I felt stifled today, I don’t know why. Maybe the heavy rains of the past weeks had gotten to me so now I want to be out everyday. But I don’t have the car for a week.
So I walked.
Walking in my village.
I started walking from my apartment at past 5 pm. I didn’t care if I still had a pending edit; I just needed to get out.
The less busy street in my village. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
It was nice to be out today. It’s not hot and it’s not wet. Perfect.
No cars on this road! Perfect for ruminating
Disappointing calorie counter.
Look at that, I walked 6km for an hour and I only get to burn 273kcal??? If I use MapMyWalk by Under Armour almost the same distance is around 375 kcal.
This was in February 2022
So in a way I feel cheated because I should have burned more calories…
But the flipside of this is that this means I need to work harder to burn more calories—I would lose weight faster. 😂 So maybe I’ll stick to the Oppo Band health app.
I have enrolled in my insurance firm’s program that tracks all the healthy activities to gain points. I still have to figure out how the points can be redeemed and what would be the rewards. Like, would it lower my premiums? Let’s see if the insurance can recognize my wearable (the smart watch) and the statistics it is going to feed into my insurance.
So this is now the trend in insurtech: integration of all health data into their platform and incentivize the policy holder to live longer. The healthier a policy holder is, the longer the delay in paying the beneficiaries the benefits. Simple.
As I said several blog entries ago, I need to work on myself so I will live beyond 42 years old. I also need to lose my belly because I need to fit into a dress.
I need to reduce my calories, but the incentive to eat MORE has arrived. 😭
Instant Pot bought from Lazada. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
This dang thing is huge. I can cook a whole chicken in this thing. ❤
I’m already planning dishes to cook in this. Tomorrow would be the Filipino menudo for only 10 mins (according to a recipe I found online).
Matabungkay, Batangas.Photo by Matabungkay Beach Hotel.
OK, that’s taken care of. Booked for three days and let’s see if the girls can still attend class online. If not, then so be it. A day’s absence will not hurt. We’ll make the most of this beach trip to Lian, Batangas.
I used to frequent this part of the province as a child. The last time I had been here was when we had an exercise for our Bio 150 and I couldn’t remember what we were doing then. I think it was about biodiversity or something. There was a secluded area of this coast where underwater life was still unspoiled. When my mom was still teaching Bio 150, I used to tag along when I was a kid because I really loved the sea.
While I was doing a loop in UP academic oval this evening, I decided that I probably won’t stay in Anilao for a week. I may just end up holed up here at home or I visit the construction site.
A little sacrifice won’t hurt. By 2023, I would have more financial and physical freedom to travel more frequently as the girls will be nearer extended family who can check on them daily.
If I get to have my ADB conference approved in January, then I will be able to save on airfare for my holiday by extending my stay there. I just need to work my ass off and produce 16 stories again.
If Covid didn’t happen, I would have traveled to Incheon with J in May 2020 (I told him I can bring him as my guest) so he can network with all the big guys there. In Yokohama, I was able to talk to top execs of the big Japanese trading houses like Itochou, Marubeni, Mitsui and was able to get an exclusive story from the president of Hitachi. My Japanese colleagues’ jaws dropped because they said they normally don’t have access to such high profile people, much more have a chat/interview with them. I had been treated to dinner by an executive of JTI. I had chitchats with top bankers in Asia since we sat next to each other during meals.
At the receptions (sponsored by government of Yokohama [dinner 1], ADB [dinner 2] and Japanese government [dinner 3]), I was able to establish ties with some Japanese sources. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to maintain the connections because I became too busy. Nurturing connections like these take a lot of time and effort.
I expect the top execs of the chaebols would be there in Incheon, as well as medium and small enterprises in Korea and some Asian conglomerates. A lot of solid connections for him there since his sector is now one of the top priorities of ADB’s private sector arm.
Well, it’s not meant to be. 🙃 It was good Incheon 2020 meeting didn’t push through because that #$@#$%^&* would still have cheated on me anyway.
Imagine that, he wouldn’t have to pay for his airfare (we would have used my miles) and hotel (my work) and I was able to pull some strings so I could cover the Incheon meeting (even though we have a Seoul bureau) so he can have access to all these. That’s how supportive I was of him.
Ah well I was stupid.
I’m not going to be that stupid again.
Today I grilled some ribs because…why not? Since I am limiting our restaurant jaunts for a bit, I will just splurge on home cooked meals.
