Life, Day by Day

My relatives in Metro Manila are regulars and would rave about it, posting their enviable pictures on social media. And so, when we probinsyano s first saw this Vikings logo in SM City Bacolod, there was a lot of excitement and anticipation among us. It was something that everyone I knew was looking forward to and our conversations would often touch on the question of when it will open. Well, finally people of Bacolod and Negros, PREPARE TO FEAST! Our long wait is over. This October 2015, VIKINGS SM City Bacolod will officially open!

Since I was a little girl, I was fascinated with makeup.  During weekends in my grand-aunt's house, I would spend hours watching her daughters (my aunties) put on make-up and dressing up.  My mother who was a powder and lipstick type of girl tried to discourage this growing interest of mine and even though how much I nagged her about it, she refused to get me makeup. Of course I always managed to get some from my overindulgent aunties who would give me their leftover or soon to be discarded makeup products. You can imagine my Mom's look of resignation every time I came home with a little stash of cosmetics, but then again, she did not really prohibit me from practicing putting makeup on my face, which I often did in the confines of my room. I think she believed that everything for me at that age was fantasy and make believe...or was it?

Change comes in many forms. There are the big ones that can give me a lot of stress and anxiety and can take a lot of time...but mostly change happens without us realizing it until it becomes quite apparent. But whether big or small, change always brings out some kind of emotional reaction from people. I have been through enough life-changing experiences to know how hard it is to deal with change...there were times I did not even know that what I was feeling was due to some kind of change happening in my life! It's a good thing that I had adequate coping skills, a resilient nature and a great support system to face these events in life. Then in 2008, I bought this little book that talks about change...and subsequently wrote about it in one of my early posts although I did not really elaborate about how this book helped me better manage the continuing changes in my life. The book is " Who Moved My Cheese " by Dr. Spencer Johnson, and I want to share how the lessons has h...

When I was in my 20's, the concept of change was something abstract in my mind and in a way it still is, because more often than not, it is something that does not always happen in one go.  More commonly, it often occurs in stages and is intangible and you only feel that something is changing but the impact of the change can only be seen much later. There are many people, things, standards or even concepts of the world , that are important to us and some of these, we feel like we cannot live without.  When something happens and we are forced to let go of what is important to us, we all go into crisis mode.  I have yet to meet someone who doesn't do that. So how do we avoid all the stress of life changing experiences?  I realized that the easiest way to let go of things is detachment ...but that is only as far as "things or objects"  are concerned, because when talking about detachment, I do not want to put people in the same category a...

When I was a little girl, I remember seeing deer heads mounted on the wall of my grand-uncle's house in Bacolod. His sons were avid hunters, but I felt it was a cruel sport and thought it was quite distasteful to decorate your living room with the poor dead animals. Since I did not go to their house often, I never really thought about it until many years later when I read about the endangered Visayan white spotted deer that used to roam the Visayas region but now was indigenous only to Panay and Negros. It has been reported in 2009 that only about 300 of these beautiful animals have survived in Negros. Looking at the pictures, the images of those mounted deer heads flashed back in my mind and I realized that my uncles were among the many who are responsible for their severe drop in numbers.

Life continues to be a rollercoaster ride for me and my family. We make plans but change happens, and for life to go on, we must know how to cope and deal with it.  A long time ago someone told me that change isn't bad...it just means that we grow up.  I did not understand then what exactly he meant by that, but as I grew older...and wiser, I finally did.  That somehow there is always been something good that comes out of change and important life lessons learned.  I will have another birthday tomorrow and with it, I celebrate the changes in my life.

The Philippines is a country with unending sunlight and so, one would think that Vitamin D deficiency would be uncommon. Surprisingly, it's not.  A local study on the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency commissioned by Unilab , found that 7 out of 10 Filipinos living in major cities in the Philippines are Vitamin D deficient.  Because of these findings, Unilab launched Forti-D , the first available single-ingredient Vitamin D in mainstream drugstores in the Philippines.