passionate topic, unless I am venture capitalist or Warren Buffet who gets his high whenever he closes a deal.

That’s the secret how I lasted this long in this current job. It doesn’t suck the life out of me.

“There’s professional identity and then there’s personal identity, (which) is tied up in the way that you see your purpose, mission and character,” Usher said. “Those things are distinct, and it’s probably helpful to see it that way.”

The urban gardener

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My miniature rose. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

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.

Urine: the ultimate ‘organic’ fertiliser?, The Ecologist

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.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

Convenience vs mental health

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Today’s traffic and commuter situation.

I read on Twitter that carmageddon was back last Friday, the eve of the Alert Level 3 (a.k.a loosening of lockdown to whatever) implementation. I am thankful that big events are still not allowed or else I would have been one of those suffering from a three-hour traffic jam on EDSA.

I have written numerous pieces about Metro Manila traffic and the car-centric culture that we have because our government since the beginning of time did not prioritize public transportation and kept on pandering to the oligarchs and the moneyed class–the ones who can afford to buy private cars. The Philippines was the first one to have a light railway transit in ASEAN, which was financed by foreign loans and helped the Marcoses get richer by the minute (just read between the lines).

Manila in 1984, during the time of Ferdinand Marcos, oversaw construction of the first electric rail line in ASEAN, but this system subsequently suffered from a lack of decent maintenance bringing a raft of problems. Finally it was repaired and renovated; in 2004 a second LRT line was added, and this was followed in 2005 by three MRT lines. Currently a one-line LRT expansion is in the planning stages. At present the entire rail system extends 47.9 kilometers.

Living ASEAN
Update: They have already extended LRT Line 2 up to Antipolo. MRT 7 would also be completed soon.

So of course it was just a piece of trophy infrastructure project. Subsequent administrations did not prioritize public transport, and thus, we got left behind. Imagine, we were ahead of Singapore by three years and look at them now! I can get around Singapore without taxis most of the time there. Riding the bus there is not like going into a battlefield like here.

We used to have a 1,100-km railway from Manila to Legazpi City in Albay and my father used to take the train daily from Makati (where they lived during their first years of marriage) to UP Los Baños where he was a research assistant). It was doable. The Philippine National Railway system fell into disrepair because of this neglect and wrong priorities of past administrations. Every year we get choked by cars on highways and small backroads because we don’t have enough trains. Don’t talk to me about the controversies about the financing of these various train projects because I’ve been writing about them for 15 years or so and bugging Finance and Transport secretaries year in and year out about this and the corruption surrounding these projects is frustrating.

So now we have carmageddon that is getting worse every year. It takes a huge toll on our mental health and it is not easing up anytime soon. Not being able to chase stories physically (via in-person news coverage) is a major drag during this pandemic but it has helped me get off that carmageddon agony for almost two years. I realized now that life is super refreshing, despite Covid, without the traffic jam that sucked my soul.

AND if the plan to build my tiny house in my hometown pans out, I guess my travel time will be cut into half but I would have to drive 65 km one way everyday to Makati. Gas and toll would eat into my budget but it would be better for my sanity I guess. If I leave early enough from my hometown (like 6 am-ish) and leave Makati by 5pm, I would be home by 6:30 or 7pm. If I leave Makati at 10 pm, I would be in our hometown by 11 pm. From Makati to Quezon City pre-pandemic I would arrive home by 9 pm if I leave at 5 pm.

I did the hometown-Makati-hometown daily for a couple of years when the girls were still babies. I brought them to my mom’s house and we lived there for three months every summer to cool off because our old house in QC was like an oven. Plus playgrounds and grassy fields where they had picnics every afternoon were just walking distance–without cars and pollution. I drove from my hometown to Makati four times a week if I can help it. It wasn’t that much of a hassle

Now that I don’t have to be in Makati regularly because we already have a permanent Manila reporter (while I do my coverage of Southeast Asia remotely), I can limit my trips to Makati in a week. I could have my meetings and coverage/conferences confined all in one or two days. What would change though is I need to fly to Singapore frequently or somewhere else in Asia regularly (at least once a month, if things go according to plan). That can be solved by hiring my mom’s driver to drive me in my car to the airport and take the earliest flight out of Manila and have him drive me back again from the airport in Manila back to our hometown. Right now I’m spoiled by Grab.

I like living where I am now because everything is convenient since I have two supermarkets within walking distance from my apartment, I have a lot of food choices within Grab distance. If I need materials, furniture, appliance or whatever, I can just pop in the nearest SM (which is like 3 km). In my hometown, I am confined to whatever is available in our tiny mall and choices are very limited. No Grab.