Chef’s kiss 👌😘 Photo by CallMeCreation.com
After that late lunch, I went vegetable and fruit shopping because my body is craving for veggies. I need to limit my red meat consumption and carbs if I want to get in shape for my November conferences. I need to fit into an evening dress. 🥴
Shopping at Enrique’s in UP. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I left the car near that area and did my brisk walking to make just one loop.
Wohoo! I missed this. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Only 200 kcal burned. *sigh* It was already getting dark and I needed to bring the car to Cainta to have the final buffing and polishing.
Need to lose weight and get back in shape.
I am taking advantage of this nicer weather. I hope it won’t rain heavily this coming week.
It looks like it’s going to be clear for the rest of the week (*keeping my fingers crossed* 🤞). It breaks my heart to see this clear satellite view. This would have been the perfect weather to go to Palawan or even Anilao but I can’t go. 😥
Ah well, I’ll just bring my bike to my hometown this weekend when I meet my contractor and then I will go to that secluded place my high school friends posted on IG where they grilled food on their camping stove while waiting for the sun to set over the swamp. ❤
I don’t know how many times I have to say this in a span of 6 months. 🙄
First of all, this undersecretary should know that it is the job of DA to help subsistence farmers find markets and transport these to those with low supply. The prices of our vegetables here in the lowlands, especially in Metro Manila, are very high that only the middle class no can afford to eat vegetables three meals a day.
God, are we that evil to be punished by having idiots in government?
I think I lost a lot of brain cells today by engaging a supporter of Manny Pinol on Twitter. No more. I should lay off news for a while. Which is ironic since I produce day in and day out.
Oh wait, I can’t quit news. I need to read about the markets every morning. Every fucking day.
Equally stressful is swapping materials for my home construction, deciding which I can dial down and which I should reinforce, like additional beams and posts. I asked the contractor to reduce the tiles on the walls of the bathroom because I want to hang art in the bathroom. Because why not?
Photo from Apartmentherapy.comPhoto from Apartmentherapy.comPhoto from Apartmentherapy.com
I asked him to make me a niche like this because I’m tired of dealing with shower caddies. This one is easier to clean.
My contractor will fabricate me this kind of stairs.
He said he can make the mid-landing wider so I can have sort of a deck. I’ll think about it first. My concern is, can a small dog manage this? And when I’m already a senior citizen, can I still manage this?
I have to keep costs down because as construction progresses, there would be hidden costs that would surprise me. And it’s quite stressful. I don’t want to skimp on quality but I don’t want to be extravagant on things that can be simplified without sacrificing structural integrity.
He will start laying down the materials in my mom’s garage by next week. Preliminary work like clearing the construction area and removing the balustrades in the existing structure etc.
It’s finally happening. OMG.
I am doing something very adult now. Building my home. I never thought I could but I’m finally doing it now. By myself. Alone. It’s so empowering.
So maybe a condo in Makati or BGC and a beach house in Anilao could be possible. My tiny house was just a dream a year ago…it’s finally coming true.
This is a big FUCK YOU to all the men who hurt me and treated me like dirt. Damn you, I am capable of so much, much more. I am more than a human appliance. I can make things happen. I can make my dreams come true. Even if it’s just small, this is mine. I am having this built by myself.
Ah, Megawide has de-risked itself because it plays fair; because of that it is now being eased out of the dirty, regulated infrastructure business of the Philippines. And the best entity to sell to is a Marcos crony—Aboitiz. Group CEO Sabin Aboitiz is super chummy with Marcos Jr so I wouldn’t be surprised if he comes out as the “next Dennis Uy”, the favorite businessman of a sitting president. During Duterte’s reign, Uy was like Pacman, gobbling everything in is his path. Government contracts were his for the taking. Now he is being chased by creditors and is set to sell most of his assets because NONE of the promised support from China pushed through. His telco, DITO Telecommunity, is looking for a buyer for Uy’s stake. The problem is, no one wants to sleep with China Telecom, Uy’s JV partner.
I can’t write such things as straightforward as this but I try my best to inject some of these insights in my stories—but I know I’m pushing the envelope. I take that risk because the investing community should be aware of the political dynamics we have here. That’s a service that cannot be quantified by our CRM but is valuable to our readers, as I was told by some of them.
It has been raining nonstop even in the absence of a typhoon. I feel I’m ballooning again so I need to walk tomorrow or something. I need to be back in shape for a marathon networking in Singapore in November. The big bosses will be flying down from London. And oh, I must bring an evening dress (*OMG I need one that fits me) because there would be an awards night for ***.
