Action of one, affecting all

Posted on 06/01/2022 by admin

WATCH: Makati government closes Berjaya Makati Hotel over quarantine breach. @radyoinqonline pic.twitter.com/aeKqVxl9O6
— chonawarfreak (@chonayu1) January 6, 2022

Berjaya Makati Hotel Statement
January 6, 2022

The order by the Makati City Hall closing down Berjaya Makati Hotel’s operations based on the suspension order issued by the Department of Tourism is without legal basis.

For one, the DOT order is not yet final as the hotel will appeal it within the fifteen-day period it is given. Meanwhile, the suspension is not in effect. Secondly, there is no law that penalizes a hotel for not reporting a guest who jumps quarantine. There is nothing in R.A. 13322 that is applicable to the hotel. Thirdly, we must be accorded due process and be allowed to explain before any penalty is imposed. We have not been given our day in court by the Makati City Hall.

On the operations level, if we close down the hotel immediately, where do we send the 150 or so quarantine guests we have at the moment?

The whole country is on war footing in effect against the pandemic. Every quarantine hotel, just like ours, serves a strategic purpose especially with the lack of rooms while the virus rampages throughout. To close down a quarantine hotel for no legal reason is to close down a hospital just when it is helping to win the war. There is no benefit to be gained by such regulatory posturing when national interest and public health are on the line.
Berjaya press release sent to my mailbox today

One selfish/entitled act of one affects everybody. This Gwyneth Chua has wreaked havoc on a lot of businesses and families. The people whom she infected have reached La Union and have affected a restaurant that was forced to close down. (No Omicron in La Union despite Chua contact testing positive)

There are stories floating around about her parents bribing staff of the hotel so she can skip quarantine (ugh! Parents condoning selfish acts!) but are not proven.

“In fact, her friends asked why she was already out partying, instead of being in quarantine [in Berjaya Hotel], and she claimed to have ‘connections’,” according to Tourism Secretary Bernadette Romulo Puyat in an interview with this paper. She identified a bar in Poblacion, Makati, popular among millennials, as one of the venues where Chua allegedly partied with friends.”
Business Mirror

This is the problem with the third-world country like the Philippines: the small fry with money can behave like they own the country. Such small-town thinking.

So now we’re grappling with several thousands of daily cases again. I don’t know how long we can wait for the kids can get vaccinated before omicron gets us again.

I have already signed up for my girls’ vaccination and hopefully they can get the first dose before the month ends.

We just logged 17,220 new cases today with a positivity rate of almost 37%. Sigh. Here we go again.

We’re so tired of this. There should be vaccine equality now worldwide or else we will battling this virus longer than we should.

Elsewhere in the world, Japan to declare quasi-state of emergency amid rising COVID cases while EU daily virus cases top 1 million for first time.

And so it begins again

Posted on 05/01/2022 by admin

There’s an anecdote by a guy on Twitter about being in a mall in Makati that is now almost empty and workers are waiting for customers to come so they can collect commissions enough for fare to go home later that night 😓

Lockdowns are not the answer especially when it’s the poor who are going to be hurt. We don’t have to go on lockdowns. The government just needs to speed up vaccination roll out and the boosters. Like in our barangay, we are only allotted less than 500 shots that we had to share with other barangays. The patients would have to queue at 5 am just to be able to get that slot. Since I am sick now, I would have to forgo since 1) I can’t physically have the booster shot because I’m sick; 2) I may end up endangering other people by spreading what I have (I’m not sure if this is already Covid or just plain colds). Even antigen tests are hard to obtain. My high school classmates in our chat group are asking where can we buy home test kits because none are readily available here. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Look at that high positivity rate.

This is horrible. Many people will be without work again and won’t have means to feed their families. What we need are more free or affordable tests and not checkpoints!

This government is useless.

Flu medicine shortage

Posted on 04/01/2022 by admin

Everybody is sick right now due to the drop in temperature plus people were up and about during the holidays like the pandemic is just a distant memory. Good thing I was able to stock up a bit when the girls were battling colds, plus I had some medicines when I prepared for Delta surge last year. However, my stock is dwindling because I am down with colds as well.

