Change of blog title

With the recent change of my domain name will come also a change in my blog sub-title and blog entries. I plan to focus on something which I am most familiar of, for the mean time I cannot divulge it here. . . hehehe. . . as if a big change will happen. . . I’m actually just over excited to give this site a new and better look. . . This site reflects my personality . . .  I keep on changing my hairstyle, dress, accessories – my outer look in particular, but nothing is changed within me.

My new domain name is www.durezadolina.com

I bought a new domain name at $15 per year and the money I used to purchase such domain name did not come from own pocket. It was the fruit of my curiousity in getting myself involved in paid blogging. Sometimes it pays to take the risk in doing things which you once thought to be a scam. 

Survival Tips From My Mother

 

My mother, whose name was Irenea, was a small woman with a big heart.  She barely stood an inch or two below five feet but her spirits were majestically higher than her own height. She never stood small in her daily battle against the financial complexity brought about by the inverse proportion of meager income earned and number of mouths fed. She conquered all obstacles in life without the least hint of giving up. She taught us how to face the difficult reality and survive poverty.

 

We learned to laugh and cry at the storms and hurricanes, ups and downs, and roses and thorns of our life. We learned to make people believe that we were not financially hard-up and, good thing, they looked up at us as wealthy.

 

My mother was tough and physically active. There were no idle moments for her especially when she was younger.  The petite body never hindered her from doing manly activities like cutting the firewoods using an ax, climbing the rooftop of our house to fix the typhoon-damaged roof, and making a chicken “house” out of scrap – and we all “inherited that talent”, may I correct, my elder sister outdone my mother’s manliness for she not only climbed the roof but dared to scale up the lanky coconut trees in our backyard. My mother probably would have survived if she was lost somewhere in the middle of the Amazon jungle. That’s why we called her Amazona.

 

 

The most important phase our life was our growing up years. Many did not know what our family went through. When we were younger, striving to live each day was a struggle we brawled together with our parents. We had never had the comfort and luxuries in life – no television even. To pass away time, mostly during summer, we just ran off to the beach or climbed up the guava tree in our backyard.  We became contented with the basic necessities for we didn’t have other options anyway.

 

In a way, the intricate experiences we went through gave us some useful tips on how to continue to exist during difficult times. These real-life experiences helped in molding us to become what we are now and these are my extraordinary saving graces for my own family.

 

 

Never discuss financial problems in public. My mother reminded us to be always discreet with our financial status. She, most often than not, never allowed us to let others know with respect to our monetary problems. It was unavoidable, though, especially when we were made to bring the “trademarked” one-eight sheet of intermediate paper-  with “Good For” as the heading and my mother’s signature (sometimes forged by my sisters  whose golden hands can replicate of signature of my mother) as the closing, to the Man Bening – the bakery owner who allowed us to purchase on credit breads, some of our favorites were pan de carne, pan de leche, and ilang-ilang, or to Man Erie or Mana Lucy- the meat vendors who gave us a kilo credit  limit of meat.

 

Look and feel decent even if you only have a single cent in your pocket, and even if that money can only afford you to buy a stick of banana cue for lunch, just savor its sweetness for it will definitely help you energize.

 

Learn to recycle. We learned to recycle our food – we concocted a variety of new menu out of our leftover viands, vegetable and rice. Whatever was left from our previous day’s banquet was re – cooked into a new food and, literally, there was nothing left for the dogs to eat. Our dresses were recycled too – the long and outmoded dresses  given by our Aunt in the United States were cut and re-sewn by my mother, despite her inadequate sewing skills, to give it a new look.  Her favorite and only style of dress for all of us girls was a gartered on the waist balloon skirt with matching spaghetti-strapped blouse. Our school bags and notebooks were never spared from recycling. The unwritten pages from our notebooks, from the previous year, were compiled to make one or two new notebooks.

 

Never add mouths to feed. My mother neither employed maids nor encouraged relatives to live with/work for us – she believed they were plainly extra mouths to feed. All of us in the family were involved in doing the household chores, the young girls did the cleaning of the house, my elder sister and my mother did the washing of our clothes and the boys did other stuffs outside of the house. This does not mean however that we did this as our routine activities. Sometimes the girls worked the manly stuff when the boys were all away and the vice versa. For that, all of us learned how to cook and bake food – both for humans and the pigs, wash the dishes, sew our own clothes, clean up our mess and the whole house, and grown plants.

 

Plant. We had lots of fruit bearing trees, vegetables and other ornamental plants surrounding our house. Aside from harvesting and eating fresh fruits and vegetables, we were able to save, and even earn, money. My elder bothers were even made to sell coconuts when our finances run out.

 

Pray. We were taught to pray for guidance and more blessings but were not taught to rely purely on prayers. Prayers must be coupled with actions.

 

Poverty was our passport to get a college diploma – we were made to believe, rather forced to believe, that education was the only way to be freed from poverty. All of us seven children managed to get a college degree, and majority of us pursued post graduate degrees, even if going to college was a bumpy ride.

