family news

 have you been reading all those happy happy elitist green essays on using natural resources to grow crops?

Well, the price of chicken Manure is up, and Kuya is trying to find if he can buy it cheaper than from his usual resource. Sigh. And of course diesel is up, meaning more money to prepare the fields for planting rice.

He is hoping to keep the rice organic, but if he can't get organic fertilizer, he might have to plant part of our fields with ordinary chemicals.

By the way: Under the land reform of many years ago, most of Lolo's family's ancestral land was "bought" for low prices by the tenant. There is a limit on how much a person can own, and foreigners cannot own anything here. So much of our rice comes from subcontracted farmers, who we help with finance and equipment and supervise they are actually growing organically (no cheating... at least no cheating that we can detect. This is the Philippines you know)...

Certified organic rice can command a higher price, but it is vulnerable to pests etc. Ducks help keep some of the insects down. Yum.... Balut (fertilized duck embryos)...

Joy is in Manila: The people who rented one of our properties there sort of went broke when everything shut down: They managed to stay afloat by doing e commerce, but this meant long trips to their customers, (with the high price of diesel, and during the epidemic the cost of numerous covid tests)...

Since most of their customers are in more affluent areas,so now that things are open, they plan to movecloser to the customers.

the bad news: The only reason they stayed in our property is that we left them stay rent free for the last year, with the agreement they would make up what they owed us with this year's rent... which now we won't get. 

Theoretically we could sue, but that would probably cost more money than the lost rent, and they probably don't have the money anyway.

So now we have new renters, and once they open we should again be getting a small income from that shop, but first we had to fix the roof, the ceiling, the wiring, the water pipes, and renovate the front for more room. And so more money from my small retirement savings, since although the shop is in Ruby's name, the agreement is that the income goes to my name (although most of it is actually being sent to pay her college expenses, so we are not mixing up the rice businesses finances and our private expenses).

In the meanwhile, I am feeling better... I was tiring and sleeping all the time with a lot of aches and pains but couldn't figure out why. But after reading how one can get slow covid after a mild case of Omicron, I wonder if this was the problem... I had a cold about a month before this started, but didn't get tested because I wasn't sick. I am double vaxxed, but no boosters because they have limited help in the new varients, although if a bad variant comes through I probably will get a third vax.

right now, there are only a few cases (under 100) in the country, which I suspect is because no one is being tested unless quite ill. The bad news is that a handful of cases of the newest omicron 2 varient has been diagnosed in Manila and among tourists. But this one supposedly is less dangerous and more infectious than previous variants.

Only half the country has been vaccinated, and we have been pretty well open for the last month (masks and distancing indoors). Kuya took me to the mall and they wouldn't let him in so he had to borrow my extra mask. But we don't need face shields now, and of course, the cynical take is that the quarantine regulations were lifted for the election campaign rallies, and cynically saying that the quarantine will be restarted after the election. We'll see.

People are tired of being indoors, and the deaths from lack of medicine and poverty are worse than the mild covid variants that are around now.