battening down the hatches

A supertyphoon is off the western Philippines. It should not hit us, but the edge is bringing rain and sucking the monsoon rains into the area. Our area is signal one with flood/landslide warnings:

So everyone is battening down the hatches.

I got money early from the bank just in case. And the usual relatives are asking for medicine money just in case we get hit.

I am still trying to get the backup generator fixed (both backup generators have minor problems and don't work, but right now the big generator has been fixed so should work in case of prolonged electrical brownouts).

Here, we usually shop from day to day at the palenke. We are in the working class/middle class area of the city, and the poorer folk don't have refrigerators so locals (and our cook) tend to shop for fresh food and supplies every day. It's not like the USA, where I would shop once a week for supplies and store them in the fridge/freezer...although things are changing, and we do have fully stocked supermarkets that take G cash etc. at the mall.

that, by the way, is why SPAM is so beloved: no, not the email type but the pink food that everyone loves to hate, except for those here in Asia where it is beloved.

You see, if one gets a visitor or wants to eat meat the alternative is killing and cleaning a chicken.

So in case of typhoon, a can or two of spam comes in handy, or keep a live chicken or two for unexpected guests.

Come to think of it, we already killed two of the chickens that are cared for by our help in the side garden: It is his birthday party today and they cooked them yesterday and put the food into our refrigerator

Here, we get hit with two or three typhoons a year, but the last big one was the week before the supertyphoon hit the Visayas in 2013 and killed a lot of people and wrecked a lot of houses. So most of the help and publicity went to that area, while we were off line (electricity, internet, water) and with blocked roads (No fresh foods or deliveries for medicines, and the banks were short of cash) for a week from an earlier typhoon.

What saved us then was our own water pump that Lolo had put in, and my backup generator after the big generator broke.

When I see those affluent kids shouting no fossil fuel, I think that they should have to cope without all the comforts of modern life: starting with their cellphones

You see, when we had the prolonged brownout back then, some neighbors came for water, but most of them came to recharge their cellphones for free, and a lot of small businesses put out signs: Cellphone charge 25 pesos (about 50 cents)

Priorities: mainly to check in on relatives that they were safe

We are getting notices that Starlink will soon be available here in the Philippines, but since the rice buyer's check bounced and she fled the country with our money (and the money from a lot of her other customers) we are short cash at the present.

Oh well: As Lolo told me: If I live here I will always have rice to eat

Now, if only we manage to plant and get a decent crop without the weather destroying it, as it has in the past

No it's not global warming: these things happen all the time, alas.