When will zoonosis stop? Perhaps never. It’s nature’s way of flashing the dirty finger at humanity.
Can we just keep them within their borders??? I mean none of their citizens can leave the country now since their passports are held or are no longer renewed (Zero-Covid policy of China). This ought to stop the spread of this new zoonotic disease, methinks.
Time check: It’s 10:45 pm and I’m still working. Replying to emails, uploading stories, picking up stories to edit first thing in the morning…OMG why am I doing regular OT? I am burning myself out.
On the side, I’m having an exchange with a former presidential spokesperson regarding nuclear power on Twitter…
I need a life. HAHAHAHAHAHA!
Have paper bag, have cat. And another cat. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
My life now revolves around my children–the twins and the cats.
I should probably take time off…drive to Zambales with gay extraordinaire K and dance on the beach and have drinks by the bonfire. He messaged me today to check up on me. I said I may go to S.Korea in October while he said he has no travel plans yet. I said maybe we should go on a roadtrip. Then he suggested we go to Zambales by the end of this month…Will have to check my calendar as I have to bring the girls to my hometown on the 19th to prepare them for the simulation entrance exam to be conducted by their review school. It is yet to be decided if this would be conducted F2F but I have to prepare just in case.
Now I wonder how I would fit the buffing and polishing of my car into my schedule.
Tonight I made cold soba with zaru soba sauce and flaked roasted chicken. We’re laying off red meat for a while after that high blood-inducing, 10-hr bulalo that tasted heavenly but deadly. I still have the bulalo broth that I can use for pho, which I plan on making this week as well.
Zaru soba. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
My girls like the cold soba and the ready-made sauce that I bought from SM Hypermarket in Marikina. Since it is a hypermarket, it has more imported food items like Japanese sauces and noodles.
I wonder what I would serve for lunch and dinner tomorrow…
Ah the men in my life didn’t know they had it good with me because I can cook. Idiots.
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 am supposed to visit you in S. Korea when I come there in October. I didn’t tell you first about this plan because I could see that you are in and out of the hospital the past few months. I don’t didn’t want to pressure you to get better. I saw your last post that your were put in isolation. I had always prayed for you whenever your body failed you. Then I read Yo’s early morning post that you already passed. I was in Singapore at that time. I couldn’t process your death well because I was busy with work in a foreign country.
You were the stage actress that I looked up to in our group. I remember that time when I sang Joey Ayala’s “Bathala”, you provided the impromptu interpretative dance that had everybody in stitches. You taught the craft at the Philippine High School for the Arts when I left to pursue my journalism career and I told myself, how lucky were the students to have you as their mentor. When I was making a fool of myself during one of our performances in Letran because I was struggling with the Henerala Agueda character (I wasn’t able to completely memorize the script), you supported me by ad lib-ing so much.
I never heard a negative feedback from you even though I was messing up. You always encouraged me. You and Bill saw my potential way back in high school and the rest of the ensemble took me in after that.
I’m sorry I was not so much of a friend the past few years. We were all charting our own paths, with our own struggles. When Bart died at the start of the pandemic, I worried about you because you were among the immunocompromised people I know. But then I knew you were better off there than being stuck here although you are away from family. I thought that your university where you taught ought to be taking care of you well…
Your love for the theater and the arts never died as you continued your podcasts with our fellow stage people even from afar.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
No more pain. You are now with Him.
While you aren’t here in this photo, this still reminds me of our group. Our memory keeper, Bart, already went ahead of you so we couldn’t recover our archives.
Dear Theater Actor,
Congratulations! You had a good opening night. You received so much flowers and gifts from admirers. I don’t think I ever received such gifts on any opening night I had…😂😂😂 Hopefully I can still catch the last run of your performance, but damn it’s so difficult. Scheduling my vegetable shopping is already difficult for me. Hahahaha! Shall I bring flowers backstage? I dunno; it will just get buried with all the other flowers that you often receive. Am I brave enough to meet you backstage? That I have yet to see.
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.
I have to say that today’s lunch (and extended to dinner) was the best Hainanese chicken rice I’ve done so far. I know now the secret to the yummiest rice—I bought the secret from Fairprice 🤣 For years I struggled with cooking the rice that matches the the the taste of the rice served by the various vendors I patronize in Singapore. It turns out it can be achieved through a packet. OMG, I have wracked my brain for years…
Perfected by trial and error. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
But the chicken itself is a different story. I experimented for years and it was a lot of trial and error. The best technique for me is not to cook a whole chicken if I won’t do it in a huge stock pot and hang the chicken on poultry hooks while it is being poached in liquid with aromatics and its own chicken fat. If I didn’t do it this way, I always end up with a bloody chicken or an overcooked chicken. I instead chop the chicken into manageable sizes, season as usual, then poach it. This way I end up with perfectly cooked skin and inside.
After poaching, I put the chicken in an ice bath to arrest the cooking process so the skin will still remain tight. Then I rubbed sesame oil on the skin. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
The soup is lovely. My girls and Ate C enjoyed the dish that 1) Ate C had to cook rice again; 2) Twin I went for seconds or thirds even. The ginger sauce/paste I bought from Monterey Community Market and Lee Kum Kee Hoisin sauce completed the dish. *chef’s kiss*
Tomorrow I want to make Nasi Goreng and Nasi Lemak. I need to do a big vegetable shop and I can buy from the veggie shop in UP the lemongrass and pandan that enhance the flavors of Nasi Lemak.
I’m not yet that brave when it comes to cooking Laksa. Rendang I can manage but it does require slow cooking.
Another option for tomorrow is kolo mee, which is basically pancitcanton for us in the Philippines. Mee or Mi is the Hokkien/Minnan/Fookien/Fujian word for “noodles”. The Filipino Chinese here call noodle soup mami, which became a generic term but it is actually Ma-Mi, which is a noodle soup dish popularized by a Chinese migrant whose last name is Ma. If I’m not mistaken, he was the founder of Ma Mon Luk in various Chinese enclaves here in Metro Manila.
In Batangas, where my family comes from, we have lomi, which are bigger noodles with thicker soup compared to mami.
The word pancit came from the Fookien words biang shi/biang sik, which refers to food that can be eaten with the hand/flat food. Traditionally, we have dry noodles that were served on banana leaves and we eat it by shoving the noodles into our mouth through a folded banana leaf, kinda like what you do with nan bread or tacos–only you don’t eat the banana leaf. I had this kind of pancit habhab in Quezon province when I went there during one Pahiyas Festival. I remember buying big packs of pancit habhab to bring home because the one I tasted in Lucban, Quezon was delicious.
My daughter, Twin I, said, mommy, why do you know such things??? I told her I am a walking encyclopedia of useless facts. I love reading and researching such things and for some reason I retain them.
That’s also the reason why I can recall deals and so many facts about the companies in the Philippines, their history, who is not in good terms with whom…the tension between the Chinese Filipino tycoons and the old guard Spanish families and that’s why we had two stock exchanges before (Manila Ex and the Makati Ex), which was stupid, really.
I’m the trivia girl. It serves me very well in my job right now.
