Missed: The Highs of Jogging

Over a month after the terribly bad accident, I still am unable to get back to routines of the past, most especially the regular physical exercise I have maintained for close to 30 years – jogging.





Though I did not miss it as much as when I saw this picture of Gov. Palin of Alaska taking a leisurely run against the majestic backdrop of Alaskan winter scenery.

I love running close to rivers or lakes where I can find them. Some things about them are very exhilarating and calming. Just right for a meditative or reflective running session, accompanied and occupied by one’s mundane and more profound thoughts.

In San Francisco, I loved running around the perimeter of beauteous Lake Merced, whether in the nippy cold of winter or the subdued glare of cool summer.

Here in the old hometown, I have taken a keen liking to the newest bridge that spans the Cagayan River, connecting Carmen with Nazareth Subdivision. During early weekends, the complete span and the approaches to the bridge are decidedly empty and amply cooled by the slow meandering flow of the typically sleepy river below. Quite ideal for my taste!

Sooner or later, I will definitely get back to my routines – like jogging, and blogging, too.

With the added promised caveat: If I do get the chance to take a trip to Alaska, I will definitely allocate some time for jogging, against the majestic backdrop of similar Alaskan scenery.

You can bet on that!

Digits in the Digital Age

An utterly needless and totally unnecessary accident drops one on the knees of utter helplessness, deep trauma, gnawing remorse and frustration. Bringing in bouts of pain, sleepless nights and some depression.

Exactly two weeks ago, one such unfortunate incident visited my otherwise harried but hum-drum life. Topping off a busy day with a flurry of chores needed to enhance our little business enterprise, I was ready late in the afternoon of a humid Saturday to call it a day, on the tail-end of the last chore of cleaning our ominous-looking (in hindsight) dough roller machine.

When from out of nowhere, and certainly not from heaven, I now vaguely recall being conscious of three of my fingers on my left hand being deep inside the two spinning rollers.

Sparing the grisly details of what happened in the next moments, hours, and days, I can only say that now my three fingers are heavily bandaged still, feeling still the occasional throbbing pain, and at times feeling the depressing feeling of self-anger and conscious self-loathing for allowing such a needless and unnecessary turn of events.

Why was I not my usual uber-careful self? What a stupid thing to have allowed such a thing to happen? Now I can’t type, tie my shoelaces, not even go through the usual personal hygiene chores – without the same difficulties only a learning child would typically encounter.

Now I have taken to looking at my right hand (the good one), flexing the fingers every which way, and generally admiring the science behind them. The genius of the opposable thumb! And then sadly turning my gaze on the other. Sigh. How badly I took it for granted, having been reckless in its use! If only time could be pushed back. I would pay money for it to happen. But regrets always trail behind, a hazy image of our life’s rearview mirror. And time does not walk backward.

How particularly crucial your digits have become on this Digital Age. Typing is now an excruciating chore or exercise for me.

No doubt I have discovered new-found respect for my digits.

A loose board of a bedroom cabinet remains untended and unrepaired, staring boldly at and challenging my innate resolve to keep things in the house in good order. Because at this time, I do not have the ability to hold a nail on one hand and holding a hammer on the other to drive the nail.

Oh, brother!

In A Fog: What To Blog

Having wrenched myself away from the secure comforts of home and hearth in Northern California, I am now three months into another extended sabbatical in the land of my birth, immersed again in a life rendered quite removed and different from three decades of living in the adopted country.

Though eternally busy in dealing with all the ennui of the arcane chores of daily living in the old hometown, certain precious times are still available for eking out moments of quiet introspection and reflection into the profundities of life.

Like the eternally relevant and mind-challenging question:

What the hell am I doing here when I should be scouring the pleasure spots of the world trying to find pleasure, what else, in the kind of life most of us work very hard all our productive lives to aspire for and attain?

Or the trite and more mundane query into:

Why does the unbearable heat, humidity really, of the tropics not frustrate enough the people here to want to move to a more temperate climate – like in the mountains or to another country?

Search me.

I am not a wise man neither am I a fool, as one of Elvis Presley’s’ songs goes. Thus, But what I am the way the good Lord made me, the song intones further.

First, sedentary retirement is not an option. In my quaint vocabulary to re-tire is likened to an automobile tire given new life, a retread. Retread for a more useful life. Retread to add more life to one already spent.

And beyond the sublime and surreal, there is the gaping need to try to recoup losses in physical resources such as a home and retirement resources such as pensions and 401ks which both have been equally decimated by the fortuitous onset of the global economic crisis.

