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Yesterday we ducked into a store to get out of the unseasonable rain and found not just a solution to sudden downpours, but an accessory that enhances any outfit. It’s an umbrella with the handle of a samurai sword. Picture the consternation of security as you enter a building. (Actually we have entered buildings carrying a variety of longswords, and the guards made no comment.) These umbrellas are badass. Next to those Avengers (the old British spy series, not the Marvel superhero assembly) umbrellas that contain swords.

We also got the folding version. Maybe we’ll attach the chicken tchotchkes.

We got these at the park last Sunday. They’re stuffed lacy chicken tchotchkes with tassels that you can attach to your bag for no reason whatsoever. They just are.

“You could turn them into earrings,” Rene suggested brightly.

“For when you want to be incognito,” Noel added.

“No one would ever look at those,” said Rene.

Our friends, ladies and gentlemen.

The Minotaur by Benjamin Tammuz. Background: Striped abel fabric woven in Ilocos.

Citi Philippines CEO Batara Sianturi leads a discussion with participating microentrepreneurs.

We attended a round table with Citi Philippines CEO Batara Sianturi and eight beneficiaries of the Citi Microenterprise Development Center (CMDC). CMDC trains, coaches, and mentors high-potential micro business owners. It has been recognized with a social empowerment award by the Asia Responsible Entrepreneurship Program.

In part 1 of the podcast, the microentrepreneurs tell us how they got started in business, and express their fears about the future of their enterprises. We’ll hear from a former overseas worker who had had enough of being separated from her family for long periods, so she set up a business that would keep her at home in the Philippines. Then there’s the former sugar plantation laborer who got a small plot of land in the agrarian reform program and turned it into a thriving plantation.

In part 2, the microentrepreneurs tell us how they overcame personal hardships, what they’ve learned about running their own businesses, and how entrepreneurship has changed their families’ fortunes. A start-up entrepreneur recounts how she switched from a hollow block-making business to something closer to her heart: native Filipino snacks. A widowed mother of three marshaled her inner resources to build a thriving meat processing business and now extends financial assistance to other microentrepreneurs.

Hear their stories in our two-part podcast at the Citi Microenterprise Development Center.

Listen to, download, and subscribe to the Jessica Rules Podcasts.

There were cats.

There were teeth.

There was cotton candy.

There were pots,

Strange furniture,

And objects, eerie.

There was Romeo Lee’s painting of mother with dead baby.

“No one will buy that!” he exclaimed with glee.
(It’s got the same subject as the Pieta, actually.)

We found out that our longtime reader Anne dabbles in calligraphy, so on the occasion of our friend’s birthday we asked her to render a section of a famous poem that pertains to aging. Beautiful, no? We’re convincing her to do a collection of first paragraphs from our favorite books, or even hand-made, handwritten, one-of-a-kind books (We’d call it Prometheus Binding). Right now we’re in love with the stories of Isak Dinesen, so we might commission Anne to do The Immortal Story or Ehrengard.