Tegalugan Series #116 ft. Khaila Hernandez

Thought Lost but FOUND!

Eph created our own Maniago family website, under which our blogs were published,  several years ago but was unable to maintain it so I thought all my blogs are lost forever.

Apparently they're still under Blogger,com!

The bigger question however, was with most of my time focused on the Kapampangan language advocacy, would I be able to update my blogs!

To be continued....

Thanksgiving '09 in the Phil

And here's another unfinished blog. Some or most of the topics below are all in my Facebook account.


Most of the things that stresses us out are either self inflicted or things that society as we know it pushes us to stress about.
One of the cool memories I have of living in the US is celebrating Thanksgiving.

August 8 - Election of Ari ning Parnaso
August 28 - Coronation of Ari ning Parnaso
All Saint's Day
Ligligan Becuran
Mercy Algallar
Monasterio de Tarlac, again
Flor Barcelon
Alice and Den Catacutan
Pacquiao
Tacasan, Macabebe
Ella's B'day, Halloween

Major Updates - 3 Arizona Trip

Below are all the topics I wanted to blog about 9 years ago!!


Arizona Trip, Jun 2010

Mareng Glo Manalastas had mentioned that she had access to the cottages at Fort Tuthill - a recreation area in Flagstaff, AZ which caters to Air Force personnel and their families, since she works at the Luke Air Force Base in nearby Glendale.

Barringer (Meteor) Crater
Tang Joe's birthday, July 2010

Sister Gay's 60, Aug 2010

Imang Paz, Aug 2010

Mel (Datahan) Paras, Sept 2010

AKI's 1st Mission, Sept 2010

AKI's 2nd Mission, Oct 2010

Imang Glo's 86th, Sept 2010

Cong Paing and family's visit, Sept 2010

Precy Manalastas, Oct 2010

Emy's birthday, Nov 2010

Lance's 1st B'day, Nov 2010

Daddy, Dec 2010

Gian is 21, Dec 2010

Camille's 1st Christmas, Dec 2010

Romar's wedding, March 2011

Reggie and Manami, March 2011

w Mary/Robert March 2011

JASHS Meeting March 2011

w the Mejias in LV, Apr 2011

Tattoo June 2011

Maniago Family Reunion, July 2011

Bert and Ed's b'day, Aug 2011

Edward Sunga

I probably was going to blog about Edward's passing in the blog but somehow didn't get a chance to.
This was about 7 years ago or so..

February 14, 2011

It’s Valentine’s Day and I’m sitting in the Tom Bradley terminal of the LAX.

Bummer!

Oh well..

Cong Raf picked me and Donna up from Long Beach this morning and took us here to the airport. We had breakfast right after I checked in. Incidentally, I checked in at the required time of three hours before departure and the counter was absolutely empty except for the check in clerks. My luggage was weighed and tagged without any hitches. She even weighed my small hand carried bag.

Donna and Cong Raf went out to get Doret’s In N Out burger. He’s supposed to pick me up from the DMIA in Clark and when I asked him what he wants from California, without hesitation, he said, “In N Out burger!”

Last night, everyone’s in the house for a Valentine’s eve and a farewell dinner for me. Rose and Jun got all kinds of stuff from Cheesecake Factory. But the best Valentine’s gift anyone can get was given to me by Camille; a half a dozen (dark) chocolate chip cookies.

How neat is that?

There’s all kinds of WiFi connection here at the terminal but they’re all locked. See y’all on line soon.

Aside from some turbulence, the flight from LAX was all right. I was able to watch one movie and dozed off through a couple more. My headset was pretty bad. Only one side is working. The flight food was nothing to write home about. Landing at Incheon International Terminal in Seoul was pretty uneventful. When I turned on my Mac, sure enough, there was free WiFi! So, of course, I visited Facebook and responded to a couple of comments and messages. Our layover lasted for almost 3 hours.