So to the first question, everything is on hold. This would be the more appropriate option. And the old homeland still not reeling too much from the rippling effects of the global crisis would be a decent alternative in trying to generate some revenue for any business undertaking, or compound yields for financial assets that can be invested there.

Re the climate portion, indeed why do not people move? There are enough highland areas still uninhabited where heat-challenged people can ease in and enjoy life more, rather than constantly be warring against and always losing in the process with the irritating, debilitating, and paralyzing effects of intolerable heat especially in city or urban lowland living. Filipinos are indolent if this charge is factual for a reason. The heat can wreak havoc to the most industriously diligent human being. Man only takes so much heat. Try measuring the time one can bear to hold one’ hand over a lighted candle against the same action but this time with ice or anything cold. There is no contest.

As once proud residents of the San Francisco-Bay Area in the West Coast, we always prided ourselves on our sweater-weather climate. Any resident or guest desiring to spend time outdoors can almost always count that wearing a sweater would be sufficient enough apparel whether in the thick of summer or the throes of winter. Average temperature is almost always mild and changes are hardly perceptible.

But the sun in the tropics can beat on you mercilessly, whether sans apparel or wearing layers of clothing for protection. There is no escaping the intolerable effects of the hot and humid climate. Whether in the way it burns your skin or the resultant incessant sweat oozing out of our bodies. And this whether in the thick of summer or throes of the most wet wet season.

So there you go. Another abbreviated reflection session terminated, to live another day.

And I still live and the world around me continues to exist and spin.

Give due thanks to the Grand Designer.

Inspiring Confidence?

Or confidence builder?

Last June, I wrote about a quirky situation right in our own subdivision. What might be called a bit of irony?

Another one appears a likely candidate. Rack this one up as another possible entrant in our Ironies circular file, if ever we will have one.

Pictured below is the humble structure of our subdivision’s homeowners association. It serves both as office, storage house, and then some. Like some spaces being rented out to enterprising homeowners selling refreshments and knick-knacks. It is quietly and unobtrusively nestled under the now wooded park, tucked neatly in one of its corners. It appears cozy, comfortable, and safe.
Now in our subdivision a pivotal if not the primary concern of the association is security – keeping residents safe, streets lighted properly, and so forth. Security guards are stationed in the active gates 24-7, or until they are closed. There are I believe three of these, and possibly two more that have been rendered unusable for vehicular traffic. One has been fenced off with a high hollow block fence and the other with a barbed wire fence in disrepair and no bridge over the gaping drainage canal of the national highway.

And indeed the association does a pretty decent job in providing security guards. Though more could be done in regulating access and egress of outsiders and their vehicles. And overall lighting needs critical upgrades.

But what gets the goat is this situation.



An office secured like a prison or a fortress? Four locking devices are visible from outside – two padlocks, a door knob, and a padlocked heavy duty deadbolt. And of course, the windows framed with heavy metal grilles.

And this is the office or clubhouse? Pray tell what valuables may be kept in there. Residents' information? Collectibles? Some table and filing cabinets?

Now does this inspire confidence among the residents that they are indeed kept safe by their sentinels? The sentinels themselves appear leery or fearful about security within the premises? or maybe simply overprotective?

Alien Alert

Lately I have been receiving electronically strange pictures with cryptic messages seeming to originate from some alien who appears to be coming from beyond our galaxy, the Milky Way.

He, she, or it appears to be using a very powerful telescope or ultra-magnifying instrument that can cut through all the miasma of interminable space and zero in on details of the earth’s surface or sub-surface, like active ugly fissures underneath our thin crust or smoldering magma flexing to burst out.

And from his lofty perch beyond our little microcosm he appears to be highly evolved and in use of technology that we can only dream about.







This morning though as I was jogging around our little park for my regular constitutional I chanced upon certain portions of the concrete road that defines the park’s boundaries and noticed certain familiarities. Like the typical concrete joints and cracks, signs of an aging roadway traversed by man and his vehicles and showing the deleterious effects of nature’s erosion on a man-made structure.

Quite a role reversal. Instead of obtrusive man trampling upon and violating the pristine offerings of nature, it is now nature acting upon the structures that man has superimposed on its works.

Anyway, it appears our overly solicitous alien with his and his instrument’s overarching capabilities focused too minutely or microscopically as to miss the forest for the trees as they say. And worse, he or his instrument may have been playing tricks on the colors of the pictures taken. Like inverting the colors?

HiHiHi.