It has been a month of sunshine, rain showers and cloudy skies. Overall it was a quiet and peaceful month for me.
Social life? Practically zero but the important thing is, I was able to spend lunch with my balae’s family on New Year’s Day, came home refreshed from my one week stay with Nissa’s family at Gentri, fixed my little garden and was able to visit my nephrologist too. Still catching up reading such lovely books I found this month.
I looked at my main page on this blog, took note of how I fared and I am happy that my total views increased to 804,850 as I write this. Hallelujah 🙌. I earned 10 more subscribers this month and I am happy that some of them are engaging and commenting on my posts.
I am sad though that I was not able to update my other blogs except my blogs on Nate and my garden. I have yet to update Dreams Never End, I have neglected it for so long. The truth is I could no longer update it since I forgot my password there. I used a different e-mail address when I started it.
Just done with my 71st blog post which I started late November, the whole month of December and this month which is about to end. Hallelujah 🙌! It is easier to write when you blog every day but I could never duplicate the challenge I did back in 2011 with WordPress Post A Day Challenge. That was the time I earned so many followers and my views went up.
Also done with 11 books 📚 for this year’s Goodreads Reading Challenge. As I have said a few days ago, I want to reread those books that gave so much joy over the years, some are classic books. A book you read fifty years ago might give you a different perspective now that you’re getting on in years.
Dropped by the Kadiwa stalls beside the church on my way home from the bank this morning. It is now a weekly ritual for me. These itinerant vendors are usually there from Friday to Sunday selling vegetables, fruits, dried fish, fish sauce, vinegar dips, chicharon and pusit (sun-dried squid). Their vegetables are way cheaper than in the wet market. No middlemen involved so they can afford to sell their goods at a cheaper price. Tomatoes are regularly selling at P80 pesos a kilo but I was surprised one stall sell them at P40 so I bought some. Then I dropped by Savemore supermarket to buy coco cream to use for my curried eggplant later. It’s nice that our mayor allowed them to sell in our town, a big help for those in a budget like me.
It’s Friday again, another weekend to just relax. February is on its way in. Time flies. Seems like it was only yesterday when we celebrated Christmas and New Year.
Side by side with reading the Shell Seekers, I started The Girl In The Glass by Susan Meissner. It is a story set in Florence, Italy and the great masterpieces during the Italian Renaissance. I read so many books written by Meissner before and rated them four and five stars but reviews say, this is not her best. I love the challenge of finding out though.
This showed on my Memories app on Facebook today. Can’t believe these were taken fifteen years ago, the last high school reunion I attended two years after my chemotherapy.
Though I am not really active in attending the subsequent grand reunions every three years, I still get in touch with some of them through Facebook. Almost half of my classmates are now living abroad in different countries. You guess it right, we were all girls. Boys sections were separate, they had afternoon classes while we had ours in the morning. Separate entrance and exits…haha. I blogged about our high school life before but haven’t touched on our annual presentation before we graduated.
It is a sort of legacy from the previous batches and we followed a month before we graduated. Long days of preparations for a two-hour presentation of the graduating class (mixed boys and girls). We have brainstormed about the title but we could not think of an apt one so we agreed on Walang Pamagat meaning there is no name or title for it. It was a parody of most television shows back in the seventies. We imitated several programs and turned them into laughable episodes. Yay, my batchmates were great actors and actresses. Some were even gifted in singing. I was on the production side of the program. It was our goodbye presentation to our beloved University of Santo Tomas Education High School.
It was a success and several years later,two batches named theirs Walang Pamagat 2 and Walang Pamagat 3. I enjoyed my high school life more than the years I spent in college. We never had reunions like we had in high school except for general reunions of different colleges in the university. I never get to see college friends and classmates for several years. One of my best friends was ninang (godmother) to Josef and another classmate was also an officemate at the Bank of the Philippine Islands where I worked for almost 22 years.
There is this song by one of our gifted Filipino singers Sharon Cuneta about high school life, I love the melody. Here’s a part of the lyrics in mixed English and Tagalog. It defines how high school life was.
