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Pop of colour in an urban jungle: Last day of winter at the #Salesforce Park

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  I had an exam in the City in mid-March and brought my meal-prepped lunch. So I hopped into a lift that brought me to Salesforce Park (for the first time). It is a garden 70 feet above ground, suspended over three or four city blocks in the East Cut neighbourhood. It is a sight for sore eyes after being on the BART and walking on San Francisco's concrete trails under the shadow of the tall buildings of the Financial District. Salesforce Park reopened in July 2019, a few months after I finished studying in the City . In fact, the construction site for the Transbay Transit Centre (on which the park is found) was under construction while I was a student at UC Berkeley's SF campus. And that is why I didn't get a chance to see it earlier. Walking along the paved path in Salesforce Park reminded me of my visit to Singapore's Flower Dome . The park is rich in greenery, with the path lined with plants and grass-covered hillocks. Since it was (literally) the last day of winter,
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Beyond imagination: Realising the massive size of the world's largest dinosaurs

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Donan has recently become fascinated with dinosaurs. He has been asking many questions about the differences among various groups of dinosaurs, what they ate, and where they lived. Because of this interest, I thought it would be an excellent idea for him to see the dinosaur exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences.  When we reached the front door, an enormous dinosaur appeared and freaked us out. Donan didn't want to see the rest of the exhibit anymore.  In contrast, I didn't see the same fear and worry when Donan and I went to the animal exhibit in the Blackhawk Museum. He was enthralled by the dinosaur skull and paused to see the videos of ankylosaurs. 
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Location: 55 Music Concourse Dr, San Francisco, CA 94118, USA
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Learning Spanish via Loteria

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Solano County's Health and Social Services (H&SS) has a committee preparing for the Public Health Day sometime in May. I attended the first of its meetings, and I found the committee organisers to be very friendly. It did help that they prepared a check-in activity to make everyone at ease: "loteria". When they first mentioned it, I thought we would play the lotto. However, I learned that Loteria is similar to Bingo. We were each given one card with several drawings and Spanish words. We were also given a handful of beans. One had to put one bean to each drawing on the card to win the game. Players would place the beans on their cards as the game master mentioned the word or showed the photo he/she had drawn from a deck of photo cards.   My Spanish is limited to numbers and a few objects... I am not able to string words into a sentence just yet. And so, I heavily relied on the photos that the game master showed to the group. It was a fun activity, albeit short (about
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Food for thought

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I came across Dr Cielito Habito's opinion piece entitled "Dumb and Dumber?" in the Philippine Daily Inquirer while browsing LinkedIn posts. This article highlighted the Philippines' poor performance in the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test measuring selected students' math, reading, and science performance. Because I now work in the public health space, the last portion of this article resonated with me: poor performance attributed to weak cognitive and learning capacity is brought about by malnutrition. The author then mentioned that children's academic performance is closely linked with agriculture (e.g., farm productivity). Dr Habito's article resonates with Solano County's Public Health Leadership meeting agenda before Christmas. During that meeting, I learned (a bit more) about how public health is not just about diseases (being a microbiologist, my focus is disease diagnosis). It also covers maternal and child w
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And just like that, the car seats are now forward-facing

"The time has come", the Walrus said, "to talk of many things: of shoes and ships, of sealing wax,  of cabbages and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings..." – Lewis Carroll  I bought the Diono Radian 3QXT and the Clek Foonf many months ago because I preferred that Donan stay rear-facing for as long as possible (or at least beyond his second birthday). After all, this is the safest seat orientation for him as an infant and a toddler. One of his teachers commended me for keeping Donan's seat rear-facing as long as we had. I told her this might be the last week of it because Donan had figured out how to unbuckle the chest clip to look forward.  That same weekend, I worked on reversing the orientation of his car seats (one is in my car, and the other is in Daddy's car). I had entirely forgotten how heavy his seats were! They are both heavyweights! Anyway, uninstalling them was more challenging than I had expected. The anti-rebound
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Experiencing Restaurant Abaca's winter offerings

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Mommy and Daddy recently celebrated their 44th wedding anniversary. In faithful Anna and Rochie style, we suggested eating somewhere "masarap" (aka fine dining). Anna suggested we go to a Korean restaurant in Danville; however, we discovered it was closed that day while en route. So I suggested (while we were on I-680) that we eat at Restaurant Abaca instead. After all, they haven't tried the wagyu salpicao and the bougie halo-halo that Ate Maddie and I raved about on a late summer visit. Thankfully, Abaca had an available table at 5:30 pm.  Abaca now has a four-course degustation menu called "Paubaya". However, we weren't too hungry, so we ordered a la carte for this occasion. We ordered wagyu skirt steak salpicao, sisig fried rice, Manila clams, pork lumpia, pork barbecue, crispy pata, and Java rice.  The portions were big enough to fill us but not overly so. In fact, we had room for dessert! Sadly, the halo-halo I was raving about a few months earlier was
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From Moon landings to Mars missions: A toddler's POV of the space age

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That's one small step for [a] man. One giant leap for mankind. – Neil Armstrong (July 20, 1969) My fascination with the space age began when I watched a 1980s cartoon about the different periods of human civilisation (e.g., Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Space Age). I seized the opportunity to visit the Kennedy Space Centre on my first visit to the USA almost two decades ago. I also saw the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. I probably have been passing on my interest in space exploration to Donan—subconsciously—because when he started to stitch words into sentences, some of his first topics were rocket ships! I only fueled his interest when we started frequenting NASA 's Ames Visitor Centre at the Chabot Space and Science Centre (I am not exaggerating when I say that he can lead a tour group before he's even potty trained; that's how interested he is about space exploration). Thanks to the wonders of the internet and supportive family members, Donan has ama
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