Changes Come in All Sorts of Packages

by Maricar on February 18, 2010

A couple of major changes have happened to my problogging in the past few weeks. One of them was my choice, the other was dropped into my lap from thin air.

The first, I resigned my post on PlanetEye Traveler, writing about Philippine Culture and Travel. It was just time for me to let it go.

The other one is harder to adjust to. Early this week, the entire entertainment channel of b5media was shut down. About 50 bloggers were given the boot, not considerately, locking us out of our blogs without even the chance to say goodbye to the communities we built.

And so, Merry Royals was wrest away from me, just like that. Sure, it wasn’t truly mine, but I built that site from scratch. I even thought up the domain name (which I love!) and, save for a couple of guest posts, was written solely by me. I understand economics and dwindling ad revenues, but the firings could have been handled much more graciously. I shed a few tears over what happened, but I’m glad to say I’m now steadily working out the shock of it.

I believe the loss of the entire entertainment group is a big one for the company. Five years of SEO, talent and contacts thrown out the door. Quite difficult to understand that decision, really. In the end, though, maybe it’s all for the better. There are some top-rate writers in that group, with loyal followers who will (and have!) followed the writers to their own new sites. As one of the writers put it, b5 just might have empowered these bloggers to branch out on their own and finally be their own bosses. And that is always a good thing.

I do take several positive things from my b5 experience. I remember the early days of the company, when we were all passionate and excited and were a real community of bloggers. I have good memories of tetris tournaments. :)

I learned my blogging chops from the best. And, most of all, I made great friends. You’ll learn more about them in the coming days and weeks. We’re all just rather busy at the moment, reorganizing and restructuring our own endeavors. This is one tough (and wonderful and talented!) group of bloggers who are far from crushable. You haven’t seen the last of us, I promise. :)

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Double Rainbows

by Maricar on January 27, 2010

And this is why I didn’t sign up for Project 365. The past days have been swallowed up with this thing or other, that weekly (much less daily!) blogging has been impossible. I have a few topics that I wanted to write about, but just never got around to it. I’m hoping that those posts will see the light one of these days.

For today, I want to share with you a very rare event in these parts of the world at this time of year. Background: In January, we’re usually under several inches deep of snow and several weeks’ worth of cloudy days. The sun shines only occasionally. Even more unusual is rain. To have these two come together at the same time is an extremely rare thing indeed.

And so, we were blessed and very excited to see this in our backyard last Sunday:

rainbow-jan-2010-2

Twin rainbows. And these were not just tiny half-hearted things either. They were full-arc ginormous rainbows. I couldn’t get the entire span in one photo; I had to take three!

rainbow-composite2

I have never been so excited to see a rainbow as I was on that day. I’m always thrilled to see these gorgeous colors in the sky, and it’s been a while since the last time I saw something like this. I piled coats on the kids and practically shoved them out the back door. I wasn’t going to let them miss this!

The camera really didn’t capture all its beauty, but I’m very glad I have these pictures to remind me of this day. It had been raining/drizzling the whole day (rather depressing, actually). I remember looking out my kitchen window at the field of wild grass behind our house. It was all orange from the setting sun. And that’s when I saw it. There was just a small window before the sun disappeared and the rainbow with it.

Rainbows are reminders of God’s promise to Noah that He will never send a flood to cover the whole earth again. To me, a rainbow brings to mind God’s promises in general. And that He still sends silent testaments of His faithfulness. I just have to take the time to listen.

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