Random Threads

I was in Manila for  two weeks getting overhauled in a hospital for a week, and staying with good friends there afterwards. It was nice seeing friends I never get to see and strangely. I saw more friends from Palawan there that I never see in town. Odd to run into more of them in Manila than where I live. It's always wonderful to get back home after seeing nothing but sky scrappers, except for the verdant garden at the friend's house I was staying at. But for that little oasis, I might have gone nuts. It was nice to go for a walk down the road I live in and see not one concrete structure, but the road. Here is what I like to see, not much of anything but green and verdant valleys. It help me remember why I love Palawan. I have been so upset over the approval of a coal fired electric plant and the  Ocean Park  in a marine sanctuary, I almost forgot why I live here. Mangingisda Road. This is walking back towards my house from the Mangingisda Pier. A very common...

We moved to Palawan after searching other islands for our retirement base. I liked Palawan because it was so pristine compared to other cities. I also loved the fact that earthquakes don't happen here, nor the ferocious winds of the Typhoons that strike Luzon and other islands. In 2009,when we moved here, it was a laid back town. Not much of anywhere to shop for groceries except for NCCC and the public markets. I hated NCCC because they constantly blared Christian music so loud I couldn't even think straight, much less remember what to buy. I don't have anything against Christian music in general, except I didn't expect to have it blasted in my ears at a Supermarket!!! I think that should be left to churches. If I wanted to listen to that type of music...I definitely would have gone to church to hear it. To make matters worse, at checkout, they would stop the process to pray!!! This drove me crazy and I actually had to force them to stop praying and continue to check ...

by Vince Naso 1971 It was 1971, and I was 21 when I met a lovely man many years my senior, named Vince Naso. I think he was about 36 at that time. We hit it off right away and we were literally inseparable. Not long after, much to the chagrin of my conservative parents, we bought a house together and proceeded to set up house and home. I had been raised in the Philippines with household staff and ridiculously unaware of anything as mundane as putting things away etc. It was never asked of me to do one stitch of household work or any of the cooking. In fact, it never dawned on me to even consider it. Simply oblivious. When we moved in together, I pretty much winged it.  I always was fairly precocious, if not experienced, but here is one incident that backfired on me. One day he asked if I did laundry. Thinking, Hell everyone in America does laundry, they have washing machines. I mean how hard can it be?  I was pretty smug. In the Philippines, we had laundry people, and my...

Last week my husband and I were driving along the highway heading to town and in the middle of the road, on the yellow painted divider I saw something tiny moving....after we zipped past it, I realized it was a kitten! I begged my husband to go back, we already have so many rescued animals he wasn't too thrilled about it, but I knew if we came home and I saw it as a splattered ink spot, I would feel guilty all my life about it. So he relented and took me back. There were cars zipping and weaving as we approached it and I thought for sure it was a goner! This is the poor lil guy after I grabbed him from the highway! However we managed to safely pull over about 15 feet away and I ran over to it. The poor thing was so scrawny and thin, it could hardly move! I called to it and it began to stagger over to me! However it wasn't moving fast enough so I ran over to it and picked it up and brought it back to the truck. I had to de-f;ea the lil guy, clean his ears of mites, p...

We have several bamboo groves on our property. Consequently, we build a lot of things with it. Here are a few of the things we have made with the help of local carpenters, who had never made anything like these things before. I think they did well. Bamboo dish drying rack. I bought a wooden one many years ago, and it lasted so long, but it finally fell apart and our assistant Jhun Solis, who is not really a carpenter copied it and rebuilt it in bamboo! I love it don't you? Bamboo jewelry tree! I have so much bling. They were stashed for many years in clear boxes and I had to dig through each one to find what I wanted. Now it's all there for me to pick and choose. All with scrap bamboo from building our native deck. It also doubles as a hat rack! When we built our new bedroom cottage, I didn't have anything to put the towels on and when I shopped for stainless steel towel rods, there were so expensive. Having seen these in a couple of hotels we stayed in, I show...

I lived in the Mt. Shasta area, and neighboring towns at various times in my life since 1977.  Before I went there, I had a vivid dream about a woman and a mountain. The next day I was invited to lunch at a friend's place and an Israeli kibutznik was there. After a few hours conversation, he mentioned he was thinking of going up to Mt. Shasta, because there was a woman who wrote an esoteric book, and he wanted to meet her. (This is a whole other story though) I immediately offered to pay for the entire trip, if we left the very next day! He agreed!  Thus began my love affair with that area. The pristine evergreen forests, interspersed with Aspens that turned gold in the fall, wild blackberries covered in raindrops, wild sweet pea flowers blooming in all their pink splendor. I left West Hollywood the next year, with what would fit in my car, moved there, and never looked back. Every year that I lived there, there was an annual fireworks display by Lake Siskiyou in the tow...

Our daughter is now going to the local public school since we live almost 2 hours round trip to city center, which is where the private school she last attended was. Now she gets to ride in her daddy's e-Trike which he developed as a R & D research project with former Mayor Edward Hagedorn. It's still going strong and now we use it to take our daughter and her friends to school everyday. We only live 5 minutes by etrike away from her school. Several of the her friends ride with her everyday and we pick up more kids as we go. It makes 3 round trips per day, as Alysha likes to come home for lunch since we live so close. Our number one assistant Jhun, taking our daughter and her friends to school. This trike prototype was built by local a Palawan  body shop owned by William Russel.  We used some of his mechanics and ours.  Dave Dewbre designed the mechanical system and helped Russel with the design based on the roads here and passenger capacity of the 5000 watt...