But I have mountains, trees, fresh air, freedom to bike anywhere, walk to anywhere.

I think I’m at that stage where I’d choose to live a boring life than suffer 6 hours on the road daily. I’m done with night life of my youth (I’ve had plenty of those). I can finally leave Metro Manila for good.

Lockdown again

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The strict enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) a.k.a. hard lockdown has started a few hours ago. Since I was busy with work, it was only this morning I was able to go to the barangay hall to apply for a quarantine pass.

But they sent me home because I didn’t bring a 1×1 photo for the pass, which they will make as an ID of sorts. Who the hell carries a 1×1 photo all the time?!

Good thing I always have a stash of photo papers at home. I printed 1×1 photos all over my A4 sized photo paper. I just don’t know how I will be able to use up all those when everything these days are digital 🤔

I went back to the barangay hall only to be told that I don’t need a quarantine pass because I can use my work ID. Drats. So I called up my househelp and told her to apply for her quarantine pass instead so both of us can go out.

While I was at it, I asked about the seal of authentication for my vaccine card. The barangay officer took my card and said the barangay captain will collate all those needing the authentication seal and have them stamped then they will return it to us. I just hope they do it soon.

Then I spent the rest of the morning and noon panic-buying. I bought a lot of meat from a Monterey Community Market, then shopped at Puregold for other food and household supplies we will need in the next 2-3 weeks. Then went to UP for vegetables.

My shopping cart. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Then added some essential stuff. For my sanity.

For mental health. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

In other news…

Carlos Paalam’s fight will be at 1 pm today. He can either win silver or gold.

Fighting!

Rain, rain go away

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So it looks like the rains will continue for the rest of the week, if the cloud system hanging over most of Luzon remains like that. Highly probable as the typhoon up north and the one forming in northeast continues to pull up the southwest monsoon.

The leaking stopped in the laundry area as my landlady’s worker cleaned the rain gutters of debris (mostly leaves from the mango tree in front of the apartment). Hard to dry clothes and bed sheets still.

Because I’m too lazy still (Metro Manila is flooded!) to go to the hardware store to buy paint and a gas regulator for my LPG tank, I busied myself this morning with experimenting with my new Linux distro, Fedora.

It’s basically the same as Ubuntu but the command line on terminal is a bit different. Instead of using # apt-get, you use # dnf (formerly # yum). Therefore, I have to master some basic command lines because I find using command lines easier when tweaking and installing drivers and programs on Linux compared to GUIs.

My girls are very comfortable using Linux, whatever distro, as I started them on this OS. That’s good since this means I don’t have to pay for expensive OS and hardware whenever Microsoft or Apple forces people to upgrade and find that their hardware cannot cope with the system requirements. And yes, I’m talking about Microsoft releasing Windows 11 this October and supporting Win 10 only until 2025. I just bought a new laptop, for crying out loud!

I was only forced to use Windows again because my company is unfriendly to non-Windows users. Even Mac people complained. I used to work exclusively on Linux and our IT guys were surprised that I was using it, the only one they encountered using it for whole of Asia Pacific. Because of this, they couldn’t help me with workarounds to specific backend problems. Why would they study troubleshooting Linux-company system problems just for one nerd in the company? So I had to switch to Windows 🙄

Since we’re dealing with biblical calamities all at the same time (pestilence, flood, earthquakes, volcanic eruption) it’s high time that I reorganize our emergency bags again. You’ll never know when you needed to evacuate. One bag for each of us containing basic necessities like flashlights with whistles, clothes, toiletries, biscuits or crackers, medicines, and water bottles. These bags should be ones that you can easily grab and go. Then another bigger container, if you have time to grab, are stuff for longer term evacuation like tent, sleeping bags, portable stove, canned goods, water purifier, and solar lamps. I already have all of these except for the plastic container to hold the tents and sleeping bag. I need to buy more sleeping bags.

I once told J that if he wants to survive Armageddon, he should stick to a Filipino since more or less we are used to Armageddon regularly so we know how to go about it. We’re like cockroaches, we can survive disasters. This is also one of the reasons why I drive manual transmission vehicles; mechanics on roadsides in all provinces know how to deal with manual cars. Automatic transmission cars are good as dead, especially if computer boxes get wet.

