I long for days past when I could spend time at home and just read a book. I do not think I am being hampered by technology — I still read a lot on the phone, but I feel like a physical book needs to be enjoyed like an 80 proof glass of scotch. It has to be nursed.
Improved patient care and treatment
The reality is that medicine hasn’t always been the kindest to patients in the past, and this is especially true in the psychiatric units. History has shown us a need for renovation and it has finally started to take hold with improved patient consideration and advanced treatments that are thoroughly tested to be safe.
We are one year into the pandemic lockdown and although this was purely coincidental, I celebrated staying home (as usual) with an online tasting event with Highland Park’s latest bottle that made it to the Philippines, the Triskelion. This is a limited bottle release with less than 50 bottles left for the local market.
Historically, the triskelion is a Celtic symbol that literally means “three legs” derived from Ancient Greek. Through the years, the symbol has been adopted by many modern organizations but the classic meaning has always been associated with symmetry, progress and inspiration. Highland Park’s Triskelion is named such to fondly commemorate the three master distillers involved in this project, Max MacFarlane, Gordon Motion, and John Ramsay. The three master blenders from Highland Park and Edrington (the parent company of Highland Park, Macallan and Glenrothes) represent the past and present of the company with MacFarlane having worked with the distillery for the past 44 years and has recently retired.
There was a magical time in my professional life. It was between the years of 2007 to 2011. I was in my mid 20’s (and early 30’s). I felt invincible. I was brazen enough to quit my day job to become my own boss. I remember it clearly. I was stuck in a routine 9-5 job. It was a Saturday at the office (I know right!) and I was online looking at blogs from the US. I honestly do not remember the website, but I do remember that there was “a call for bloggers” listed on it and it involved something unique and different. There were interesting names behind it. Darren Rowse of rising ProBlogger fame was there. Duncan Riley. Jeremy Wright. These were the netizens of 2006, making their way through the WWW x 2 (the wild wild west of the world wide web).
“This is completely unprecedented, so we gotta take advantage of the times. I doubt we will have another opportunity to do this.”
This is me talking to my three friends on Discord as we were making waves through the Snowrunner campaign. If there was one silver lining in last year’s pandemic, the work from home shift gave me more time to spend finishing my Steam backlog. In the past, long single player RPG’s would be the thing. Huge thanks to games like Deus Ex, Witcher 3, Dying Light, and the Yakuza series for keeping me company throughout the years. I didn’t have a lot of time to play back then as Manila traffic automatically took away at least 3 hours of my time daily.