September 19, 2019 at 4:47 pm (destinations, Family, Food and Drink, Links, Places, Recommended, Relatives, Traveling)
Tags: Bacolod, happiness, memories, restaurants, The Philippines
Thanks to a Photo a Week Challenge prompt: SOMETHING NEW.
And self did do something new: She went home.
Not only did she go home, she went one better and returned to her Dear Departed Dad’s home island of Negros Occidental.
She stayed with cousins.
7th Floor, Belles Artes Condominiums, Galo cor. GV & Sons Street
She saw, for the first time in six years, the house where her Dear Departed Dad grew up, the Daku Balay:
Daku Balay, 50 Burgos Street, Bacolod City, Negros Occidental, The Philippines
In Bacolod, she had the most delicious pizza! Here, smoked bangus pizza and basil pizza:
Café Oscar, Galo Street (Ground Floor, Belles Artes Building), Bacolod City
Great trip.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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September 18, 2019 at 7:10 pm (destinations, Family, Holidays, Links, Places, Traveling)
Tags: Ateneo, Don Salvador Benedicto, nostalgia, The Philippines
Week 178 of the Tuesday Photo Challenge is FUZZY.
So glad there is a Photo Challenge that lets self post pictures she would never otherwise have posted!
Her Dear Departed Dad comes from the province of Negros Occidental in the Philippines. She recently had the chance to return. These pictures are from that trip.
Reading in the Gamboa House in Silay, Negros Occidental, The Philippines
Lissa Ylanan Moran, Best Friend Since College Days at the Ateneo, flew to Bacolod and Self took her to a resort in the town of Don Salvador Benedicto.
View of Canlaon Volcano from Manggapuri Villas, Don Salvador Benedicto
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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September 9, 2019 at 12:31 am (Artists and Writers, Books, destinations, Explorers, Memoirs, Recommended)
Tags: advice, Mondays, nonfiction, reading lists, wisdom
- The secret to walking to the South Pole is to put one foot in front of the other, and to do this enough times.
— Erling Kagge, Silence in the Age of Noise
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September 7, 2019 at 11:32 pm (Conversations, Dearest Mum, destinations, Family, Food and Drink, Links, Places, Relatives, Sundays)
Tags: Manila, memories, The Philippines
This week’s Photo-A-Week Challenge asks us to “share photos showing a tradition you have.”
Self is visiting Dearest Mum in Manila. Been a whirl of activities, since there are many people to see.
She had a small get-together with her college classmates, and lunch with one of Dearest Mum’s oldest friends, Tita Ateta Gana.
College Reunion: Fely J’s, Greenbelt 5, Makati
Tita Ateta Gana and her daughter Tessa treated self and Dearest Mum to lunch at Romulo’s
Finally, self’s headboard back home in Redwood City: made by a metallurgical engineer, to self’s own design: an atis tree!
Self’s headboard in Redwood City, CA: Made in the Philippines
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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September 5, 2019 at 2:46 am (Books, destinations, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: California, novel, reading lists
Hidden Valley Loop Trail, Joshua Tree National Park:
- In the distance were giant boulders and, everywhere on the plain beneath them, Joshua trees. I had always loved the oaks and pines and redwoods of the Bay Area, with their long and leafy limbs, but I had missed the desert trees: stout, prickly, wild-armed, and yet utterly fragile.
— The Other Americans, by Laila Lalami, p. 137
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September 5, 2019 at 12:35 am (destinations, Family, Filipino Writers, Flowers, Links, Relatives, Traveling, Weather)
Tags: Manila, seasons, The Philippines, transitions
To self, FALL means changing weather and fading summer flowers.
It is rainy season in Manila, which means grey skies:
Self loves the light:
As the weather turns, the hydrangeas on self’s front porch are starting to fade:
Hydrangeas on Front Porch, September 2019
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 16, 2019 at 2:26 am (destinations, Links, Places, Plays, Traveling)
Tags: Cal Shakes, Cee Neuner, Cornwall, England, Fowey, Mendocino, summer
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge is TREES.
This is self’s second photo challenge post today. She spent a long time poring over her photo archive and came up, finally, with these three:
Early Morning Fog, Mendocino, April 2018
Cal Shakes Grove, Orinda, CA, September 2018
Monterey Pines in Fowey, Cornwall, England, May 2019
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 9, 2019 at 4:44 am (Artists and Writers, Books, destinations, Filipino Writers, Lists, Places, Traveling, Weather, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, horror, Ireland, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, work-in-progress, writing process
from the Dictionary of Birds (1985):
- a ‘large, homogeneous, successful group probably at the summit of another evolutionary line.’
from Birds of the Western Palearctic (Unforgivable, in self’s view, that Dee fails to provide a date of publication):
- ‘Predator, scavenger, food-pirate … taking almost anything available of suitable size, texture, etc’
Self’s horror story The Rorqual (currently 51 pages — self is so out of control!) uses exactly these kinds of dictionary definitions (in self’s case, pages long) to describe her ‘pagos’ and her ‘longnecks’ and her other what-not. She birthed this horror in Tyrone Guthrie. She can’t seem to write any of it until she returns to Annaghmakerrig. California is just too dry, too intensely hot, too savagely suburban.
Stay tuned.
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August 3, 2019 at 10:31 pm (Books, destinations, Flowers, Links, Movies, Places, plans, Recommended, Weather)
Tags: California, Garden, inspiration, psychology, Redwood City, Saturday, summer, summer movies
Self’s current book, Mihaly Czsikszentmihalyi’s FLOW: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OPTIMAL EXPERIENCE is a very, very interesting book.
Her son and daughter-in-law were Psychology majors at Claremont, the school where the author taught. In fact, she read about him in the Claremont Graduate University alumni magazine, The Flame.
She is trying to practice Flow thinking (see graph below). She is trying to achieve “complexity” in her consciousness. This will be her project for the rest of the summer.
She thinks this goal is very much tied in with the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: TAKING A BREAK.
Today, she walked downtown, which she hadn’t done in two weeks. Courthouse Square was empty. Nevertheless, the trip was not in vain, for she saw a movie: Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Is this a ‘Flow’ experience? Self thinks it is. Watching movies is one of self’s most enjoyable activities.
Mid-Afternoon, Courthouse Square, Redwood City, CA
And, she spends A LOT of time in her garden, where her efforts are repaid with gorgeous blooms like this one, on her Sheila’s Perfume rose:
Sheila’s Perfume, last week of July 2019
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 1, 2019 at 3:35 am (destinations, Links, Niece, Places, Recommended, Relatives, Sundays, Traveling)
Tags: Cee Neuner, discoveries, memories, Prague
The prompt is WATER IN NATURE.
Clearly self hasn’t been spending much time outdoors because she had to go all the way back to May, in Prague, to find pictures of a body of water.
So, here are three pictures of Prague’s Vltava River, from the trip she took with her niece, Irene, end of May. All these pictures were taken during one beautiful Sunday. She wouldn’t have thought of posting them (She likes to post her travel pictures IN REAL TIME. Which is to say: as they are occurring) but she was going through her photo archives and, well, a river is a natural body of water.
A local told her that in Prague one could never be lost. And he was right! As long as you see a bridge, you can orient yourself. Luckily, the city’s not that big.
And besides, the city is so beautiful. So why be in such a hurry to get to your destination? Just relax, enjoy discovering new streets.
Families Enjoying Sunday on the Vltava River, Prague, Late May
Hiring Pleasure Boat on the Vltava River
The Vltava: Giving the Seine a Run For Its Money
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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