Bomb Blast

Another bomb. Lives lost. Many injured.

I used to really love Cotabato City, it was a place I called home. WAS. Now, I can't even think straight if I'm within the city, be it a quick business trip or even if we are just driving through, there's always a feeling of unease and a sense of danger; a little voice inside my head always whispers a litany of warnings - hold onto your bag, don't let go of your kids' hands, don't be so comfortable in crowded places - the list is endless.

The fear started about 6 years ago. I was still in Cebu then, working. My beloved sister was in a PUV going to the city center to have her shoe fixed when she was shot at point-blank range, all because of a cell phone. My sister was rushed to the hospital and spent hours in the operating room fighting for her life. She is alive.

Another horrifying incident happened moths later, and this time, it happened to my brother. He was at the city center, picking up photos he had had developed, when all of a sudden, a group of boys smashed his head with a rock. My brother ran for cover, so did his two friends, but not without the assailants coming after them.

And now, years after those incidents, it's as if all that we can hear from the news about Cotabato City are deaths, hold-ups, kidnappings, and yes, bombings. What is happening, Cotabato City? Doesn't anybody value life anymore?

rainy days.. :)

I love rainy days. I love the smell of the sweet, crisp, fresh wet grass. They smell so... clean. Like the world has been cleansed - the cool rain washing away the dirt, pain, disappointments, lies, problems and evils of the world, leaving only hope and happiness in its wake.

It was this kind of day today. I spend my day outside, feeling the cool breeze, listening and watching the rain as it kissed the grass on my front yard.

Clean slates - this was my thoughts when as I was watching my baby girl play in the rain, loving the way the rain caressed her soft skin, squealing in delight to show her happiness. I was then that I remember I have a blog - two, in fact. This one, and http://ladycalliope.wordpress.com/. I scanned the posts I had on the wordpress blog, and found that I had nothing but headaches, hurts and hatred. Almost all of the posts were about something that I could definitely live without. So, here I am, coming back to my first home.

I contemplated on making yet another blog, to start anew. To have a clean, fresh start. But I figured, all of my past posts were/are a part of me. And they are a reminder of how much I have grown, changed and learned.

So, instead of creating a new blog, I would keep this one, and start making new stories, instead. :)

thank you, God, for blessing us with yet another long weekend!! yay!!

i still have lots and lots of things to do - office stuff - but i'm super duper happy that i'll be doing it here at home... :) i seriously pray that time will come that i'll be able to bring the office home... haha!! i mean, i love office work but i just don't get why i have to be physically present at the office when i can do everything i have to do at home. i hope i make sense to you. haha!!

anyway, i guess, it all comes down to the people you work with - not the work itself.

and just so you know, i am well aware that my previous entry was also something about work... so, yes. there is something fishy going on. :)

as i was saying, it all comes down to the people, not the job. you may already have your dream job, but if the people around you are pulling (or pushing, whatever) you down, that dream job may as well be a job from hell. say, you're like me who, just landed a great job, but later found out that the environment is "unfriendly", wouldn't you want out?

or what if you just accepted a job offer because it was the only offer given? you dreaded the thought of the job, but when you met your colleagues, you fell in love. would that be enough for you to stay?

i used believe that i work better when alone. i thought that i was not a team-player, and maybe it's true, because when i was a call center agent, i worked for myself. i know that in call centers, we are placed in teams, and we must work hard for our team... but in the end of the day, you always do good for you, if your team benefits, then good. but it all starts with you.

with that kind of thinking, i was sure that office work would be a breeze. you wouldn't be in a team if all you had to do was paperworks, right? right. but after a while, i get so bored very often... i find myself doing nothing. and then, i caught myself waiting - waiting for my officemate to give me purpose, to give me something to do... it was then that i doubted myself... maybe i was wrong... maybe i do not work better alone at all... maybe i really needed someone to get me going. but, no. i realized that that wasn't the problem, the problem was, i did not know what to do. i did not know my purpose was (more like, is)for that office. because unlike call centers, the government apparently just throws people into the sea of officework, in the hopes that they will learn to swim amidst the pile of paperworks and discover how to keep their head up to keep from drowning.

