the Earth-bound adventures of the Lost and Found

Haven't made any (edited) videos in awhile, so suddenly decided to make one out of some videos I took of Sahara that I thought were hilarious. Here's my YouTube description: The pigeons trying to nest outside my bedroom window drives Sahara so crazy, he often forgets his good sense. What drives ME crazy is that he often does this at 3 am, in the process destroying my window blinds and screen (before I learned my lesson) and waking me up several times in the night. Finally caught him on camera last week! My sweet revenge. This time it was a pigeon and her two babies. While before, the pigeons would fly away just seeing Sahara looking at them from the bed, now they don't even blink when he's clawing at them from behind the glass! This is the first time ever I've used my phone to edit a video, because I got rid of my Mac, and Windows 10 doesn't seem to come with a native video editor :P

Rating: ★★★★★ Category: Other lost and found by Jeneen R. Garcia published in March 2004 In commemoration of the fourth year anniversary of lost & found , I am posting the eight essays that were published pre-Multiply. As it happens, these essays are also among my favorites so far :) As I write now there is a rainbow, no, TWO clear rainbows, the larger one above the other, stretching across the whole expanse of the sky. It is rare that the weather is cool enough to work outdoors. The sight is so incredible, I want to shake everybody around me to make sure they don’t miss it. “Look,” I point out to a one-year old boy practicing how to walk, “do you see that in the sky?” He flashes a toothless grin that says I’m the last one to know. Funny how rainbows fascinate me more now that I’m older, as if I can hardly believe something so amazingly larger-than-life still exists. When we were children, rainbows were as real as Rainbow Brite and My Little Pony, which we could always count on to ...

i've been floating, floating it seems these past few days, weeks of craziness having to make my presentations and papers. as if in rebellion (or is it total surrender?), my spirit has been dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. days no longer exist. dreaming and working weaving in and out of my hours, so that i no longer notice when it's dawn, or when it's time for a meal. and my body, frighteningly, seems to have adjusted to it so well that it doesn't even feel sleepy or hungry anymore unless my mind remembers to look at the clock.... at midnight two nights ago, having spent the whole night dreaming awake, i found myself reading poetry with tears running down my cheeks. and i didn't even know why. only after that was i able to work on my presentation. the next night, a poem sprang out of me, so suddenly, i was taken aback. good thing i knew well enough to just listen and write down everything it said. in spite of my better judgment and a final exam i hadn't studied for...

Returning to Dumaguete in June was like returning to a new city with new hangouts that (joy, joy!) have free wi-fi--McDonald's, Jollibee, plus some others that charge per hour--and a National Bookstore at the corner of Silliman (joy, joy!) with walls made entirely of glass. As of last sem, there was wi-fi only at two internet cafes. Imagine that. Civilization, as most cities know it, has finally set in in Dumaguete.   But the best news--wi-fi-wise--is that we also have free wi-fi in school (for a limited period) and at the marine lab =D And I hope to hitch on my neighbor's (yes, I have a neighbor now on the second floor) DSL once I get my own wireless router. So work, school, house--I'll have everything covered hopefully by the end of this month. I HAVE been working on controlling the addiction, too. I no longer stay so late in school surfing. Only till 10:30 pm at the latest =D   In fact, for this semester, I have resolved to put on the habits of a new lifestlye altog...

i've never really wanted a cat of my own, except for ashley, whom i picked up on the street only because i knew she would die if i didn't. i believe animals are better off in their natural environment with their natural parents. but when the kids brought this one home while we were watching the pacqiao-morales fight last sunday, i had second thoughts. about a month or a month-and-a-half old, this kitty reminded me of ashley when i brought her home to davao last december. and although, her color isn't as unique as ashley's, she's still different--all white, with just an orange spot on her back and near her ear, and her tail orange, black and gray. so even though my father had her brought back out on the street, i went out and got her back after making sure she didn't have a mom looking for her somewhere (and i didn't even have to carry her--she followed me home). she's proving to be one very smart kitty, and already toilet-trained! the other cats still pi...

My second day in Davao -- Keesha and her nameless greatgrandmother. Made me miss ashley =(

cats i temporarily adopted in my travels in March and April. one of them even kept coming back to sleep with me :D (sorry, not enough doggies to make an album, but there were quite a few adorable ones)

ash went on her first visit to the vet yesterday for a general check-up. the very nice dr. gorre (on r. landon st. i recommend him to everyone out there who has pets. very helpful. gave me very good advice on the phone last week although he had never met me) cleaned ashley's ears, gave her orange-colored, yummy de-worming medicine, vaccinated her against five cat diseases, and sprayed her with some anti-flea solution. except for the de-worming medicine, ash hated every moment of it. bit dr. gorre's hand as he injected the vaccine, tried to scratch his assistant tony's face, and yowled as i had never heard before, not even when i give her baths. in the end, as she shivered from the anti-flea spray, she looked defeated, but nevertheless still proud, keeping warm beside tony as i took her photo. not only did dr. gorre give me six cans of friskies tuna & mackerel, he also gave me a discount on the bill! we're supposed to come back in a month for booster and ant-rabies s...

