If there is one thing we can be thankful about the lockdown,  it was the opportunity to stay at home and become one real family. We only had each other and there were no distractions such as office meetings and late night deadlines. For  three months, we listened to our stories, helped clean the house and do other chores together, watch TV eat, laugh, sing, dance, paint, exercise and pray together. Indeed, we were in the best place we could be -- at home. There's no place like home The Enhanced Communiry Quarantine has also definitely  given us time to transform our house into a wonderful place to stay during the hot summer months, and appreciate it as a safe haven during the pandemic. And while at home, we all learned the "new normal" together -- basically distancing ourselves to the rest of the world and becoming healthy, fit and hygienic -- by eating nutritious home-made meals, hydrating, getting the right sleep and having some exercise routine, keeping ourselv...

At the first Father's Day celebration, young women handed out red roses to their fathers during a church service, and large baskets full of roses were passed around, with attendees encouraged to pin on a rose in honor of their fathers – red for the living and white in memory of the deceased. Sonora Smart Dodd, the woman who started the celebration,  brought her infant son along on a horse-drawn carriage ride through the city, bringing roses and gifts to home-bound fathers. That was the scenario 110 years ago as documented by the Spokane Regional Convention and Visitor Bureau. Thanks to Dodd's desire to honor her own dad, and her campaign to designate a day for the man of the house, Father's Day has steadily gained popularity and is celebrated with the same importance as that of Mother's day through the years. Our 2019 family's dining experience tells it all: Practically all restaurants at the newly opened SM North Park Inn bridgeway was filled m...

  Touring Lopburi   Central Thailand’s Lopburi is one of the oldest cities in the country. It was within the large Khmer empire in times gone by and was briefly the capital of the Ayutthaya Kingdom. Today, Lopburi is known to be the sunflower province of Thailand and home to many temples which the country is famous for. There's also a road in Lopburi where macaque monkeys roam and live around with the locals. Unfortunately, the sunflowers were not yet in bloom at the time of our visit. But the monkeys in Phra Prang Sam Yod live among the Thais. They freely roam the street and jump onto the cars to look for food. The locals had made it a point to leave foods or bananas for the monkeys on top of their cars. Some locals feed them on the street. Temples are everywhere. Even  street rotundas are made of old, restored temples. We visited Somdet Phra Narai National Museum where special, ancient temples can be found. King Narai the Great, King of Ayutthaya during the sec...

With two months grounded in our own houses, we realized we are actually strangers in our own place we call home. President Duterte was correct in saying we may still have parts of our house unvisited and the lockdown maybe the best time to discover them. He said this at the announcement of home quarantine mid March to abate the spread of Covid-19 virus among Filipinos. Was I bored during the nearly two months enhanced community quarantine? Not at all. And I was never upset that I couldn't leave the house knowing that the frontliners want to go home and enjoy the peace and love of their families as well. There were so much projects within the house left unattended due to lack of time and our busyness outside of home: wooden parts and furnitures need revarnishing, old but usable and unused, unwanted clothes have to be dispatched or given away, media tokens and events giveaways need to be stashed as well, re-arranging the house to give way for work-from-home set up, rooftop garde...

Las Piñas City: Vibrant, competitive and productive By Leony R. Garcia As a private citizen and way before she became chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, Senator Cynthia A. Villar has been very busy and active in implementing her own environmental programs (through Villar SIPAG or Social Institute for Poverty Alleviation and Governance) in her hometown, Las Piñas City. Her livelihood projects have environmental component since all of them use wastes as raw materials: the waterlily basket-weaving enterprise and the handmade paper factory; coconut husks for the coconet weaving enterprise and the charcoal-making factory; kitchen and garden wastes for the organic composting facility; and plastic wastes for the plastic recycling factory that produces school chairs. For the record, everything started in the lady senator’s hometown, Las Piñas, and now it’s all over the Philippines giving small businesses to many of our kababayans while helping m...

It's not really where you travel but where God wants you to be. I've learned this during my last travel in Thailand in December 2019. It's a good thing we were able to travel abroad before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted all local and international travels. My daughter Angeline, together with her Ate Melissa, were supposed to visit Osaka and Hiroshima in November 2019. Un fortunately, we were denied the Japanese visa even if Angeline and I already  had travel history in Japan in 2017. Of course, we were saddened when our visa were denied. Angeline wanted to see Osaka again and meet friends, teachers at the Saori training center. Likewise, I was excited to meet my niece and her family again. They were based in Chiba Prefecture during our first trip in 2017 and we would be visiting them in her newfound place in Kure, Hiroshima, where she's currently working as a kindergarten teacher. But really God has other plans. And so we made it in Thailand instead. Just ...