Gardening stuffs

I'm still not done cleaning our garden. I cut the grass using garden scissor which is time consuming and laborious. But the repetetive action, the smell of cut grass and Wes Montgomery's guitar in the background made the task relaxing. I guess it's the feeling of being intune with nature.

Now my feet and legs are itching. I guess that's why it's important to wear proper clothes when gardening like long pants. rubber boots, gloves etc. But in this summer heat... Anyway, the culprit is this weed. I don't know what this is called in English but locally we call this "lipang aso". A contact with the leaves produces itch and irritation comparable to and bite. Before I knew about this plant, I always thought that I was bitten by ants or other insects until my mother told me about lipang aso.She had this childhood story about naughty boys rubbing lipang aso leaves to girls' panties that are drying on clothesline.

The eggplants are already producing fruits and maybe in a week or two the rest of them will also be fruiting. I was hesitant about planting eggplants because I have rheunatism, knee and ankle gout to be specific. I have had excruciating flare ups and the culprit are foods with high uric acid contents. Eggplants, because it contains little seeds which is almost impossible to separate, is considered a high risk food. But many vegetable contain seed like string beans, gourds, okra, peas, etc. I mean, if I avoid all these vegetables I may end up undernourished or worse I could starve. Anyway, vegetables do not contain that much uric acid and according to what I have read the body can easily process and eject or flush out uric acid from vegetables and what is really bad is uric acid from animal innards.

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Yellow Bitter Gourd and Bonsai etc...

I don't know if it can be called a garden, forest or jungle is more appropriate. My bonsai materials are being outrun by weeds and maybe after I'll work on them later.

Anyway, I did some cleaning in our garden, pulled out weeds and swept the yard, a task that took me the whole morning and still I'm not yet done. The sun is already at its peak and the heat is unbearable.

I'll take a rest and continue maybe at three or four in the afternoon.


Even my bittergourd is affected by the el nino phenomenon. The extreme heat of the sun caused this young fruit to turn ripe prematurely. It has not been even reached it's teen age years (imagining the'yre human beings). I was waiting to harvest it for cooking sauteed bittergourd or ginisa but it grew old too fast.

Bitter gourd or ampalaya is good for the health. The Department of Health did studies on it and officially listed it as a bonafide medicinal plant that is good for fighting high blood pressure, diabetes and other diseases.

I have noticed that healthy food usually taste awful and most of the times are bitter, take for example serpentina a weed that has been traditionally used by asians to cure number of diseases. The leaves of serpentina is so bitter that boiling two or three pieces of its small leaves in a liter of water makes the resulting tea almost undrinkable. I guess that's why they call it "king of bitter" in English.

If bitter food is good for us, why is it that evolution or the creator did not program our taste buds to like them. I mean, instead of having sweet tooth, why not have bitter tooth. Why do we not have this uncontrollable urge to eat bitter foods especially when we feel down or depressed instead of diving in and devouring fatty and salty junk foods and consuming tons of chocolates and gallons of sodas, beer, ice tea etc.

Maybe it's because the change in our diet in the last century kind of reprogram our sense of taste. This is evident by the proliferation of candies and sweets. Sugar was once a rarity because of the difficuly of processing it from plants. In fact the ancients used honey as a sweetener but becuase of the invention of manufacturing and processing plants sugar became common, so common that it became one of the most common food ingredients.

I saw a documentary about the aetas and they have this natural knowledge of medicianl plants in their environment. They have specific plants for specific ailments and diseases that are proven effective that even the US military trained their special forces with the aetas on jungle survival. These herbological knowledge of the aetas is inculcated in them through thousand of years of adaptation to their environment.

I guess we all have these natural and instinctual herbological knowledge. Sometimes it's obvious like the lagundi which is good for cough, crush the leaves and you'll notice it's minty smell and taste. Even animals know what plants are good for them and they eat them instinctively.

I guess we, the modern humans, lost this innate knowledge when our sense of taste evolve into the mst based,  sweet, fatty, greasy, salty  etc. orientation that it now has.



I got addicted to bonsai that to came to a point where almost all the space in the yard was occupied by bonsai materials. Bonsais are beautiful to look at, they are great works of art specially if you see them in exhibitions. But before they become works of art, they are nothing but stumps. It takes years to grow branches and more years to train and wire them. This is why many bonsai hobbyists keep and train many bonsais to keep impatience in check.

Anyway, I stopped acquiring materials because I'm starting to get overwhelmed.



