Life is interesting right now. It may well have to do with this little pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel that has appeared now that the 9-months-to-go mark is nearly upon us. That single digit adds a certain vigor and urgency to the way I'm viewing my experience, and a welcome one at that. But there's something more to it. In big ways and small, things have been getting shaken up lately here in Clarin. And here is a smattering:
There was a shake up in my job description for a few days when I temporarily took on the role of dental assistant during Faces of Tomorrow's second annual surgical mission to Bohol last month. Instead of the usual meetings with fisherfolk and compulsive list-making my job usually entails, I spent a few days running an Autoclave, acting as translator, snipping sutures, and suctioning blood out of people's mouths for the Dr. Daniel as he did extraction after extraction.
Another shake up came, this time in my living situation, when I used my MIND to get some serious home improvements under way. Really. Okay not really, but I do almost want to take credit for this. I have several visitors passing through this spring (yay!) and I've been a little paranoid about how to house them in my concrete hovel/unintentional critter menagerie. For some reason, I got it into my head that the best possible thing I could do would be obtain a new floor. Forget the dearth of running water, the constant insect and gecko invasion (who am I kidding, the geckos are the best thing ever), the aggressive ten-inch tuko lizard who lives in my bedroom and hunts in my kitchen (I love her the most), or the fact that I live next to a rooster farm full of birds who think 3am is as good a time as any to wake the world. No, I was convinced that it was my rough, raw, uneven and un-cleanable concrete floor was the thing keeping my home from being guest-friendly. I got this idea that tile was the answer.
Now, I had no idea where to get any, how much it would cost, or how I would get the required amount home with me from the city by bus. Nevertheless, I was sure it had to happen. Even if I had to put it all in myself, using crushed up crackers and mashed roaches as mortar. Upon further contemplation, and remembering where I live and what my monthly allowance is, my dream dwindled to something more like Maybe I can get a big roll of linoleum and just do the bedroom. Then, unbelievably, I came home from work one day to find several boxes of pure white flooring tiles on my front porch. What the what? I had told a couple people about my tile dreams, neither of whom have anything to do with the complex where I live. It was straight up coincidence. Despite construction materials for my neighbors having been stored on my porch before, I dared to dream that somehow, these were for me. The dream faded a bit when the boxes started disappearing, but I figured that if I found out whose they were and where that person had got them, I could at least really start looking into my own flooring project.
A couple weeks after the tile first showed up, I ran into my landlord behind the house. Behind her, past some chickens and an old bed frame, I could see a new white floor gleaming through her front door. "My new floor!" she said. "Very nice," I said covetously, and before I could get another word out, "We will do yours next, maybe this week!" No. Way. It's been a week and a half since they started. My living room and dining area are finished, my bedroom underway.
Shake up number three came just before noon yesterday, February 7th. This was the literal kind, as literal as it gets. The 6.8 magnitude earthquake killed at least 15 people on Negros, and left several homes buried under the aftermath of a landslide. In yet another coincidence, I had just the day before been reading up on earthquake preparedness, and the notion that anyone in an old or unstable building ought to get out as quickly as possible was fresh in my mind. Well, that's every building here, I had thought, and remembered the almost graceful, if unnerving, way the brand new Hotel Indigo tower had slid back and forth along its tracks in a perfect display of earthquake-ready engineering back in San Diego the summer before PC. From the 11th floor, Leah and I watched East Village undulate below our floor-to-ceiling-windows. That had been my only earthquake, and I was in quite possibly the safest place one could be other than an open field.
So yesterday, when my vision started pulsing and desk rattling, I was up and out the door before my mind had formed a single cohesive thought. Well, that's not entirely true. The image of my camera did pop into my mind, but I didn't have time to find it. I waited out the rest of the quake barefoot in the front yard, checking overhead for power lines and listening to human shouts and inhuman creaks from all around. It seemed to last a long time, and I gripped the grass with my toes and imagined the great plates vibrating themselves into a more comfortable position far below. When it was over, I walked back into the house and away from the howls, bellows, and calls of countless animals flooding the air. I straightened up, then packed a little emergency bag. Just in case.
After all that, I have a confession to make. The entire reason I sat down to write a post tonight was because of another shake-up entirely. It was because I revamped my Nalgene, and got so excited with its new look that I felt like I had to share. Now, is it really important for you to know that I stripped all the old duct tape off my trusty bottle and finally replaced its well worn blue lid with the spare black one I packed a year and a half ago? Probably not. But it was a big deal to me. I did contemplate writing a whole post about it. But that's because it's exactly the kind of thing I get excited about these days. And in these parts, it's noteworthy. I guarantee you the next time I see Abby or Jessica or Kate or Todd, they'll say "What happened to your duct tape? And is a new lid?" And I will launch into the whole story about how I found an article online about non edible uses for coconut oil, one of which was removing adhesives, and it got me thinking about how the reserve of duct tape I usually keep wound about my Nalgene had become a useless lump of fiber and goo. How as long as I was getting rid of the tape, I might as well go all the way and switch out the old lid too! I did a little dance when I had finished. I did a little Nalgene dance on my white tile floor.
Shake-ups matter here. The big ones, it's easy to see why. The little ones, they're a bit more of a mystery.
