Our house is filled with smoke and I can hear the screech of firecrackers in the distance. I took the photo above from the window, a few minutes before the clock struck 12, before we made the big switch from 2013 to 2014. The dogs are tulala, especially Pip who is having his first New Year in Dumaguete. But all is well, I am here with family, and blessed with all the good things that make my heart fat and full. This year has been filled with so much happiness, lessons learned, new experiences, joy, sadness, light and love. I hope you are looking back at the year that was with joyful eyes too.
You were great, 2013!
A big HELLO to you, 2014!!!
It's always a different kind of happy when it's Christmas. Perhaps it's the thought of getting together, of having an excuse to be together and just spend time as a family... Christmas is an extended weekend of sorts, with some gift giving thrown in. I love Christmas because it is a time when looking back is mandatory, so we can reflect on how blessed we have been for the past year, for new additions to families, new memories made, stronger ties forged. I love Christmas which is why I took out our mini Christmas tree and started to deck the halls like I really meant it. Pepito even joined in on the fun (Ok, the dog was coerced into displaying a good amount of Christmas cheer for the camera, but he does look cute, LOL!).
Merry Christmas everyone!
I got an early Christmas gift from Kat, a photographer/graphic designer friend of mine currently based in SG: a new domain name! Couldn't quite believe my ears when she told me that she got me this as an early Christmas gift. With her help, I jumped from a Blogspot subdomain user to having a domain name of my own. I have always wanted to get a domain name of my own, but domains and htmls and the mention of codes and lines of code freak me out and give me a serious case of the hives, so I stayed away. Perhaps this is the Universe's way of telling me that it is finally time to get a domain of my own, and Kat was the person to prod me into taking that important step.
Soooooooooo, welcome to www.joselleamahit.com!!! (still can't believe that I now have a .com after my name. If there's such a thing as a hundred degrees higher than super stoked, that's where I am right now, LOL!)
The holidays is gearing up to be a great one for me, I can feel it! Thanks Kat for such an amazing, wonderful and super thoughtful gift!
I rarely post anything about what goes on behind my blogging but recently I felt confident enough to do a little tweaking with the HTMLs and the foreign-sounding codes that you can find in any Blogger blog and I thought I can do some changes there without hurting my layout. To cut the long story short, I messed stuff up, LOL! My comments were not appearing and this morning my Facebook LIKE button, which is such an easy way for readers to let me know that they visited, didn't show up. I'm glad online tutorials are always around to help me solve my problems. The links below helped me get my LIKE button back up and running in a matter of minutes and helped me solved my missing comments problem.
Don't you just LOOOVEEEE the Internet? I do! Morning everyone!
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Prayers for Leyte, Cebu, Palawan and other places struck by Yolanda |
The devastation that I see on TV is shocking. Although my hometown also braced for the storm, we experienced just a tiny fraction of what the people in Tacloban and other hard-hit areas experienced. The tragic scenes of men crying over dead wives and daughters, lifeless children covered in blankets, evacuation centers drenched and covered in debris-- it is heartbreaking and never something that one could wish on his worst enemy. As the water swelled and entered homes in Tacloban, we were safe, warm and dry inside our homes in Dumaguete, and even wondered if 'this' was it. Little did we know that in other places, people were fighting for and losing their lives. It is sad, the amount of lives lost. Could we have foreseen that the damage would be this great? Looking at how ravaged Tacloban is, the entire city should have been evacuated. Maybe no one saw it coming. We knew it was strong, but strong enough to pummel an entire city to the ground? Maybe not.
I am rambling. There is no emotion but sadness. Sadness for all the lives lost, sadness for the survivors who are hurting for lost loved ones, for the survivors who have slept and will continue to sleep in the rain and cold, with little food, water, or clean clothing.
I really hope that this will be the last, at least until we get on our feet. We are a strong people, after all. But lately I have been feeling like we really deserve a break, a breather from all that's been going on. Suffering through typhoons and earthquakes is not a privilege in my book. An opportunity to learn lessons and test our capacity for kindness and strength, maybe, but to those who lost loved ones in the waves and floods, this is hardly a privilege that they would want to bear.
Contact numbers for those looking to send help or donations can be found
here.
But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."
Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses,
so that Christ's power may rest on me.
2 Corinthians 12:9
I started this week with a bang, if you could call it that. My JD thesis defense was scheduled for 3:30 PM on Monday. This thesis and the thought of standing in front of a panel of lawyers who would grill me for two hours on a paper that I fussed and cried over and wanted to shred to pieces numerous times during the past months... well that thought was enough to make me unravel. I contemplated quitting law school just because I didn't want to deal with the thesis. And after I saw how critical the past panel members were, the anxiety and dread about my impending defense mounted and mounted until finally, on that very day, I felt nothing at all. It was strange and weird and I felt a teeny tiny bit of anxiety because I didn't feel anything! It was probably my brain and body shutting down from all that tension and anxiety. After months of being scared, my body got tired of feeling that way and simply gave up and started feeling normal again. That's my theory at least.
