Touring the Skyline

I know this has been long overdue but I want to share it anyway. Despite of all the stuffs I've been doing lately, it's still always a struggle for me to keep abreast.

Anyway, being a traveller is tough, but fun! On the other end of it, it's tiresome (for the packing, unpacking and re-packing....) I mean it...it's really badly tough...that's to include laundry and ironing...eeerrrr!! I always feel I would faint.

Back to the story, we got the chance to tour Skyline Caverns while we had our trip to our exact destination, Alexandria in Virginia. Going to skyline is at least 2 hours drive, so we had to save at least a day to do that to have more time.

It was my first time touring a cave, and it was cool down there.

Scary!

What True marriage Is

This is actually an email attachment sent to me by a friend. It is called "Article of Love" written by Jim Paredes of Apo Hiking Society, a famous Filipino musical band in the Philippines. I am not an avid fan of Apo, but I love mostly of their songs. Anyway, back to the topic...

Just want to share Jim's article titled "Article of Love" which talks about the essentiality and what true marriage is. It's a nice article, and a very good stuff for married couples as well. For those who are still single and planning to settle down, it is a very good foundation ahead of you.

Subject: ARTICLE OF LOVE by JIM PAREDES of APO HIKING SOCIETY

Change in Eternally Beautiful Humming in my UNIVERSE By Jim Paredes
The Philippine STAR 11/05/2006


Exactly 29 years ago on Oct. 29, Lydia and I walked down the aisle. She was 20 and I was 25, both of us wide-eyed but so sure of ourselves and our decision to stay together forever as we plunged into matrimony. We were sure, the way young people tend to be certain, that it was going to be an adventure. But little did we know that it was going to be a big one, probably the biggest one we'd ever know. Getting married is like signing a blank check. You have no idea how much it will cost you. You are committing an unquantifiable amount of material and emotional capital time, money, patience, sacrifice, and an infinite number of things you have not even begun to imagine that you must deal with eventually.

Many of them are real minefields as Lydia and I, like all couples, soon discovered. There are the in-laws, kids, expenses, the balance between career and family life, personal habits, sex, jealousy, etc. There is also the process of arriving at a "negotiated settlement" on how to deal with things like getting along with each other's friends, child rearing, spending habits, religion, hobbies, and how much "independence" the partners should be allowed. The institution of marriage, as we inherited it, was very complicated.

One of the things I found out much later in our married life is that there is a difference between a love affair and a marriage. A love affair has a dynamic that is different from a marital bond. Generally, love affairs are not meant to last. They are meant to have a beginning and an end. Why? Because they are about two separate people bonded by romantic, oceanic feelings of what seems like love. They live for the intense feeling, riding it as far as it will go and split up when the thrill is gone.

Marriage, on the other hand, is the experience of life by two people as a couple. Many times, new couples discover that they are not an easy fit, as Lydia and I discovered early on. That's why in a marital relationship one must necessarily give up big parts of himself/herself to the union to get a payback. While one may still want some privacy and independence, one cannot have them without a large dose of a shared life. From the start until the end, marriage is about two people experiencing one and the same lifetime.

It starts with romance and the sexual thrill of being with each other, but you can only count on those for so long. Anyone married for more than 10 years can attest that there are times when the attraction which seemed so strong when you first laid eyes on each other as single people can be non-existent for long periods. Viewed from the perspective of a love affair, that is certainly not a good thing. One may feel like the journey has reached a stretch of uninteresting flatlands. The joyride is over.

But from the perspective of a long marriage, this is simply a hiatus of sorts, or may even be the first signs of a qualitative the way one loves. It can be disconcerting at first but if you stick around long enough, the picture starts to get clearer. While gone may be (from time to time) the breathtaking highs and exhilarating moments, something else may be happening. Author M. Scott Peck put it so well when he wrote that "the death of romantic love can be the start of true love."

In our early years, Lydia and I felt that being married meant we had to do something dramatic all the time to keep it going. But as we got older, the doing often gave way to just being. Where before, love had to be "proven" by the sparkling diamond on her finger, or the great trip abroad, or the special dinner with wine in some plush place, love in our 29-year marriage feels no compulsion to prove itself as dramatically. Having long walks, conversations after dinner, holding hands during long drives, snuggling in bed or just simply being together sometimes without even talking, have often taken the place of all that. While sex can still be as great as ever, the truth is, as an older couple, we have discovered other ways to remain interested in each other. There is not only comfort but magic in the "ordinary," as one realizes that love can be expressed in simply caring or supporting each other's steps towards personal and spiritual growth.