Looking at my growing bonsai material collection, a friend asked me what they are good at. I was tempted to engage him with a lecture on the art and the philosophy of bonsai but his question hit me: ge's right. I am not rich and my salary as a teacher is barely enough for our budget. My friend suggested I plant vegetables instead. To tell the truth his suggestion was good and utilitarian. I looked around the yard and then moved my bonsai materials to the edges of the lot so as not to occupy too much space and I started to plant vegetables.

Anyway...
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Banana Smoke

Buying bananas. We love bananas. Going bananas.

I read about this new diet called the banana diet. The dieter is supposed to eat two to three pieces of banana before eating a meal. The idea is to fill the stomach so that when you eat your meal you can only take a small portion. I have tried it but it didn't work. I guess if you want to lose you've got to discipline yourself to eat the right portion.




I have been sneezing these past few days and in my experience frequent and violent sneezing is a sure sign that my asthma is acting up. I guess it's because I had been burning dead leaves these past few days and the inhalation of the smoke trigerred my allergies. I keep telling myself to avoid burning leaves but it's irresistible especially after sweeping the yard. The pile of dead leaves beckons me to light them.




As usual, I took my ventulin via the nebulizer. I have been feeling better but because I would be playing bass guitar with the band in the evening, It was pre,-emptive.

On the stage.
We were on the stage playing and the heat of the spotlight was so intense that the lead guitarist and I were sweating profusely. The glare was also overpowering.

I was shocked when the smoke machine started pumping smoke in the stage. I moved away but the stage was so small and there's no place to go. Anyway, it's a good thing we only performed three songs, about ten minutes.




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Haircut with Danny the Barber

I went to the barber to have my hair cut.   I saw in the mirror that white hair were starting to envelope my head. I am getting old.




Danny has been my barber since I was in high school. He was one of the barbers  at the demised Christian Barber Shop.

My childhood hair cut was done by Ka Bider the neighborhood barber who was so old that he couldn't see patches of unshaven hair on the nape. His shop was an open air affair, a balconahe of some sort. The place was a kitchen, a dining area, it was a common area for three or more families and the things that identifed it as a barbershop were the barber's chair, mirror's and of course, sexy pictures of women promoting alcoholic drinks.

In high school I started to look for a more respectable barbershop, not that Mang Bider is not respectable, but I'm already in my teens and crew cut was not my thing anymore. Christian Barbershop was a novelty for me. It was airconditioned, well lighted, and the clean painted walls featured pictures of male models sporting the latest "new wave" hairstyle of the era, think Tony Hadley, Simon Lebon, George Michael, Depeche Mode, etc. The place looked more like a beauty shop, which boys and men didn't go to to have their hair done back then, than a barbershop.

The shop didn't last long and when I asked Danny why, he told me it was due to mismanagement. I guess another factor that contributed to the demise of the barbershop was the rise of the franchise beauty shops in the malls that cater to both sexes.

Danny has moved to the AMA barbershop which also folded until finally he had his own shop.

Two decades of haircuts. I can only imagine how much hair Danny had snipped from my head.

This is called "Suki" a patronage relationship in the Philippines that is synonymous to friendship that sometimes borders on to family between a vendor and a seller, a relationship that is fast disappearing because of the impersonal and professional marketing technique used by malls and commercial establishments.

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Trying out Mobile Bloggin

How do I do this?

I finally got a smart phone. I was motivated or forced to get one since my neighboor, my brother, shared
with us his wi-fi connection which made access to the internet very cheap, theres a bit of a quid pro quo, negligible, really.  Also, I got tired of begging my daughter and my wife to lend me their smart phones.

I am trying out the blog app. I haven't posted on my blog for a long time because my PC ,an old pentium 4, is so slow and the modem stick slower that I stopped using them except to write reports for work and to compute grades for my pupils. It's unsettling to realize that this tiny phone possesses more computing power than my old HP PC.

It will take some time to get used to typing using my two thumbs. It's frustrating because I keep hitting the wrong letters and since the space bar is near the period, a dot keeps on appearing between words which I have to keep deleting. I'm sure with practice I'll be able to type words faster. The controls, sorry for using an old analog word, is easy to use and though I had to stop for a while to figure out how to use features like the Oppo swipe thing, I believe I don't need to read the manual.

The blogger app is good, easy to use. I just can't figure out how to edit the photo caption and how to move the photos.

I guess I should welcome myself to the mobile computing age.