Life, Day by Day

I have not opened my e-mail for 2 days and when I did yesterday, I found an invitation from Nuffnang to join the "My ZALORA Wishlist" contest.  Hey, Nuffnangers! Wish to expand your wardrobe without depleting your funds? Join "My Zalora Wishlist" Contest! Why, this contest is right up my alley! And so, I excitedly logged on to the ZALORA website to check what yummy items they have that I could put on my wishlist.  You see, I love to buy clothes, bags, shoes and everything else, not just for myself but for my entire family, however because of problems at work, I had to suddenly curb my spending.  For the last 8 months I have not been getting any salary and therefore, not having enough resources for "wants", I don't go shopping anymore unless it is for something really necessary.  Last week I was in the mall to run some errands for my mom while she waited in a coffee shop.  When I got back to her with the things she asked me to buy, she loo

Every neighborhood has one. Our next door neighbor is the perfect example of the grumpy, cantankerous, ill-tempered, and disagreeable type that one can find even in the nicest villages.  He is peevish, constantly complaining and a fault-finder.  He makes Mr. Wilson of Dennis the Menace and Sarge of Beetle Bailey combined look quite tame in comparison. Everyone in our street and our surroundings find him so annoying that I often wonder how his family can stand him.  I feel quite sorry for his wife and children who are all very pleasant and friendly.  In fact, I was a sponsor at their daughter's wedding several years ago since she is quite close to me.  And so, for the many years that we have been neighbors, my family and I have tried to be as respectful and as tolerant as possible to the man of the house in spite of his crankiness and many idiosyncracies .   Retrieved from http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/s/sam_foss.asp But today, I just felt that enough is enough. A

All my life I have known how it is to have a family member with special needs.  My aunt (my mom's younger sister) was born normal but when she was three years old she had measles together with the rest of her siblings.  She was the first to "recover" only to develop seizures about 3 days later.  This was in 1940 and there was no measles vaccine then, nor was measles a well understood disease.  She was brought to the best doctors but at that time the complications from measles were not yet completely known so they thought she developed poliomyelitis and treated her as such. My grandparents placed her on therapy to treat her flaccid paralysis but, she did not improve.  Her condition was aggravated by the onset of WWII when accessibility to health services was not readily available.  From then on, my aunt needed full-time caregiving in order to feed, bathe and clothed.  Although she can walk wobbly, she cannot use her hands and eventually learned to feed herself with her

To be or not to be...concerned, worried, bothered, involved on one hand, or indifferent, detached, uninterested, uncaring on the other.  That is the dilemma I face now-a-days with regards to my brother's almost 15 year old daughter.  My brother who is a single parent lives next door with his two kids, a son and a daughter.  The son started college last year and comes home only during breaks while the daughter is still in high school. My brother works in another city four days a week. He goes every Friday afternoon and comes home early Tuesday morning, leaving my niece whom I shall call Aloof Girl with their househelp cum nanny during those days. Her mom usually comes to pick her up on Saturdays unless something comes up and brings her back on Sunday afternoon. Her relationship with us has been good until last year when her brother left. Since her dad and brother weren't around, I would watch out for her and she did not like it. She felt it was enough that her father knew her w

...at least for today, it looks like summer.  The sun shone brightly with no rain clouds in sight. It was a different story yesterday when it rained so hard in Bacolod...but only in the vicinity of the Lagoon, SM and downtown area because when I got to Robinson's and Lopue's, it was just rain showers and by the time I reached the Ayala area, it was drier than dry.   What Rain? Reaching Silay, I drove into a gas station for a refill and asked, "did it rain here?"  I got a blank stare that said..."what rain?" Oh...okay.  But this is actually a common occurrence in the occidental side of Negros Island since who knows when.  My mom tells me that when she first came here to live in the 50's after she got married, she and my dad would borrow my grandfather's jeep to go to Bacolod.  The sun would be shining in Silay and the weather balmy.  But when they enter the boundary between Talisay and Bacolod, it would be raining...and vice versa.  It was real

If only I could hold it off a little bit longer but Preemie girl is turning 4 in July and yes, I know...she needs to start school now. So it's off to summer classes for our little girl, in preparation for the regular school year this June. I enrolled her in our local parochial pre-school which has been putting out graduates who easily get accepted into the first grade of the big schools. I am hoping that if she does well, she can get accelerated to Prep school by the time she is 5 years old since the government's primary and secondary levels will now be 12 years all in all (K12), as compared to the old curriculum which took only 10 years. That means Preemie girl will graduate from high school at 17 years of age (I was only 15 when I graduated from high school) and if she takes up medicine, that will be another 10 years!. It's been 2 days now and so far, so good. She seems to be enjoying herself in the 2 hours that she is in class and made friends with another

We have been experiencing really crazy weather the past week.  I don't know if I should be grateful that the dry season isn't really going to be dry, which is good for the farms and the grass; or scared because summer should be here by now and it is still raining and quite heavily too. What is even more weird is the fact that yesterday at mid-day, a "buhawi/ipu-ipo" (tornado) hit the areas around The Bacolod Doctor's Hospital, St. John's Institute and the back portion of the University of St. La Salle, uprooting trees, throwing off billboards, ripping off rooftops and damaging properties. Retrieved from skyscrapercity.com ( original post by member Boy Muscovado ) flying debris are GI sheets, glass and wood  (picture taken from behind The Doctor's Hospital) besides the old Ceres North Terminal (photo retrieved from GMA news) USLS parking lot besides the football field another view (Bayan Mo, Ipatrol mo) And to top it all, because of the heavy r