Daily Report:Crabs to Jazz, Beginnings and Ends

Had a fair day of work today. I think that the end of my employment at my company is finally in sight. In both pushing and pulling fashion, things are working towards a denouement of my career as a medical transcriptionist.

In push, my company is going bankrupt (much to my surprise... it was only after cutting salaries by two thirds that they became profitable for the first time in 7 or 8 years; hell of a time to go all Chapter 11 on my ass) and is being purchased by their leading industry competitor. Although the corporate promise is that "most everyone" will keep their jobs in the takeover, I now cannot miss the writing on the wall.

In pull, I have new opportunities opening up here in The Philippines which I had always planned to start working on in the near future, but now are actually taking shape in very exciting and promising fashion. Assuming things work out, you'll start seeing my nisus take shape in the next month or two.

A lady came by the house today selling a bag full of live crabs, which we purchased for 200 pisos ($4). Mamma Nila put the crabs in a cooking pot, but the crabs weren't having any part of the cooking process, and in short order we had a living room full of crabs... none of whom had rubber bands on their claws.


After getting the crabs back in the pot, I had a very nice lunch of crab meat.

In the evening, it was out to Spooks where we met up with Dave and Jessa for Spooks' all-you-can-eat non-Filipino-food buffet (200 pisos... still a great deal!) and 45 pisos ($1) San Miguel beers.

The sujet du jour was the arrival of electrical shortages in Northern Mindanao, with every-other-day outages expected all around the region, 4 or 5 hours at a time. Supremely inconvenient to those of us who use electricity to earn a living. (Tomorrow, it will be out to the hardware store to invest in a home generator.)

After Spooks, we all went over to Limketkai shopping area for more drinking. It had been our plan to meet up with Warren (just back from Australia) and his wife Jen for drinks at Sky Park — the outdoor lounge area on a wide bridge over the traffic below — but it had been rented out for the evening to a private party. Instead, we wound up at the nearby strip of boutique restaurants with an outdoor seating area that spanned in front of all of them, which had a nice jazz band playing. We actually met up with our photographer friend, Rene, and his friend from England, and their wives... making 10 of us out for the evening enjoying the music. A great time all in all.

After that, our driver Chris drove Epril and I, Dave and Jessa back to Jasaan.