But of course DOH had to say something like that to prevent panic buying. The reality on the ground is, everything is sold out now. Even Zennya has sent a message through their app that says Covid tests are fully booked that’s why they’re extending their operating hours until 11 pm to accommodate requests.

I ordered from Bayer’s page on Shopee several tubes of Berocca, which helped me to recover from Covid. In case we get COVID again, I still have Lianhua here but so far we only needed antihistamines and Sinupret forte for our colds and cough. Nasal sprays have done their work on the kids while I am still torturing my nostrils with it.

And oh, teas are wonderful, not just the one with caffeine though (my shrink forbids me as it will clash with my meds).

*Ginger and lemon infusion tea. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

Because I’m so paranoid, I’m no long going out and I’ve used my Puregold app to order groceries. My problem is fresh veggies. Let’s see if I can drive tomorrow to UP for that.

And this is what I’m talking about the localization of social marketing strategies, just like the communication of disaster mitigation and awareness on the local government level. The government and developmental workers shouldn’t use a bullet approach of one-size fits all. It’s never going to be effective. In the AKAP stages of social marketing (Awareness, Knowledge, Attitude, Practice), you need to be able to communicate well on the Awareness level and Knowledge exchange stage for Attitudes to change and push them into favorable Practices (in this case, getting their vax). If people don’t receive the message well on the Awareness stage, how can they even accept the Knowledge? They will just reject it.

Sheesh. These people should employ development communicators if they want something to happen. I remember writing some proposal for tuberculosis innoculation project of WHO though I cannot remember if I did this for graduate school or for an employment exam.

Anyway, the localization approach was the reason why the zero polio campaign was successful–until Duterte came along–because the DOH then was employing something right at that time. I miss Dr. Juan Flavier for his pro-development, proactive, and pro-poor policies at DOH and at the Senate.

DOH is such a mess right now.

First working day of the year, newish keyboard

Posted on 03/01/2022 by admin

I had been feeling dissatisfied with my computer keyboard as the keys keep getting stuck. I knew it was because it was dirty and it has been a few years old (probably six years old or more?). I had been window shopping for keyboards online and the ones I like are a few thousands of pesos…something I could not justify yet given that my current Logitech keyboard is perfectly serviceable.

Then I tried cleaning it myself.

With Youtube, a lot of patience, a stick vacuum cleaner, alcohol sprayer, a lot of cotton buds, and Wipeout (which you can get from any cleaning supplies section of a hardware or supermarket), I started disassembling my keyboard.

*Before cleaning. It’s a petridish harboring pathogenic microorganisms and whatnot. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

*Wipeout and tweezers. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

*I was half afraid that I won’t be able to return the keys. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

And for the love of God, if you’re anything like me who gets lost in mall parking spaces and wandering around trying to remember where I parked my car, PLEASE TAKE A PHOTO OF YOUR KEYBOARD before disassembling it. You may forget where the quotation marks and the colons are placed.

No, I didn’t forget to take a photo of my keyboard since one guy whose tutorial I watched reminded me of it. I could only imagine my frustration trying to piece back together my keyboard without a photo to guide me. This guy, didn’t take a photo so he swapped keys and had to take off the keys and put them back in again. So it’s kinda assuring to know that I’m not the only one who’s dumb like that.

Here is the video to show you how to lubricate the keys of a membrane keyboard. I don’t know if it’s the same for a mechanical keyboard but he warned that the clackety-clack of the mechanical keyboard may get muted if you lubricate the keys too much. It did turn by formerly clackety-clack keyboard silent now.

*A clean, new-ish keyboard to inspire my workday…*

I saved myself about PHP 2,000. If I didn’t solve the key-sticking problem by cleaning my old Logitech keyboard, then I would have been clicking my way into buying that Logitech K580 that I could also use with my iPad 9

Oh well, it was an unnecessary expense anyway.

There were a lot of cat hair underneath the keys. My cats love sitting or lying on anything that I am working on or working with, which includes keyboards, the printer, or my iPad.