One of the big recent highlights of our journey as life partners was Lydia 's big cancer scare three years ago. We felt so helpless as we tried to deal with the fear of losing each other. But we took it on as a couple. As far as we were concerned, we both had cancer. Those were days of great emotional upheaval. Ironically, they were also moments of calm and assurance. Even as we cried about it, we also learned that we loved each other enough to willingly suffer together because, paradoxically, by doing so, we eased each other's pain. This may sound flippant, if not cruel, but looking back, I can say that if I could only guarantee survival, I would
recommend cancer to everyone because of what it has done for Lydia and me. It has been such a rare opportunity to meet and accept unconditionally the hard-to-take faces of love that we often run away from. Yet when we bit the bullet, we opened ourselves to greater depth and began to see the face of the Divine in the other human being we had chosen to love. Only then did we realize that all the suffering made sense.

In the end, the very suffering we undergo turns into something eternally beautiful.

Jim Paredes is a member of the Filipino band
Apo Hiking Society

My Multi-media Accessories & Gadgets

Since I have been into lots of blogs and website makings, it's just good to know that the gadgets and stuffs I have been using have been ever so reliable to me...a good help, from the desktop I use at home, to my laptop, up to my tiniest device I personally use, so that wherever I go, the web is still just around the corner. Just trying to see these stuffs becoming so popular worldwide make me analyze how the world is fastly moving to a much more high tech world, through the use of internet. They are good and friendly as long as they are being used in the right way. Few years ago, I even had no idea about how to operate and handle those multi-media stuffs not until I began entering the worldwide web. I have analyzed you don't have to go too much formal schooling to learn these techniques, huh?

Meantime, I have added more multi-media assistants, and this time I am in the world of music making..geesh! it's not a music composer but a music converter, more on music compressions and other stuffs, etc.

I just bought an MP3 music maker which is really  good. Price is good and you can get it for only $30. Not really bad, because I can still use this to add MP3 music on my MP3 player as well.

This comes in a CD which is downloadable on your PC. Once you have it, you can convert all your audio CD's into MP3 songs and save it on your MP3 players or ipods or even on your cell phones (as long as it can play music) if you want.

...and here's my sony MP3/MP4 player which I recently bought in the Philippines. It can handle thousands of MP3 songs, and can also handle videos. You can save at least 2 movies here as long as you have the big memory card in it. (Cute no?) It was really a good idea carrying it with me because I am now having the songs that I like saved in it in an MP3 format which I saved from my audio CD's. Actually, the charger works in the Philippines, but not here since we have a different electric outlets standarized only for US. So, we got to run to a radio shack store closeby to get a US standard charger. It's good it worked!

Here's my cell phone which is also ipod convertible and a mini pc featured one. It si bulky, and heavy, but when it comes to getting to the internet.."walang katulad"!!! I decided not to do that right now because cingular seems to charge me a bit expensive rate. I'm also downloading lots of MP3 songs in it. Plus, it has a 2gigabyte memory card for more photo handling capacity.

Here's my bluetooth which is already with me wayback when I was still in the Philippines. It's now 3 years old and still working at its best. I am recommending this one for those who love to download photos or music from their cellphones to their pc's. Why? ...because you don't need any wirings to attach to when downloading. As long as your pc and cell phone is bluetooth enabled, you can send your photos within 10 meters range from any bluetooth enabled PC. Just don't forget to attach that little thing on any pc USB port, and ...presto!!! you're on thego!

And these are my two thumb drives, which I use to save ALL my music and ALL photos. The black one is 4 gig, while the other is 2 gig. They are convenient to be carried anywhere, and always of course being attached to any USB pc ports. One good feature they have is they are safely carried in your purse or pockets, without taking your CD's with you. Convenient, right?

And last but not the least, this is the memory card adapter of my cell phone. The memory card is placed inside the adapter then attached to any pc compatible with it. Another option to use just in case my bluetooth is not around, or I am downloading bunch of photos in my pc or sites.

My husband told me one time, "I won't wonder if you buy the radio shack store one time and put it inside the house"! I replied:..."don't you like it??? LOL!

We ended up both grinning...

Virus Outbreak!