Speaking of work, my most senior but least productive reporter told me he would like to step back and have a different arrangement, like a per-article basis freelancer status because he acknowledged that he could not meet his quota.
Now this poses a big problem for me because since top management is NOT prioritizing hiring of new reporters or editors (only a senior North America editor), losing one headcount means it would not replaced. I lose it, then I lose it. As it is, competition in the region is heating up. Other news organizations are finally catching on and realized my niche is lucrative so they’re building up their own team dedicated for this niche.
I cannot lose more people.
I was having back-to-back calls today with my seniors to solve this conundrum. I also need to arrange to have my team fly to Singapore in the first week of December for a year-end training that I would be conducting. 🥴
Because I was preoccupied with admin concerns, I wasn’t able to write again my stories that have been pushed back a couple of weeks and months now. I also need to see a doctor for my left knee that has been hurting now. I don’t know if this is an old football injury that I aggravated during my walks in my hometown the a few weeks ago. I also need to bring Twin I to a pediatrician for her nosebleeds. They’re getting worse now.
How to shoehorn these doctor visits in between all these work pressures? I need to attend a conference tomorrow or on Thursday and I have a lunch meeting with some bankers and another set of bankers in the evening on Friday.
Oh geez and I need to book that resort in Batangas for that beach holiday at the end of the month.
Wait, I still need to follow up my travel arrangements and visa application for Korea.
I need to breathe.
What have I been doing? I don’t know, I haven’t been keeping track. I’m having a hard time finding mental space for all the important things to do. I only have two hands and finite amount of brain cells to balance being a manager for Southeast Asia (which is a lot of work), being a specialized journalist, a mother, and a future homeowner who needs to build her home, and at the same time I must take care of myself if I want to live beyond the age of 42.
Maybe I should cancel that Korea trip. Maybe I just take a week off in October and just go to Palawan to go island-hoping and dive for a week and burn to a crisp.
Yes, I think I should do that.
I don’t think that Korea trip with my friends is that compelling anyway. They’re planning to go to Busan when I haven’t even explored Seoul. 😶 Maybe I’ll just do that next year when it’s less hectic.
With my reporter friend who interviewed me this morning.
So yesterday was so exhausting. It took me several days before I finished my car registration with the Land Transportation Office, at its headquarters.
I spent x number of hours queuing at LTO Main but a lot of people got stuck there and some had been going back and forth there for days (just like me, albeit at a different LTO satellite branch), which ate up productivity. In some cases these people lost income for the day/s.
Why is it taking so long?
It’s because the IT system had been going down for days. The entire LTO system has been going offline—nationwide—for several days now.
Because of this, people that had been applying for their car registration are getting stranded. The process has been/is still crawling.
This is how chaotic the LTO office had been yesterday. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Some applicants had left after spending the entire day at the LTO but I refused to budge. I didn’t leave LTO until somebody attended to my application because DAMN IT, I’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR A WEEK NOW!
I was told that the inspection and stenciling of the serial number of my car had to be redone because it was done in another LTO office. I was like, “WTF!!! It’s not even my fault that LTO @20th Ave Cubao just packed up and left without warning to the public!”
I didn’t budge, I didn’t leave the premises until an inspector did the entire bullshit again. And I began tweeting the process, the issues, and the instances of people leaving their posts at 4 pm.
It was 4:01 pmand no one was around anymore to help us just because they couldn’t encode our papers because the “system was down”. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
One inspector said, he couldn’t do his job of doing the stenciling—his reason for being—because the people in the cubicle above didn’t say I can proceed. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! Those guys just didn’t want to do their work and left their posts!
I continued to tweet and tag the Twitter account of LTO central office about my very public ordeal.
Long story short, I finished it because I was adamant at pushing for my right as a citizen.
I was so frustrated with the entire thing that I posted a video monologue of my ordeal on Instagram.
So the next day, this reporter-friend messaged me on Viber about my tweets that were forwarded to her by some LTO people because they said whatever I tweeted were true.
We chatted and agreed that she will drop by and have the interview outside my apartment—along the avenue where we’re at. I was still in my sleepwear and my reporter-friend said that I should put on makeup because this will be an on-cam thing. HAHAHA, talk about pressure.
So to sum it up:
As I said in the interview with ABS-CBN, the problem is the entire system. It was a grave problem—the issue is about the service provider. Apparently STRADCOM is no longer the IT service provider for quite some time and shouldn’t even be there (but wait, STRADCOM still has a window there!) because they were already replaced by a German IT company. But LTO says they *couldn’t* turn over the database to the new IT provider, saying it was *difficult*. So this tug-of-war between the very old IT provider and the new, no non-sense Germans is causing outages in the IT system. Which affected the whole nation because the system outages are all over the Philippines. Every LTO branch is OFFLINE!
