At KitchenAid, Ayala Vertis North. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
The girls and I went to Ayala Vertis North so our grocery shopping would be a little different. We did this late in the afternoon since the girls had their mock entrance exam the entire morning while I grilled herbed pork steak outside the apartment.
We dropped by KitchenAid to check out Instant Pot so I can see for myself how big it is. It is selling for around PHP 7,000 (the 7-in-1, 6 quart variant). I was tempted to buy this after doing the grocery shopping but I checked the prices first on Lazada.
Lo and behold! It’s 1k cheaper on Lazada and it comes with a free ceramic inner pot for slow cooking.
I pulled the trigger when I got home and paid for the reservation. It is done.
I primarily wanted this for making yogurt. My girls consume a lot of Greek yogurt, or any type of yogurt for that matter, so it turns out it’s more expensive than eating ice cream.
The pressure cooker and slow cooker functions are just bonuses for me since I already own a Crockpot (which is on its last legs). Let’s see how I can make beef pho soup and tonkotsu ramen broth with this. The classic Japanese tonkotsu requires more than 12 hours of slow cooking pig trotters and chicken carcass so that the collagen will be drawn out.
Photo from Seriouseats.com
Ever since I read that article from Serious Eats, the slow-cooked tonkotsu broth never went out of my mind. I said to myself, one day I will just devote an entire 24 hours just making ramen broth. That’s a mark of a serious home cook 😂
I miss Japan. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
The thought of making tonkotsu broth in an Instant pot and/or Crockpot made me crave for ramen so Twin A and I had ramen while Twin A had some rice meal set.
Dinner before doing grocery shopping at Merkado.
Ramen at Jaoan Fudo Street. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Once I learn how to make the right tonkotsu broth (kinda like what Ramen Nagi serves), I don’t think I will tolerate anymore the flavored water excuse of a ramen some shops offer.
In a totally unrelated development/event…
My cats looking out the window. They were looking at the birds. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Well not yet. I mean it takes years before you can establish a small holding like this. My plan is to have something more organized than this. Like veggie beds under the existing fruit trees that my father and my nephew planted. This guy also gave me an idea what to do the the laundry runoff—I will create a “wetland” to process the grey water from the washing machine since I plan to make my ground level a contained utility area and next to it is the outdoor patio for barbecues with an optional hot tub.
This video calmed me down after the shit I went through again today as a result of that idiotor that had been encroaching on other people’s turfs. Because he misunderstood the corporate structure (because stupid company named several layers the same thing), he messed up and made it look like I got it wrong. He published his own version of the story while I stood my ground and stuck with how we explain things. My manager kept on harping about it and until I drew a chart of the corporate structure and sent it to her and had the reporter explain it. So she recognized that I was right, the idiotor did a shortcut and edited it according how he understood it.
It was a painful way to end the day and my brain was so exhausted. All this hee-hawing while I was editing another story that competition was also chasing. I told another editor-friend that I was already tuning out (it was before 6 pm) as I was already so pissed and my brain was already hurting.
Then I played the piano and sang for an hour. God bless my piano that was within my reach.
Fedora for the win! Photo by CallMeCreation.com
For several days now, I had been installing several Linux operating systems on Twin A’s desktop computer because Minecraft doesn’t seem to agree with Ubuntu 20.04 and crashes. This last OS I installed is the latest Fedora version and so far so good, it is running smoothly. The Bluetooth manager is better compared to the crappy one that Lubuntu 22.04 has.
Choosing wallpaper background. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Twin A: Mommy, how did you know how to install operating systems?
Me: I learned by myself. Trial and error.
A: How did you learn Linux systems?
Me: I learned again by myself. I studied by trial and error.
I wanted to add to her that I am a geek at heart and tinkering with operating systems was a hobby of mine before I had kids. I even wanted to have a Raspberry Pi system (the barebones PC setup) to experiment with. I wanted it to be my multimedia machine back when downloading *stuff* was still a thing (now everything is streamed).
Photo from www.raspberrypi.com
I think I can make a smart home with this Raspberry Pi if I learn how to configure this. Something to occupy me—as if there’s not enough to occupy me these days.
Kimchi 🥰Sushi 🥰I don’t know who took these photos since they were taken while I was starting to work this morning.
