The Time to Love is Now

I created you with phenomenal imagination, creativity, and intelligence. Stuff I would want you to use! #GodWhispers

"Beauty Pageant: Beauty&Brains Human♥Nature: Beauty&Brains&Heart" - Anna Meloto-Wilk

"On the other hand, perhaps meaning can be found in how much we allow life to touch us...even in nothingness." - Bernadette Sembrano

"You don't just sit down to wait for inspiration. You have to go out and look for inspiration."

"Do not be afraid to love. Learn to love without boundaries. The time to love is now." - Tony Meloto

Links bookmarked!!!

I've been collecting lots of bookmarks lately. Web bookmarks to be exact. My top picks below:

Cute monster bookmarks! From Must Have Cute

• Cucirca TV series marathon, anyone? Woohoo! 
• Wonderopolis A general knowledge website. I love that they presented the information in bullet points, simple yet still full of information. Makes me feel so geek-y. Must tell my little brothers about this. They're gonna love it! 
• Join Me Great for working professionals who usually hold Skype meetings and screen sharing is necessary. And it's FREE!
• Learn Vest My top 1 pick! I badly needed an online application, a push, a read about how to maintain and organize my finances, and I finally found it in this website. Hope I'll be able to utilize it and actually use it. I already signed up. And they offer online bootcamps. For FREE! I love FREEbies! :)
• Khan Academy and Open Yale Courses As mentioned from my previous post, I really want to take up a crash course that'd help me in my work so I'm browsing thru these websites if they have related topics that I can read thru and listen to, parang classroom lectures lang, minus the classmates and the classroom setting.
• Stay and Hipmunk I'm saving and bookmarked this links for future travel plans and adventures. 
• Excercise TV Let's see if me and my roommates will actually get to use this. Haha. But I think it wouldn't be possible here in our room though. Hope a lot of their exercise videos are available for free.
• Summer Tomato Offer tips and recipes on healthy eating. Would want to share this with my Mama. We would need an inspiration for new recipes, fresh ingredients sourced from our front yard.
• Design Mom I am such a sucker for blogs which tells a story of their designing adventures. Just never fail to awaken my love for colors and design concepts.
• Wakerupper This is one interesting application. Need a scheduled alarm (other than your phone) to wake you up? Need to get away from a boring date? Need a quick break from a straight-whole-day meeting? You would definitely  need this! You can schedule from this website a phonecall. Pretty cool! Downside: It only works in US and Canada. Boo. 
• Free Rice I got addicted to answering the questions presented in this website for as good as an hour. And for every correct answer, they donate 10 grains of rice to World Food Programme. Go give it a try! 

Hope you'd be able to make use of the links that I shared above. How bout you, do you have any links that you might want to share? :) 

If There's A Will, There's A Way

Today's learnings:

• If there's a will, there's a way. If I will it, I can wake up as soon as my alarm went off. Who invented the snooze anyway? Relate much? Hehe. Finally found time to actually just sit and focus and pray fervently...for as long as 30 minutes! It's been a month since my last (irregular) prayer time and I finally made time to just sit and do away with the noise in my head and just focus on the silence of my heart and listen to God. He just continuously reveals Himself to me and it was just this morning that my heart finally exploded and I decided to just pause and allow God to embrace me and His spirit to consume me. 
•  "Should not have doubted God' grace." My bestfriend's reflection after she passed her LET Exams which I made it my reflection for today too. :) Congratulations bestfriend! 
• There's always a first time for everything. 
• The beauty in one's heart never fails to exudes and show physically. 
• I've been reading through today's #adcon22 timeline in twitter and I picked up some simple yet (what I think are) powerful marketing insights. I actually dreamed of being able to take up crash course/s in online/web/internet/social media marketing. I dreamed of being able to attend conferences that will enrich me and help me with what I currently do for GK. And the Ad Con is one conference that I would want to go but it costs P20,000. Yes, you heard me right. Quite absurd and impossible for people like me, in my current financial state. That's like my tuition fee for one semester way back in college! Mag twitter stalking muna ako for now. Mwahaha. Thank you technology! I truly heart you. So insights reposted below:
• Act out your brand's purpose to be effective. - Mark Tutssel, Leo Burnett. #AdCon22 
• People want to play an active part in a brand. They want to be involved. - Mark Tutssel, Leo Burnett #adcon22 
• Create connections. Not commercials. #adcon22 
• Joeri Van den Bergh: New meaning of Cool = Surprising. #AdCon22  
• Today, products are about feelings and emotions, not the products themselves. - Joeri van den Bergh, Gen Y expert. #AdCon22 
• Keys to Gen Y Marketing Succes: 1. Stay true to roots. 2. Warm is the new cool. 3. Be open and respectful. - Joeri Van der Bergh #adcon22 
• Top 3 models of this generation: my friends, my mom, my dad - Van den Bergh #adcon22
• Just got reminded once again that happiness is a choice, a decision. Thanks Pearl! :)
• Most of the things in life are meant to go through a trial and error process.  
• And I've got lots of online finds that I would want to share here. Today, we had a quick marketing  meeting and a short presentation of the survey we conducted. We were asked to "profile" our assigned target markets for our pre-work for GK's Online Planning next week. The source of this week's Friday Finds (another "segment", not necessarily found online) are:
• Time's Top 50 Best Websites for 2011
• From the survey that we sent the target audience assigned to us: the non-working youth.

