Down the Rabbit Hole

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...

"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 ...

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...

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...