Operation Splurging

The news has just heralded the highest power rate hike which dampened, i must admit, my meager efforts to create a festive atmosphere at home. We decided to light up the tree on the eve itself. Yep, in twenty days. Simple is the operative word.

Toning down the festivities, not just because of the looming bills, is also extending still our oneness with the Mega Typhoon's victims. This just feels right.

If there's any splurging happening -- i leave it to mother nature to take the lead. Here's a photo of a shrub that shows off in wild abandon its eye-catching purplish offshoots. 

Thank you for such generosity!

Still Life with Flowers

Why does time run away from us so fast? It zips past our days...our lives... and leave us breathless (literally) at the end of our days. We can't stop the flowers, the joys of our existence, from wilting, even if we mix in glycerin, vinegar, aspirin, sugar or some perk-me-up temporary pleasure. Surely it will delay the sadness... the drooping... but the inevitable happens. Kids are no longer kids. Our body (every detail of it), is not the same body we had at the start of the year. Even the dynamics in our relationships we find, have altered to some degree. 

Don't you sometimes feel like arresting this marching off of time? In just about four weeks we will be writing a different four digit number -- to mark our next year. 

We can either have regrets or look back with fondness on the days past. They are all behind us save memories, like snapshots we have chosen to keep or delete. We can immortalize those good ones we have gathered from the garden we have tended, or neglected, as still life -- our way of arranging them as we wish or preserving as long as we can, the lovely blooms that captured us as much as we seized them.