So there you have it. My notes and learnings for today. I am excited for Human Heart Nature's Humanity Fair tomorrow. Can't wait to see my friends from Cebu tomorrow! Yay!

What I Learned Today #1: The New "Segment"

This will be my blog's new "segment". As if I had an old one. Haha. Just would want to jot down my day's thoughts, notes and learnings worth sharing and worth remembering years or decades from now. So here I am in my DAY 1 of the WILT Segment. O di ba, may initials pa. Social. Haha

No segments from hereon. I don't blog regularly so it doesn't make sense. :) My learnings for the day below:

• I know my sister would do anything and everything for me...like skipping the first 30 minutes of her laboratory class just to send me an urgent email. Thank you my dearest Nyn-nyn! :)
• Passionate people are everywhere. Each and everyone of us has our passion that we are willing to live and die for. And we excel when we do it because we strive to become better til the better becomes the best. 
• Answered prayers just send you praying more because God has shown you once again of His faithfulness to you, to His plans and to His people.
• This question still left us all hanging:  Is Youtube already classified as a social networking site?
• "If Facebook were a country it would be the world's 3rd largest." - Wikipedia.org: Social Media
• Wikipedia.org is a not-for-profit website and it looks like they need our help to maintain the site. - Message from Wikipedia founder here.
• What secrets? HAHA "What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…" - Social Mention Article here.
• Hope it'd be the least activity. "Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web." - Social Mention Article here.
• From WWF: Mark your Calendars: EARTH HOUR 2012 will be at 8:30 p.m., March 31, 2012
• "Masakit maging mahirap." - Mang Nestor Our GK Videos never fail to tear us up and it never fail to remind us that we still have so much to do! 
• Social Media is a PARTY (Plan, Act, Reply, Test, You measure) Taken from Dawn Gartin's twitter profile

That'd be all for today. Hope to be able to list more tomorrow! 

Categorization

This was supposed to be published last Friday but I didn't actually know what went wrong and it's still saved as draft in my dashboard. Anyways, here it is. 

Categorization is the science of categorizing and assigning categories to a lot of files for easy and quick access later on...duh! I made that one up. Benta ba? Haha. Btaw, so finally, I had categories for my blog. I don't even know if you're following me but I need categories in my current state of mind just to rev me up. Wala lang. OA lang. Haha So the categories that I wrote are listed below with "descriptions" unless self explanatory. The "descriptions" are more for me than for those reading my blog. Hay, I don't know if I'm even making sense here but yeah, categories are:

• Arts, Crafts and Creativity - I am one frustrated artist. I love colors, watching my brothers draw and paint and gets fascinated with cool design concepts. This actually is not my niche, but I am hoping to include here the works of creative friends who just tends to shy away from exposing their really cool and creative artworks. I am gonna do the exposing for them. :)
• Blogging and Other Challenges - I have this "trip" of joining blog challenges or doing challenges which I never get to finish. I actually attempted to finish a 30-day blog challenge thrice and a 21-day challenge once but I never got close of finishing it. Fail. But I would still want to do challenges, like 365 photo challenges or 365 stories to share. I am inspired by this blog, "1000 Awesome Things". Very simple but very "tagos sa puso". The only challenge I know I finished is earn 10 pounds in one year. Great. Haha. 
• Books - I love books. But I've stopped reading for almost a year now. I can't even remember the last book I've finished reading. But I am planning to pick out one and start reading again.
• Bucket List - I already have a bucket list and I hope to document and share every item that I have crushed out.
• Celebrations- Family celebrations and share every milestone worth celebrating!
• Childhood Memories
• Dear Diary - My rants. Yes, included this so if ever you don't feel reading rants, you can simply...um, find another blog to read! Btaw, I kid. 
• Family
• Filipino Culture
• Food
• Gawad Kalinga
• GK1world
• Green Lifestyle - Green warrior mode on! 
• Health
• Hope and Love Stories - Inspiring stories reposted. 
• I'm a Work in Progress - Self-checking from time to time. 
• In His Steps - My God stories. My journey with my ultimate Love. <3
• Life Learnings
• Missionary - My life as a nation-builder.
• Movies 
• Music
• Online Finds - I get to stumble a lot of interesting and pretty useful stuff online. Kahit online, magala pa rin ako. Haha
• Photography - Frustrated photographer din ako. Lahat na lang gusto kong pasukin. Ay ambot. Not because I have not found my niche but because I want to be able to try a lot of things. All I know is I just love capturing moments, especially with my family and the kids in the communities that I serve. 
• Projects - I see myself working on online and creative projects other than GK, to help me sustain my missionary life, provide for the family and start up my dream of being able to send kids and youth through college. 
• Quotes - I love collecting 'em!!! Same as how much I love collecting bookmarks. Web bookmarks. I've got hundreds of them.
• Shopping and Other Girl Stuff - I hope to share my Divisoria and ukay-ukay finds. 
• Sunshine Chaser and Nature Lover - My stories and adventures of witnessing sunsets and sunrises and exploring and preserving nature! The explore I get to do, the preserving I hope to do, with my family.
• Trailblazer - Mission work + Travelling = Trailblazing 
• Traveller - I love to travel, travel, travel! 
• Web Marketing and Social Media - I finally found what I want to do for the rest of my life, a job that I love, a job that I know I will strive to become better and I am grateful for GK for helping me discover that. So I dream now of becoming a Web and Social Media Marketing Rockstah so I can best share the inspiration of GK to the rest of the world. I wanna take crash courses, I wanna have an online mentor, I want that I'd be able to become the best in this field. 

