Bad news for now: Joy's father is in a coma, and they took him to the hospital. He is in his 80s and has high blood pressure so I suspect it is a stroke.
Up to now, he still goes out to the fields to supervise the rice and veggies grown on their small farm.
So she left early this morning to go there (she is the eldest in the family so is essentially the head of the family). Keep them all in your prayers.
To make things worse, he mom has Parkinson's disease and needs a lot of care. They do have a part time caregiver during the day so that the family there can work.
Keep them in your prayers.
My news: last week, we finished the paperwork to get my retirement visa approved. Lots of slowness getting the proper forms sent to us, and then we had to go to the bank to pay the fee (thanks to Covid we don't have to go to the Manila office like we did in the past).
The payment is in American dollars, or in pesos, but the exchange rate has been fluctuating and they advised us to pay in dollars.
So we got dollars out of my dollar account at our usual bank, and then went to the bank that handles the government papers, and paid in dollars... no problem...?
but the fee was five dollars US. And our lowest bill was a 20 dollar bill.
The bank said, no we won't give you change so you can pay the fee, so Joy went to other nearby banks to try to get it (long lines due to covid) but they said no also. Finally Joy found a private money changer who had a five dollar bill but not 20 dollars in change, but she said please so he gave her what he had and she will get the rest late.
So that is done and hopefully I am ok for another year.
Kuya is busy with the rice harvest: the typhoon missed us but there has been a lot of rain, and this caused a delay in harvesting.
We do have our own thresher and in the past harvested by hand and then threshed the rice for our fields and for our contract farmers, but now we rent the machine to harvest and thresh (separate the grain from the stem). And we had to wait our turn to use it. And then there was a delay because it got stuck in the mud for awhile.
I don't have a video of our harvest, but this one is from nearby Pampanga and gives you an idea of how it works:
Sigh
For Green types who see the wonderfulness of back to nature, maybe they might want to go out into the fields and spend a day bent over cutting rice by hand, and then budling it up by hand and then putting it on a cart pulled by a waterbuffalo, the taken to thresh by hand too.
Then it needs to be dried before storing so that it doesn't get bugs or mold. We had bought a rice drier but it burnt out and so now we either pay a rice merchant to dry it for us, or we dry it the old fashioned way in the sun.
During harvest season, that means either on a tarp, or on a road or parking lot.
The sun will dry it, but you have to move it around to dry properly, and you have to remove it if it threatens to rain. And if it is too rainy, it means poor quality rice. After one bad typhoon, a couple years ago, we "lost" most of our harvest when our drier broke and we had to wait too long to get it dried. We did save much of the rice, but since we sell gourmet brown rice, the quality was too poor for us to use it, so we had to sell for a lower price to be used mainly for feeding animals.
In other news, Kuya's daughter is in college in the US and even though she had her shots, got some kind of a virus and is now having brain fog. Or maybe it is from the stress of college (she's third year).
She is planning to go to Hawaii for student teaching in January.
What is it about Hawaii and student teaching? Because my niece is there now doing her student teaching rotation, but will come back home in December.
Ruby told me it is to have the students learn about multiculturalism but hey, her college is in Minnesota, which has a large Native America, Hmong, and Somali population in the Twin Cities.
But Hawaii, unlike Minnesota, is considered safer for student teachers, although they do have a teacher shortage, probably because of the isolation.
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