Daily Report: Holy Week Summary

Holy week is over... but summertime sure isn't. As they say: It's not the heat, it's the humidity. They were thinking of the jungle when they said that. Temperatures here are in the low-to-mid 90's only, but it's sticky hot.

Fortunately, I'm surrounded on all sides by cool natural spring pools for my bathing pleasure. Work improved immensely for unknown reasons over the last week, and I was meeting all of my minimums by noontime, and then taking off to the pools and rivers in the afternoon. At the same time, the girls were all up at 3:30 a.m. to do Jesus-related things, and then slept all day.

On Friday, of course, was "sacrifice day". Epril and her friends went 1500 feet up a mountain into the pre-dawn sky in the annual Catholic tradition of sharing in Jesus' suffering on Good Friday. As you can see, at this hour, even the camera was bleary-eyed.

Epril said she nearly passed out from exhaustion during the climb, but as you can see in this strike-a-pose-for-Jesus moment with Lherma, Inday, and Susan, she is looking mmm-mmm-good.

Epril and the crew after about 3½ hours of walking into the upper reaches of the troposphere. I would have just about been waking up now.


Tyson has almost doubled in size in the
past 2 weeks. But he still gets carried
everywhere by his mommy. People
think Epril is carrying around a baby
when she does this.

We're hopefully going to get Tyson's
ears and tail done this week. Then
he'll look dorky for the next 6 months
with his ears all wrapped up.Anyway, we spent the rest of the weekend swimming. Jams and Maggie came by on with their friend Alfred (a merchant marine captain) on Saturday and took us up to Cahoulugan Pool Resort for the afternoon. The drink of the day was an old standby Filipino favorite: One bottle of gin mixed with one bottle of Rose's Lime Juice... straight. (Yes, you're right to shudder at the thought.) Surprisingly, if you mix about one part of that mixture with one part 7-Up, I discovered that it's not too bad.

On Sunday, Susan's new boyfriend (a family driver for some Koreans) came by and took the girls out to the beach. I'm not a fan of the nearby beaches (except for Agutayan Island), so I stayed home and worked.

Tyson is a biter, we're learning. Actually, he just walks around with his mouth open and wraps it around anything and everything he comes into contact with. He doesn't really chew or bite down much. He's just tasting stuff, I think. I've had a tough time convincing everybody to give him a little smack whenever he does that, but when I explained that while he is a cute little 4-kilogram pup with small teeth wrapped around their thumbs now... in a year, he is going to be 40 kilogram dog with big teeth wrapped around their arms, then they got the picture.