ashley went missing today. for the first time. and i got worried because she ALWAYS comes running when i call her, no matter where she's sleeping or playing. so i knew someone must have taken her by force. like last time, when we were in laguna , she went missing because someone had put her inside a big, box-like wooden divider. good thing i heard her meow when she heard me calling. although i feared it, i knew it was unlikely that she would be run over by a car, or killed by a dog, because this baby's smart and knows how to take care of herself. so really, it could only be kid(cat)napping. anyway, what made the situation worse is that ashley bit my officemate's foot when she was stepped on last week, and we had agreed that ashely be observed for 10 days for signs of rabies (i had already paid for my officemate's anti-tetanus shots and antibiotics). now that she had disappeared, how could we observe her? i looked for her like crazy again and again all over the office...

thanks to ana , ashley now has a new playmate (a substitute for our kitten at home whom she befriended only after nights of catfights). a perfect match, just like caesura's . when i bought her a puppy roughly the same size, she snubbed it after one bite. but when i gave THIS one to her today at the office, she was rolling on the floor with it immediately. i even have a video of it =D i think she thinks it's a real kitten. when she sees its face she pokes it and wonders why it doesn't poke back.

well, you got a glimpse of how it was. here are the rest of the photos showing one of ashley's favorite activities. in davao, she finally learned how to play with another kitten, too. and got good at climbing up and down the stairs by herself to follow me. other favorite activities--climbing up the face of my screen door and up my father and brother's legs during meals, sitting beside visitors on the sofa.... i actually regret it a little that i had to take her away from all that, just when she was feeling so settled =( but i want to take her to the vet, give her shots and all that before i leave her in davao where we already have too many animals.

Okay, okay, so I'm obsessed. But isn't she ADORABLE? Photos taken December 15 and 16 at the office =) (i've taken to bringing her up to my desk in the afternoons because our big, gay office cat always eats up her food if i leave it downstairs). Have videos of ashley playing, too, but can't upload videos on Multiply anymore =( I LOVE MY CAT pin courtesy of cris , from the I Love You Store, where i got my oktomat =)

November 23 to 27, 2005. photos to complement my journal entry on ashley's first flight .

like all first-time mothers, i was a bit anxious about my baby's first plane ride. but as before, i was more anxious than she was. she was so behaved, and eventually treated her carrier (which again i had borrowed from ana , who bought it when she had to bring caesura from manila to cebu as a baby) as if it were her private bedroom. (gave her a warm bath the night before, with more neighborhood kids trying to help out). you can check out the photos in my album .                                                      and of course, everywhere i go, she's always a conversation-starter. i had to check her into the live animals section, and a mean man at the airport was saying, "gamay pa man ni. mabuhi kaha ni?". other popular questions...

at church, in a jeep, at the office, at the beach...check out the Traveling Cat in my journal ;-)

it's just been a week and a half since i found ashley, and wow, her teeth have really grown. and claws, too. the scars on my hands are proof of that, especially when she's really hungry. but we've adjusted to each other better, especially after our trip south for my birthday. surprisingly, she wasn't afraid of the waves, which were quite high last week because of a typhoon somewhere in surigao. she didn't mind the bus ride as much as i did, either. a summary of my birthday weekend: 17-18: took a leave from work to rent a cottage by the sea in south cebu. went snorkelling only three times because of the bad visibility the first two days.  and with a portable tripod and a digital camera with a self-timer, you can just imagine how i spent my time   moon was full, though cloudy. took some long exposures of it with my trusty manual camera and tripod. 19: woke up to catch the orange (this time) sunrise on my birthday  was supposed to go diving on the day itself, but so...

lost and found by Jeneen R. Garcia to be published on November 19, 2005     Because this is supposed to come out on my birthday, I had started writing about something else entirely. And then SHE walked my way.   So there I was, taking a stroll after a solitary dinner. I was supposed to be hurrying home to write this column, but I had deliberately gone round the long way, in the hope of bumping into someone I knew. Instead, I bumped into her. She was shrieking on the sidewalk, too tiny to feed on anything but milk. As I am wont to do in these situations, I picked up the filthy ball of fur to return her to wherever her mother was. Problem was, no mother was to be found. Someone had dropped her there, a man on the sidewalk said. She would just die if I didn’t take her home, he said. What else was I supposed to do?   After a quick stop at a convenience store to buy powdered milk, I carried her home, quite appropriately, on top of my “Poetry for the Earth”...

couldn't sleep again last night. could've been the humidity. could've been post-vacation stress. anyway, decided to start reading the neil gaiman picture book that cathy  lent me. The Wolves in the Walls--"when the wolves start coming out of the walls, it's all over. everybody knows that." love the art. it's a montage of watercolors (i think) and photos. great story, too, as probably only neil gaiman could conceive of. i mean, i've read some of his Sandman stories, as well as his novel Neverwhere, but i never thought he'd be great at writing children's stories, too. after, i still wasn't sleepy, so i thought i'd start a few chapters of the other neil gaiman book cathy lent, Coraline. of course, as usual, i ended up reading the whole thing, even though my eyes were already stinging a little from tiredness. this one i'd love to see as a movie. just like Neverwhere, it was about a parallel universe. and it was just as scary, even thoug...

at the market, at the mall, visiting relatives.... just random shots to match the journal entry =)