A Sad Goodbye

books

Last week, I finally bid farewell to a bunch of books that were damaged in the flood, after my feeble attempts at resuscitation. One of my shelves got submerged in the knee-deep flood that entered our house, and most of the books that were on the lower layer got damaged. I am thanking my lucky stars that I never considered storing my Harry Potter collection downstairs.

Prior to this, while I was in Singapore, my mom had already thrown away a batch of paperbacks that were an indistinct  mess after the flood. When I got back, I still had a couple batches of soggy hardcovers drying out next to to the fridge (where it’s warm), weighing about thrice their original weight due to the water absorbed by the pages.

Last week, my cousin (who’s completing her internship at the Philippine General Hospital) warned me about the dangers of keeping active mold spores inside the house and I was getting paranoid, as my mom and sister  were both nursing a bad cold, so I decided to conquer the pile once and for all.

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Surviving the deluge

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Finally I’m back blogging. Pardon the lull out here, I actually started this entry last weekend, but I’ve been out of the country for the past week and upon our return I was floored at the chaos left by the floods to actually finish this entry.

My Filipino readers need not ask what I’m referring to, I’m sure we were all affected by typhoon  Ondoy (international name Ketsana) in some way.  To my readers outside the country, you’ve probably heard in the world news that there’s been a bad patch of natural calamities in this part of the world (including the tsunami in Samoa and the earthquake in Indonesia, which was felt all the way to Singapore and nearby areas).

Here’s my story:

Saturday started out innocently — it had rained a fair amount the night before and was still raining when my cousin Dianne came to pick me up for the perfume making workshop we had scheduled as a pre-discussion activity for the Flips Flipping Pages’ September book discussion, which I was supposed to moderate.

Dianne and I went over to Jupiter St., to the company conducting our workshop to reschedule our reservation, as the roads were getting flooded and Flippers from all over the metro were reporting their status. We met Flipper Andrea who was already there, and just decided to have breakfast at a nearby Starbucks.

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