While silver is selling for $10.50, and gold’s selling for $800-$830, this is a prime time to buy precious metals. Dominic assures us that the prices will skyrocket in the next few years. You could get a ten-fold return on an investment in silver. I recommend GoldMoney.com. Check it today. Precious metals are a safe haven and a wise investment.
I couldn’t be happier to hear the cacophony of a dozen dogs angrily barking at each other nearby. Sounds as if I’m in a kennel. People don’t discipline their dogs here; they only feed the noisemakers. If you get e-mail from me at 3 a.m., I’m surfing the internet while dogs bark enough to prohibit sleep.
For months, Dominic and I have heard crawling, scratching and gnawing sounds above our ceiling which suggest that rodents are in the crawl space between our ceiling and the floor of the unoccupied apartment above us. When moving across the ceiling or scratching in place above my desk, they sound like large claws – not bear claws, but not tiny field mouse claws, either. »→
This morning I took Rose* and two of her neighbors to Baguio City to eat lunch in a Jollibee restaurant and ride rental tricycles and a pedal boat in Burnham Park. I have wondered in previous outings if a pedaled boat would be preferable to a rowed boat, so today we went to the concessionaire who had royal blue-and-yellow pedal boats and row boats. I picked an open-top boat. »→
When we arrived in Manila in March, we got 40.25 pesos per dollar over the counter. Since then, the United States dollar has been grossly devalued by the wanton printing of funny money by the Treasury Department. Nonetheless, I have observed weekly in the newspapers an increasingly favorable (for me) dollar-to-peso exchange rate. The past several days we have seen an interbank exchange rate of 49.7 -49.9 pesos per dollar. Today a dollar buys 50 pesos.
My purchasing power has increased, and ten percent of the Philippines’ economy is U.S. dollars sent from Filipino expatriates back to the homeland. These days, the dollars transmitted from foreign lands to relatives back in the Philippines can buy one-fifth more pesos than they could in March! »→
I couldn’t be more happy to hear a drunken man bellowing on the street several meters away while dogs fight 80 meters away in the other direction. Monterrazas Village is so unnecessarily noisy, though it was described as a quiet neighborhood. I plugged noise-canceling, in-canal earphones into my iMac to listen to music. But I could still hear all the caterwauling. (sigh)
I found FreeRice.com, a website committed to ending hunger. Advertising sponsors pay the UN World Food Program for our participation in an online vocabulary game. For each word shown in turn, click on one of the four given possible definitions or synonyms. Every correct answer gains 20 grains of rice for the poor, donated by the sponsors. »→
I walked down to Baguio Gold to see the family and take the girls back uphill so that we could get a jeepney ride to Baguio City. On Thursday, the sisters had expressed in riding tricycles in Burnham Park, so I said that I’d take them today.
Quezon City police stopped Enrique Panlaque in a Mitsubishi L300 cargo van about 10 p.m. on Sunday. In the van were 75 dogs, including 67 sick ones, that Mr. Panlaque intended to sell to butchers for 600 pesos ($12.24) each. His employees had been observed buying unwanted dogs and snatching stray dogs to sell to meat markets although Panlaque has been arrested six times previously in seven years for selling dog meat. Apparently he wasn’t convicted and punished enough to dissuade him from resuming snatching and selling sick dogs to butchers in Northern Luzon. Demand and supply… »→
I didn’t know that the kitchen in Olahbinan Resthouse had a box of Lipton tea bags. I only knew that Masferré and other restaurants don’t serve black & orange pekoe tea. They serve delicious Mountain Tea, which you should savor if you come here. I wanted some caffeine to help me perk up, as there was no chance of dozing in the bright sunshine from the east window of our hotel room while Dominic snored, a hog squealed, traffic roared up and down main street and someone cut lumber with a circular saw beside our hotel.