being thrown into the sea isn't such a bad idea if you have a lot of officemates who would offer to share their lifejackets with you, or offer to let you board their yacht of knowledge. but not so easy in a school finance office, where the only other employee, is the veteran bookkeeper who would let you put your arm over her boat, but would not let you board all the way. so you end up doing what you are told, when you are told to do so. that would actually translate to a lot of idle time spent at the office at one time, and having to do overtime at another time, which means you spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling of your office when you could have played with you babies at home, and worse, you have to spend more time at the office because of the overtime needed... do i make sense?

what i just actually want, is for me to know what my duties are. what do i have to do? what do i have to prepare? what is my function?? what is your favorite color? haha!!

this isn't the end, there will be another job-related post tomorrow (or the next day)... ttfn! :D

what am i doing here?

i love holidays! :)

and by that, i mean i love weekdays that our government declares as days that we actually don't have to show up for work! haha!!

hamm.. i long for the day when i wake up in the morning and finding myself excited to go to work.. i wonder if that day would ever come... i mean, it's not that i am not thankful for the job that i have, because i am. i surely, 100%, totally am.

in fact, i love working. i love going somewhere (the office?) and doing something, that in the end of the day, i would get a feeling that i have accomplished something. i love feeling that i have been able to be of help to someone. i actually don't mind being at the office (physically) for a whole day, i don't even mind staying behind and logging in some overtime, if that meant i will be spending my time working. no, i don't mind working. but i have to know that i am being effectively and efficiently spending my hours at work. i don't want to be going to the office at 8:00am just to sit there and busy myself rearranging the paperworks on my table to the nth time. I want to go to the office with a purpose.

i know you could be thinking, "well, of course you have to do something, that's your job!"

wrong. yes, i have a job. unfortunately for me, i don't know what the job description is. i don't know what my exact duties are. i have been at this particular office for a year now, and still, i am waiting for orders and instructions before i can move. i want to know how things work in this office. i want to be in the middle of the process. working the process. but i cant. why? the only answer that i can give you is, "i don't know what the process is."

you see, i work as a finance personnel at a public high school. and at this public high school, there's only two finance personnel - the bookkeeper, and the disbursing officer, me. during my one year stay, i have only learnt how to make a disbursement voucher and its attachments, how to write a check (which i already knew), how to encode the amount for the payroll, and how to bring the checks to the payees and making sure they are signed.

i am not complaining here (okay, maybe i am). all i want to be is efficient. i don't want to waste my time knowing that i could be doing something useful had i known what to do and how to do it. i have asked for the bookkeeper to teach me some of the things that she do, because truthfully, she always complains that she has too many reports to do, too many deadlines to meet, and yet here i am, doing nothing. but she doesn't teach me... she doesn't want to share the knowledge, or maybe just doesn't want to share the workload.

is there a possibility that our government would let new hires undergo a training or some sort before they are allowed to work?

this may be the reason why so many of our government agencies are so low in productivity - majority of its workforce doesn't even know what the heck they should be doing. so more often than not, they are not functioning for what they're supposed to be for, only following their direct supervisor's order. even our teachers don't know what they're doing! c'mon, 70% of our public school teachers don't even know how to compute their students' grades using the K+12 format!!

hmmm... i don't even know why i'm ranting about that... bottomline is, shouldn't government new hires be given a training on what their supposed-to-be role is in the betterment of our government?

lucky me!