*This monster loves sitting on my iPad. See the cover? It’s full of scratches. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

I love my little monsters anyway.

*Sushi is savoring my petting. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

On the second day

Posted on 02/01/2022 by admin

This year’s theme is self-love.

Last year was just brutal and I couldn’t define what it was but it was an uphill battle. Thank God for supportive friends, some of whom had to literally drag me out of the house to join the living.

So as part of this year’s theme, I’m celebrating the things that made me who I am.

*My gallery wall. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

*My photos and my watercolors. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

*When I was in high school I experimented with a Chinese paint brush*. *My control was dismal but at least I tried. Photo and art by CallMeCreation.com*

I ran out of picture frames so I guess I would have to order online from Ikea.ph instead of going there again. I have a lot of photos I can print and hang. Or I can paint again with watercolors. But I’m super rusty. It has been 25 years since I have picked up a watercolor brush. I’m not good but at least I’m enjoying it. I’m not even aiming to have an exhibit like my sister but this is just something for my own home. Some of the better watercolors I did in high school were given away to classmates.

I’ll take photography seriously again, just like when I was in college. I didn’t invest in DSLRs because I know how time-consuming photography is as a hobby to justify the expensive equipment. And time is something I didn’t have for decades. For now I’ll use what I have–my cellphone and my Fujifilm XQ1–until I can say that I can now commit time before I step up and buy myself a mirrorless Fujifilm, which I find to be the best when it comes to low-light photography. I’ve worked with Canons, I had a Nikon, and two Olympus cameras but I find Fuji to be the best when it comes to color rendering and low light scenes. I have yet to try a Lumix. I’ve read about Hasselblads when I was still fooling around with films because those are the go-to cameras for medium formats–for book covers and posters. But those things are out of reach of the general public, especially now in digital. I’ve only seen a Hasselblad in a studio for portrait photography.

I lost all my Lomography cameras 😔 I had a Holga and I still had a black abd white film stuck in there when I left it in the old house. All that is left of my Lomo stuff is the 135 film converter. 😕

*Rose tea to stave off colds. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

I’ve been imbibing copious amounts of tea as I’ve been feeling under the weather. I might have contracted the girls’ colds so I took 500 mg of vitamin C, Neozep every 8 hrs, and a lot of bed rest. I slept early last night and slept some more after lunch. So far it has worked but I’m refraining from going out because this may turn out to be the dreaded omicron variant. It can’t hurt to be paranoid; look at what happened last year when I thought what the girls had was just an ordinary flu turned out to be Covid that knocked me down.

There is this Gwyneth Chua from US who broke her quarantine stay to party in Poblacion, Makati. She was positive for Covid and has infected 15 people whom she had dinner with or partied with. Stupid, stupid privileged asshole. And Twitter has the receipts. As it turns out, she studies at De La Salle University and Lasallians are now disowning her.

https://manilastandard.net/news/314026121/woman-cuts-quarantine-to-party-15-test-positive.html

Now, we’re back to a higher restriction due to tripling of cases in the last three days. Another lockdown to stem another Covid wave is not far behind. 😩

Here’s to a better year

Posted on 01/01/2022 by admin

*Our neighbor’s fireworks on the street. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

*My girls’ sparklers’ dying out. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

*Fireworks in our village. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

Here’s to a healthier 2022. More camping trips. Hopefully we would have roadtrips and diving trips.

Less stress from work. Better working conditions for us.

No more Covid please!

Please no Bong Bong Marcos presidency!!!

More personal growth for me and the kids. More love for family and friends.

~~I hope I hurt less~~. I hope I no longer hurt. Period. I hope I become more numb so I can finally move on.

But I should be kinder to myself because it’s not easy to emerge from that kind of heartbreak when you have given your love unconditionally like that. This is not a race. I should give myself time to heal better. As my shrink said, I should heal in a proper way so I won’t have another relapse and get into a cruel cycle.

2020 is horrible in every possible way. 2021 is like walking through fire barefoot. I hope for 2022 I come out stronger than steel forged by fire of the past 2 years.

Stories from the sidelines

A journalist has a life other than news