There you have it. My blog posts will be categorized this way...until further notice. Now time to work on my bookmarks. :)

I Have the Right to Write

Yaaaay! Can I say I never have been so excited to blog again (and regularly, I claim it!) in my entire "blogging life" 'til now? Waaah. I can't exactly say/write the right words why I am. All I know is I wanna write, share, inspire, be inspired and just put down here all that's stuck in my mind right now. But, but partly, because I also found Shai Coggin's blog (that majorly caused the excitement, I am so lame that way...HAHA) which just stores or documents everything, and I meant everything, that she's into. Arts, online marketing, hobbies, her line of work, personal stories, writing, travel,shopping, music and all that jazz and she's been blogging since 2000. I wanna have a blog anniversary too! Babaw eh noh. HAHA I know I've told you, whoever is reading this (Hi bestfriend! *nagaassume* HAHA), time and time again that I promise to blog, and I never fail...to disappoint you. But now, I plan to take this to the next level. No holding back. Will put everything out there. Well except those I know that may hurt other people, or with lots of sensitivities or may cause a stirring online and offline. I promise to be a bearer of good news, hope and inspiration, no matter how boring it may be you for you my dear reader (Hi sister! *nagaassume again* HAHA)...but not bad news. Ever. I know you had enough of those on TV, radio and even here online (assuming that there really is someone listening to me ranting.). And I wanna put my writing muscles back to practice, back to work, since I want to write a GK1world-worthy post in the near future. Naks! As if di ko pwede i.post whatever or whenever I want to. Haha. Yes, I manage Gawad Kalinga's website and all of GK's social media networks. Spilt the beans. There I said it, I said it, I said it, cause I care! (Sorry, got carried away...on a Last Song Syndrome of that song.) Anywho, so I want to be able to finish 2 things first.

1. I want to be able to have standard "categories" for my blog that I wouldn't want to change ever for the next 5 years or so...not like what I currently have right now. I am so not good in creating "headlines" and that include categories and titles. If Bisaya, kaya pa. Or I bet even Tagalog, but English...maka-nosebleed sometimes. 

2. And I need and would want to organize my bookmarks first. Promise, it is kinda connected so I can proceed with my blogging career. Naks! But yeah I know, I'm just trying to make lame excuses just so I can procrastinate more. Hayzz, so me. 

The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life by Julia Cameron  Brought it with me during our Palawan trip but still wasn't able to finish it. 

But, but no, I will conquer thyself, thus the title. I just want to remind myself that there is no need to be conscious and be critical of my own writing because each of us has its unique style of writing and the the right to write. And pagnapapractice, napeperfect! And I wanna write because it gives me joy...it makes me think more...it makes me want to learn more so I can have lots of stories to write and eventually share to the rest of the world. Actually, the title of this post is from a title of the book that, I again, did not finish reading, The Right to Write by Julia Cameron. I love how she says that all of us has the right to write. It's pretty inspiring and refreshing, an eye-opener...and I am inspired to finish reading it! Lez dow dis! Okay, so I'll be off fixing and renaming and finding "cool" names for my blog categories. I promise I will not try too hard to sound smart or else I'll be spending the next hour doing just that, renaming. Hehe Let me leave you with a few lines from the book, "The Right to Write."

"I love it when I write well, but I love it when I write, period."

"Start where you are."

"Taking the time to write in our lives gives us the time of our lives."

"Writing is like breathing. I believe that. I believe we all come into life as writers. We are born with a gift for language."

"Listen with your heart. Let yourself listen. Let yourself write."

"Writing need not be fancy. It need only be regular and steady. That is deep enough. That takes us deeper."

"Heart is where the art is." 

Special thanks to Kuya Kirby Llaban for the book! He got lots of inspiring reflections and insights about life, family, friends and community life too! Visit his blog here. 

I am Home

I am back home...literally. But just for a week. More posts are coming soon, I hope, and I want to. Just want to test this new look of the blogger dashboard. Hope to be able to post before I leave for Manila again. And so I leave you with these inspiring quotes that I grabbed from my Facebook friends' posts that I so wanted to repost but did not. So here's my chance to post them all at once without flooding anyone's timeline. (Labo!) 

photos from Pinterest

Have a great week ahead!