Twin I said she saw my door was open this morning (while the AC is running) as the cats let themselves in while I was sleeping. As I posted here before, Sushi knows how to open my bedroom door if it’s not bolted.
My sister-in-law told me over Viber last night that they adopted a black kitten. She is part of the litter that resides near their apartment and SIL said she fears that mommy cat is pregnant again. I told her when we come home this Friday I will bring my cat carrier so we can bring the mommy cat to the College of VetMed hospital to have her checked. If she’s not pregnant, we can have her spayed the following day.
Black Kitty.I want to name her Kuromi クロミ. Hehehe.
We will be spending 3 days at my mom’s. I hired my nephew to tutor my girls on Fri and Sat for their upcoming simulation high school entrance exam on Sunday. I’m quite useless when it comes to Math because I already forgot how to solve algebra problems, among other things. My nephew, Kuya H, graduated with honors from my high school–the high school that my girls will be trying to get into. At least his memory is fresher than mine. I took the entrance exam in 1991 and of course I couldn’t remember if I had a hard time when I was taking the exam. All I remember was I had no problem with English and my high score there pulled up my Math score 🤣.
OK, another day has ended and OMG I need to cut off all communication tomorrow so I can finally finish my drafts. Like seven of them.
Dateline Philippines: Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino issues an internal memorandum calling on schools and public libraries to pull out books that contain ‘anti-government’ text.
Who the hell does the Commission on the Filipino Language think it is? We must resist all this historical revisionism and dumbing down of Filipino students.
We must expose these assholes and bring them down. Public torching should be the SOP for such things.
OMG I’m so incensed today.
An asshole editor, who is trying to be relevant, is looking to pick a fight today. Just because he no longer has any reporter left since they all quit and could no longer stomach him, he intrudes into my turf when he clearly doesn’t have any basis and grabs stories from my own backyard. We had a long email thread about his arresting stories on the backend/CMS because I stood my ground and told him that next time he should inform ME first if he is going to poach and mess with a story that I painstakingly edited for four days. I did not back down and told him I will not tolerate such discourtesy and I made sure I cc’d relevant people. Even the reporter who wrote the story couldn’t understand why he was dipping into this story that doesn’t concern him. It’s not even his turf.
He could not even understand how joint ventures work.
What a way to end the week.
I should really pick my battles but damn, this dude really is public enemy number one. And as I promised myself, I will not let anyone disrespect me anymore. Ever.
Ice cream to calm me down. It’s the weekend! Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I was too exhausted, too agitated to relax on the last working hours of Friday. I should have been happy because I had so many scoops this week, especially today. But nhooooo, this asshat idiotor had to rain on my parade.
Ghad, I’m working too hard.
Meanwhile, my mom is super happy that my older sister gave her this:
And I was just thinking about having my own massage chair. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I think I will be a frequent customer of this thing next weekend. Hohoho!
Lemme see, tomorrow we need to pickup the girls’ school uniforms, new PE shoes for Twin I (she already outgrew *again* her PE shoes that we just bought from Decathlon), pick up their Kumon sheets, and let’s see where else we can go to…
New keycaps. The keyboard is cuter now. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
To inspire me to type long passages today. LOL. As if.
This arrived late in the afternoon. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
The keys feel much better than the stock keycaps that came with RK61, less clackety but still has this satisfying clicks since they’re blue switches.
However nice my keyboard looks and feels like, I’m still not inspired enough to finish what I need to finish as I’m not done with the things I needed to write and publish today. TOO MUCH ADMIN WORK! Then a reporter got stuck; couldn’t access our system and I had to act as a go-between her and our IT guys in HK and Mumbai. Then an application for our job ad in Bangkok came through so I need to schedule calls…
It’s already 7:03 pm and I’m not yet halfway through with the digest I need to publish soon.
Some cuties to keep me company during this bed weather day…
These fluffies refuse to leave my side. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Entrance exams
My kids and I are preparing the entrance exam requirements today. We’re filling up our applications for Philippine Science High School as it turns out their grades have qualified them to take the entrance exam (above 85%). However, we need to wait a little bit because we still need to submit their 1st or 2nd quarter grades by November before they can take the exam in December. Our target school’s exam will also be in December.
I was also looking at the requirements for Quezon City Science High School and it looks like we need an endorsement from the principal to certify their grades will qualify them to take QSci exam.
