Down the Rabbit Hole

Look at the photos I've unearthed! (I'm still posting material that originally came from my Multiply blog) --- "Buon giorno" is Italian for "good day". It is an apt name for the Italian-themed restaurant Ate Maddie, Larees, Anna, and I went to in Tagaytay City after an afternoon of taking pictures in Caleruega  more than three years ago. I want to go on a photo walk again! :)

Holy Week 2009 , a set on Flickr. Photos taken from Good Friday to Easter Sunday in 2009.

I do mean S-L-O-W. Some people say that patience is virtue; slow cooking in a crock pot certainly is certainly a test of character... and of hunger. On Thursday night, I prepared lentil soup using my Kyowa Slow Cooker (KW-2802). I just placed the lentils, the mixture of sauteed onions, celery, tomatoes, and carrots into the crock pot and added some water. Then I added dried basil and dried oregano. Once all ingredients were in, I just placed the lid and put the slow cooker on high. Then I waited. And waited... And waited. Four hours (and an extremely hungry stomach) later, I decided that the lentils must already be cooked. The lentil soup I made definitely did not look like the ones on the internet and was not as thick as the soup Anna and I had tasted in Tapella by Gaudi (Greenbelt 5). My soup was on the watery, bland side as well; I must have added too much water or skipped a step in the recipe. But the nice thing about the bland lentil soup was that I could really taste...

I attended the World Food Day celebration at the Asian Development Bank this year (October 15-16, 2012). The event was graced by Julian Cribb, author of the book The Coming Famine   (University of California Press, 2010). In his presentation, Mr Cribb discussed the real possibility of a global food shortage in the near future brought about by scarcity of resources. To avert the food crisis, Mr Cribb recommends that people start working on and  re-investing in agricultural and food R&D  now (among others). Especially since technology adoption takes time. During the Global Rice Science Partnership (GRiSP) Asia Review, Kamala Gurung reported that it takes more than ten years for farmers to adopt current varieties in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal.  But just in case people do think that nobody is working on this issue now, I'd like to point out that agricultural scientists have not thrown in their lab coats. They are hard at work in laboratories an...

(Photo by Keil Marinay) I think my sister has always wanted to visit Pamplona, Spain for the festival honoring San Fermin. Looks like she dared to be run after by a bull -- or a cow, I'm not really sure -- while in UPLB.

Photosynthesis is an organism's way of producing food (if it can, like plants and algae, and several bacteria types) using carbon dioxide and sunlight. Along the way, plants produce oxygen, the gas humans and other organisms need to survive. Photosynthetic organisms, then, are both source of food and natural carbon dioxide scrubber.  Despite learning about photosynthesis in school, I never bothered to understand it with such passion as the people working in the C4 Rice Project . See, the research areas that interest me tend to be closer to the rice eater sitting at the dining table than to clouds floating in the bright blue sky.  But I digress... Scientists from the C4 group are attempting what previously was probably a product of science fiction: to tinker with the photosynthetic processes in the rice plant and make them more efficient. During the IRRI Young Scientists Conference  (November 8-9), a lot of the early-career researchers took to the stage to bri...

Last Tuesday, November 6, I attended the lunch organized for participants in this year's Mentoring Program at the International Rice Research Institute. The special guest during this lunch meeting was no other than Dr Roland Buresh, IRRI's nutrient management expert. And just like while listening to Dr Bruce Tolentino in one of the earlier lunches, I took note of three points that Dr Buresh discussed over lunch: 1. Stop thinking about why something doesn't work; start thinking how to make it work. In a laboratory, young scientists who are eager to test new ideas may, at times, feel like they're butting heads with brick walls . The younger ones shouldn't take it personally, according to Dr Buresh, because the elder scientists may have had supervisors who didn't entertain their ideas either. Dr Abdelbagi Ismail, another mentor present over lunch,  also said that we also have to observe the way we present our ideas. The way we say our ideas and suggest...

I was lucky to be chairing the morning session on Innovations and Novel Approaches during the IRRI Young Scientists Conference  on November 8 because it provided a glimpse of what new technologies are being developed or being applied by young scientists for the rice sciences. Novel ways for observing plant characteristics One of the challenges of phenotyping (that's technical jargon for describing or measuring observable characteristics of an organism) is that it is a slow process. For example, measuring length, width and/or height of plant parts can be tedious and slow. To save time on phenotyping, Katherine Meacham uses a technology that takes 3-D images of plants and automates the measurements. She uses this technology (among others) because she needs to develop mathematical models about plant responses to environmental conditions within the time she's required to finish her PhD. New look at proteins involved in water transport in plants Alexandre Grondin talked abo...

Anna and I, on one of the weekends she was off-duty, went to Makati to celebrate our mother's birthday. We ended up in California Kitchen in Glorietta 4.  That's Anna with her pasta plate and the whipped cream-topped shake. 

This time, I write snippets as I attend the IRRI Young Scientists Conference.  --- No, not literally. I was chairing this morning's session on Innovations and Novel Approaches in the first IRRI Young Scientists Conference (IYSC). Being a chairperson for the first time, I was clueless with what I was supposed to do; particularly because someone else was doing the moderator duties. Thankfully, the moderator of the session,  Shanta Karki  was well prepared and organized. She had print outs of speakers' profiles (which I used to introduce the speakers), time-keeping and alerting materials, and certificates of participation on hand before we began the session. The back-end of this technical session felt like a well-oiled machine. There were only a few people as the session start time approached. Luckily, we had Hei Leung  in the audience. He was able to convince more people to listen in on the Innovations session.  It turns out that chairing a tech...

