Fun in Gate Fabrication

Every once in awhile, you see a gate or fence that is really rad (like these and these). After all, the cost of making something run-of-the-mill is often not too much less than if you apply a bit of personal touch. Luckily for us, gates here are hardly pre-fabricated, as lot entrance sizes are extremely variable, at least while the real estate market has not yet become completely (appallingly) homogenized.

An orphanage of sorts, somewhere in Muntinlupa.

Take this bunch of happy, armless children, making things look very cool but also there to give integrity to the flat sheet metal. I would maim for this gate, which I believe is the gate to an orphanage. Constraints in welding materials and economy make such "best effort" attempts at human form acceptable and admirable, kind of like weaves that have geometric animals or people that make us go "oh wow".

Fruitmix

Meet fruitmix.

I dwell in the realm of "hot" "coffee-like" beverages, but the summer almost got me consuming the cooling pampalamig (cooling) beverages available to aid in temperature regulation.

Ambulant vendors do well in poorly-insulated and open areas.

Fruitmix is basically chopped up fruit with milk, sugar, and ice. The cooling variety of drinks usually have fruit or jellies in them (think sago't gulaman, Thai iced whatever with weird jelly and fruit). You can find some version of them in all tropical places. Fruitmix is found most especially among fruit vendors, who transform their produce into this ready-to-eat/drink form. This genre of sweet-starchy drinks are somewhere in between a beverage and a snack, a kind of low-commitment merienda. I rejoice when I see such populist, fresh, bordeline-junk-food maintaining popularity despite the ubiquity of commercial drinks and sweets.

Fruitmix-- karatula-official.

Urban Drying of Semi-Unidentified Plant Matter

Note: The eschewing of iThings (for the most part) has led me back to using a camera. I really enjoy the freedom of not having a device to charge all the time, as well as having a ghetto phone verging on analogue that lasts for three to five days without charging. I feel like I have part of my sense of the present back. Having the internet all the time had me bookmarking thousands of things (mostly about food and plants and stuff that I tend to rabbit-hole about in a bad way).

This blog will be used now for both garden and street and whatnot posts. I'm a grown woman now, with my many responsibilities and indulgences. I have chosen to retain, as of those indulgences, understanding and enjoying this world through documentation.

Cut stem on a piece of cardboard.

Sunny spaces for drying plant matter and mops out.

Urban drying of a branch (or a false trunk). Likely banana, but maybe other thing. Purpose unknown. Always nice thing to see plant use in urban areas. This is a Pasig warehouse, where many of the workers are migrants. We have a lot of migrants to thank for the persistence of interfacing with plants, against environmental odds.