There was a shake up in my job description for a few days when I temporarily took on the role of dental assistant during Faces of Tomorrow's second annual surgical mission to Bohol last month. Instead of the usual meetings with fisherfolk and compulsive list-making my job usually entails, I spent a few days running an Autoclave, acting as translator, snipping sutures, and suctioning blood out of people's mouths for the Dr. Daniel as he did extraction after extraction.
Another shake up came, this time in my living situation, when I used my MIND to get some serious home improvements under way. Really. Okay not really, but I do almost want to take credit for this. I have several visitors passing through this spring (yay!) and I've been a little paranoid about how to house them in my concrete hovel/unintentional critter menagerie. For some reason, I got it into my head that the best possible thing I could do would be obtain a new floor. Forget the dearth of running water, the constant insect and gecko invasion (who am I kidding, the geckos are the best thing ever), the aggressive ten-inch tuko lizard who lives in my bedroom and hunts in my kitchen (I love her the most), or the fact that I live next to a rooster farm full of birds who think 3am is as good a time as any to wake the world. No, I was convinced that it was my rough, raw, uneven and un-cleanable concrete floor was the thing keeping my home from being guest-friendly. I got this idea that tile was the answer.
Now, I had no idea where to get any, how much it would cost, or how I would get the required amount home with me from the city by bus. Nevertheless, I was sure it had to happen. Even if I had to put it all in myself, using crushed up crackers and mashed roaches as mortar. Upon further contemplation, and remembering where I live and what my monthly allowance is, my dream dwindled to something more like Maybe I can get a big roll of linoleum and just do the bedroom. Then, unbelievably, I came home from work one day to find several boxes of pure white flooring tiles on my front porch. What the what? I had told a couple people about my tile dreams, neither of whom have anything to do with the complex where I live. It was straight up coincidence. Despite construction materials for my neighbors having been stored on my porch before, I dared to dream that somehow, these were for me. The dream faded a bit when the boxes started disappearing, but I figured that if I found out whose they were and where that person had got them, I could at least really start looking into my own flooring project.
A couple weeks after the tile first showed up, I ran into my landlord behind the house. Behind her, past some chickens and an old bed frame, I could see a new white floor gleaming through her front door. "My new floor!" she said. "Very nice," I said covetously, and before I could get another word out, "We will do yours next, maybe this week!" No. Way. It's been a week and a half since they started. My living room and dining area are finished, my bedroom underway.
Shake up number three came just before noon yesterday, February 7th. This was the literal kind, as literal as it gets. The 6.8 magnitude earthquake killed at least 15 people on Negros, and left several homes buried under the aftermath of a landslide. In yet another coincidence, I had just the day before been reading up on earthquake preparedness, and the notion that anyone in an old or unstable building ought to get out as quickly as possible was fresh in my mind. Well, that's every building here, I had thought, and remembered the almost graceful, if unnerving, way the brand new Hotel Indigo tower had slid back and forth along its tracks in a perfect display of earthquake-ready engineering back in San Diego the summer before PC. From the 11th floor, Leah and I watched East Village undulate below our floor-to-ceiling-windows. That had been my only earthquake, and I was in quite possibly the safest place one could be other than an open field.
So yesterday, when my vision started pulsing and desk rattling, I was up and out the door before my mind had formed a single cohesive thought. Well, that's not entirely true. The image of my camera did pop into my mind, but I didn't have time to find it. I waited out the rest of the quake barefoot in the front yard, checking overhead for power lines and listening to human shouts and inhuman creaks from all around. It seemed to last a long time, and I gripped the grass with my toes and imagined the great plates vibrating themselves into a more comfortable position far below. When it was over, I walked back into the house and away from the howls, bellows, and calls of countless animals flooding the air. I straightened up, then packed a little emergency bag. Just in case.
After all that, I have a confession to make. The entire reason I sat down to write a post tonight was because of another shake-up entirely. It was because I revamped my Nalgene, and got so excited with its new look that I felt like I had to share. Now, is it really important for you to know that I stripped all the old duct tape off my trusty bottle and finally replaced its well worn blue lid with the spare black one I packed a year and a half ago? Probably not. But it was a big deal to me. I did contemplate writing a whole post about it. But that's because it's exactly the kind of thing I get excited about these days. And in these parts, it's noteworthy. I guarantee you the next time I see Abby or Jessica or Kate or Todd, they'll say "What happened to your duct tape? And is a new lid?" And I will launch into the whole story about how I found an article online about non edible uses for coconut oil, one of which was removing adhesives, and it got me thinking about how the reserve of duct tape I usually keep wound about my Nalgene had become a useless lump of fiber and goo. How as long as I was getting rid of the tape, I might as well go all the way and switch out the old lid too! I did a little dance when I had finished. I did a little Nalgene dance on my white tile floor.
Shake-ups matter here. The big ones, it's easy to see why. The little ones, they're a bit more of a mystery.
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| Assisting Dr. Daniel |
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| I have no earthquake photos. Please accept this picture of me holding a pineapple instead. |
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| ...and this picture of me and Abby hanging out (har har) in her house. |
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| Here I am at Abby's school, giving a presentation on terrestrial and marine biomes, the three main Philippine coastal environments, and how to be "Ocean Friendly". Please note the Nalgene, pre-op. Ironically, the slide says "Use a Reusable Water Bottle" |
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| Post-op Nalgene. Fancy! Also, is that a new white tile floor I see down in the right-hand corner?? Oh my! That bamboo thing is my bed - currently in the living room. |
