I'll Procrastinate Later.

In the fourteen-or-so months (YIKES!) since I last posted, things have happened (as they are wont to do). Things I meant to sit down and write about but lacked the focus needed to apply myself to the task. Incidentally, "lacks the focus needed to apply himself" was a regular note my teachers left in my report cards back in the day.

Some things, you never outgrow.

Sure, I can make a lot of excuses as to why I didn't have time to blog. Tons of them! I could talk about how hard things got with my slow crawl to a Mass Communications degree and how not getting enough sleep didn't really seem like a problem in my thirties but my forties don't like it so much (I'd just turned forty when I last posted and hadn't truly started to feel the effects). At the end of the day, though, I just kept putting it all off.

That doesn't discredit the other things that have happened, however.

For one thing, school is tough on a working adult! A lot of you can attest to this. I reached the point where I suffered clear sings of burnout and developed a acute aversion to sitting down to do my assignments. Too bad you don't get to just throw your hands up and quit and still call yourself a proper adult. I totally would have done that, believe me.

So there was that... but the main thing that was giving me an excuse to put off writing was the flood.

Yup! Flood.

And I'm not talking about a flooded bathroom again. I mean a real, honest-to-goodness, house-under-water deluge.

Coming down to the end of last October - four days after our fifteenth wedding anniversary - Mrs C and I lost pretty much all our material possessions to a massive flood. Nearly everything we had accumulated over those fifteen years was gone after two days of freakishly heavy rain that left our community (as well as many other parts of our tropical paradise) under water for nearly two more days.

In our house the water got as high as five feet while others in other parts of our community saw as much as ten feet. I can't say we were the lucky ones, though. Be it five feet or ten, if you live in a flat everything you own is toast. Soggy, muddy toast.

Alas, poor Adella! I hardly knew ye!

Mrs C and I weren't home, fortunately. The rain caused a traffic nightmare in most of the country and, as a result, we were stranded in the capital where we both work. Kawaii - you remember Kawaii, right? - was the only one home and she was able to swim to safety and wait out the flood on top someone's pickup. The little so-and-so actually came right back to our street the same day all the the water had finally receded and met up with us when we were finally

able to get back in.

After several months and thousands of dollars, however, we were able to finally get back to some semblance of the life we had (though we still haven't replaced the TV and dinner table).

In some good news, I have finished with school (without having to throw my hands up and quit). By November I'll graduate and have my very own bachelor's degree! Not so comforting is the fact that, nowadays, everybody and his brother have degrees so to even consider myself marketable I'll have to jack back in and go for my master's.

Later.