I didn't really think much of it until I was gathering my things and making small talk with J, the school attendant (best guy ever!) while he was cleaning up after my defense, just how blessed I am. The unworthy recipient of so much grace, that's who I am and for a moment I felt ashamed. I spent the past months totally taking this on and doing such a mediocre job of showing grace under pressure (I was the epitome of "stressed under pressure" which is the exact opposite, LOL!) And here I was, being shown so much grace and faithfulness when in the last months I showed none. I was moody, irate, anxious, faithless, mean sometimes, and I turned to all the wrong things for comfort when I needed a quick fix. A humbling experience, that defense was. I did pass it (and I was even given pre-defense advice by the ASec of the DOJ himself!) but the more important lesson that I got from all that is that I was and still am the recipient of so much undeserved grace. It was a reminder that He always stays faithful, even when I fail to live up to my end of the bargain.
I rarely post spiritual stuff here on my blog but it's never too late to start, methinks. And what better way to do so than to show just what a powerful and faithful Father I have. :)
I cannot remember when I first wanted a leather camera satchel. Perhaps it was when I saw my favorite photographers
Josephine Sicad-Minerva and
Aileen Siroy either blogging about their favorite satchels or shooting with a stylish satchel that held an extra lens or two. I have always loved the retro look and feel of a satchel, so much so that when I found one for really cheap in SM CDO, I grabbed it and never looked back. I also window-shopped online to find camera satchels like the ones I saw on my favorite websites, since I wanted a camera bag that didn't scream "CAMERA BAG" especially for travelling and walking around the city.
Lo and behold, I found a
seller on ebay who sold exactly the ones I were looking for!!!
The great thing is that although the seller was selling from China and sent my satchel through regular China Post, the bag arrived on time! And here it is! I still have a thesis to proofread and print, one day past the deadline, but I am one happy girl!
Good vibes everyone!
“No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.”
― Lewis Carroll,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
It's times like these when I feel like the world is so big, what am I doing sitting here? Everything seems to be so easily possible when its almost 1 in the morning and everyone is sound asleep except me.
My mom is one of the most amazing people I know, perhaps, the MOST amazing.Her faith, her ability to be kind in the face of situations that normal people use as an excuse to be unkind, and her unwavering reminder to me, my brother and my sister to pray and go to church every Sunday makes me wonder about how she does it. Perhaps it is because my mother is a praying woman, perhaps that's where all that strength comes from, and perhaps I should double up on my praying too. Mothers, too me, are amazing. They are counselors and doctors and drill sergeants and sisters and best friends. Perhaps you learn all these things when you have children, perhaps there is no other way than to be all these people rolled into one, but still, it is amazing how mothers face all these responsibilities head-on and still manage to smile and laugh and give wise advice when needed--- it simply boggles my mind.
To my mother, who is both my confidant and the person who gives me a good whacking in the head when I need it, Happy Mother's Day :)
“There is an ugliness in being paid for work one does not like.
Anaïs Nin
I was kind of hesitant about using this quote... I have been trying to remove even the slightest bit of negativity from my life, and that includes words that say 'no, don't, do not'... it may seem like overkill but I prefer it that way. I don't think we can ever have too much of positivity, and by that I mean the rational kind. Today is the day that I plan on hunching over my computer and finally starting the first 50% of my legal thesis. I have butterflies everytime I think about it. I want to get started on it, and I'm so lucky to be able to arrive at a topic that I am really passionate about, but the grueling technicalities of writing a paper, the formality of it all just makes me want to spend the day working.
Legal or scholarly papers have never been my thing. I have done two of them but still I would like to avoid them if I could. I prefer writing conversational pieces, which is why I LOVE LOVE LOVE my job. My clients often adamantly say that they want something to be 'conversational, please' and I would happily reply, 'With pleasure!' None of that friendliness in a legal paper, where formality and the use of pretentious legalese is often mistaken for good content (gaaaahhhh!!!) But still, I hope my paper will be able to contribute something. It deals with cyberlaw and child exploitation which are two areas where my interests meet, so I am part-excited at the thought of all the things I'm going to learn, part-dreading the tedious task of arranging the footnotes (I think I was born lazy and am still trying to overcome that habit as I approach my 30s). I really should start writing on my thesis instead of writing on this blog haha!
Until the next post!
“Have you ever lost someone you love and wanted one more conversation, one more chance to make up for the time when you thought they would be here forever? If so, then you know you can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.”
― Mitch Albom,
For One More Day
It has been a pretty boring Saturday. I wanted to go to my hometown and spend some QT there, since I've been spending waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much time cooped up in the house doing nothing but work (although I have to be thankful that I do have work, which I love). I've actually been spending the entire week just feeling sorry for all the good sunsets I just missed. I know, I have been talking about sunsets and how good summer sunsets are here, but I have not actually been seeing a lot of them lately which is sad. I am going to post another entry where I shot a spectacular sunset in Dauin so that's something I'm looking forward to. I've also been thinking about buying a new tablet for myself. Since I am flat broke I think all I can afford are the cheapest kinds but I do know that I want to buy the Cherry Mobile Fusion Bolt (check it out
here) since it is a quadcore tablet, (*yay*) so I'm quite interested to see how good a tablet P3,999 will be able to give me. Will definitely post something on that when I get my hands on that tablet :D