Everything Under The Tropical Sun

Dear Blog,

Oh how I’ve missed you. I know I’ve pretty much neglected you all but 1 post last week but I’m back! And I’m sorry. I know you feel neglected but I have not taken you for granted. I thought of you all the time but instead of filling you up with junk, I just took a break instead. I tended to the things I needed to do before coming back to you. I missed you so much, though. It was painful to stay away. I will never put myself in that kind of predicament. I vow to always find the time to see you and to post. No matter how busy I got.

Thankfully, you still had many visitors. I hope they treated you well. I’m sure they did. You always liked being read. Comments are also an added bonus but not so much. I know you liked being read more. It fills my heart with happiness to know that you weren’t alone.

I love you, Blog. I will never leave you. EVER.
Love,
Me

I am ashamed to say that I am a creature of habit. So much so that I really hate the little things changing on me. Just like upgrading to a newer version of wordpress.

Sure, I understand that they like checking on their software and updating it as soon as a bug is found. I understand that all these upgrades are to my benefit. But they really messed up with my last theme just because it was no longer compatible with the newer wordpress version. I could live with that because it’s the theme developer’s responsibility to keep the theme up to date to accommodate the new wordpress version.

Now, imagine my surprise when they changed the whole interface of wordpress. No longer are the tag and the category fields are where they used to be which is right below the text box. They moved all the buttons around! Such bullies! Just because they’re THE software to use by bloggers they can change their interface with little or no consequence. Let’s all face it, they’ve designed a nifty software which makes our lives a whole lot easier.

There must be some bugs still because as I am typing this, it feels like there’s a delay with the keys pressed and when it appears on screen. *Sigh* I hate little changes like this when I’ve already gotten used to where to click that it comes out as muscle memory. Now, I have to adjust my life around yet another wordpress upgrade. *sigh*

It’s the middle of December already and we have not… I repeat, HAVE NOT gone to check out the yoga place near our house. I was so ecstatic to be able to enroll my husband to yoga. My positive attitude didn’t falter even when Kara-Leah of Prana Flow NZ commented that it’s one thing for one to say something and it’s quite another to actually do it.

Right now, I’d have to agree with her. She’s a yoga instructor and her partner isn’t enrolling in any of her yoga classes. Isn’t practicing, period. So I’m resigned to the fact that maybe my husband might just be agreeing with me simply to shut my big mouth up. I don’t usually nag but yoga was something that turned me into a broken record.

So yeah, maybe Kara’s right. Or maybe it’s because it’s the holidays and so many things are going on. I’m still keeping my fingers crossed that we’ll be able to go during the first week on January. If not… well, I’ll go ahead and do my thing. I don’t care whether he comes or not anymore. He’ll just suffer the consequences like: late dinner, large belly, no meat, large belly, no wife to accompany him home, large belly… (ya get it, hubby?! — he reads this blog.) Hehehehe.

There’s something about Halloween that makes everything seem so mysterious even at this not-quite-middle-aged age of mine. I think it’s because of all those Hallow’s Eve spent at my grandparent’s farm that instilled such a feeling in me. We had a tradition back when I was still in Manila. We’d spend every October 31 to November 2 at my grandparent’s farm to visit our dead. (You see, in the Philippines, flocking the cemetery during these dates is a big tradition.)

My father has 9 other siblings so you can just imagine how many cousins I have. It’s our massive numbers that prompted our elders to build a hut for us adjacent to the main house. We were just too many and too rowdy and when they have their family meetings, it was most convenient for them to just send us away to the hut. It’s also easier to keep tabs on us that way.

Along with the national tradition of visiting the dead on Nov. 1, my cousins and I created a tradition of our own. We gathered in a circle at the hut and exchanged ghost stories. My older cousins tried to best each other as they took turns telling us their spookiest and gruesome stories (there were a number of us who were just too young to know any cool ghost stories). My favorite is the one that gave me chills all over:

There was an atheist named Joan who never believed in God. Which was a pretty odd choice since she lived in a mainly Catholic country, went to an all-girl Catholic school, and hung out with Catholics. Her friends would endlessly try to convince to convert to the Catholic faith. She heard it all but it fell on deaf ears. She just doesn’t see the point.

She went about her life and stuck to her usual routine: Get up, have breakfast, take a bath, brush her teeth, go to work, work overtime, get home at 10 pm, a quick dinner, wash her face, brush her teeth and go to bed.

