I checked my dashboard, I wasn’t chosen for the consultancy gig I applied for. There were others but they weren’t a match. There was one that I could chew on but the rate was low so it was a no-go for me.

This would slow down my plan.

I need to push to get more side gigs. My boss is already driving me insane—causing my Monday anxiety so much.

People resign because of bad managers. I’m a testament to that. As my high school friend told me last night over dinner (I cooked for them and her kids), I cannot afford to just let go and say, “fuck you, I’m leaving!”

“You have kids that you’re sending to a private school. You can’t just walk away like that. That’s why I’m going through all this circus for my PhD (in Belgium) so that I have an ace with me when things go south,” she said.

This is the signal that I should really take that short course on data analytics in May. 

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The kittens are more free now that they can go up and down the stairs. They spend most of the day downstairs, playing in the laundry/utility area. They only come up to eat and sleep with mommy cat at the end of the day.

Our little derpy orange boy is hiding under one of the water tanks, taking a nap because it’s cooler there. He emerged after I panicked when I couldn’t find him. I’m always scared that they will get eaten by snakes. We do have some large ones here since we’re just spitting distance from a rainforest.

I should add more flowering plants on my stairs. 😝

Yesterday, I had to go out and buy cat supplies because the stainless steel cat litter box I ordered online has arrived. I needed to buy fresh cat litter to fill the new box.

I could hear my mom in my head, commenting dryly that my cats are so spoiled. Yes, they are. The stainless steel box cost me PHP 2,700—just for pee and poop 😶. Well, I keep justifying to myself that 1) the smell of cat pee (the foulest odor there is if not masked by cat litter scent) does not stick on stainless steel whereas they do on plastic boxes; 2) it’s big and has high walls. Kimchi finally fits in a cat litter box!

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It’s just 45 mins away from our house. Some springs were cold, some were warm, which was not surprising as this resort is nestled in between maars within the Laguna Volcanic Field.

We arrived at 7:45 am to maximize our day trip there as they haven’t renovated the cottages there for overnight stays. Going from the parking area to the pools required some walking through a rainforest.

We were provided lockers in the shower rooms since the huts were quite spread apart, which makes it hard to monitor your stuff.

The place is clean and easy on the eyes despite the resort being in existence since the 1980s, or even 1970s. Urrrrgh…research told me that the 45-hectare property has been run by the same family since 1918. 😱

Just like the forest back home.

It’s a bit tedious though to go back and forth the locker rooms and the pools because it requires a lot of walking up and down the stairs and winding paths.

We spent several hours hopping from one pool to another. We transferred to the colder springs before lunch and stayed there until we decided we were already tired of turning into prunes and needed to grab lunch.

Our PHP 2,800-per-head fee includes buffet lunch and snacks.

My girls have had enough so they had just hung out in one of the pavilions. Good decision since it rained. And it rained hard.

But my older sister and I were nonplussed and went around the rainforest under torrential rain, went upstream to try the other pools, one of which was called Lovers Pool. Well, I guess it was called as such because it was remote and it required you to cross bamboo bridges. Only lovers would seek that kind of secluded pool to do R-rated stuff.

We wanted to go further up the forest to reach the falls but it was raining so hard and going there was foolish because we had to cross a creek. Our experience living at the foot of a mountain all our lives taught us that torrential rains in rainforests could cause flash floods in creeks. Many students have died of drowning because of flash floods in an area we called Flat Rocks, where a natural pool was and had been a magnet for hikers since time immemorial.

It was fun walking under the rain in a forest. It has been a long time since I had done that. I didn’t do that while living in Metro Manila since I always felt rain in the city is acidic (we are perpetually covered in smog) and hardly refreshing.

On the way back home, we decided to take another route but Waze decided to take us to a less traveled road.

Damn that driving app. The road it told us to use was rough i.e. unpaved and at some point I got terrified because some of the rocks were sharp. I was trying to keep my cool because on the other side were cliffs.

I was literally driving through a rough mountain road, with no sign of civilization, with no end in sight.

I was overjoyed when we finally reached a hairpin turn that led us to a more familiar paved mountain road.

I slept the entire morning as my body compensated for the stress and disturbed sleep I had been having for a couple of weeks now..

Then cabin fever took over. Twin A and I walked grabbed our running shoes and walked for about 6 km late this afternoon to take the cobwebs away.

PAGASA declared that the hot and dry season has begun. My backyard, however, disagrees. It’s still raining at night.

At this point I already took 6,000 steps and going up the mountain was out of the question since it was already getting dark.

Tomorrow we will be driving east/southeast early morning to a place of cold springs and waterfalls. We need to cool down and get away from the maddening crowd.

This is the lovely thing about getting out of Metro Manila, going into the great outdoors is not much of a hassle.

This is my toxic trait: I keep on buying plants, thinking I could keep them alive despite my busyness. I keep blaming the weather and pests as the reasons for my plants’ demise.

Now I’m convincing—no, lying—to myself that this time it’s different. That since I would be relinquishing my manegerial position and I’m transitioning, I would have more time to devote to my plants and finally set up my garden.

Or I would garden more so I can take away the stress my boss is giving me.

Whatever the lies I tell myself, I believed them and bought more plants to kill. 😑

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I had a strange dream. A Filipino around my age who works for a global bank was very taken with me as I dialled up my charm offensive. He kept asking me out, so at first I thought it was part of work but later on it seemed like it wasn’t anymore.

I was in a dilemma. I liked him enough to say yes to invites but I don’t want to go through that again, be involved with someone I met through work and be used again.

I was about to say no to another invite, saying he is compromising his job, when I woke up.

It was a strange feeling. I never even knew the guy in real life—his face is not someone I encountered in the past. 🤔

Maybe it’s a warning. Maybe in the next few months I will have this encounter.

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I will watercolor this tomorrow because I refuse to work. I just had another shitty encounter with my manager today that I couldn’t help telling her off.

I no longer care because I’m dialing back soon anyway. If I bag that consultancy job, I will go on leave without pay for a month, just to prove a point to my manager and our APAC head that what they’re doing to me is already taking a toll on me mentally and physically. I can also tell them that I may or may not come back after the hiatus. Of course there is always the danger that they will call my bluff so I need to get more clients quickly within that one-month break if that happens.

But right now I am sticking to the timetable I initially set. I just need to have less engagement with my manager.

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I finally finished Oppenheimer during my round-trip on Cathay Pacific. The thing with Chris Nolan is that he makes really long movies. I had to cut my movie viewing in half because that freaking movie is 3 hours long!

For two-thirds of the movie, I have been trying to figure out what’s going on. Only in the last 1/3 of the movie did I understand what this was all about: Oppenheimer is the American Prometheus and he has to suffer the consequences of stealing fire to give to the world.

There were many scenes in the movie that could have been cut out to make a more compact movie.

However, the last scene was so poignant that I could forgive Nolan for this long-winded movie.

“Now I become death, destroyer of worlds,” Oppenheimer said.

Now, watch Grave of the Fireflies after Oppenheimer and let’s see if you won’t become an emotional wreck after this.

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