This time, I write snippets as I attend the IRRI Young Scientists Conference.  --- During the Global Rice Science Partnership (GRiSP) Asia Review, I observed that early-career scientists are being given the exposure they need to move their careers forward. Just four weeks after, they are once again given the chance to talk about their work, to meet their peers, and to hear what their peers in other scientific fields are doing. I am talking about the two-day IRRI Young Scientists Conference  ( #IYSC2012 ) going on at the International Rice Research Institute. According to Govinda Rizal  (IYSC conference chair and current president of the Association of Fellows, Scholars, Trainees, and Residents in IRRI), the conference serves as a platform to bridge "between experienced senior scientists and those following their footsteps". Indeed, the conference did allow me to talk with more established scientists. I was able to discuss with the likes of Jauha...

We named this cat Ninja because it's the first tortoise shell cat with predominantly dark patches. As a kitten, she was so dark that she's almost invisible at night. That's an almost perfect camouflage and she uses it to her  advantage... and to my annoyance whenever the "prey" she's set her eyes on is my foot. She's not shy around humans and love to use their shoulders as perches (hence the photo above) and their pants-clad legs as scratching posts. She meows to announce her presence or just to greet us when we arrive home. She sometimes also races past me through the door into the house for reasons only she knows what. Apparently, I'm not the only one to notice this unique tortoiseshell behavior. The blogger of The Conscious Cat has written a piece of what is termed as "tortitude" . I am certain that Ninja displays  that.

Before I went for my three-week training in the USA in September, I donated blood during the IRRI-Rotary Club of West Bay blood drive. This is the annual activity that I participate in which requires me to gain a few kilos to qualify as a blood donor . This year, I went along with Cindy and Crystal. For the first time, because I got good results for weight and blood pressure, the doctor did not ask too many health-related questions anymore. Crystal didn't donate but Cindy qualified to be a donor. I didn't know what was up with my arm, but it took quite a while to get enough blood from my veins into the blood bag. The nurses, the phlebotomists, and the Rotarians were certainly helpful: I was given a stress ball to squeeze at while the collection was ongoing; the phlebotomists kept playing an MP3 of Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love" (I wanted to finish fast because I didn't want to hear it for the nth time!!); and the Rotarians provided congee and fruit juice fo...

"A wide array of bitter foods are... good for you." -- Elliott Essman Last night, I had to eat bitter gourd for dinner. Plus a few eggshells, give or take. Bitter gourd Filipino name:   ampalaya Scientific name: Momordica charantia This hard-to-swallow veggie packs a powerful health punch; it's known to have antimicrobial, anticancer, and antidiabetes properties. Just one tiny detail: it is BITTER! A lot of people have devised a lot of ways to remove the bitterness from the bitter gourd, from squeezing the juices out to putting a lot of salt onto the raw vegetable. Unfortunately, this kitchen novice has never cooked ampalaya before. I just blanched the bitter gourd and then scrambled five eggs to add the cooked vegetable in. The eggs certainly did the trick. The ampalaya was not as bitter as its aroma suggested! The accompanying pieces of chorizo also helped mask the bitter taste of the ampalaya. Now, I've still got four pieces of cooked ampalaya...

During the week that I was in training in Los Angeles, I was looking forward to see one thing: the flyover of NASA's Space Shuttle Endeavour . It was all over the morning news everyday the whole week. On September 22nd, I was quite sad because the space ship already landed the day before and I didn't see it fly over LA because I was indoors. I wasn't even sure that I'd see it while outdoors because it might not have flown by Torrance (where I stayed) or Rancho Dominguez (where I was training). So I contented myself with watching the news coverage of the space shuttle's LAX landing. I was wrong last year. While watching Endeavour's final flight last year, I thought that the next time I'd see this would be when it's a museum piece. It turned out that the world would see it one more time before it goes to a museum! It There's one consolation for me though: while the plane that was flying me from Los Angeles to Sacramento was going from t...

Thanks to the foot pain, I've become a more picky shoe shopper. I couldn't buy shoes that don't have the right kind of support for the arch (thank you, tendonitis!); as such, I became limited to getting mostly running shoes and a pair of comfortable black pumps.  Until I discovered Danskos  last November. Dansko is a brand of footwear catering mostly to people who have to be standing a lot like medical professionals and restaurant employees. The shoes are designed to be very comfortable and non-slip. So, I thought, why not get one for myself? I'm also on my feet most days and I'm known for slipping on the flattest of surfaces (hence the rehabilitation doctor told me to jog on a treadmill, not on the road yet). Just in September this year, I finally got the opportunity to buy myself a pair (at The Walking Company branch in Sun Valley Mall). Initially, I wanted a pair of the red leaf patent or the funky knit patent. However, I ended up with the one that...

I barely knew my paternal grandfather, Lolo Batangas. My only recollection of him was when he dropped by our house with a wound on his knee; he had taken a fall from his bike back in Padre Garcia, Batangas shortly before he visited us. I was, I think, almost five years old at the time. I was drawing on the back of some piece of  cardboard using a permanent marker. It was supposed to be a sketch of a girl skating on an ice rink. When I showed it to him, he said: Ano yan, kuwago? (What's that, an owl?) Lolo Bats' grave, Nov 2012 Of course, I didn't know what a kuwago was until my parents explained that it's a bird with huge eyes (the girl I was drawing had big googly eyes :P). Despite not really knowing him, I feel like I know of him enough based on my family's stories about him and even from people he had helped long time ago. From what I gather, he was a quiet man who always smiled. He worked really hard to keep his brood of six children in the b...