The flight to DMIA (Diosdado Macapagal International Airport) in Clark would have been better if there were on demand movies but as luck would have it, there was none. The passengers consisted of 8% Filipinos, 90% Koreans and 2% other.
There were only two people at the immigration in the terminal. In spite of the flight getting there on time, it took us over an hour to finally haul our luggage through customs. Doret was already anxiously waiting outside thinking I didn't get on the flight. We had a late dinner at the Jollibee by AUF and headed on home afterwards. It was already almost 3 am by the time I got to bed.

Note: This was my last unpublished blog before I got addicted to Facebook. Oct 8, 2019

Camille and Elijah

Facebook post for 1-11-12

Her days as a Crawler are slowly becoming history while she joins the realm of the Walkers.

Friday - Jan 13, 2012

Yes, at fourteen months plus, Camille has started walking! And everyone's ecstatic! Today, Donna is cooking some arroz caldo to celebrate this milestone! Come on over and celebrate it with us! Sorry, the picture below doesn't show it.

Three years ago today, Camille's older brother Elijah, at a little over 5 months, was born. That's why everyone went to Forest Lawn to celebrate it. Rachel created a crown and a nice 'flower cake' (from flowers that Rose and Jun picked up from the downtown LA flower market early this morning) and they got a wonderful red velvet cake as well. While Rose and Jun got a beautiful wreath.

On the way to the park, Camille fell asleep in her car seat but a few minutes after we arrived, she woke up and took advantage of the wide space and practiced walking, a lot!

Here are all the pictures I took.

Major Updates 2, Mariko and Lani

Yesterday I posted the following on Facebook:

"First thing tomorrow I'll finish a post in my blog and I'M NOT GOING TO LOGIN TO FB."

You see I blame Facebook as one of the reasons that I've been lagging on my blog posts. As I've replied on my post above, once I login to FB, I get stuck there and can't or won't do anything else. That's how addictive Facebook is for me. But I'm proud of myself since I finished my blog post before this, as promised. And I'm now starting on this one!

WooHoo!

Mariko's 2nd US Visit, Jan 2010

My first cousin, Atching Nida, has a daughter, Mariko, from her Japanese ex-husband and she lives in Japan. In January of 2010, she made her 2nd visit to California. She previously visited several years ago when she was much younger. It just feels sort of strange to have a Japanese relative somehow. But then again, I have a Japanese daughter-in-law so I should just get used to it.

Here is Mariko at Cong Raf's place in Bellflower.



Click here for the rest of her pictures in the set.

Lani's Visit, June 2010

My niece Lani, (Cong Romy's oldest daughter) who lives with her family in Missouri somewhere took some time off in June of 2010 to meet us here in California for the first time. She stayed at Cong Mansing's place and the pictures below were taken when we met her at Homer's house in Downey and the day Atching Lori treated us for lunch.



Lance, Roland's younger son, was still a baby then.


You can check out the rest of Lani's pictures here.

That's two blog posts in a row. Now I can take a break and visit Facebook!
Yay!

Major Updates 1, Asian Cruise

Thank goodness for Flickr.com, I can go back to my pictures and try to discern which event or activity I haven't blogged about. It's really helpful because I noticed that pictures there have some sort of ID; what camera was used, what date the picture was taken, etc.

And so I start from a couple of years ago..

ASIAN CRUISE, JANUARY 2010

Pat, our friend from Guagua called and said she and a bunch of friends are going on a cruise and there are still a couple of spots left and would we want to go? Donna and I have been talking about going on a 2nd cruise so we told her yes we do.

We flew from the DMIA in Clark to Singapore, and we stayed overnight there in a hotel booked ahead of time by the agency who arranged for the whole thing.


After we checked in, Donna and I ran around and checked the place out. It was indeed clean, like everyone, who's visited it has been saying.

At the time, my niece Myla, her husband Alex and their son were living in Singapore. He was working for some computer company. After we checked in, they picked us up and showed us around a bit after taking us out to dinner. For some reason I couldn't find the pictures in Flickr which I took with them.

The next day, a tourist bus took us to the port where we started our cruise aboard the Super Star Virgo.





