Life update & my first post of 2015

Umm… Happy New Year?

My first post of 2015 comes embarrassingly late. I made the conscious decision to take the holidays of 2014 slow, but I had no idea I would be this slow coming out the gate into 2015.

For those of you who are new to my blog via Rappler, welcome! It isn’t normally this silent around here, but I’m working on getting back into my blogging groove. After almost two months away, so much has happened that I want to share with you.

In December I had the opportunity to tag along with Marlon on a business trip to Linz, Austria…

and we squeezed in a day trip to Salzburg, much to the delight of this lifelong fan of The Sound of Music.

Do you suffer from asthma? Did you know that winter is the peak season for hospitalizations due to asthma? I learned this the hard way when, upon returning from Austria, I ended up in the emergency room and was confined for two days for acute asthma. I was discharged from the hospital less than 24 hours before our 17-hour flight to Manila. Fun times.

But then, soon enough, I was home. With family.

And friends.

And though I made a deliberate effort to meet up with fewer people this time around, my heart was still so full. (So was my calendar. And my stomach.)

And though there were times I swore this would be our last Christmas in the Philippines until Tala turns a manageable age (six seems like a nice round number), mostly it was when we were suffering from the worst jet lag, or watching yet another death-defying jaywalker (carrying a baby or child, no less!) dash in the dark across C5, or sitting through the most ridiculous traffic jams.

Other times, I just felt inexplicably happy. I learned to make my homeland part of my dreams again, and admitted silently to myself that part of me would only truly be complete in the land of my birth.

We celebrated a quiet Christmas and New Year at home with family, and Marlon and I celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary together in Coron.

When we got back to Amsterdam, we struggled with even more jet lag for a week (yay!) not to mention a stubborn flu that hit all three of us at the same time and overstayed its welcome for over a week (double yay!).

In between those nasty events, however, we got to work on something fun and exciting involving two filmmakers, a very expensive film-grade camera, a big international brand, and some of our most cherished places in Amsterdam. I’m dying to share it with you here, but I can’t just yet. Patience is not my virtue.

Oh, and I got published on Rappler! Conventional blogging wisdom dictates that I should have had blog posts ready and scheduled to take advantage of the huge surge of traffic I got from Rappler, but real life just doesn’t work that way sometimes.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to. A little random, a lot real. I seem to have forgotten most of the things I wanted to do this year, but I promise to put my blogging hat back on and start the nitty-gritty work of sharing the places and discoveries that inspired me while I was offline. I guess that’s just what it means to live now, write later!

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