INTO THE STORM (How Our Shoes Got Wet at the Igorot Stone Kingdom)

We thought we eluded Typhoon Carina until it caught us at the Igorot Stone Kingdom...

where storm rain cascaded down steep streets
flooding the dining room of a Farmer's Daughter
and made us wait with love almost lost in a Trulab.

Suddenly, we were enveloped in a storm of surreal and scary hospital appellations...

adenocarcinoma with a lepidic growth pattern from NDCH  

who can do a thyroid transcription factor 1

but not the thyroglobulin immunostaining at BGH. 

We have descended into the storm amidst a flurry of weekly meetings, I-JET matters, the national dialogue in Vang Vieng and a regional convening in Phnom Penh, a forum and a summit in Vientiane, and early morning email catch ups that not even the payment of P216,000 for my labors in May and July can dissipate.  

My shoes were soaked as I sought refuge in leftover pinatisan, day-old carinderia food, an early birthday bash, and even paid the bills despite the still missing remittance from May.

I prayed for divine intervention from San Sebastian and the Sacred Heart of Jesus to deliver us to the best oncologist that we can afford as I forced my way through wet bike trails.

St. Luke and one of the doctors in Nueva Ecija responded with an encouraging initial prognosis and a positron emission tomography scan schedule on July 31. 

One day at a time.

I prayed during my Grab ride to the airport after checking out of Hop Inn-Morato, then waited for almost 6 hours for TG 574 in Bangkok before arriving into a  late night wecome reception in Vientiane...

CAST AWAY (The Blog not the Movie)

No, this is not about the FedEx guy who survived a plane crash but ended up being marooned in an island for 4 years until he was rescued by a cargo ship.

It's about a plaster cast for a wrist hairline fracture that was opened with an oscillating saw and a cast spreader two weeks after the Legends of the Fall.

And bursting from the plaster fragments are bits of Year 3 and Women Leders' Summit budgets, logistics for the Vang Vieng National Dialogue and the Phnom Penh regional convening, the usual weekly catch ups, a CSO mapping, and regional HR matters.

We attended a friend's funeral too and had beer for breakfast while he was being cremated. 

My consultancy fee for May remains in limbo but the order for an optical coherence tomography of the optic nerve head was finally delivered along with the payment of third quarter SSS premiums plus an inquiry on teaching license renewal and catching up on a missed PMU meeting.

The cast has been broken but the The Conjuring in Baguio is still inconspicuous and for that, we entreated St. Rose of Lima's divine intervention for next week to be all well.  

Beer poured in the highway on Tuesday and Friday nights where Wednesday's adobong bibe frolicked because Richard Carapaz finally won a Tour de France stage before Thursday's kinilaw na bangus and inihaw na hito, Saturday's menudo, and Sunday's calamares were unleashed.

Then there is one tire change in four stages of my mini-TDF in between the weekly laundry, a living room rearrangement and a bit of Ironman work...

THE CONJURING (The Seers of Baguio)

"When life gives you lemons, make lemonade".

A lot of lemons were thrown at us lately so I made lemonade by taking only airconditioned buses when [1] we received the order for a CT scan-guided biopsy from a conjurer in San Jose City that I tried chasing away with a Monday night adobong tofu, [2] retrieved scanned images from the  conjurers of Cabanatuan City that I marked with a Tuesday beer, and [3] upgraded my Pay Maya app while having a meeting in an airconditioned bus to finally seal the dates for the Vang Vieng National Dialogue and subsequent flight bookings to Bangkok and Vientiane. 

We took the first Solid North trip to Baguio on Wednesday for a breakfast of Balajadia Kitchenette's classic sinanglao and pork tinuno overload (Sobresaliente!) that helped us endure an 8-hour wait for a private room in the company of a gangrenous man, a pale woman and what must be her concerned husband, a hysterical woman who apparently works in a bank, a white man who the next bed said was given preferential treatment on room assignments, and a baby with a possible gatroenteritis at the Notre Dame De Chartres Hospital's Emergency Room which is a paradox since it does not seem to operate in an emergency sitiuation.

We stayed in Room 1 for a succession of CT scan conjurings that revealed benign cysts but what-we-must-know will only be disclosed after 10 days and for that I pleaded to Our Lady of the Atonement for mercy, in my bare feet and knees, and received holy communion after a long while before charging into the soft rain of Session Road for a recovery take-out dinner of mami and siopao from Luisa's Cafe (Bien but not in the level of Ma Mon Luk) and getting discharged the next day to the haunted halls of Casa Vallejo, a thanksgiving visit to the Baguio Cathderal, and a dinner at Hill Station (Notable alto but pricey).

The ghosts of Casa Vallejo were apparently absent because we almost did not make it there due to an Agoda debacle and broke a glass jar of bath gel too so we searched for Baguio Masonic Lodge No. 67 before enduring breakfast at a Cafe by the Ruins (Insuficiente, ruinuous, disappointing and overrated!) that was somehow mitigated by a criterium and sparring boxers in Burnham Park, and three approved Fridays off in lieu of my first meeting with CANSEA and a weekly I-JET PMU catch up on why Jonas Vingegaard outsprinted Tadej Pogacar in Stage 11.

After 3 days of conjuring and a day of recovering, I finally snatched a smoke in the toilet of a vegetable stall along Kennon Road, almost 3 hours before entreating Apo Baket Manaoag for her divine intervention.

The kinigtot, pigar-pigar and grilled boneless bangus at the Kainan sa Kubo Ningnangan Ed Manaoag rocks but their dinakdakan, sinigang na salmon belly and pinakbet Ilocano sucks.

That is my conjuring back in Bakal 2 where the beer freezeth over a weekend of birthday sessions...