Click here for more pictures taken on the ship.


The next day, our Star Cruiser sailed towards Penang in Malaysia.



And here are more pictures in Malaysia.

Next stop - Phuket, Thailand. I need to mention that the owner of the travel agency accompanied us to this cruise and whenever we pulled into port she arranged for the tour vans and the guides who showed us around.

In Thailand we had a choice of two tours; shopping or sightseeing. People in the group who've previously visited Thailand chose the former and first time visitors, the latter. And since Donna and I don't really have cash flowing out of our pockets, we opted to sightsee as well. We even went to an elephant sanctuary type place where we rode on the backs of an elephant.



Check out more pictures of Thailand here.

Slowly but Surely..

I'm trying to coax my writing and creative juices to blog again but I got stuck in reading my old blogs. When Eph changed the format of my blog a while back, (click here) I lost the pictures I posted on older blogs and I was hoping I can re-post them but I encountered a couple of problems; there was way too many pictures to repost and the only way to do it is to upload them into Flickr.com first. You see when I started blogging, I used to post pictures directly from my hard drive. Not anymore, I now have to upload them first into Flickr.com, then grab the HTML from there and into my blog. Oh well...

Next month, it would have been 6 years since our early retirement.

YES, SIX YEARS!

Well, I'm not sure about Donna since she's back to work. And like I mentioned in the previous blog, hers is more like retirement interrupted for a couple of reasons; to save for another European trip and to recover expenses for my father-in-law's hospitalization and eventual demise December of 2009. But more on this later.

Burnout

My last blog was in June of 2011.

If I recall, back in the day I started blogging almost every day. Well, I used to give updates on the construction of our new house in Pampanga. And from then on, the words just came out; travels, various events and activities got blogged about with accompanying pictures.

Call it what you will; blogger burnout, writer's block..

Whatever it is, I succumbed.

I found a couple of drafts that I had yet to finish and this is the first one. What I'm planning to do is combining them and present an abbreviated version; 1) to make a long story short and 2) because it's been such a long time ago (one was from June of 2010 and the other was from April 2011!) that I've forgotten some events.

Sorry.

LA MIRADA, June 2010

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to pick me up a couple of pairs of jeans two sizes bigger than my usual. Yes it's horrible but what can I say? The sad thing about this is I don't even drink beer and I have this beer gut. The horror!

That's why I miss Indo. Back in the Philippines he's been my constant incentive to walk around the neighborhood. Emy walks her pet Dachsund, Koji here so I don't need to walk him. But since Donna started working recently, I've started walking again every morning after I drop her off. It's nice because I think summer officially started a few days ago and yet it's still fairly cool during the mornings, cool enough to wear a sweater. Around the park and once around the lake gives me my 1 hour walk so it's a perfect scenario.

It's been 4 years now since Donna and I decided to quit our jobs and retire early in the Philippines. As most of you know, we come over here to California at least once a year to; a) use our round trip tickets which are good for a year and; b) exit out of the Philippines within a year's stay due to the fact that we're not dual citizens.

RETIREMENT INTERRUPTED

Oh, did I mention Donna is working? Indeed she is.

We arrived last May 15, 2010 and since then we've been invited to lunch and dinner by quite a bunch of friends and relatives one of whom is Atching Lori. She's the ex wife of my departed cousin, Cong Frank, and is now married to Chuck Zilafro who owns Lakewood Park Health Center in Downey. Donna casually asked her if they have a job opening for a nurse in their facility. I don't quite remember what she told Donna.

One early morning we got a call from Atching Mariette who works in the same outfit and told Donna they wanted her to come over for an interview. She was sort of indecisive about the whole thing and asked me, "What should I do?"

So I told her the least she can do is show up since she did ask if they have an opening. I took her there and when she came out she said she got the job and they want her to start right away. Yup, just like that she went from early retiree to another working stiff, again. There was a considerable pay cut in her usual rate as a dialysis nurse but the job is much closer and apparently less stressful since she's supposed to only do some paper work.

