Year End Inventory of My Missions

My first unforgettable mission happened in 2003 in Davao City, and it was an accomplished mission. At the same time, it gave me the opportunity to celebrate my golden birthday at Pearl Farm Resort. After that, I've considered some common missions part of my own missions too. Here's an inventory of those missions:

1. To spread the message of God to mankind, a message relayed by God through a task I was doing in 2001: This was the main reason why I started blogging, but sad to say, only 76 has read this message from the time I started to blog until yesterday.

2. To disseminate information about health and wellness: I have been accomplishing this as needed during conversations, through this blog, my "Amusing Tips" blog, my Facebook account, and my special child's Facebook account which serves as a journal of her therapies.

3. To be an advocate in bridging the gap between Western Medicine and Alternative Medicine: This seemed impossible at the start but just after a year, this was made possible by a non-stock non-profit organization called Philippine National Association of Acupoint Practitioners or PNAAP, and I believe that the organizers like Dra. Josie Ponciano and Edward Lee will be successful in their missions and visions for the organization. I cannot join them yet at this point in time, but I will be their advocate in any way I can, in continuing this very challenging mission.

4. To encourage people to be always positive and avoid negative thoughts, to start with myself: This is a recent mission that has just started and through Facebook, I have started with myself. It will surely be very hard and challenging to enlighten people who have posted negative comments in Facebook, but maybe through inspiring resources, that can be achieved.

May the year 2013 bring true peace and happiness to everyone!

Calamian Islands of Palawan

I was about to change the Asia Living TV channel my son was watching till he fell asleep but WOW! What was showing was a documentary of very beautiful islands and the seascapes around. To my surprise, it was in the Philippines, at the Calamian Islands of Palawan. If there is one popular place in the Philippines I haven't seen yet, it is Palawan!

I hope I could share whatever I chanced to watch, so I searched YouTube and found videos featuring Calamian Islands, which consist of group of islands and they are Busuanga, Coron, Culion and other smaller islands.

Enjoy viewing these very beautiful islands, seascape, Coron Island lake and the deep waters...

Pearl Farm in Davao and Mission Impossible

I hope those who read my previous post The Special Child’s Rights will be able to read this post because it tells what happened before we adopted Lyca, the special child. I assumed the responsibility to care for the mother and child after birth and also brought them to the relatives especially the grandfather of Lyca who lived in a remote town in Davao, a province in the Philippines. The biological grandmother of Lyca stayed for a while in Manila to see this child so she was already with mother and child and a cousin, when we all went to Davao, my daughter Lauren also with us. My daughter and I stayed in the city of Davao while the grandmother, cousin, mother and child proceeded to the remote town where they lived. Lyca was already one year old at that time, her disabilities already known to many.

Lyca’s mother had wanted me to adopt Lyca since birth, but I was ready for whatever can happen when they reach their home in Davao. I said I’ll stay in Davao City to wait for them to come back, but only for 3 days. Whether they come back to me or not after 3 days, I’ll go back to Manila.

In the meantime, Lauren and I had the opportunity to stay with one of the closest persons to me when I was a child, her name is Ningning and lives in Davao City, and also the opportunity to spend a two days and two nights vacation at the most popular resort in Davao, the Pearl Farm Beach Resort in Samal Islands. At first I thought it was really a Pearl Farm so I expected to see shells with pearls but they said it used to be a pearl farm. It is now a resort that was initially exclusive for tourists until they opened it to the public. It has two white sand beaches and another two or more beaches at a smaller island.

That two days and two nights vacation at Pearl Farm Beach Resort felt like a gift from God. It was the first time I took a vacation leave from the office after 15 years, and it covered the eve and the day of my 50th birthday!

The video posted here was created by Ully Jerus, the President of Makati Toastmasters Club at that time, but it was just a series of photos that were of course shot by me, or Lauren if I was the subject. Ully used the "Mission Impossible" soundtrack which I feel is very appropriate because the only reason why I was in Davao was because of my mission to take back Lyca which seemed impossible at that time. I was also known as "Malui", and that explains the title of the video.

To make my story short, Lyca’s biological mother fought for her child to be brought back to me. Their place is not suitable for Lyca’s condition because it is a remote town two hours away from the nearest hospital by boat and four hours by bus, and there were limited facilities at the hospital. Worst was the grandmother couldn’t accept that Lyca has disabilities so she wouldn’t tell everyone about them. The latest that I’ve heard was the biological grandmother of Lyca has already accepted that the best for this child is to be under my care.

Feng Shui Rule for House Colors

Yesterday and today, I was out of the house the whole day to work at our townhouse unit that was vacated by our last tenant. It is located in Taytay, a town beside Antipolo City, a popular city on the hills in Metro Manila here in the Philippines. Though not as popular as the mountainous Antipolo, Taytay is well known for its wood and clothes industry. At the far background of the second photo are the hills of Antipolo and some parts of Taytay, then the longest road in Taytay better known as "highway", and the Taytay branch of the most popular mall in the Philippines, or SM City Taytay mall, at the right. The mall has two buildings on each side of the highway and an enclosed bridge connects them (where I shot the photo). It is about two kilometers away from our townhouse unit.

We’re selling the townhouse unit now, so my husband and I started to work on some minor repairs that have to be done. I remember when we renovated the house two years ago, to make it easier to decide on the colors of the paints, I followed the rule of Feng Shui. It was not hard since I’ve done that to two other houses, ours and my in-laws’.

At first I just memorized the colors auspicious for every location of the house: green for the eastern part, blue for north, orange for south and yellow for west. Of course that doesn’t have to be strictly followed otherwise it will be hard to imagine how a small house will look like with all those colors.

If there are walls that will divide the locations, a different color after a wall will separate a room from the rest of the house thus making the house look bigger, contrary to what others thought that using just one color for the whole house will make it look bigger.

As an actual example, the photo shown is from our small townhouse unit. I can’t do much with the other structures of the unit, except for the arched doorway and window that I designed. You’ll notice that the walls of the small kitchen which is after the arched doorway is light green because it is at the eastern part of the house. The cupboard at the right before the arched window is light orange because that is where the south is. The color of the larger area now became light blue because it is the color for the north, which has the biggest wall area in the whole unit. I also applied what I learned from my Interior Design classes. Blue is the complimentary color of orange, which is the cupboard’s color, and the blue color also has a tinge of violet that matches with the other secondary colors orange and green. All colors were lightened with white (tints). The design rule for complimentary colors is to use either all tints or all shades (darkened with black), or matching tints with small amounts of bright or dark complimentary colors that serve as accent colors.

Going back to the rule of Feng Shui, I just acquired additional information that can associate the colors to the locations: green for wood, the element for the east; orange for fire, south’s element; blue for water, north’s element; and yellow for metal, the element for the west. How about that?