Most tropical countries in Asia including the Philippines are always a good thriving spots for mosquitoes, a common carrier of dengue virus. It usually affects children, the virus doesn't choose whom to kill. Also known as h-fever (hemorrhagic fever), it can also be found in drinking water and food.
Witness this news, the outbreak is in Cambodia:

I Need A Good Sweep!

I seldom get into extensive cleaning into my office room, but suddenly, it just surprised me for being so perky doing a BIG cleaning into it last week.

I got a li'l bit crazy on how I could sweep the floor to scoop all the dirt under my table. Well, I got to use 3 kinds of brooms to sweep the dirt and dust, but either any of them did work well. It was not either a good idea using the vacuum cleaner since it's a wooden floor:


I bought this one in Missouri, thinking it would be a good dust sweeper. It is as hard as a nylon cord and makes a lot of noise when you sweep it over. It can get some lints and just sticks on it, but I still have to remove the lint on it...hassle and time consuming. See that floor? That's my office room floor!

I thought this one was probably better. But it's almost the same as the first one. Besides, this is exclusively for my kitchen.

I ran down into the garage and get this broom as it might help me with a good grip....I ended up hitting my forehead at the tip of its handle. (a witch broom..that is!) I really don't enjoy this job, as much as I ended up frowning, and still dust was everywhere in the room.





Then, I thought of thinking of where to get a conventional broom (soft broom) or "walis tambo" as being popularly called in Tagalog, and is very popular in every household in the Philippines...hhhmmm, actually, I miss using this too! It's been awhile I haven't got hold of my "walis tambo" that I use at home in the Philippines.







This is the broom called "walis tambo" proudly made in the Philippines. Many of these are being made in Baguio City and its handle has actually the name Baguio City. Its bristles are really soft and long, and can scoop all the dirt and dust in a flat floor. A Philippine household seems not to be completely clean without this! So, it's always a MUST for every household. Pretty cool! because vacuums are not that commonly used, not unless your floor is fully carpeted.

Now, I felt better! Whew!

Some Thoughts About Love

Love is when you hold her in your arms and nothing else matters, not your faults, not her faults, what people say, or what people think. When you are with her, you feel young and alive again, and you know that together there is nothing that can stop you.

Love is when you go through every minute of every day with her name in your heart and her face on your lips.

Love is when you can close your eyes and still feel her arms around you and taste the sweet taste of her lips hours after she has gone.

Love is willing to sacrifice and give everything to your partner. Loving the person unconditionally, embracing and accepting the weaknesses of your partner.

Love can make you a better person (inside and out).

Love can inspire you in so many ways in life.

When you CARE for that special someone
When you RESPECT her
When you ACCEPT her for what she is and not for what you want her to be
When you FORGIVE her for her shortcomings
When you have TRUST in her

----that is LOVE.
Love is when two people become one. One in pain. One in joy. One in illness. One in hardship. A mysterious union where everything is shared. Shared thoughts. Shared feeling. Shared dreams. Shared bodies. To be separated is to be cut in two.

More about Love:

1. True love doesn't have a happy ending.
2. True love doesn't have an ending.
3. To love is to receive a glimpse from heaven.
4. Love can hope where reason would despair.
5. Love is like a tranquil breeze that sweeps over your soul making you whole.
6. To love is to place happiness in the heart of another.
7. Love is like flower that blooms with love and care.
8. Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is eesential to your own.
9. Love is born with pleasure of looking at each other, it is fed with the necessity of seeing each other, it is concluded with the impossibility of separation.
10. Love is like a fabric, which never fades, no matter how often it is washed in the waters of adversity and grief.
11. Love is like a candle.Lighting another with our own never diminishes the light we have; it only helps us to see more clearly.
12. Love is when you look into someone's eyes and suddenly you go all the way inside their soul and you both know it.
13. Love is seeing a new side of a person you thought you knew and it is renewal.
14. Love is always an open arms. If you close your arms about love, you will find that you are left holding only your self.
15. Love doesn't make the world go round. It's what makes the ride worthwhile.
16. Love is like a butterfly. It goes where it pleases and it pleases where it goes.
17. Love is NOT blind and it's only the thing that let us see each other with accuracy.
18. Love is not a clock. You simply cannot take it apart just to see what makes it tick, and even if you could, you probably could never get it back together again.
19. Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies on blindness and errors and betrayals.
20. Love is the irresistible desire to be desired irresistibly.