I am talking from experience; I was in the middle of Pasig-Cainta when Tropical Storm Ondoy submerged Metro Manila underwater for weeks in 2009. After a month of the disaster, I saw a lot of new AT cars dumped on roadsides of Manggahan Floodway ready for scrap recovery because they were already useless. For MT cars, you just push it through flood while the driver revs the gas pedal on first gear until you get to dry land. That’s what we did to our cars to get out of Pasig-Cainta when that area was like Waterworld. This is also the reason why I don’t want to buy sedans, if I can help it. If it’s already the end of the world, you may at least want your getaway car to be able to cross flooded areas. That’s why I am still not letting go of my old Isuzu Crosswind; I was able to drive through Super Typhoon Haiyan ground zero with that, about 2000 km to and from Samar-Leyte. Plus you can sleep at the back of the car if I just push the passenger seat further up against the back of the driver’s seat.

Ok, I must go out today to buy: 1) butane bottles for the portable stove; gas regulator for my regular LPG stove; one or two emergency lamps; rain boots (I don’t want leptospirosis adding to our worries) and wall shelves. Because I’m bored and I want to add shelves in the cooking area. And hanging plants.

Speaking of boredom, my girls are reading again. Yey.

Their reading positions are bad though. They often catch me in this position as well. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Daughters were craving for junkfood. So I made junkfood. Home-made hamburgers.

I just bought the Angus beef Highlands burger patties and Gardenia burger buns. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Veggies and Kewpie mayonaise. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Comfort food for rainy days.

If only Youtube was accessible then…

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My father would have been spending his final days drinking all these concerts. He would have been watching the lost clips of The Beatles, Everly Brothers and Simon and Garfunkel. He would have been discovering NPR Tiny Desk Concerts. He would be watching Sting’s versatility with the guitars and listening to his voice that doesn’t seem to age.

He would have been watching with me live concerts that were inaccessible to us before Youtube came along. Youtube was founded a few months before he died in 2005. Internet speed then was barely 512kbps; the videos would have been forever buffering. That would have pissed him off.

Our love for music came from my father. People always told me that he went around town with a guitar strapped to him. He was part of a “combo”, or in today’s language, a band. One of the reasons why my mother went nuts over him. When we were growing up, we were always surrounded by music. I remember he and my brother made some huge DIY wooden speakers (which looked like the cahon (beatbox used in acoustic performances). They put together our sound system that involved amplifiers, microphones, and cords. Meters and meters of cords. Tape decks. He justified the expense by saying that I kept on joining singing contests that’s why we needed those (LOL!).

One time when we were in high school, at the height of alt-pop rock and grunge, my younger sister learned the guitar. She asked if she could have one. That afternoon my father came home with a guitar on his back. He just needed an excuse to buy himself a new guitar because he smashed the last one we had. All first three children had piano lessons but I was the only one who stuck with it for a couple of years. We three girls played in a rondalla (originally from medieval Spain) in elementary school. My younger sister and I played the 14-string bandurria while my older sister played the guitar. I can also play the 12-string octavina. Playing those were brutal on my fingers that I had very thick callouses for years. Tuning these things every time we played was a pain. 14 strings! And almost every other week the number “0” string would snap and I often had to go to the store and stock up. Because of that I learned to string these instruments. I can string a guitar! I also learned how to tune strings by ear without those electronic devices that most people use nowadays.

So when my girls picked up the ukelele, it was easy for me to learn it (in just one night) and I know how tune it (hello Youtube!).

I was always at the piano when I still lived there. My neighbors suffered whenever I learned a piece by oido (Spanish for “by ear”) because I would repeat and repeat the song until I got it right. I have little patience for learning a song by reading notes because published transcriptions came too late and I wanted to learn the latest song that caught my ear as soon as possible. Learning the power chords was invaluable. I have yet to master the diminished and augmented chords but I no longer have the time and patience.

When I left my parents’ home, I lost my access to a piano. It was only in 2016-ish i was able to buy myself a Roland keyboard as I promised myself I would. Now my problem is timing because I have neighbors and I have to be conscious of their working/waking hours…

I wish Youtube existed then for my father. He would have been like me now, drowning in concerts.

We weren’t able to ride our bikes yesterday because it rained hard but we were back on the saddle this late afternoon because I was already unproductive.

Lonely bench. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Stray cats around Vinsons Hall. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Ordering macha and milktea near Bahay ng Alumni. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
We stopped by the Carillon Tower to drink our tea before riding back home. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I won’t be able to bike tomorrow since I would be doing some grocery shopping. My freezer is already empty.