Mission accomplished. I finally applied for water connection this morning and the utility company’s engineering team went to my house in the afternoon to arrange the right of way issues. Once that’s out of the way by tomorrow and after I paid for the connection fee and bond, my house will be connected to the mains.

Now, next on the agenda is Converge connection. I already told their corp comm head about my intention to transfer my account from here in QC to my new house. HOWEVER, I still can’t do it because I’m still using my line here. Oh well, let’s see how that could that be arranged…

After the darkness of my current bathroom, my new bathroom seems very bright. My current water heater is still perfectly fine so I will pull it out of this apartment and transfer it here instead of buying a new one.

I opted to keep the original tiles, to mimic Vigan tiles of the old houses there. Plus these are very durable so I don’t need to worry about dinging it–or worse, cracking it–like when you have the shiny porcelain ones. The girls’ loft beds will arrive on the 22nd so hopefully by then I will have an idea of how much space will be left for the storage system I will be buying from Ikea for their room.

Only a few days more before the kitchen cabinets are done.

They will start with the welding works next week so this house will be inaccessible for quite a bit since they will remove the old staircase and manufacture a new industrial- sttength one. After that, I can start moving the books and the kitchen stuff that we don’t normally use.

After finishing a call and uploading one digest for publication, I walked around for a bit at 5 pm to buy my girls cookies from my favorite pastry shop and hopped to Infinitea. Then I went to the university park for some air and to drink my milk tea in peace.

My sis-in-law later joined me here and we talked until 8 pm, which was a good time to drive back north (1.5 hrs). The change of scenery has done me good, in the sense that I feel I can write a long article tomorrow.

That’s the thing with writing, if your brain is not ready, then no matter how you try, you can’t really force words to drip out of every orifice of your body. It’s like extracting blood out of stone.

Hopefully, I can finish the story tomorrow because our marketing team in Japan is ready to tweet it next week. Talk about pressure…

Meanwhile, today’s soundtrack is brought to you by Breaking Benjamin. I had been playing it while driving (to and from my hometown) so that I can keep myself awake.

This song, Evil Angel, sounds like it’s about substance abuse, which Ben Burnley has written extensively about in some Breaking Benjamin’s songs. He battled alcoholism for a while and he was almost a non-functional alcoholic. His health issues today are a result of his battle with the the bottle. Dear Agony album’s cover was Ben’s brain scan after he was diagnosed with “wet brain” or Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome due to alcohol abuse.

More than the heavy guitar riffs, what attracts me to Breaking Benjamin are the melodies and the relatable words, which echo in your mind especially if you have suffered from depression and substance abuse. Lucky are the people who did not have to suffer such things. They shouldn’t judge because they have no idea how we survivors are able to get out of our hellhole. They have no idea how it is to live without proper sleep for months…in my case, two years. It’s kind of sad that the only respite I had then was Covid.

I first listened to Breaking Benjamin when I still didn’t have kids. Then “I Will Not Bow” became my anthem while I was trying to keep myself together while my girls were battling with life and death in the ICU.

After going through the difficult recent two years, I could relate more to BB’s songs. Thanks to therapy, my faith, and friends, I got past it.