family news

Electricity and internet now on

All of us are okay The farm buildings were essentially destroyed as was much of the rice crop (some can be harvested for animal feed but too low quality to sell for human consumption). Our higher fields should be okay though.

The greenhouses/organic veggie project, which had just started to produce crops to sell, was flattened. The roof over the small rice mill and rice drier blew off but we think that the machines are okay. Rice harvest starts this week, and we'll have more news as we harvest to see if the crop survived. The chicken farm is no longer there...luckily the renter had just harvested his last chicken crop and decided to leave, so there were no chickens to bury. So we are going to have to tighten the belt for awhile: Maybe we can just concentrate on organic rice for awhile. electrical wires in town were badly damaged by falling trees, so we have been on generators. We brought the large generator down from the farm, but it broke down after one day, so we survived on the smaller one until it got fixed yesterday...the small generator doesn't run airconditioning, with the air filter and dehumidifier that we need for asthma. and it didn't run the water pump, but it will run lights and fans.... Luckily our roofs in town stayed on, and we are high enough that we didn't get flooded, but we lost the back gate, a couple of trees in the garden, and a lot of windows.

Some of the relatives and help in San Lorenzo were flooded out, and moved into Doy's house until the water level went down.

Chano and Joy got home from Manila before the typhoon hit badly, but Ruby stayed later to see a concert and caught a ride home in the pickup truck (making rice deliveries). the road was flooded at San Miguel, so they pulled over to sleep in a gas station parking lot. Then the water started to rise, and they took refuge first inside the store, then on the roof of the gas station store, and ate a lot of the junk food snacks that the owner told them to grab since the store was being filled quickly with rising water, and climb up onto the roof with others who were stranded there. Ruby, being a young teen, grabbed only her cellphone: no blanket, nor her computer. The good news is that she could call here to say they were okay, but they were out in the rain for five hours.

The eye of the typhoon went through just after midnight; this was the second time I've experienced the eye, but the last one was not a full blown storm. This one was: Lots of smashing and banging and then silence for 15 minutes, along with lightning and light rain, and then suddenly the wind came from the other direction and we were back in the storm.

Lolo, being hard of hearing, slept through the whole thing. He had a case of influenza and is still coughing. Not too sick but when you are 88 any infection is serious. Dr. Danny came to check him.

With the lack of full electricity, we had no water pump, so lived on city water, which thank God was working okay. but that meant carrying buckets of water to flush the toilet, and to wash.

The thin white dog Sophie had six puppies three days after the storm, and another dog is due any day now.