42 days to go...

I felt so relieved when I came home late today, after midnight. I had been out having dinner with a close friend with whom I used to work before in Thailand. He had a colleague with him who had come to Manila for the first time.

We had dinner in a Spanish restaurant and enjoyed the tapas, the terraces, the palm trees, and the merry making on Friday night.

After dinner we went for a ride along the boulevard, intending to go as far as Intramuros. But the whole area turned out to be one huge traffic jam. And so many of them were smoke-belching buses and trucks, who seemed to be on the road at night when their trail of pollution would be (slightly) less obvious than during the day. My friends arrived back at their hotel after two hours of traffic jam. For me, to arrive home with cleaner air and without noise was marvelous.

I was reminded this evening that to be friends with someone, we need to regularly reach out to each other, and that’s what we did this evening, with lots of laugther. It was so relaxing, and I realized that I had been going through a serious bout lately. It was good to laugh again and be generous with myself. After all, I have been making good progress with my journey to rebirth at 50. Except with laughing more.

Friendship and laughter, is there anything better?

And what a pleasant day it was too! After getting up very early, the day warmed up when I met two office colleagues in the same hospital waiting room, all lined up in hospital gowns for the same proctosigmoidoscopy test as part of our annual PEs. I got to see a part of my body that I was unfamiliar with until today!

Then my office IT friend got my ActiveSync to work with my new PDA phone, ast least in the office network environment. I found a nice new printer for my daughter (one set of cartridges costs half the printer). And I had a photocopied booklet on becoming a coach bound with a metal spiral and pleasing green cover.

This evening, while waiting outside Cafe Havana for my two Thai friends friends to arrive (they were held up by traffic), I composed two haiku poems and wrote a collection of thoughts. A smile touched my heart.

Photograph: Art at thefiction@love exhibition in Singapore's Art Museum, June 2006.