And to us reporters, we already know why.
Of course, I couldn’t say it outright that this is caused by corruption. The very inefficient STRADCOM leaves a lot of room for fixers and cash-related items that can fall through the cracks. The rank-and-file up to the high officials get their cuts from the fixers. This is also the reason why there are a lot of dumbass drivers on the road—even those who couldn’t drive can get registered or get their licenses because of fixers.
Once the German company takes a complete hold of the IT system, the entire LTO process will be efficient and accurate. NO room for grease money. Payment system can expand beyond the cashiers of LTO offices and they can tap other payment gateways like what SSS and other government agencies do. Imagine, they couldn’t even process credit card/debit card payments; everything has to be cash basis. If the German company has settled everything, the car registration and drivers license renewal can be done under an hour. No need for long lines, no need for fixers.
DAMN IT.
In the interview, I said this process shouldn’t even take a couple of hours and this shouldn’t even be done every year. In other countries, these are done every xxx number of years and only the old vehicles should inspected regularly for road worthiness. But everything should be done online.
UNFORTUNATELY, the LTO story did not air tonight. Probably it was bumped off by more time-sensitive and mass-oriented matters like the senate hearing on rice shortage/prices and the impending increase in rice prices. I understand that it is beyond the reporter’s control since I am also in the news business and I had been with a TV network too.
My desk and new keyboard before the keycap change yesterday. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Good thing I had some distraction because I was so angry. Because my newish mechanical keyboard is so tactile and cute, I was inspired to finish my job even though I was already boiling and ready to kill.
New keycaps arrived. Something that cheered me up yesterday. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
And today, I was on a Thursday chill mode to drive away the bad jujus of the previous day.
The latest Chromecast. Photo by CallMeCreayion.com
I chose to be happy while being reasonable. This thing is only PHP 2,800 and it transformed my decade-old TV into a smart TV with all the streaming apps you can install on that pebble-like thing you call Chromecast. I upgraded my second-generation Chromecast to this one instead of buying a new smart TV that costs PHP20,000, if I’m lucky. My LG TV still works perfectly fine and I have no reason to dump it. When we transfer to my new home, I will just mount the TV on the wall and dress it up like a picture frame and have artworks stream via this device (you can choose the kind of artworks you can display). I will have a gallery wall around the old TV so it won’t be obtrusive.
The old Chromecast will be given to my mom so she’s not limited to her laptop anymore when binge-watching Netflix. She has a TV that swivels so she can watch on her bed.
Ah tomorrow, we will be chasing a lot of executives in a hotel where a conference is now ongoing. Good luck to Friday driving madness.
I got a little bit triggered today because of some short video I watched. Then I got to view this video, which is like an affirmation that my life just sucked in the past because I didn’t know any better. I met the wrong people, chasing their approval when I shouldn’t be.
Come to think of it, they’re not that special. They were special for me because I made them special in my eyes and I made myself believe that. Otherwise they’re just like any other guy/s out there.
I want to write about so many things about this subject, especially this last partner I had. But it is what it is. It is exactly a year ago this week or last week when I realized I was a big mess and decided to seek professional help.
What progress I had made! Thanks to my therapist, I sorted myself out. But it was a long and difficult process. 1 year and 8 months ago, I couldn’t imagine how it is to be where I am right now. I wondered if ever I could even reach this stage. I should love myself more for getting past that horrible stage.
Now I just need affirmative words/reminders like the one I posted above from Instagram to remind me that it’s not me—they’re just the wrong people. No matter how much bending backwards I do, it will never make a dent. They just don’t and won’t ever love me.
And if someone is the RIGHT person, he will seek me out. He will find me, even if I will soon hide myself at the foot of the mountain in my hometown, he will find me.
If not, it’s fine. At least I’m going to be happy with the life I am building for myself and the girls.
Folded gimbap. Photo by CallMeCreation.com Korean breakfast for the girls. I wasn’t able to include the miso soup with seaweed and mushrooms in the photo. Photo by CallMeCreation.com British breakfast of eggs and beans on toast for me. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I had more energy today so I decided to cook brunch. Didn’t attempt go out today because I have no idea if I could.
Will do another antigen test in a few hours.
Tomorrow is the girls’ mock entrance exam. Must sleep now to prepare them tomorrow.
