Tidbit

To tide you over as I'm still a bit under the weather.

This is Christmas in the old house in Buencamino.

See if you can find yourselves. ; )

Baguio Bites

We have gone to Baguio several times in the past years...usually summers, mainly Holy Week, but lots of other times too. There are a lot of old pictures hanging about and a lot of short incidents that have happened. These are a few bits of the past that have been preserved through the magic of my scanner ;-)

The Original Baguio Brats....for which the house was made for...years and years before the majority of us were even born. ( he he he)

This was taken when I was about one. Jo Ann was a bit older and she remembers this day. She said we were walking around on this Igorot Village and as we were walking on rocky ground...as we were about to pose, Tita Maya, focusing on the camera, forgot to pay attention to where she was stepping...

...thus this picture

Vanity...Vanity!!!

This one shows a very young Eric with a large band-aid on his head.

Jo Ann told me this story. She was playing in the ground floor of the Baguio house, you know, the one which is wide open and drops three or four feet off to the parking area? Anyway, she was down there playing and someone left Eric there too, then they went off to get something or other. Eric was at that age where he was attempting to walk and unfortunately, this was the one day he finally succeeded at it.

The problem was, he walked straight off and dropped off from the edge. Luckily there were a lot of bushes there to catch him and so he only got a teeny bop on the head.

All I remember was Jo Ann yelling "Eric walked!! Eric walked!!" We all came running down to watch him; and well, we couldn't...'cause he had already fallen into the bushes see? Oh well.

I remember this a little bit. I was with Juliet and everyone else at Burnham Park doing the rent-a-bike thing. When I was done, Juliet took me back to the vendor to return the bike. Suddenly she gasped " Ay si ------!!"

I had no idea who she was talking about but she grabbed my arm and yanked me over to this guy. She asked if he would be okay with having his picture taken with me and he said it was fine.

Look how odd my smile was. I remember thinking all this was very weird.

By the way, I still have no idea who this guy is... I didn't know him then, I don't know him now...just in case you do know, can you tell me please? It's kind of driving me crazy



There is no story behind this picture. I just thought it was funny. It was taken in one of the Camp John Hay playgrounds and I was with Jo Ann, Eric, Tasha, and Carlos, and we were being supervised by Gil, Mercy, Chit, and of course, Juliet (Our forever queen of all things Baguio). I think this was one of those summers we went without parents and grandparents and were just there because....I guess... it was hot in Manila?

I just posted this picture because I found it funny. The top picture shows us monkeying around these bars; the next picture shows us on see-saws with Jo Ann and Tasha showing off their impressive balancing talents...

Now...where could Carlos be?

Look back at the monkey bars again... see him all alone back there?

I just thought it funny that he was out there balancing on his own without anyone paying him a bit of attention as we were busy praising the older two keeping their balance on the see-saws.

Talented wasn't he?

Botany

Remember passing notes in class...

Come on, everyone's done it.

Remember the feeling that the teacher might catch you passing one and yell at you or make you read it out loud?

I've passed a lot of notes in my time, you know the ones, " I'm bored." " I'm sleepy na." " So...did he call you last night?" " The teachers slip is showing" " Meet you at lunch" " Did you do the homework...pakopya ha!"

Of course there were the more substantial ones...the sketches that one would make and pass to you for your visual pressure, the hangman and tic-tac-toe ones, a few poems and such things.

I've kept the more interesting notes from the years past and I think I'll share the most interesting one of them today.

When I was first year in Ateneo, I had been assigned a class in Botany. Just like Cristian who is now in his first year at UST. His recent comments on his botany difficulties reminded me of this thing I've been stashing in my "baul" for roughly fifteen years now.

I got it from one of my best friends Meng, who I met during our required Orsem 1989. She was late, we were already on our break, she sat next to me and I offered her a sip of my Royal true orange and basically, that is how we met.

Seeing that our class was blocked for our first years of college, we attended the same classes almost all of the time.

She gave me this at the end of our final lab class in Botany...right before finals and semester break.

Dear Leslie,
Howdy! How's life, pal?
Are you done with your exercises?
Can you believe it? This is the last normal lab day
already! I'm sure we're gonna miss it. Let's remember
this as the last activity we did in lab, rather the last kalokohan!
Were done!
Meng

I kept this for so long so I remember the day she handed it to me exactly. It was sunny, we were all chattering because the teacher had given up and just sat in his chair reading. For some reason, I remember one of my classmates cooing at this feathery troll ballpen topper thing she kept with her all the time. I forget her name now.

Meng snuck over to me from her table and handed the leaf to me. I think she was done examining it under the microscope.

Notice she says she gave it to me so I would remember our last lab day.

The thing is, I do...kind of.... but ironically, she doesn't.

I had to send her a picture as proof a couple of years ago.

I'm actually surprised the writing is still on , or for that matter, that the leaf is still intact. Must have been one of those that we put chemicals on.

Oh oh...

I wonder if it's radioactive.

Bagyo Season

It used to be that when it started raining, the lights would go out.

An after effect of lightning I guess…but of course, in those days, when the electricity goes, the water pumps stop working, and then the water goes too.

So it’s dark, there’s nothing to watch, no lights to read by, no television, boring boring radio programs, because it was kept on the news channel to find out how long the electricity would be out, and to add insult to injury, no running water.

At first, you try and say the magic words to make the rain stop.

“Rain, rain go away. Come again another day. Little girls just want to play.”

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t but in case it doesn’t…

There’s only one thing left to do…

Play in the rain.

We used to have these really old and rusty drainage pipes around the roof.

They, by the way, also had an enormous amount of holes in them. When the rain would really fall down hard, a lot of water would come rushing through those holes. It was like having several open showerheads every couple of feet.

It was a good thing too… since there were a lot of us vying for the one which had the most water coming through.

It was always brisk and icy cold, and your head would feel like it was being pounded on by a gazillion siblings hands slapping you on the top of your head. Which it was occasionally, I grant you, as they were trying to get you out of the best water spot, but most times, it was just the water falling hard.

Just kidding….

Mostly, the argument for the best water spot stops when Dad, driven by the increasing heat and humidity of his unventilated bedroom, would come out in his shorts and soap and shampoo in hand, would take the best spot and take his bath right out there in the rain.

We used to splash and run around a lot, spray each other with water, slip and slide around and fall on our butts. It was a lot of fun. A lot of silliness comes out of you when you’re playing in the rain.

There were conflicting advice when we played in the rain; someone had the opinion that it was the cleanest water possible since it came straight out of the sky. It was said to be so clean that it was caught, blessed and used as holy water.

Some said it was dirty as it passed through all the pollution as it comes down. You had to bathe with tap water after getting rained on otherwise it would make you sick.

In all honestly, I stopped playing in the rain the moment a teacher told our class about acid rain.

She said that there were places where it would rain acid instead of water and would burn everything in its path.

As I used to stick out my tongue to catch drops of rain falling down, I was horrified by a vision of me standing around looking towards the sky when acid starts pouring on me.

I had a cartoon vision of me as Wile E. Coyote looking up just as liquid fire lands on him when the roadrunner again outwits him. There he is, all alone, as he stands burned to a crisp with eyes wide open blinking in surprise.

That’s exactly how I pictured myself in case acid falls on me.

I rather miss my other vision…the one that I used to play in my head as we ran around in the rain.

Of Gene Kelly, after he leaves Debbie Reynolds at her house, and waves his driver to go on without him.

I think you can see Eric doing his version of Gene Kelly’s shtick in this picture.

Too-doo-root-doo

We were singing and dancing in… the rain.