🎶🎵High school life, oh, my high school life Every memory, kay ganda High school days, oh, my high school days Are exciting, kay saya
There are times, may problema ka Kung ang homework, left undone Pray ka lang, huwag tawagin ka Upang ‘di pagtawanan
High school love, my one high school love Not infatuation or crush Tunay ‘to, siya ang buhay ko ‘Di niya alam, ako’y nagba-blush
Bakit nga ba ang first love ko Ay ‘di serious, so it seems? Kung alam lang ng first love ko He is always in my dreams.🎵🎶
I always wake up when Josef gives the second feeding to our dogs at around 1:30am. We only feed them twice a day, one in the late afternoon and at around 1:30am or 2am. Every day Josef would buy veggies and ground meat for them, sometimes chicken liver aside from the dog food they purchase every week and those vitamins, kibble and beef sausages. Imagine 10 Shih Poo and pure breed Shih Tzu, 8 Aspins and the Siberian Husky that they adopted because the previous owner could no longer take care of it. He stays in the garage while our Aspins are scattered in the dirty kitchen attached to the main house. I admire their dedication in caring for these dogs. They have given away several puppies to friends and Jovy’s officemates.
Sometimes Josef forgets to luck the main door when he feeds Addie so I always check it before going back to sleep. It’s quite funny that our doorbell is seldom used now. The motorcycle riders who bring in Jovy’s purchases online just wait for the dogs barking non-stop. They excitedly bark too when our car is infront of the garage when Jovy comes in from work.
When I’m in the kitchen, our Aspins stay close and when I’m in the garden, they are there too. Dogs are loyal companions. They alert us when there is someone at the gate. Their bark is different, a little louder and somewhat aggressive.
It is a sunny Wednesday morning. A perfect day to just read after doing household chores.
Started reading The Shell Seekers again. I looked at the YouTube link that Pete sent me about the movie adaptation and it is still clear but I couldn’t understand the dialogue/conversations much. I will watch it again as soon as I am done with rereading the book. It has been years.
Last night, I enjoyed the short stories featured in A Place Like Home. Wonderful short stories. Set aside the other books I have started…haha! My TBR list is quite long now – some books by David Baldacci, Anita Diamant, Paulo Coelho, Fredrik Backman, Emilie Hart, Gwen Bristow, William Kent Krueger, Leon Uris, Ken Follett, Viola Shipman and other some new authors. I loved Bristow’s Tomorrow is Forever which I read wayback in college. It was my first taste of historical fiction. One of these days, I will do all those reread about the books I enjoyed fifty years ago.
Goodreads says I have read 1,959 books since I started my virtual library there back in 2011 when shelfari.com closed. Those books borrowed by Dad from the UST High School Library were not included in that list. When we got flooded in 2009, we lost so many lovely books that Nissa, Josef and I have accumulated over the years including our three Thomasian yearbooks and even their grad pictures. We have slowly replaced them with new books and new authors.
I can’t forget what Stephen King said on his lovely book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. And I quote, ‘books are a uniquely portable magic’.
After reading Adichie’s book Zikora yesterday, I looked for another book of short stories. A long time ago, I found a book by Rosamunde Pilcher called The Shell Seekers. Since then, I have looked for more of Pilcher’s books every time I visited Booksale until I found more books of hers. I have read eighteen of her books so far with two books of short stories entitled Flowers In The Rain And Other Stories and The Blue Bedroom And Other Stories. Hallelujah! I found another short story book of hers with several well-known authors that I am reading now. It’s entitled A Place Like Home. What I like about short stories is that they are so easy to read and you won’t get bored reading compared to a long novel.
I first encountered Rosamunde Pilcher upon the recommendation of a friend whom I met at a book club several years ago. I got curious because for a guy to rave about one particular author or book, she really must be good. So I looked for a copy of The Shell Seekers, one of her well-known and much-loved books. I was hooked and from then on, I tried to look for more of her books every time I got the chance to visit Booksale. Her stories are not your run of the mill love stories. They speak of family relationships, heartbreak, friendships, betrayals, forgiveness and love. Once you start reading her books, you get to absorb the characters like they are your next-door neighbors or your favorite cousin or your beloved brother or sister. And seeing her describe Cornwall and Scotland with such beauty and grace makes you long to go there and see the snow-capped vistas and azure skies, it makes you stay at the beach all day long and just look at the water and go home with the thought of a nice hot cup of tea and fish and chips prepared by a loyal housekeeper who treats you as a long-lost daughter. It makes you even curious how a Biro pen looks like because the character you’ve read won’t have no other except a Biro. It makes you long to buy rose-scented soaps and lavender bubble baths and stay relaxed for an hour or two immersed in warm and scented water and wrap yourself with pretty thick bath towels afterward. You think of the first chill of autumn and the countryside awashed with pretty flowers. Short of saying, I want to live in Scotland and get to explore Porthkerris despite the rains and the cold. I want to see the silver hues of the raindrops on a cold and chilly morning. Such are what you can imagine, just reading her books.