Scary Fun??

I and my husband always travel almost every month. We were able to visit 6 flags like twice so far when we were in Atlanta. It was fun seeing high rides all around, but I don't understand why no matter how I fight my fear of heights by trying to go and try some "high" rides, I ended up backing up from the loong lines. Gosh! my husband feels the same.
Well, good thing is we didn't spoil our day in 6 flags the whole day. It doesn't necesarily mean you have to be on that Hell-a-vator to have a good fun!
I guess, our fear of heights is always a blessing in disguise. Thank God, we just had more than hundred?, million times? made possible away from loosing both our feet!

A Battle Cry Against Dog Meat Trade!

Thanks to Rachel for a great influence about this so long struggle of battle against dog meat trade...the main enemy of the man's best friend, the dogs.

I am a dog lover. I don't know why dogs always warm my heart everytime I see them. Ever since I was small, I had that trait, and I remembered my mother telling me: "You're probably be a good vet someday."

Dog meat trade has been so popular and widely practiced in the Philippines, particularly on the northern part. I was a witness to that, I grew up in one of the northern provinces. Those were the days when I was still small and innocent, being always hurt seeing dogs slaughtered and eaten! Yes...and I was forced to eat dog meat, at a very young age too! What can a small and a frail child do to stop it but to utter a small voice of plea saying "please don't", and would ignore and give her a big laugh. I still see those adult males doing it and it was horrible!

I am giving you a brief summary courtesy of care2petitionsite.

A Brief History of the Dog Meat Trade
Traditionally, dogs were sacrificed and their meat eaten when a family was faced with bad luck, or when a death was witnessed. It was the belief that a dog's spirit protected and guarded the spirits of the living family. However, this was an infrequent practice. Greed and corruption has evolved the ritual into a massacre of over 500,000 dogs a year in the Philippines as a commercial industry. Although most Filipinos detest the practice and do not eat dog meat, it is still concentrated in areas in and around Baguio City and the Cordilleras Region.

What is the current law?
The Philippines' Animal Welfare Act of 1998 (Section 8 of the Republic Act No. 8485) prohibits the torture of all animals with the exception of livestock. In addition, it does provide an exception to killing for religious purposes. Unfortunately, the Act fails for three reasons: (1) there is no direct prohibition against the commercial dog meat trade; (2) the penalties are minimal; and (3) there is a lack of enforcement due to corruption and bribery of police officers.

The cost of a trader to keep his business of slaughtering dogs for profit:
Traders plead guilty and pay a fine of not less than One thousand pesos (P1,000 = $20.35) nor more that Five thousand pesos (P5,000 =$100.00).
It pays for Traders to pay a penalty because it's actually less than bribing a police officer.
It is a $3.8 million dollar industry and the payment of a penalty is small cost of doing business.

What needs to change?

Because this barbaric commercial industry provides a steady flow of income not only to the traders but to officials and police officers, the dog meat trade remains unscathed from the Welfare Act. However, House Bill 2991 is currently pending in the Committee on Revision of Laws that provides a stiffer penalty to dog meat traders. Introduced by Representative Francis Escudero, the creation of the bill was based on the need to upgrade an Act that, as noble as the objectives of the law are, the traders remain elusive because the penalty is unrealistic. The penalty must be upgraded.

PLS HELP US SAVE THESE DOGS' LIVES!

What can you do?

OUR GOAL is to obtain OVER 50,000 signatures by June 30, 2007. The Bill is expected to be addressed by Congress in July 2007. It is obvious that the only way we can ensure that dogs in the Philippines are protected is to place the Philippines government under the international spotlight.

References:

Status of House Bill 2991: http://www.congress.gov.ph/bis/qry_show.phpAnimal Welfare Act: http://www.dogmeattrade.com/library_articles/philippine_act.html

We are circulating a petition link just to make it to its goal of 50,ooo petitioners til July 2007. We need your signatures just to make its way to the Philippine Congress and the House of Representatives before July 2007. Pls. sign your petition HERE.

It would be a great help for us, more importantly for the dogs.

We are saying our big thank you's for each petition. It means your petition will save one dog too!

May our prayers be granted, and God be with us always.

Blogging All The Way!

Lately, I had been spending a lot of time working on my blogs. I've learned to analyze managing several of them is not a joke, and perhaps 1 or 2 blogs are enough. From these blogs, only 1 so far is considered functioning actively. No big fuss about it since I don't update the others.

