In observance of Earth Hour on March 29, the world turned off its lights for 60 minutes. We happened to be in Serendra at The Fort for dinne...

“You are looking at a flawed mother . . .” is how I often begin my book talks when I have moms in the audience. I want to start on the right...

I have just finished writing the first draft of my book, Gifts of Grace 3 —all of 15 chapters, including an Author’s Note ! If I weren’t s...

As soon as the 4' x 4' oil painting of Jun Alfon, a well-known advocate of Philippine tribal groups, was up on my (and my husband...

As he makes the text of one whole book disappear before 70 children (from the slums near our church), JR says, “I have absolutely no power,...

Unless I am out of town, I wake up at five in the morning to walk. Nothing stops me from this daily one-hour exercise. Not even rain. Afte...

I am off to talk on "The Revolutionized Filipina" as a keynote speaker in the celebration of International women's Day of one ...

I would like to spend the day quietly. My eldest cousin, Esther, just left to be with the Lord. In our last clan reunion, which I chaired,...

In two days it will be March. February has been an unusually busy month for me.     I’ve been mostly at home—in my little corner pound...

Once in a while, a print ad jolts me. What I do is clip it and discuss it with my students in my Contemporary Advertising class. Today, th...

It was like having a dream where you want to wake up but can’t. You’re blinded by the twinkling of a galaxy of stars in one big, but suffoca...

Another Valentine’s Day has come and gone and I am still unsure about what it means. I know it is a stroke of marketing genius—when flowers,...

When man landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, something in me died. Sure, it was a leap forward in science but it was step backward in music...

Yesterday, two days after I posted my blog on death in which I mentioned his name as an honest doctor, our good friend Leni (Dr. Lenito Gatc...

Medical science has a lot to say about how people should lead their lives to stay healthier and live longer. Time Magazine had an article o...

My family and I, bibliophiles in varying degrees, are perpetually poised to pounce on a bookshop. As soon as MV Doulos —the biggest floati...

Great news it was indeed! JB was featured on the cover of a medical magazine in Michigan, USA. His wife, Gianina, took his photo reading th...

Some students had wanted to interview me for their class assignment on authors. So we set a date, time, and place. It was the exact date a...

From day one, I have been a fan of American Idol. Go ahead, laugh. It’s probably the only TV show I watch consistently. Unless I am in a pra...

I tried to google myself again for the second consecutive day (vanity is endless). This time I was even more curious as to what I would disc...

I can’t get over this new word in my vocabulary in 2008! Thanks to the American Dialect Society which voted it as the most creative word i...

Amazon is slipping. It was three weeks delayed in delivering JC’s gifts for his parents. My husband and I were not really bothered. Gifts ...

Tony’s gifts to me are never a surprise. I pick them out myself and he simply pays for them. I know that inwardly he winces when he sees the...

End of the merry season. As I was taking down our tree early this year, I kept rewinding in my mind what our pastor said about Christmas t...

The clan reunion that kept my pulse over-speeding all of December came through! It exceeded all our expectations, trashed all our worries, a...

I said I was coming back on the 2nd of January, but it is now the 3rd. I am lagging behind in my writing (both blog and book). I was submerg...

Tomorrow I am taking a four-day trip out of town. I am chair of our clan reunion. This is a job that comes to me every nine years by virt...

On Christmas afternoon, after a festive eve till the wee hours of the morning, our home settled into a quiet lull. Everyone was doing his o...

Around our traditional turkey dinner on Christmas eve: Tony, JC, Moi , and our chef JR. Not in photo are son JB, daughter-in-law Gianina, an...

“Please buy me P500 worth of tupig ,” my friend Irene e-mailed me when she heard I was going home to Pangasinan. “That’s a whole lo...

Two days ago I kept my whole day free for gift-wrapping. As I was about to wrap my gift for eldest son, JC, I happened to glimpse the first ...

Teaching university students in a transnational school is not stressful—or, in today’s language, not toxic but benign. A teacher can set her...

“Why spend so much time on a tree? That’s not what Christmas is all about!” My friend Sonia asked. Well, she did not really say those words....