Reading is such a thrill. I got so much time on my hands at the moment because I am done gardening and my appointment with my hematologist is next month yet.
It is a short story written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, a Nigerian author of various literary works.
In this short story, Zikora is a successful lawyer. It captures her thoughts as she was in her final stages before giving birth. She was left by her boyfriend when she told him that she was pregnant. For a short story, various issues were directly related to the situation of Nigerian women – single motherhood, polygamy, sexism and preference for male children. Mother-daughter relationships and love are also explored in this story. I rated it four ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.
I read two of Adichie’s books before, the Purple Hibiscus and We should All Be Feminists which I both rated five ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.
I said I was done yesterday gardening but when I visited it early this morning, I opted to repaint our concrete garden seat which we bought several years ago. Early on, we used to eat breakfast here when we still had our avocado tree as shade and bamboo slots atop our perimeter fence. Since we had to install new slots every four or five years, I had it changed to steel matting. I had my small pots hang there. Occasionally, I still drink my morning coffee here with all our Aspins running around. Bamboo fencing is nice though because it is cool and gives you that privacy from passing cars and people. Will just post the photos on my other blog. https://arlene1027@wordpress.com
For two hours this afternoon, I gardened non-stop pruning the carabao grass almost to its roots. This is the last part of my gardening job. I don’t want to hire a gardener at the moment because she charges by the hour which is more costly than a normal daily wage earner. It’s tiring of course but the joy of seeing the garden so nice more than compensate for the work done. Now I could concentrate reading again.
I am done with The Lion Women of Terhan. Atmospheric, evocative, filled with feminine courage, lasting friendship. I rated it five ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.
I am looking for another book of Marjan Kamali, she is that good. I found another book by my favorite author Richard Paul Evans entitled Sharing Too Much: Musings From An Unlikely Life, a charming and inspirational collection of stories, sort of his autobiography, how he started writing despite his Tourette syndrome. He is dubbed as the ‘king of Christmas stories’. I have a collection of his books, mostly gifts from friends who know my penchant for reading his books. I am always updated with his books because we are friends on FB for more than a decade now.
It's been some years since I started this blog. Supposedly, it was only to share my plight as a cancer patient and survivor but over the years it has somehow evolved into something personal about my life and my family.
So really glad to have met you all wonderful people out there. Someone commented once that he liked the title of this blog, Dreams and Escapes. Dream on, there are more things in life than we really think. Be happy, you only live once. Sometimes you also need an escape from the vicissitudes of life and this blog helps me cope. Welcome. Feel free to leave your comments, I do welcome them.
It took me so long to access this blog, I wonder what happened really. It is always touch and go so I stay with my main blog Dreams and Escapes which you can access here. This is just a trial post once more. I could not even see the tags and categories….whew!
It’s been a while. I am reblogging this here from my main blog Dreams and Escapes. I hope you’ll find time to visit it to. My gosh, I got so excited when I saw it. There are several designs actually and all with Biblical passages. One of the vendors in our subdivision is selling them. […]
I can’t believe I haven’t touched and visited this blog like forever (an exaggeration of course) but I was so focused on updating my main blog so I forgot about this. Early this morning while I was watering the plants, I looked up at our jackfruit trees and saw this. I was hoping I could […]
I am reblogging this here for all its worth. Thank you for reading 🙂 You might wonder how are family has been since my brother was diagnosed with rectal cancer which has metastasised in his liver. Allow me first to thank you all for your prayers and words of comfort. It is helping us a […]
Gosh, I can’t believe it’s been almost a year now since I posted something here. I am always updated with my main blog though, a link of which is attached here. Sharing this photo I took yesterday, we locally call it Lato salad, a appetizer. I love seaweeds and I buy them once in a […]
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