yey!! i finally remembered i have a blog.. lol. truth be told, i always wanted to visit and share my stories everyday, coz if you were me, something's always worth blogging about in your day. :) anyway, i do have many thoughts to share, i just don't have the time (or the energy?) to do it  regularly.. haha!! here's the most recent note i had on facebook... and just because i'm too lazy to type a lengthy chicka for now, i'll repost this here. :)

 all alone in the office, i decided to listen to carly rae's "call me maybe" (and had in on loop, lol). yeah, i guess those pretty girls (i only recognize dyosa anne curtis there, lol) who lip-synched this song had me singing and setting my ring tone to this tune. :))

anyway. white cutting away the office stuff i just had out of the printer, i grew a bit hungry... so i took out my week-long 'baon' - longa (haha!! kato bitaw biskwit nga naay lunga oi..). there i was, munching and cutting away, when thoughts of my dear husband start clouding my head.. (char!)

kidding aside, right before i left my cutting papers and crunchy longa, i felt SUPER DUPER LUCKY to have mcloy as my husband... see, the memories that came to me were the time when we are at our lowest of low (to date). it was when we were sent here in libungan to start working, and as you know, government employees would have to wait (a long time, it seems) before could be compensated for services rendered - and by that, i mean we would have to wait for our appointment to be received by the office we are working at before we could receive any salary. so, if you think about it, it wasn't that bad, in our case, about five to six months of waiting. and truthfully, it would have been okay, we had a "financer" (my mom, lol) at that time, so we just wait for our allowance, and get by each day.

but things were a little more complicated, at that time, i gave birth though C-section, so that alone meant a lot of moola... not to mention the baby's needs - milk, diaper, etc; and of course, mine, too - vitamins, supplements, etc. i have mentioned that we were still not receiving out salary during this time, so we could not afford to have a yaya just yet... and as i just had a C-section, i just can't move around like nothing happened. and my mom has limitations, too. she can't possibly support my 4 siblings and my family (with a newborn at that).

i can't possibly enumerate the things that we've been through... haha!! but i thank the Lord for sending mcloy my way and i that mcloy for accepting my marriage proposal (hahaha!!!). it's not everyday that you would find someone who would get coonut from the tree and opening it (even if he doesn't know how to, but tried anyway), and helping you make bukayo out of it. you wouldn't just come accross someone who would eat your home-cooked bukayo, and have it AS breakfast, luch and dinner because you don't have money to buy rice and ulam... :)) you would as lucky as me if you could marry someone who would pick the banana heart and learn to slice it into little pieces with you (pathetic, i know), and make bola-bola out of it, and is so game to eat the same bola-bola over and over until all the banana hearts in your area has been cut and cooked (by you) already. you would also thank the Lord if come accross someone who would wake up at 3am with you, slice and dice vegetables with you, cook and wrap the vegetables, and fry them to make lumpia with you, and then go to the office and sell the lumpia both of you made just to have money for the next day... :))

i know it seems so shallow and everything, but for someone who isn't accustomed to these things, they are a big deal... and to have someone with you, experiencing the same thing, but not giving up on you - that's priceless. for everything else, there's mastercard. (haha!)

luv u, lab!! :)) 

BBG!!!

What's in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet...

yey!! it's been two months and two weeks since i gave birth to a Bouncin' Baby Girl (hence the title. lol.), and it has been a blast! don't you just love watching a baby sleep? sneeze? smile? hiccup? well, don't you just love everything a baby does? from opening their tiny little eyes to giving you a huge burp after they have finished their milk? :) oohh!! i just love my baby!!

by the way, i wanted to share with you my daughter's name... Calliah Cytheria. :) that's why i borrowed shakespeare's lines.. :) Calliah means "beautiful", although some sites say it "beautiful voice"... i have no complaints there. beautiful and beautiful voice is great. Cytheria is venus' other name... so basically love and beauty. lol.

here's a couple of pics of my beautiful baby girl... :)

for macky

i sit and watch the sky

thinking of the time that has gone by...

i think of you and me

and go to the beginning of our story.

you were just a new face then,

someone who i thought could be my friend.

i never thought that we would be

husband and wife, building a happy family.

funny how life and love works -

if not careful, you'd sure be hurt;

and just when you're about to give up,

fate gives you one last love-cup.

time indeed goes by so fast

but i know that we sure would last,

for everyday i love you more and more

and i still would, even if we'd have children of four.