Everyday was just like the one before it ’til one day…

The day started out the same as always. When she got home that night, she fixed herself up with one of those store-bought TV dinner and ate it in front of the television watching the news. When she’s had her fill she continued to undress and went inside the bathroom and started to brush her teeth.

She bent over the sink to spit out the toothpaste in her mouth and when she looked up. She saw a demon with big bloodshot eyes, a mouth filled with sharp teeth, and horns protruding out of its forehead. It was just there, peering at her over her shoulder… its arms positioned as if he’s about to grab her.

Without thinking, she suddenly closed her eyes, clasped her hands together and whispered: “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed by Thy name…”

She looked up at the mirror once again, feeling confident that demon have already fled.

And there he was, still staring back at her and in a taunting voice, he said: “Our Father…. who art in Heaven… hihihihihi….“

Happy Halloween everyone!

Disclaimer: I have nothing against atheists but growing up as a Catholic child, I found that story very scary. It is not my intention to offend any practicing atheists around. I just had to share the story… because I stopped brushing my teeth alone for a week after I heard it. Would like to pass it on. hihihihihi.

I got the cold last Friday and I have to say, I really really HATE getting a cold. Aside from the inconvenience of blowing my nose every 30 seconds, I hate feeling dumb. It’s like my mind is in slow motion all the time. You know? You can’t really grasp anything right away because everything’s too slow?

That’s how I feel and I hate it.

It started when my husband started getting sick because of over fatigue. He’s been working his ass off for the last week and a half. Two weekends ago, I felt like I was starting to feel like I was coming down with something. So I called in sick last Monday, tried to talk my husband into resting too but he decided to go the office because there’s so much stuff to do. He came back home in the afternoon but left for the office again.

I on the other hand, felt better and went to work. While he kept feeling under the weather throughout the week. I thought I was in the clear but last Friday, my nose started running.

My husband gets really worried when I get a cold. He says that I look AND ACT like the world is going to end at any moment. It’s the first time in weeks that he’s his normal caring self. He’d ask me how my nose was, how I was feeling instead of getting totally rapt by his oh so busy world. I get that the pressure was getting to him (which is off character because he usually doesn’t let me get affected despite anything that’s been happening in his professional life) but at least now he’s back. He’s my husband again.

I understand that we all eventually change. Sometimes for the better and sometimes we change into exactly the people we avoid turning into (namely, our parents). I’ve always believed that circumstances in our lives will come and go but it’s how we learn and react to these events that defines our character.

I just hope he doesn’t turn into my Mom, who’s a raving workaholic. Don’t get me wrong, I love her to death but because of her work, there were huge gaps in her relationships with the people who matters and should matter in her life. So now, she lives a life of fear. Fear of being alone.

I hope he doesn’t forget that we’re only doing this in the meantime and that there’s an end goal in mind. A life that has meaning and full of love. I don’t care how many weeks in a year my husband would seem possessed as long as he keeps coming back to who he truly is and he’ll never forget to return to being the man I fell in love with. Just like this damn cold. It’s here now but it’s not the end of the world and it definitely does not define me.

Today’s a national holiday in observance of the last day of the Ramadan. Though I’m not a Muslim nor is the Philippines a Muslim nation, this holiday is but one of our government’s feeble attempts to gain popularity with the Muslim parts of this country… mainly in the southernmost part of Mindanao.

From what I remember from my history classes (which, by the way, was a loooooong time ago), the MILF (Moro-Islamic Liberation Front) is a Muslim separatist rebel group that branched out from the MNLF (Moro National Liberation Front).

An incident in 1968 wherein they claimed that the AFP – Armed Forces of the Philippines – has killed at least 288 Moro recruits was the reason why they formed their group in the first place. The incident is called: The Corregidor Massacre.

It is said that the then president, Ferdinand Marcos, ordered the military to create special units composed mainly of Moros to attack Sabah’s non-Malay ethnic groups, the Tausug and Sama, (Sabah is now part of Malaysia but was part of a land dispute with the Philippines way back in the early 60′s) because I think he wanted to claim that area back. Malaysia included Sabah in their federation in 1963 and that was when the Philippines severed all diplomatic relations with them.

When the Moro recruits found out the true agenda of their mission, which was to wage war against the Tausug and Sama of Sabah, they went into mutiny since these people who were closely related to them and their culture. In a sense, they were family. They were executed by the dozens. A lone survivor, Jibin Arula, recounted the things he had witnessed.

