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Drogon likes attention, hugs, and parkour.

Happy Birthday, Drogon Targaryen-Targaryen Hiddleston Cumberbatch! The vet says he was about a year and a half when he joined our household and we picked a birthday for him. It’s also the birthday of Koosi, who would’ve been 16 today.

Koosi

Whenever our feline masters celebrate their birthday they deign to read your future. This week Drogon is The Oracle. To ask a question of The Oracle, you must go out and feed the first stray cat you encounter. Then look into Drogon’s eyes and post your question in Comments and await his reply.

White Walker-blue eyes.

We have readers who ask the same question every year (pertaining to acquisition of boyfriend, more desirable employment, or both). If you want a different answer, try rephrasing it.

We’ve always stayed in Metro Manila during the lenten holidays. While everyone makes a mad dash to the provinces, enduring traffic, congestion and the infernal heat only to run into the exact same people they encounter daily in the city they have just escaped, we enjoy Manila. Emptied of its frantic inhabitants, this place is actually charming: temporarily quiet, comparatively less polluted and chaotic.

We can tool up and down the highway at top speed and visit the burbs which we never see during the working week. Hence our decades-old plan to shut the entrances to Metro Manila and declare it an independent republic one Black Saturday, preventing the vacation crowd from returning to block our view. Aalis-alis kayo, huwag na kayong bumalik.

In recent years many people have caught on that the best place to spend the long weekend is Manila. (Or maybe there are just more people.) We no longer have the city to ourselves. More restaurants stay open, but they’re all full. You have to make reservations at Old Swiss Inn and good luck getting into Cafe Adriatico. Traffic around the restaurants is as heavy as weekday traffic.

Our secret city is gone. Next year we will contrive to get as far away as possible. (Unless by saying this everyone decides to get out next year, in which case we will stay.)

Supposedly all women turn into their mothers, and we thought we were spared because we don’t have children (never liked them, even as a child), but we live with cats and the youngest, Drogon, can be a pain. He’s extremely affectionate and hyperactive, and the other night while jumping from our desk he upset a cup of coffee over the papers we were reading and we found ourself uttering an oath we haven’t heard since childhood, when our mother said it.

Lilintianan! That’s Bicolano for “Lightning strike”. She also said Babagratan a lot—that means “Thunder!” (Our ancestors came from the volcano; that’s all the Bicolano we have left.) Which is like saying “By Jove!” or “By Toutatis!” Basically it’s “Hala, kukunin ka ni Thor!” (Yes, please.)

Saffy: It is faithful to its literary source.
Drogon: There are not enough cats.

Saffy and her stuffed toy sheep, with a box of the world’s greatest hopia. Delicately flaky crust, finely ground mung bean paste. Hopia that you have to get from Xiamen, since they invented it.

Mat may be nearsighted. He also pretends to be afraid of heights. Sometimes we catch him prowling the tops of the shelves.

We’re myopic, so when printed signs are not near enough for us to read, our brain notes the shape of the letters and makes a guess. Today we saw a Valentine event poster that said “A Calibration of Love”. This struck us as admirably unsentimental for our gooey culture. It sounds like something our druid might say while wielding her slide rule to club stupid people unconscious. Then we realized that the text was “A Celebration of Love” haha. Nearsightedness has its advantages.