This is how my desk looks like for the past 24 hours or so. I’ve been busy setting up meetings, filling up my calendar for my trip to SG in a few weeks. I need to justify the cost of being there despite the fact that 1) I head the region and we would be hosting a conference; 2) my office is there.

It’s really ridiculous. It’s not my fault that the parent firm/owner is highly leveraged that they’re being stingy in so many ways. I had to defend why I need to fly on a Sunday instead of a Monday (to save on hotel booking). I said, even if I take the earliest flight on a Monday, half of the day is already gone because I would be able to get out of the airport at almost noon. I would also be battling sleeplessness since I have to drive to the airport at 1:30 am so I can have enough time to deal with the long queue at immigration in NAIA. I booked Philippine Airlines so I don’t have to deal with the horrible queues at Terminal 3.

I have a million and one things to do.

The daily househelp next door finally took Tuxedo kitty home. She is the first to be adopted in the litter of five. Before I had let her go, I administered deworming medicine to her along with her siblings. I gave her new owner the rest of the medicine since she needed to take that again twice, two weeks apart. I’ll just buy another bottle for the rest of the litter.

Her cries were so pitiful as she was taken away in the cat carrier I lent her new owner. She can no longer play with her siblings 😢. But adoption is the best option for these kitties because I cannot have them all inside my tiny house.

Meanwhile, I administered antiparasitic medicine topically on the adult cats as prescribed by the vet who spayed Ampon. For my indoor cats, Sushi and Kimchi, they only needed to have this every three months (good, because it’s pricey) but for the outdoor cat, Ampon, this needs to be a monthly thing.

😩 It’s costly to keep animals healthy. But as they say, single women collect cats as they grow older. I don’t know why.

Maybe because cats love me back whereas human males just use me and then discard me once my usefulness has expired. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I shouldn’t be hard on myself. If things are not going as fast as I want them to be, then I should be patient. Pushing too hard may cause me to choose the wrong path for me. Anyway, no one is putting a deadline on me except myself. Like all my interview requests aren’t coming back to me immediately and it has taken them weeks to reply about a date and time. Just like the gigs I want to get; initial meetings aren’t getting scheduled as soon as I want them.

So having two clients by June may not be that easy.

I should be less emotionally involved with my work. The editor who I once had skirmishes with a few years ago told me in HK that in order for me not to go crazy because my boss is being insufferable, I should get away from my desk figuratively after 5 pm. He told me the problem with me is that I am too invested, too emotionally tied to my work. “You take work seriously,” he said.

Yeah, that’s the problem. I’m too passionate about work. I also identify myself too much with my profession. My identity is too much tied to what I do.

Because I loosened up my timetable, I allowed myself to spend on big-ticket items the past few days. My reason is that when I have already transitioned into a new role while still building up my name/income, I wouldn’t be able to afford to replace my mobile phone and that of my daughters. So this past weekend I replaced Twin A’s four-year-old phone, which she inherited from me, with a new but entry-level one. Then yesterday, I bought myself a new, mid-level phone and passed on my two-year-old but higher end phone to Twin I.

They take turns in inheriting higher end phones from me so everything is fair and square. They’re good kids; they haven’t caused me too much grief (of their doing) and they help me with chores. They know now how to be responsible for themselves and the house. In terms of academics, I wouldn’t ask for anything more. I expect them to get the highest honors and high honors by the end of the school term in June.

Since I already pushed back my timetable from June to yearend—I initially thought I could step down from my management position and go freelance by then—my budgeting for expenses has become more flexible. I still have time to have surgery on my osteoma and have another executive check-up while Twin A is winding down her therapy. I may step away from my job and be independent by next year, 1Q25 instead of end-2024.

Work slowly and live gracefully. No one is chasing me. If something is for me, then it will find me. Just like when finding a partner, the more you pressure yourself and not take things easy, the worse it’s going to be. You will choose the wrong person. It’s like eating fruits before they are ripe… Hinog sa pilit.

So my message to myself is: be patient, work hard on it. It will work out in the end. God has always been kind to me.

I’m not a millennial (a young GenX or Xennial) but this article from the Guardian embodies what I’ve been feeling all along: wanting a “softer life”. However, the interviewees here are all single and childless so they can afford to halve their salaries and be underemployed for a kinder life.

Increasing private school tuition puts a lot of pressure on single mothers like me. I can’t just do what they did but it seems like that’s my direction. The big thing weighing on my mind is, I would be sacrificing financial freedom for mental health when I have dependents still in school.

So what am I to do?

At this point, I really don’t know.

Probably, just work and give the bare minimum—the quiet quitting—until I can become an independent contractor or consultant.

All my life as a mother, I always had a million and one things racing through my head that’s why I always seemed like a scatterbrain or negligent. But they don’t know I had to balance so many things and I always needed to think ahead. I couldn’t live in the moment because there were so many people and things dependent on me. My mental and physical health suffered. It is exhausting. If only I could choose the “soft life” this article is talking about.

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. 

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!

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.