The girls are complaining that their classmates in their review school could keep up with the advanced lessons because it seemed like they have already taken up those in regular school (and their school is based in my hometown). In contrast, my girls said most of the lessons/concepts tackled in the review and practice exams were alien to them at first—they only encountered those for the first time in review school. That was why before I left for Singapore, I had to help them answer the sample tests to supplement the lectures given to them by review school.
Just as I suspected, the schools in my hometown are advanced compared to Metro Manila counterparts. This was first observed by my bff C, whose niece first went to an elementary school in our hometown. After her parents split, this niece transferred to St. Paul Pasig to live with her mom. She later complained that the lessons in St. Paul were late–they have already tackled those in her old school in our hometown. So when she passed our high school’s entrance exam, she went back to live with her maternal grandparents to study there. I think she already graduated college from UP.
I don’t know why this is so. Maybe because we are a university town, thus, basic education around the area had to be competitive? Maybe because of the existence of my high school, so other competing high schools had to level up? I will know later when we transfer there. All I know is that the kids there have more school days than their counterparts in Metro Manila as class suspensions in my hometown are not as frequent compared to Metro Manila. We didn’t have to contend with epic floods and horrendous traffic then. Kids here in the city have to wake up at 4:30 am so they can leave for school at 5:30 am and reach their school at 7 am. Imagine that horrible commute everyday. The kids are always tired.
This is the primary reason why I chose to live where I am now so my children will just be within 2 km radius of their school even though it would make my own commute for work horrible. I want them to be less stressed about the commute so they can stay awake in school.
I remember in elementary we only had to wake up at 6 am so we can take public transportation at 6:30 am and be in school at past 7 am. But in high school, our family transferred to a new house within the university campus so our school was just 100 meters away from our house. LOL. Living near our schools made a huge difference in terms of our scholastic performance and participation in extra curricular activities. It was just I had different priorities in high school. Hahahaha! Well in the end it served me well since it was the arts that saved my ass.
My Greek-letter organization brother, who just got back to Chicago where he has been living for two decades or more, contracted Covid. He said he never had Covid or got sick the entire time he was here in the Philippines when he was taking care of his parents for three months. He said people in the US treat the pandemic as something that is already over and he’s pissed that people refused to wear masks. People are dying again because they simply refused to have boosters/vaccination and wear masks. It’s simple.
It’s inconvenient but my goodness I will have all the inconveniences that come with mask-wearing than suffer another bout of Covid. The variant that hit me last year was nasty and it took months before I could fully recover. I’m glad that Asia hasn’t dropped masks yet. Ever since we got hit by SARS, mask-wearing has become second nature to us. It’s courtesy to other people so they may not get sick from whatever virus or bacteria we’re harboring, especially if we’re taking the public transport.
Manic Monday. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I started working at around 8 this morning and I had non-stop calls from 11 am until 4 pm. A lot of talking and graph display had taken place. I haven’t had any chance to write my own stories—all admin work today. Arrrghhh.
And here I am, still sifting through hundred of cards that I got in Singapore and I have to make sense of all of them. It will take me days to sift through and email all these people and seek re-connection.
And yes, I have two keyboards. I use both, depending on my mood. My new key caps for my Royal Kludge will arrive tomorrow. I’m looking at this GammaKay 65% and Rakk 65% keyboards. Just because.
I think I had been feeling ill the past few days because my body is withdrawing from escitalopram that I had stopped taking on 24 July…about 2 weeks ago. And I feel really bad: I feel like I’m floating and have this nagging dull headache somewhere. It was a bad idea to skip it. I took a half pill today and I don’t know if it was psychosomatic that I felt a bit better. Having less triggers doesn’t mean I’m fully cured; it just means I can manage myself with less synthetic chemicals in my brain.
It has been exactly a year this week when I learned about J and that silly young journo, plunged into darkness, and had alcohol for my companion. I had sunk so low, as low as when I dug myself a hole in December 2020 – January 2021. When I started barfing on my toilet after downing a whole bottle of wine by myself, that’s when I decided I needed professional help to sort me out. That’s when I learned that what I had been experiencing was post-traumatic stress. I wasn’t properly healing and I just kept on putting on a brave front but deep inside I was crumbling. Seeing my therapist was the best thing I did for myself. Putting a name on what I was going through helped me sort out the tangles inside me.