So while Dominic slept, I asked in the stores along the main street for black tea bags for sale. I didn’t find any until I had gone far down the lane. I had to buy a whole box of 100 tea bags. I wish that I had known that Olahbinan already had an opened box in its kitchen! »→
The young people filling some of the other rooms in Olahbinan woke me at 6:30. I prayed then arose to got to breakfast in Masferré. The Saturday street market was in full swing under a cloudy sky by the time I arrived. But I didn’t peruse the stalls as I did last month; I wanted to break fast and get some caffeine. Outside Masferré the staff had a table holding four pots, and I asked for a bowl of Aroscaldo to take inside for an appetizer while I awaited my Mountain Tea and Spanish omelet (which turned out to contain fish!). The “toast” on the menu was a round sourdough roll sliced into fourths and untoasted. No butter, jam or jelly… »→
Friday morning, at 9:38, a G.L. Lizardo Transportation bus rolled out of the bus station south of Baguio City’s Center Mall. We were headed to Sagada, in Mountain Province. Our tickets cost 236 pesos each. The bus slowly chugged along Magsaysay Road in stop-and-go traffic. Eventually we went a bit faster in La Trinidad. By the time we reached Tomay, we were doing a respectable speed toward our destination and had left the ugly urban squalor behind us. I began to pray the Rosary. Green, hilly scenery including farms unfolded on the left side of the bus. »→
Today Mack walked upstairs to Mail And More in SM City Baguio to retrieve a copy of his birth certificate that was mailed from National Statistics Office. We ate lunch in Vizco’s beside Session Road then walked downhill to a UnionBank branch to open a EON Cyber Account for Mack.
Afterward I paid a PLDT bill then tried to find a parcel sent via registered mail from Quezon City on Monday or Tuesday. PhilPost advised me that it may arrive tomorrow. I’ll be riding a bus toward Sagada tomorrow morning, so I suppose that I’ll see the package on Monday.
I hate PhilPost. I had thought that the U.S. Postal Service in Bay County, Florida was lackadaisical. Philippine Postal Service makes U.S.P.S. in Cedar Grove look like FedEx. I’ve heard that Filipinos prefer courier services to PhilPost. But Mail And More/Air 21 hadn’t wanted to deliver to Mack, and 2Go, a U.P.S. contractor, didn’t want to deliver a parcel to my home!
Well, one small step in the intended direction: one of the two sidewalk vendors in Baguio City whom I had recruited to sell The Jeepney magazine has sold her initial, free allotment and has bought additional copies to sell in evenings after selling men’s, women’s and children’s hosiery in daytime. Our other vendor-partner, Jeffrey, hasn’t been heard from. Perhaps he tired of trying to sell a new, relatively unknown magazine to passersby on Baguio City’s sidewalks. The corner vendors of newspapers and magazines haven’t asked me for additional inventory, and I’ve seen the first three issues awaiting buyers on their newspaper/magazine racks. The only thing they’ve asked me for is another magazine title, something that people are familiar with, such as OK! or T3 or Maxim or Star Studio.
I have been waiting one week for Mack to gather certain things so that we could go to a UnionBank branch office to open an EON account for him. But he’s been sick and then dragging his heels. I haven’t heard from him for a week. I tried several times to get N.S.O. to send another copy of his birth certificate, because I’d paid P315 for one, but N.S.O. was uncooperative. When it did send a copy, Air21 courier service was uncooperative and would not deliver it. I asked numerous times for Air21 to just leave it at Mail And More, an Air21 franchisee in the local mall, for Mack to retrieve. Either Mail And More wouldn’t telephone Mack to advise him to pick-up, or Mack is dragging his heels, as he did in May. »→
I feel as if I’m covered with a layer of fine dust after hiking four-and-a-half hours then riding a jeepney back to Baguio City downtown. I’d really like to take a shower, but while I’m in the big city, I thought that I’d use an Internet café to check my e-mail and my weblog.
Late this morning I took recyclables to the mall (‘trash to cash’), then trudged downhill to Vizco’s for a beverage and a scan of the national newspapers. After slaking my thirst, I began walking without aim toward Burnham Park. I had no destination nor photographic subjects in mind. I just wanted to walk in the glorious autumn weather, and if I tired of walking, I’d take lunch and resume reading a book about spiritual healing. »→