I've 0ften told people, living and working in the US is similar to being in a virtual prison. People work all their lives and can't stop because of all kinds of obligations; mortgage, insurance, bills, etc. I had the chance of getting paroled so to speak and I dread going back to prison, not to mention how difficult it is for people like me who're absolutely talent challenged to join the work force, what with the current situation of unemployment due to the world economic crisis.

It's a different story with Donna, however, due to her nursing experience, they more or less created a position for her to help out with the nursing staff's paperwork. She committed to working for them for three months.

Now why is she working again you ask? Well, I'll tell you. Eph's in-laws were with us for the first leg of our European trip in 2007 and now that we're talking about it we realized we didn't get to see the other part of Europe; the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc. and with our meager funds the only way to go is for Donna to work again and save up for it.

And we're back to the present...

As you all know, Donna and I moved from La Mirada to Long Beach a few days after Camille was born in 2010. Thank goodness for Cassie, my only form of exercise here is our twice daily (one during the day and one at night) 15 minute walks. And it shows with my beer gut! Not to worry, as mentioned above, I've gotten a few pairs of jeans to fit me because the old ones just won't do anymore.

Scary Incident

Has anyone seen that PSA (Public Service Announcement) on traffic safety about a car coming out of a driveway where the driver looks first on the left, then turns his head and looks to the right, sees it's all clear and proceeds to drive out, but a split second later, a guy on a motorcycle slams into him?

It happened to me last night coming out of the SM parking lot, Mexico exit and I was making a left towards Mexico! And just like in the commercial, I stopped, looked to the left, turned my head to the right. When I saw it was clear I let the clutch off and proceeded to move out the road.

In the PSA, the biker slammed into the car for dramatic effect I think. In my case, once he noticed that I didn't see him, he deliberately fell on the ground with his bike so as not to slam into me to avoid being seriously hurt. His actions made him slide towards me, scratching my bumper a bit in the process. I'm just glad he had the presence of mind to do that. Otherwise, he would have been in a lot of trouble, not to mention he's not wearing a helmet.Oh, did I say this happened at around 5:30 pm, with a slight drizzle and it's starting to get dark? And of course he didn't have his light on.

He immediately stood up right afterwards, obviously in shock. I rolled down my window, noticing people started to mill around checking things out, blocking traffic. So I pulled over to the other side of the road. I heard some people yell at me, "Go on and go!" So I did, but a few feet away I pulled over and checked out my bumper. I noticed a jeepney driver pulled over as well and told me I have to go back. I made a U-turn and on the way a mall security told me the guy was still there.

I got off and asked him if he's ok. He said he is, looking at his leg. I saw he had some minor abrasions. The fact that he was standing told me he didn't have any fractures. I told him to start his bike and sure enough after a couple of kicks, it started. He kept on saying he's ok but the mall security took our names and addresses anyway. By this time some cops came and tried to find out what happened. One of them asked us if everything is ok before he can 'release' us. I told him it's up to the biker. The biker said he's fine. So that was it and we went our own ways.

I went to see my brother Naring and told him about it. He noticed that I was concerned about the biker so he told me to go back to the mall and ask for his address so I can follow it up. I remember his head light came loose a bit and you know how in an accident you don't really 'feel' your injuries right away? He may have other injuries that weren't apparent and since I have insurance anyway I figured I'll find out if he's ok. I have a feeling he didn't have a driver's license that's why he never complained or perhaps he didn't have insurance. And since he's not wearing a helmet, he probably thought even if I was at fault, he may end up being in trouble himself.

The problem is that he gave his name and his address; Francis Duruin, Sto. Dominggo, San Ysidro. That doesn't make sense. There's a Sto. Dominggo in Mexico and there's a San Ysidro in the City of San Fernando. He may have deliberately misled the guards into giving out his real address.

Anyway, the point of the PSA is look to the left, then to the right AND THEN, look to the left again. Because the few seconds it took to look to the right, is enough time for a motorcycle to come unnoticed to cause an accident. But if I would have looked to the left again, I would have seen him coming.