Down the Rabbit Hole

Two years ago, I assembled a bookshelf using only a Swiss knife (because I didn't know where the proper tools were stored). We never did use it as a bookshelf because we've used it as an open cabinet for clothes. For most of its use (so far), the cabinet had been standing tall.  But the presence of a baby has made us review the risks posed by the furniture we've got at home. The most obvious of which, for us, was that a lot of our stuff are fall risks in the event of an earthquake.  Three bookshelves are now lying horizontally on the floor. I decided to use the one assigned to me as a clothes container again with  each shelf acting as a partition for clothes (and there won't be too many clothes piles collapsing because of the weight!). The second one is also used in the same way but for Anna's clothes. The third one is assigned to the dining area or the living room; I'm just not sure how it's going to be positioned and what its contents will be. With just a ...

Adulting 101, California edition! This year, I learned how to get these utilities up and running for a residential property in Pittsburg CA. It turns out that there are three utilities that I needed to set up: water, garbage disposal, and electricity. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic , I was allowed to create my account for each utility service online rather than doing the application process in their respective offices. That's convenient because I could work on these while the little one was sleeping. Anyway, I am writing down how I enrolled to the utilities for future reference for me and to help others who are stumped... the process is quite simple. Electricity and Gas Daddy has an account with PG&E. I didn't have to do much about it. Water and Sewer For the city's water and sewer services, I was advised to fill out an application form and submit it with other documentation. The staff in the Payment Centre would then take care of processing the papers. Once my accoun...

Over the past few months, my mom village has expanded beyond my immediate family. COVID-19 wreaked havoc on the possibility of attending parenting classes so my extended support network is virtual. Fortunately, two of my friends from high school have given birth just a few weeks before and a few weeks after I gave birth, so we face the usual newborn-infant challenges at around the same time. We have become our own little support group. It's very tempting to compare the three baby boys' development because they are about the same ages. However, we do it not for one-upmanship but to see if our kids are exhibiting normal behaviour for their age. See, when the internet proves to have too much conflicting information, it's time to see what actually happens in real life. For example, one parenting website advises parents to sleep train their children to lengthen their nighttime sleep. The sleep training methodology described in this website says that when their infants cry in th...

COVID-19 was declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Six months later, the global number of cases has breached 25,000,000 and the number of deaths worldwide is nearing 900,000 ( 1 ). This is disturbing because, without a vaccine or a widely distributed and affordable therapeutic program, more people will be sidelined from their work... particularly in rural areas where poor people, with limited access to health facilities during the best of times, live.  How does COVID-19 pandemic affect food security? The way I see it, the pandemic affects two components of food security: food availability and food accessibility ( 2 ).  Food availability This component of food security involves food production, which always involves agriculture. Agriculture plays a major role in the economy of rural areas in less economically developed countries ( 3 ). It is the main source of livelihood and food in rural areas. Moreover, populations living in urban areas rely on produce coming from rural area...

For Mommy's birthday, I prepared a burnt Basque cheesecake  while Anna decided to order a family meal from Aung MayLika , a Burmese restaurant in Pleasant Hill. We preferred to go with Burmese food because for our previous weekend dinners (which, sometimes, we do at Biboy and Barbara's house), we ordered from Thai and Peruvian restaurants AND it's Mommy's birthday so we wanted to experience a cuisine we don't consume on a regular basis. We opted not to eat out of the house because our dinner time overlapped with the little one's sleeping time.  While perusing the online menu, Anna and I found out that Aung MayLika offers family meals that already includes an appetiser, a salad, two entrees, a jug of milk tea, and two side dishes. What I hadn't realised while filling out the online order form was that I was ordering almost  the same dishes from one of our visits there!  We got samosas, lahpet thoke (tea leaf salad), tender pork, sweet chilli whole fish, coco...

Thanks to many shelter-in-place policies due to the COVID-19 pandemic , many people have been unleashing their talents in the kitchen and publicising these on their social media platforms. One of the videos I've watched is on how to make burnt Basque cheesecake, a pastry that hails from San Sebastian, Spain. I thought that this cake is foolproof; it's actually difficult to mess it up because (1) the recipe actually calls for burning the top of the cake; and (2) all the ingredients are mixed without much concern about the sequence of mixing. In contrast, many recipes I've encountered warn about burning the surface of the cake, otherwise it would be too dry or instruct readers to mix all dry ingredients, then all wet ingredients, then mix the wet and the dry mixtures. Anyway, I decided to make burnt Basque cheesecake myself, basing my version on the Bon Appétit recipe . But I tweaked the recipe because of limited resources in our kitchen. Below is the Bon Appétit recipe and t...

Val and I opted to minimise our child's online presence, for now. On the one hand, we want to protect his privacy; on the other, we want to show him respect by waiting until he can approve of photos of him before they go online. I am happy that my immediate family is okay with our decision. My brother and sister are not posting photos of him as well. However, a lot of people do not understand why we want to keep him off social media. Some of my closest friends, understandably, want to see his photos on my accounts and were telling me to just keep my accounts private if I want to control who can view my child's photos. Others don't understand why Val and I are taking our son's privacy seriously; these relatives or friends have been posting photos of their own kids to document and to share their happiness around. And then there are relatives who take screenshots of Zoom family meetings and then post these on their platforms under the belief that they need to upload a pho...