 

My mother may not have the chance to read this article anymore, for she has been dead for more than a year now. Had she read this, she would have had a hearty laugh and I am a hundred percent sure, we would have a day-long reminiscing of the past conversation. Happy Mother’s Day!

 

DORISDAY Is My Blogchild

y blog is just a few months old, nonetheless, it already found a niche in the blogosphere. I may not have much traffic in my site compared to those who have a thousand or more site visitors each day, somehow, I managed to seize the attention of some people to take time to read the entries in my blogsite.  I am overly grateful to those who have visited my blogsite – and to those who will drop by this site in the future – for they have greatly inspired me to carry on my affair with my new found fascination in the world wide web, that is, blogging. Although being swept to blogging was only accidental and having this site was once purely experimental, I seem so unstoppable from improving my blogsite and learning the intricacies in the blogosphere. Then, as I get to learn the technical know-how of making a blog site, understand the basic literature of web blogging, take some pointers from other bloggers, study other blog sites, and read the FAQs, I found myself hooked in blogging and kept that urge in beautifying my blog site to increase my visitors.

 

My blogsite is my months old baby and it will grow together with my two-year old daughter – who gives me the inspiration to write and whose daily activities enrich my mind with unlimited subjects to talk about. Having and maintaining a blogsite is like taking care of a baby who needs an everyday pampering,  a daily dose of vitamins (in a form of blog entries),  giving a good and comfortable life, and being your constant companion.   The fantastic energy brought about by blogging is similar to the happiness brought about by having a child.

 

Dorisday is my personal website where my simple and wildest thoughts are emblazoned in letters, my interests are discovered, my daily activities are transcribed, and the stories I picked somewhere are re told and divulged.

Snooping Around With Dorisday

The sub-title of this blogsite used to be “it’s all about me”, but now I have decided to change it to conform with my previous blog entries. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts to make more informative, interesting and attention-grabbing stories about me, I came to realize that I cannot talk too much about me for, in the first place, there is nothing interesting to talk about me anyway. When I made a review of my blog entries a few days ago, I notice that I get more interesting and unfamiliar topics worthy to be talked of from other people’s mouth. A lot of unrelated, peculiar, surreal, and sensational stories outside the confines of my own limited world seem like delightful and interesting for me to scoop and write something  about it. I only need to extensively open my two eyes and expand my earsdrums to its maximum potential to increase the sound decibels of my precious hearing and grasp the unedited stories , or even the casual conversations, of other humans existing in close proximity to me. In some instances, I have already exercised this extraordinary ability to listen to other people’s conversation without being noticed, in other words, I have tried eavesdropping.  While listening to their stories, and while the left hemisphere of my brain is processing the collected data to my memory cells, the right hemisphere of my brain is, in turn, concocting up some thoughts  that would probably be weaved to the actual stories and come up with an original write-up. Everyday, from the time you step out of your homes until you reach your point of destination, you meet different people from different walks of life who have different tales to tell. Some of these stories may be boring, others are just ordinary while some others are pretty exciting. But don’t underestimate the ordinary ones for those are better sources of information to create a more exciting write up. Out of eavesdropping, you learn other people’s stories, learn new things, get opinions, commentaries, enjoy some tales, adapt the moral stories and best of all, your get some free mental exercise to loosen up the iron barriers in between the cell membranes of your brain that causes mental lapses and some memory gaps through remembering what you have heard. Eavesdropping is in a way similar to watching the showbiz talk shows, regular TV novelas and even the primetime news for they all talk about people, events, styles, real life dramas and the hosts make comments and air their opinions. Eavesdropping, though, is more personal and limited, is nothing different to what the reporters do when they try to get a scoop.  You see, there are good and positive things that is brought about by eavesdropping, although I am just giving some justice to the negative connotation of my new found ‘bad’  hobby of snooping, that will surely make one’s existence worthy.  

THE WIDGETS IN MY SIDEBAR

As I go on with this experimental website project of mine, I get to appreciate the different personal websites – authored by an unexperienced and computer-lingo dumb like me to a computer geek hypothecated with techie tools – which attract multitude visitors each day. It’s from these websites that I saw the different spiders crawling on their home page. How did they make their sites worth visiting, how they make money out of it, , how they are linked to other sites, and how they add beauty to their websites amazed me. I also wondered how much it cost them to have in the home pages Google or Yahoo search, Feed Burner, Public Beta, RSS Feed, Alexa Rating, Technorati and other paid advertisements.

 

The very good websites that I have visited made me think twice whether to continue doing this experimental project or not for I had reached the top level of disappointment with my WordPress-themed site, which only showed my inability improve my site.

 

I was in constant company with WordPress, Yahoo, Google and other forums when I made a major restructuring of this site. Reading and comprehending plus a little commonsense facilitated the start of changing my theme. My first theme was greenery, followed by Andreas, then Almost spring and finally settling with Freshy theme. From changing my theme , I came to know that I can put advertisements, view meter, and other widgets in my sidebar. Playing with my sidebar got me some more interest in pursuing this blogging thing. I can say that I am really having so much fun in blogging.