Currently, I got so interested with these paid blogging sites, and I saved some of them in my favorites after joining. I love blogging, and to think of it that I joined several paid blogging sites, I thought this must be a good way of earning a lot of money by just blogging. I was wrong! It's not that easy. While I tried to register at least 3 - 5 blogs in many of the paid blogging sites, I discovered that in order to become a legitimate member of the sites, your blogs should be active, mostly they would require 90-days old blogs with at least 2 - 3x posts a month, etc. Well, I ended up submitting 1 blog which happened to be the only one active and functioning according to page ranks, and engine searches. All the rest are unsearchable and doesn't have any PR (page rank) and no or low traffic.

I am still starting wayback below, but I don't mind about it. As I go along continously surfing about these stuffs, I am continually picking up vital informations on what to do and what to improve when it comes to blogging and managing blogs. Next would be page rankings, search engines, traffics, etc...aaahhhh, I still get bad headaches analyzing those! I still am a newbie on these, but I am hoping I can catch up with the latest craze about the ever getting popular world of paid blogging techniques!

I am blogging all the way starting today!

The News Room

My Technorati

Technorati Profile

Do you think Paris Hilton Will Learn Her lesson?

I wonder if Paris will learn her lesson after what has happened to her. She should. Being a well known personality, wealthy and rich, she should set a good example for the youth. Now she must analyze, that law is law, no matter who she is. She had been given good chances, she abused it, so she should face the consequences.

Now who says jail is only for the poor?

A new business search engine

I have tried this masterseek new kind of business engine that has been around on many of the high ranking web search engines, and it seems it has good quality features, searching wise.

Whether you are an individual seeking an employment, a businessman, an entreprenuer, who needs the world wide web to search your stuffs try masterseek.

I have registered a new domain recently, and it was such a good start testing it how it works. When I tried I just thought I got one good option to use aside from the common search engines I use.

Good thing about this site is, it is not only confined to business or job searches. You can also search stuffs you used to do on your own search engines that you use, like searching churches or school close by you when you're in a new place...things like that.

You might want to try it, and enjoy searching!

Bloggerwave Mania!

Now I must admit, I am really a blogger mania. I love blogging and enjoy doing it, plus it is just fun...and i mean it's a clean fun!

Two days ago, my attention got caught about this site called Bloggerwave.

I went further into it and read all about how it works, features, FAQ's etc...and I got stuck by it! And in no doubt, I signed up. There's no harm in trying. The opportunities are rarely a chance worth trying, and remember sign up is free. Since they are needing bloggers, I thought of why not joining, afterall, it's one of the things I like doing, and not only for fun as much as I love what I do, but also I would have the opportunity to earn.

Come to think of it....I know there are so many job online offers out there, and most of them are scams. There's no need to name drop, but most of us are aware, if you love to surf the net.

Blogging is fun, and bloggerwave is much more fun to be with! Well, I can't share you much about the earning part yet. I am still 2 days old with the site, but with the testimonies, sample blogs that I saw, I might as well count myslef in.

You might want to visit and give it a try if you want. You don't have to pay anything...they PAY you!

VENTURE ALLIANCE PARTNERS is growing!

Venture Alliance Partners has been getting a lot of great hits of popularity these days...and is growing!
This company has proven its good performance particularly for entrepreneurs and investors. Investors can have that excellent opportunity to gain large capital profits on their investments and entrepreneurs can have the potential to generate wealth for their company.
For further information on their profile, feel free to visit VENPAR.

Praying Is A Must!

Is it just amazing looking at them? Just imagine if all animals are being trained to look up above...and whisper a prayer. That must be great right?

Animals are being put up under the care of human beings because they have limited analytical ability, as they say...on the other side of it, they easily learn what you teach them. Depends on who they are with.

Dogs are easily trained and sociable. Perhaps, being sociable is one good trait they have.

Keep it up doggie!!

Blogging All The Way!

It's been amazing how blogging mania has been so much in demand on the world wide web nowadays. I was hooked unto it, as much as I really love writing my ideas like personal diaries that I used to do wayback in the 80's.

Since the computer age had flourished all over the world, writing with the pen on papers are becoming obsolete, and so...the blogging was born!

Well, I guess, I just have to blog whatever comes up on my mind, as I go along in this.

Have a nice weekend.