Incommunicado
Yesterday afternoon, I was wondering why nobody was calling me or texting me. I gave it not much thought until my husband was able to get through to me. He asked why I wasn’t picking up or why I wasn’t answering his messages.
Guess what…NO SERVICE!! Yup, my network (Globe) was on the blink again. It’s been happening a lot. Even my husband experiences it every now and then. And to think he works in Globe country (aka Makati). Just to prove how sucky their signal is, we were in Greenbelt last Sunday and we couldn’t connect to Globe’s 3g service!! In Greenbelt!! How crappy is that?!? We had to rely on my ever reliable Sun MIFI which works seamlessly almost anywhere…even in the middle of the highway!
I know that there’s a signal booster that one can purchase that you attach somewhere in your house. But what about you’re not in the house?
C’mon Globe!! Shape-up!!
My Mama’s Garden
If there is one thing that I inherited from my Mom, it is the love of gardening. Although our taste in plants run in different, she has a taste for decorative flora while I prefer the edible kind, we sometimes meet in the middle. We both love flowers. We love planting them. My first experience with planting flowers was when she bought me seeds for petunias and zinnias. She gave me several pots and made me plant those seeds and had me place them on top of the “defunct” barbecue pit in our old house. This experiment proved to be the birth of my green thumb. My petunias bloomed profusely. But my green thumb could not match my Mom’s. She is know to literally stick a dead twig in the ground and it will grow. Dead driftwoods (anchors for her orchids) have come to life under her care. And even my husband (then boyfriend) would bring to her his half-dead house plants for her to rescue. Which she did, by the way.
But this isn’t about my green thumb or my Mom’s green thumb. This also isn’t about our shared love for flowers.
This is about what I found in the trash…again.
The story begins with me going to my Mom’s house to pick up “paper” for shredding which would go to Adi’s “paper drive” in school. As I was going through the pile, I chanced upon a sheet of yellow pad paper that had a masterpiece neatly written on it.
The piece was written by my Mom. Yes, she writes too and has in fact expressed her desire to go back to writing.
It’s a pretty lengthy piece. I have to commend my Mom for being so diligent in handwriting it. I can’t, for the love of me, imagine writing a piece today unless I do it on the computer.
My Mom’s masterpiece goes live tomorrow…in another post.
Why We Won’t Be Travelling This Year
You read it right, we have no travel plans this year…none. Despite all the holiday travel deals that had me itching to buy tickets for almost every declared holiday…travel plans are officially and definitely on hold.
Yes, I’m quietly sobbing inside. I had every intention of seeing the temples at Siam Reap. I wanted to go to Malacca to have a feel of what it was like during the era of the spice trade. I was even checking out deals to Machu Picchu and had every intention of riding a llama bareback as I trudged the beaten path towards the bastion of Inca civilization. And who can forget our botched summer trip to Kyoto last year in time for the Sakura festival (which was cancelled because of the earthquake).
But all that is for good reason. All time, energy, and funds will be going to the House Project. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we will be building our dream house this year. Its on hold at the moment, thanks most in part to the snail pace of our building officials at City Hall. However, with a little praying and a teeny-weeny bit of cajoling from some of our “friends”, we may be able to get our permits sooner than later.
So, my suitcases are stashed….for the meantime.
Snail Infestation
Most of us in this side of the planet are happy that the weather is less wacky than it was during the latter part of last year. We still get the occasional afternoon rainshower (which is unusual for this time of the year) but the temperature is quite tolerable now.
This also bids well for my garden. Last quarter, my herbs suffered a blow because of the weather’s mood swings. In the morning it would be scorching then in the afternoon there would be a downpour. PMSing isn’t this bad.
Anyway, this killed all my herbs. My dream of having a drink in our outdoor lounges while catching a whiff of my basil and rosemary shrubs all went kaput.
So I put off planting until after the holidays to take advantage of the better weather. True enough, my new plants have been thriving. Not one single mortality and they’ve been growing fast.
All this changed in the last few days when we noticed that there was a sudden surge of garden snails. We’re accustomed to seeing a few in the garden from time to time. This time, however, we had a deluge of slugs and snails. And their target, my herbs.
Writing Mojo
It has been a while since I last blogged. I lost my writing mojo…for a while. The “life got in the way” excuse is just too overused so I won’t use it. To put it bluntly, I lost the desire to write.
However, during my so called “break”, I had writing on my mind. I would find the most mundane things worth writing about. I would hear the most inane piece of news and I wanted to write about it. Even the simplest tasks at home seemed fodder for a blog post. In my mind I was writing a piece which I believed was worthy. In my heart I felt that I could apply for Technical Writer Jobs with my eloquently written pieces.
Well, that’s what I thought. Besides, all those “well thought off” pieces went the way of the dodo…they’re gone. I can’t, for the love of me, remember what I wrote (in my mind).
But all that is over and done with…I believe I got my writing mojo back and I’m raring to start..woohoo!
