Who Moved My Blog?

I did. I grew tired of this template and wanted to try Wordpress.

Please visit me at http://obitermaster.wordpress.com.

I will maintain Lessons on Waiting at http://www.elladelrosario.blogspot.com.

See you around!

Terrible Heat

I promised myself I will minimize complaints, especially about things I cannot control. Like the weather. But the extreme heat of summer 2010 is getting to me.

I get constant migraines. I don't like moving from air-conditioned to non-air-conditioned rooms as it makes me dizzy. I am constantly thirsty, especially upon waking up in the morning. Perhaps I'm also coming down with the flu so I have been generally feeling a bit under the weather this week. I try to drink several liters of water a day just to make it through.

I am not ignoring the sun's benefits, especially since I love to do the laundry and clothes line-dry quickly in summer. I just hope that we get some rain soon, and not in Ondoy proportions, please. There is such a thing as too much sunshine.

So this is not a complaint. Just a statement. I'll do the (pro) rain dance if needed.

The Unreachable Star

A Palanca award is like an Oscar to the Filipino writer - it sticks to the winner's name. It announces to writers' circles that this particular writer has arrived. It opens doors to great projects and probably even leads to a book or a movie in the future.

Probably, the only Palanca I'll ever receive in my lifetime is the Palanca letter from my mother, which I got when I attended the Days with the Lord retreat while in law school. Every year, I download the contest rules, toy with the idea of joining, and then decide not to. It's Palanca season once again and I actually could have found the time to write, except I have not been in the right mood to do so for the past decade.

Perhaps I have made this writer's block get in the way, and have not found enough ways to be in touch with my creative side. My writer-friends say that they submit entries to the Palancas even if they don't win, as it is good exercise to prepare and polish one or several pieces of writing. I wish them all the best.

I am too lazy, uninspired, and scared to take the plunge. Until then I will remain unknown and unskilled, happy to keep my blogs and journals, and safe from the threat of failure.

Growing Older and Techier

Over breakfast, my mother asked me to create for her a Facebook account. Then, she suggested that I get my father on Twitter, to which he replied that he would much rather setup a blog.

I drank my fresh hazelnut-flavored coffee from Baguio and when the caffeein kicked in, I got to work on their requests. Although they are already senior citizens, my parents have been able to use AIM, Yahoo, Skype, Magic Jack, and Google gradually over the years, to keep in touch with my siblings who are scattered all over the globe. My mom can access her bank accounts online, Papa reads his newspapers from the computer, buying only the Sunday issues, and together they watch their grandchildren on YouTube .

Before we got to the new account creations however, they asked me to give them a more detailed tutorial on how to maximize their Presario. I taught them about browsers, URLs, search engines, and websites. They actually had a lot of questions and it was fun. I had more tech-savvy siblings but I was the one they lived with so they didn't know what they were missing.

I showed them, like I did my legal research students, how to use keywords for more accurate results. My father's name is unique so we found only one website on Yahoo that had his full name - and it led to the Acknowledgment page of my brother's dissertation from NCSU. My parents were so delighted.

We were in the middle of reading my LinkedIn profile, which was the first search result when we typed in my name, when said brother suddenly invited us to a Voice Call through Skype. The tutorial was put on hold. My parents said we'll continue next week.

They leave next month for an extended trip to Sydney, to take care of my niece once my sister goes back to work. They want to watch TFC online and get in touch with their classmates, relatives, and friends via email and Facebook. I know of parents teaching their kids how to use the Internet responsibly. I am happy and proud to be a daughter teaching her parents how to leave their comfort zone and befriend their new laptop.