It was after that incident that the MNLF was formed. Since then, they have fought for independence from the Philippines or at least to become an autonomous region because they felt that their rights as citizens were violated and didn’t get the same support as the rest of the country. Until 1987, when they accepted the government’s offer to turn them into a semi-autonomous region.

That’s when the MILF was formed. They disagreed with the MNLF’s move to accept the government’s offer. To this day, they are still fighting for complete independence from the Philippines and have been resorting to terrorizing the Filipino people to get the attention they so desperately seek. No peace in Mindanao yet.

Only 5% of the country is comprised of Muslims. It wasn’t until President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s administration that we, the Catholics, started celebrating this day, The feast of Ramadan, with the Muslims. A feeble attempt to gain popularity among them, yes. A first step in recognizing that we live in a country among them, maybe.

I do hope that they have not forgotten what they are fighting for: the inhumane massacre of those young Moro men not too long ago.

How will they bring them to justice? I really wouldn’t know.
Is separating themselves from the government that ordered their demise the answer?
Is it right to place the blame for one man’s sins on another?

I think both our religions have the same answer to that.

I may not belong in your religious group but I do believe that we have the same blood coursing through our veins and both our religions basically teach the same core values of love and forgiveness.

Happy Ramadan to all of you, brothers and sisters.

Two weeks before we left our old home last month, we asked PLDT (Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co.) to transfer our phone line to our new home and apply for a DSL connection (we used to share an internet connection with Jung and Corinne -our neighbors- in our old house). For some odd reason, they couldn’t file the service request simultaneously. So we had to ask them to transfer our old telephone line first and when that’s done, request for internet connection.

They showed up at our old home the first Sunday after I made the transfer request. I was so amazed how fast they responded only to be disappointed later on. There was a mix up in the job order. The instructions were reversed. Instead of transferring FROM our old house towards the new one, the job order said to install a telephone line in our old house.

*sigh*

So I had to call and request for a line transfer all over again. It took them 2 weeks to install the phone line in our new home. As soon as they did, I called in to request for internet connection but they said that the last service request hasn’t showed up in their screens as “done”. So I had to wait another week. When I called back, I finally got to request for internet connection.

Here we are, a month and a half later and we still don’t have internet connection in the house. Which is really messing up with my blogging mojo. It’s so difficult to write during work hours. It’s just too exciting around here most of the time. And it’s usually at night when inspiration strikes.

Oh well. I called them yesterday. They said that the service request has already been forwarded to the contractor and that they’ll just help me follow them up. At this point, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that it will be another month before we get internet connection at home.

*sigh*

I know I said I wouldn’t be writing anything until August 1 but I am feeling so sad and worried now. I hope that writing about it would make me feel better… I couldn’t sleep last night. As soon as I closed my eyes, my mind wandered to how much pain I can cause to the people who hurt my babies. The thin line between anger and revenge is something I wouldn’t want to cross, though.

Courage and Ashley are our babies. Courage is a 5-year-old male, black, labrador retriever while Ashley is a female, yellow colored one and is about a year younger. They lived with us while we were staying at my mother’s house and when we transferred, we took them both with us. Unfortunately, we didn’t know that big dogs were banned in that compound so after Courage picked a fight with one of the smaller dogs in the place (an alpha dog thing – he’s used to being the big boss), I couldn’t justify that they stay there with us. We were forced to move them back in my mother’s house.

At my mother’s place, I commissioned the son of my mother’s household help to watch over them, to give them baths, take them out on walks, etc. I would regularly pay him a monthly salary just to do that (when in fact he stays in my mother’s house for free – he has a day job somewhere else). I would pay for their monthly food as I did not want to burden my mother with their expenses.

Now that we’ve transferred, I went and got my babies from my mother’s house yesterday. I wanted to cry when I saw the condition Courage was in. He’s skin and bones! My once magnificent and healthy baby has deteriorated into a vision of my worst nightmare. I don’t have the heart to post what he looks like now. Ashley wasn’t in as bad a state as Courage was. She has always been the chubby little one but she looks like she has caught whatever Courage has and is going towards that same path. We rushed both of them to the vet and had to leave them there.

I got off the phone with the vet earlier and they both have heartworms and we’re still waiting for their blood test and urinalysis results to rule out kidney and liver problems.

The least Dexter could’ve done was inform me my babies were losing weight really fast so I could’ve asked the vet to see them right away. Now they’re in really bad shape and I wonder whether I was taken for a ride.

