Knowing about two couples breaking up the past month brought me back to a similar breakup 30 years ago. My own breakup story. I was… Read More »A breakup story a long time ago
Updated: I posted this 7 years ago and thought of bringing it back in the light of Erap’s recent campaign bid for Mayor of Manila.… Read More »The good old Erap Jokes
Updated April 3, 2013– I am reposting this since Alan is running again for senator (Check Senator Alan Cayetano’s profile and platform here). In May 2007, I wanted to write about Alan just before election day but I felt uncomfortable writing about politics in 2007. I only became active in citizen media during the latter part of 2009. My question back then was “is there a way to write about politics without selling your soul?” I found out that it is alright to disclose any affiliations with a politician or a political party.
It is on this note that my affiliation with the Cayetano family started when my husband, Alan’s father Rene Cayetano among other lawyers were partners of a law firm in 1998. The CASElaw firm still exists today but my husband is now just a name partner.
This is the Alan Cayetano I know…
Read More »The Alan Cayetano I know @alanpcayetano
The Holy Week holds a special meaning in my heart as it’s during this time that my precious son talked about eternal life. How would I have known that he was preparing himself for his death?
“When I die, I will be alive again“,
Luijoe (with excitement), a month before he became an angel.
A month or so before Luijoe went to heaven, he asked me questions about angels, death, heaven and graves. I don’t exactly remember when Luijoe started to ask me those things.
This is what I wrote two weeks after Luijoe died.
Read More »My son’s premonition of death during a Holy Week?
Once upon a Christmas season, a mother baked Gingerbread Men cookies to the delight of her three children who eagerly waited for the cookies to… Read More »A Mother’s tale of the Gingerbread Man Cookie Who Ran Away
The lighted Christmas Village caught the attention of my daughter’s friend as he entered our dining room a few Christmas-es ago I can’t remember now… Read More »Baroque Music is Not Your Ordinary Pling pling
Good grief. What am I doing here? If I were seated here, watching this event 12 years ago, I will not be able to recognize… Read More »What rocks my socks at the 2nd IMMAP Open Mic Night: A Fishbowl Evening
Cebu, my hometown how I missed my birthplace, the city where I grew up till I left for Manila at the age of 17 years… Read More »Exploring my Cebu heritage in Parian with QR code scanning
This Halloween post was posted originally on October 26 2006.
It was my dear husband who reminded me to dress up the little girls into witches for Halloween. “Halloween?” I thought Halloween was only done in the Western countries. ” Yes you have to dress them up as witches”. As a little boy in the late sixties, he pranced around the neighborhood begging for candies and yelling “Trick or Treat” . According to him, the Halloween “Trick or Treat” originated in the Philippines in the sixties when the Americans living in the village started the tradition. In the early nineties, Halloween was not yet commercialized. The Trick or Treat was limited to Ayala Land villages, where most American expatriates lived. There were a few masks and simple decors in National Book store but that was it. No costumes. I had to be creative. I designed a witch costume with yellow piping and a dressmaker executed it. A balikbayan sister from San Francisco brought in the hat, the candy corn candies, the fangs gum for props.
We drove all the way to visit the kid’s grandparents in Alabang just for the spooky Halloween experience. As usual, the beaming stage mother dressed up her adorable girls as cute little witches. The Trick or Treat party at the club was fantastic. The kids were dressed in typical Halloween costumes like vampires, ghosts, witches, and devils or even pumpkins.The eerie decors added to the thrilling experience.
The Trick or Treat adventure in this swanky Alabang village is something else. The houses compete with each other on the scariest theme. Most of these houses had tricks. In one house, the kids were terrified of the candle-lit pathway that led to a vampire rocking on the chair. Complete with spine-tingling music as you walk towards the vampire, it even freaked me out. Four year old M scurried as soon as she saw the ghoulish figure. For many years, the girls spent their Halloween with their grandparents in this Alabang village until Luijoe arrived in our lives.
A woman is the full circle. Within her is the power to create, nurture and transform. ~ Diane Mariechild ~ Rica and I go back… Read More »A friend hears the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails