All Four Seasons In One Day

This is the weirdest day ever --- weather-wise, I mean. Early morning greeted us with scattered rainshowers, which turned into very dark and very gloomy late-morning and noon with no showers, then the sun shone so brightly in mid-afternoon before snow and hail started falling from the sky in the late afternoon until early evening. I looked out my office window to find everything covered with thin ice.

It was like experiencing all four seasons in just one day.


-----
Good thing I found a space at the lower level (covered) parking garage today! Whew!

In The Spotlight: Sneeze Fever

Spring has officially began last Sunday and so is allergy season. According to clinical studies the chances of a person having allergies are about 15% if neither of the person's parents has allergies and about 60% when both parents do (stat c/o of Gurunet).

In my case, I have the worst allergies. Regardless of the season, air temperature, environment, humidity level, pollution level, or whateverelsehaveyou, I sneeze continuously for at least 30 minutes to 3 hours every morning after waking up. My friend, Myra, who was often my room-mate when we used to travel together, called it my "morning sickness." But that's not the extent of it. The tiniest of dusts will have me sneezing my brains out any time of day. My other friend, Beth, with whom I shared an office for almost 2 years, can attest to that. In fact, we often exchanged "bless you's" throughout the day even after she moved to the office next to the one we used to share, which I continued to occupy.

Yesterday (Monday) morning, I woke up sneezing, with runny nose, itching eyes, and a splitting headache. These are symptoms of allergic rhinitis, more populary known as hay fever. And since my anti-allergy medication puts me to sleep, I had to skip work.

This probably explains my being a "neat freak" both at home and at work. My daily morning ritual is to "sanitize" the office in the morning when I get in using sanitation wipes. And at home, I often stayed up until 1 AM just cleaning.

---
Quote of the Day: "I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness." -- James Thurber

Digressive Ramblings...

Rain, rain, welcome back! Wouldn't be Seattle without it (1:08 PM)
We're seeing our first rainfall in 3 weeks! It's not a heavy downpour. In fact, it's just one of those occasional showers that fall randomly througout the day. I intentionally parked my car outside in an uncovered area because it's been begging to be washed for months. Sorry to say, I have no time for soaping or scrubbing. My poor car. I take comfort in the fact that it's been treated with a paint guard so dirt won't stick. I promise to give it a really good carwash this summer.

Caffein doze...(1:18 PM)
It's after 1 PM and I just gulped down a full cup of my daily caffein doze. I am not one who drinks coffee during breakfast. I usually just drink orange juice or milk in the morning and take my coffee after lunch--the time of day when I get most sleepy but doesn't have the luxury of hitting the sack.

WOoops!(1:29 PM)
I woke up late this morning--9 AM. My first failure after 3 consecutive days of successfully waking up at 6 AM and getting to work as early as 8 AM. Today, I came in at 10:30. Last night, I made the mistake of putting my cellphone (which serves as my alarm clock) right next to my pillow where I can easily reach for it and turn it off when it buzzes so I can go right back to sleep. And there was the cause of my failure to get up early! During the last three days (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday), I've been putting the cellphone on the dining table and leaving my bedroom door open so that when the alarm sounds off, I would have to force myself to get out of bed and walk all the way to the dining room to turn it off. By that time, I'd be wide awake and wouldn't be able to take anymore grant nap (or I like to call it OT for 'over-tulog'). I'd probably fail a few times before I can get this routine down again. But I'm keeping the failure quota to 3.

Food (or fool?!) for thought (1:43 PM)
Have you, my dear readers(hopefully it's plural), realized that this post's topic is a redundant? Webster defines both "digressive" and "rambling" as adjectives and lists "digressive" as a synonym of "rambling" and vice versa. But in my title, I used "rambling" as a noun rather than as an adjective. Errr, or did I use "digressive" as an adverb? Hmn...I can imagine the face of my college English teacher, Mrs. Tuason (the best English teacher I've ever had) all creased up at my digressive ramblings...Of course I could have just used "Random Thoughts" (**yaaawwnn**) for a title. But then if I did, I wouldn't have this extra paragraph of more ramblings! Oh well!

Update (3:56 PM)
Hail or snow is falling with the rain outside my office window. What a pretty sight!!!

Links! The Coolest Websites!

In case you haven't noticed, I recently added some links on the lower left side of this blog. And I'd like to give some information about some of those links:

Home Sweet Home
Links to websites about Baguio City and the Philippines, my home. Get Real Philippines and Grabeh.com can be a bit shocking for the uninitiated but I happen to share many of the ideas expressed in these websites. As a matter of fact, I wrote one article for Get Real once, a long time ago. The article is still there but I'm not going to tell you which one it is. Those who know me and where I stand in terms of our country's "condition" should know which one is my article. The Tagalog website is refreshingly cool and relaxing and a very fun one at that. I had fun trying to answer the salawikain and reading some of the tula, sawikain, and the origin and stories behind some of the more popular tagalog slang or salitang kanto.

Good Reads
I'm continually amazed by the vast amount of evidences that prove the existence of the one true God, creator of all things. Evidences that disprove the big-bang and accidental self-organization theories of the existence of life and its evolution. These evidences were discovered by scientists -- the very people who question the existence of God and who claim that there is no proof. They've discovered the proof but are too blind or too stubborn to admit that what they've found are the very proof that they've been searching for. The "Phinest" Source is my favorite because it gives a very extensive explanation of the "Phi", a.k.a. golden number, a.k.a. the building blocks of nature, which I think is the most beautiful number ever discovered and which is also the biggest proof of God's intelligent design of life and of the universe. It's no wonder this number is also called the Divine Proportion.

Cool Blogs
This is a collection of blogs by friends and family.

O. P. M.
O - Original
P - Pilipino
M - Music
Need I say more?

Affiliations
Jargon - my college batch mailing list
Ex-GP - the best people I've ever had the pleasure of working with. I'm glad we're able to keep in touch through this list. Afterall, we used to be one big happy family and I'd like to think we still are.
The Ground - ah, Gounders! So close to my heart! Ten years and still going stronger, better, and bigger!

------
Know of any cool site I missed? Email me or post it here as a comment. Thanks!

Mt. Baker Scenic Byway

Mt. Baker Scenic Byway was a 3 hour drive from Redmond via I-405 and I-5 north. The 50-mile climb to the mountain top was an uneventful (but not exactly boring) hour and half drive. There were very few houses and they seemed to be at least a mile or two away from each other and almost no people. After driving for about 30 minutes of seeing only livestock, we amused ourselves by searching for, and counting the number of people we saw who were outside their homes. We must have seen about a couple hundred cattle and less than 10 human beings! HAHA.

Halfway through the climb, we stopped by the Silver Lake County Park located on the edge of the Mt. Baker National Forest. The lake was calm, beautiful, reflective (literally), and so flat and quiet. We didn't stay too long. It wasn't fishing season so there was really not much to do except enjoy the calming effects of the lake and its sorrounding forest.

Next stop was the refreshing view of Nooksack Falls down Wells Creek road. The water flows from the North Fork Nooksack River, at the top of which are huge glaciers from which icy water flows through the river. We stayed there a bit longer taking pictures of the forest from one side of the river and from the the other side, which bore the sign "No Tresspasing," but we went anyway to get closer to the river atop the water falls and to get a good view of the gigantic rocks that anchored the trees of the forests on either side of the Nooksack River. The track down the water falls view point was muddy and slopy but it was a short hike and the spectacular view more than made up for it!

This is a view of Picture Lake, at the very top of the Mt. Baker Scenic Byway park. This was what we hoped to see when we got there. But what we did see was nothing but ice and snow covering the entire lake. No picture views. No reflection of Mt. Baker on the lake. Just white snow everywhere.

The temperature at the top was way below freezing point. It wasn't snowing. Nor was it raining but it was freezing cold. And guess what, we had no proper jackets (not for this temperature anyway), no gloves, no bonets. Hour hands, nose, ears, were frozen. But we didn't care. The view of Mt. Baker and the cascades was so dramatic. It didn't look real. It was like looking at an oil painting. We couldn't resist posing and taking as many shots as we possibly could in an attempt to preserve the histrionic sight.

We headed back before it turned dark. The trip to Mt. Baker was too short but even though we didn't see as much as we would have wanted, what we did see was enough to make the weekend a glorious one with nature.

-----
Of course what would a weekend be without a trip to the outlet malls, right? Well, we did go and spent some...We ended the day with a nice japanese dinner and a visit (well it was more than just a visit) to a nearby Wallmart.

Lovely Weekend...

I love weekends, especially when the weather is good for going out. It will be nice to go out again on another northwest adventure. Tomorrow it's off to Mt. Baker Scenic Byway we go. But first things first, Friday night movies with Million Dollar Baby and of course, Numbers on TV tonight at 10. Sunday will probably be a quiet rest day, which I'm also looking forward to, unless the guys come up with a plan after the Mt. Baker trip.

HAPPY WEEKEND, dear readers!

Time like these...

Sometimes trying to make the best of what's around can be hard and frustrating. It can be a lot of hard work just making things work. I'm at a place where things are good: good job, good company(i mean people to hang out with), good community, clean environment, peaceful...almost a dream place to live! But it's not! Somethings are missing --- the bigger, more important ones that without them, everything else, no matter how great, is really just the bear minimum.

"Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go." -- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

How true!

-----
Just missing the love ones from home. I'm really really really feeling so homesick right now.