At a very short span of time, for someone (even a dog) to lose weight very fast is a clear indication that there’s something very wrong. I can never expect anyone else to take care of them. I thought since they’ve been with my family since I was a teenager, they’d have the decency to take care of my dogs properly. I was wrong.

Serves me right for trusting the wrong people to watch over them. I’m never going to do that ever again. I’ll fight with everyone else if they want to banish my dogs. Seeing them like that made me feel so helpless. I just pray that there’s nothing else wrong with their health.

Okay, so I did some research on biofuels in the Philippines. Biodiesel is produced by extracting oil from plants.

The question in my mind while doing so was: Why is commercial biodiesel practically the same price as regular petroleum diesel?

I found out (with the help of my loving husband) that Flying V’s biodiesel blend is B1. Which means it contains only 1% coco biodiesel and 99% petroleum. Hence, the small price difference. So why only 1% you say? Good question. I’ve got an irritating answer (irritated because it makes complete sense):

Too many products are dependent on coconut supply like the food and cosmetics industries. Since coco biodiesel is a lucrative business (all the more at this point in time), the government is afraid that there might be a sudden shift in supply which would wreak havoc in the other industries dependent on coconuts. Just like what happened to Brazil in terms of their corn production due to ethanol demand. It makes sense that our government doesn’t want that to happen.

Though the World Wide Fuel Charter accepts blends of up to 5%, this must be done gradually. There is a law in place. In 2006, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, signed a law that makes it mandatory for fuel companies to use B1 blend (for diesel products) from the year 2009 onwards with increasing increments in the following years. She aims to reduce our dependence on imported petroleum by 3% in 2011.

Even with coco-diesel composing a mere 1% of the total biodiesel blend, it is said that it should be enough to help diesel engines to be fuel efficient thus, more mileage and is still a big help to the environment. These are good things but why do I still feel cheated? I mean, if they really want people to opt for biodiesel, shouldn’t they encourage them by bringing the price much lower? At least around P2.00 ($0.04/liter or $0.17/gallon) because despite the fact that coco-diesel is a NATURAL RESOURCE, it’s also tax-free.

It’s been 3 days now. I’ve been staring at this website practically as soon as I wake up and before I go to bed. It contains a list of Nikon Digital SLR packages which are relatively cheap for us locals. It’s come to a point when my husband would peer over my shoulder and see that the site that’s got me so engrossed is that damn list (when he would usually find me blog surfing, doing research or typing up a storm)… and start laughing that sympathetic laugh of his. He’s never seen me so obsessed.

I’ve been resisting the urge to get myself one for years because I knew it would spell T-R-O-U-B-L-E for my pocket. My Papa has been taking pictures ever since I could remember. My mental picture of him would always be with his camera draped around his neck. I’d remember that he’d buy a new lens but had to buy filters that would go perfectly with it… then comes a tripod about ye high… then another one that has a motor… and so on. I knew that if I do get a DSLR camera, that it wouldn’t end with just getting a body but a range of accessories as well.

I’ve been successfully and blissfully ignoring the DSLR urge when my irritating friend, Teach (yes, it’s all YOUR fault) was kind enough to tell me that the Nikon D40 was on sale in his area. It was too cheap to pass up on. So what I did next was something any curious person would do… I googled it.

BIG MISTAKE! Not only did I find out that the D40 is not for me but the urge that I’ve been suppressing all these years have taken a life of its own. What started as curious googling to know if the D40 was a good buy became a full blown obsession. After 3 days, I’ve made a decision that the best DSLR camera for me would be the Nikon D80. It’s the only model that I feel I won’t get frustrated over… and it didn’t stop there. Teach told me about a good lens then (stupid me) googled again. Found out that the lens that usually comes with the D80 body has limitations (and the list gets longer…).

Why a Nikon you say? Rather than a cheaper alternative like Canon? Uhmm… grew up with my Nikonian father. ‘Nuff said. I refuse to go into a debate about Nikon vs. Canon. It will NEVER end. Believe me. I tried batting for Canon because I simply don’t want my wallet to take a beating but my heart belongs to Nikon. A friend and avid Canon fan actually helped me in this realization. He says that Nikon has brighter blues and greens… which is perfect because I like to take pictures outdoors. I don’t see myself cooped up in a studio.

So what’s the hold up? My wallet won’t grow money. *sigh* I have to wait. Save up. Keep my fingers and toes crossed that they’d bring down the price before the D700 comes out at the end of the year. A Nikon DSLR in my future? I’d say: just a matter of time.