Trauma. That’s what my therapist told me. The word trauma helped me heal; it was a validation that I was not being melodramatic about the whole thing. Whatever devastation I felt was legit. I was dealing with a lot of trauma, for being betrayed despite giving my all. For losing myself into something or someone who gave so little. For the abuse that I received: I let a Dementor/Nazgul suck the life out of me and I received no love in return. I was just a human appliance.
Mental health is very important and taking care of it is as equally important as taking care of the rest of your body. Just like when your body received huge blows, it has to adjust to the trauma and heal before it can fully function again.
I can’t say I’m fully healed—I don’t think you can ever recover from such trauma—but I was already able to get back on the saddle to fight for survival for another day. I have gotten better compared to last year when I couldn’t even write. I was back again in that deep, dark pit, trying to claw my way up. I couldn’t sleep since my mind couldn’t stop thinking about what happened. What’s sad is that Covid was the only respite I had. Because of Covid, I was able to sleep and recover all the lost sleep since the breakup.
I’m much, much better now. I’m now in that place where I can say I’m content with life—at this point. Of course this can change tomorrow. But so far, I don’t feel the need to have a partner because even just the thought of having one exhausts my brain. I am in control of whatever I have in my life right now. No one is leading me by the nose anymore. No one is being unkind to me anymore. I don’t have to bend backwards just to earn crumbs of affection.
I don’t know what happened to me while my girls and I were in SM Marikina. My head was pounding and then I felt like I was going to have a fever. When we got home at almost 10 pm, I just ate a quick dinner of smoked salmon and rice and I fell on my bed immediately. Still in my “outdoor” clothes. I knew the girls were going in and out of my room while I was sleeping and I remember telling them not to turn on my fan or aircon because I felt cold already. Now it’s 5 am and I am wide awake 👀
A basic phone for my Starhub sim. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I bought this basic phone from SM Marikina yesterday so I can have my Starhub SIM constantly on roaming. You see, I have forfeited the dual sim capabilities of my Oppo Reno 7 Z by having a 400GB micro sd card occupy the slot that could have accommodated a second SIM. My storage is more important than my dual SIM. Because I have 8k photos that aren’t in the cloud.
Why have the Starhub on constant roaming? This way it won’t expire like the last time. If I have this sim always on, I will remember to top up when it is nearing the 180-day expiration. I also have some OTPs sent to this number. I also have this number as an alternative mobile so that my Singapore contacts can use this to reach me.
Same thing when I’m abroad. I need my Smart SIM to be constantly on roaming because of OTPs and sms that I should pay attention to.
This only costs PhP 1,299 and is the basic phone brand of Realme, that Shenzen, China-based phone maker. I could have gone for the cheaper ones but I read their battery lives are short. If I were to waste money on something I could live without, then might as well waste it on something with higher quality.
Another piercing. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I granted Twin I’s wish of having another set of ear piercings so she can have multiple earrings in one ear. I just let her be; as long as I have money, I let them express their individuality. They’re good kids anyway. My younger sister had multiple ear piercings when we were in high school so…
I also wasted money again on eyeglasses. I bought a second pair because I no longer want to be in that place of insecurity, with the fear of losing my only pair. My eyesight is that bad that I cannot function without it. I realized that I can no longer wear contact lenses for the entire day. I dunno why.
I could have gotten cheaper frames but those mean ugly shapes or they’re very thin and wouldn’t support my lenses that are already heavy and thick even if they’re the “ultra thin” variety. I checked out Lenskart in SG if they had decent frames at the price I’m willing to pay, but of course they don’t. And they bought Owndays a month ago or so. For the price of frames and lenses that Owndays offer, they’re pretty expensive compared to the branded ones on sale (30-40%) from EO here in Manila. It also includes the lenses.
Vera Wang. I initially was going for Zac Posen but this matched my face better
I got a Vera Wang pair. Very Vera Wang if you ask me 😂. I could wear it with her USD 10,000 gowns. I could have gone Cath Kidston but my girls said the floral prints on Cath Kidston bags don’t translate well on eyeglasses. They were right. The Ann Taylor ones on sale aren’t different from my current one, so what’s the point?
Grocery shopping at SM Hypermarket, SM Marikina. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
And I went overboard with my grocery shopping last night. Was almost 2x over budget. 😑 Oh well, as long as my echoserang froglets are well fed, then it’s money well spent.
