Family news

Internet off and on all weekend.

Chano busy at a birthday party in Manila on Sunday, and then helped to take down and bring the tradefair exhibit back home.

Joy and Ruby and I went to Luz for Sunday lunch to get out of the house.

I got my passport in the mail. Joy is going to Manila today to get the visa restamped in the new passport and check if the papers are finished for me to get the survivor part of Lolo's small veterans' pension. I don't get his Pennsylvania state pension since he wasn't married when he stopped that job so didn't have a wife clause in it, for me or for his first wife.

His first wife is ailing, and has to use CPAP for sleep apnea. So I guess she won't be moving in with her son here. Alas, she refuses to leave her house, where she is a hoarder with 30 years of junk. Her daughter and grandsons keep an eye on her, but they are 100 miles away so can't visit daily.

The newest kitten is trying to eat: If they live long enough to eat solid food, they usually live, until they get older and explore and get killed by the dogs.

Me? I am depressed as usual. No decent tv shows, so I listened to audiobooks on my tablet. Lots of them on Librivox, and a lot of newer ones probably illegally posted on youtube... they get removed quickly so you have to check frequently.


Someone downloaded the book about the Himalaya disaster on Youtube, but they seem to have the chapters mixed up.

Anyway, it is a depressing book. The best survivor story? When they had to triage on who to move down to camp, two dying unconscious people were left behind because they just couldn't take everyone. Then one of them, a Texas doc, woke up and walked into camp. Guess they didn't know about Texans. Discussion on how and why from a medical standpoint here.


The most depressing part? No, not the misjudgements or that people just were to exhausted to help, but some Asians who saw the problem and instead of helping those injured and could have been saved just continued to climb to reach the peak. Their explanation? Well, we didn't know them.

that is one problem with Asia, and is implied in religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, even after those beliefs are watered down by modernism. The idea that one has a karma, and deserves what happens to  you is one subtext of reincarnation that is rarely acknowledged by western religious dabblers...(and is alas a subtext of Oprah and other new agers who insist if you think right you can be healthy wealthy and wise...the implication that it is your own fault if you are sick or poor).

True, the saints of these religions do help, and good people are good people all over the world, but Buddha, seeing a poor man die, went up the mountain to find enlightenment: he didn't start a hospital.

Christianity, however, and it's sister religions Judaism and Islam, have the idea to help your neighbor as part of it's essence of serving the deity, so even post-Christians in the west insist on being nice and helping strangers as the essence of ethics.