Save and Retrieve

"If you tucked something away, you’ll have something to retrieve someday. "

This is one of the famous sayings of Filipinos that we inherited from our ancestors. Some other saying was too old and sometimes forgotten but it remains and is applied to our everyday lives. I included it as my preview because it has a connection to my article below.

As you go along with my article, you will encounter another one.

"An empty container is noisy." In my article, it has literal meaning though. 😁

I always believe that it is beneficial to store something for the future. Last week, my husband came home because he was having a stubborn cough for about a week. He was about to be transferred to another construction site and he left abruptly another week ago. At that time he was having a mild cold and due to the absence of a pharmacy in his location, his cough worsens. So after claiming his 15 days salary he came come.

I was anticipating a shortage in the budget already that time because in his kind of job, "NO WORK NO PAY". The more he stayed at home, the longer his absences in his workplace, no salary to collect.
After staying home for a few days with the taking over counter drugs for cough but with no effect, I was able to convince him to go to town for a check-up. We all know that in this new normal situation, running to the hospital with a cough or cold is not a good idea if you don't want to get confined. That is the situation my husband is getting rid of. He got his colds and cough from the changing of our weather and it is normal in here when this kind of conditions occur. I told him there are private clinics available in town with cheap doctors fee and medicines. I need to convince him because I felt pity in his situation. He is the kind of man who doesn't get sick easily but once a stubborn virus has gotten him, it won't leave him until a strong medicine will be taken by him. He started to lose weight, and his cheeks were getting hollow. With a bit of scolding for his stubbornness, he agreed. Honestly, he always relies on me even on simple things which I sometimes feel annoyed with him but I accepted as his flaws. So that's it, I accompanied him to a private clinic in our town. The doctor prescribed him 4 kinds of medicine. Everything worth $25 in total and a $4 doctors fee.
It was already a heavy amount to pluck from our pocket since my husband is not a big-time labourer or a professional with a degree but if we are talking about health, it won't matter. Money can be replenished anyway.
Deep inside I am worrying about how to balance our budget. I am just not showing it. It doesn't help anyway. There was a list of bills to be paid. Rice needs to be replenished because at that moment I remembered the rice in its plastic container is already shallow and you can hear the bottom collides with the scoop whenever I scoop inside and I am about to fill our pot with rice 😅. The gauge in our LPG (  Liquefied petroleum gas) is already in its warning colour sign and low digits. 🙄
Electricity bills just delivered by the electricity checker/meter reader.🙄 Eldest daughters tuition fee in a slip was clipped in one side of our calendar worth $280...there's soo much to think about!😅

So what I did was to decide which is the most urgent. Counting the money left from my husband's wage, It won't cover all our needs for now.
I decided after that.

When we arrived home, I opened to him that instead of buying rice, we had to be taking out rice from our granary in the meantime. With no choice, he agreed since it was the purpose of storing it for emergencies. This is to loosen our budget a bit. Next was the LPG. Before, when our LPG runs out, we to cooked by the fireplace using firewood or sawdust if there was no money to pay for a refill of the tank but since the fireplace was removed because of the renovation of our humble house it's not possible to cook with firewoods anymore or else the whole house will become full of smoke.

Now I would like to share our activity when we opened the granary. Together with my two sons and their youngest little sister, we went to the granary. I cannot rely on their dad to watch over their sister because of his cough. By the way, the little girl was Xzeon. 😊

This is how the inside of the granary looks like.

We just filled it in last year. Other granaries we're full unlike ours because they have lots of lands to farm. What's inside the granary was from our harvest from the patch of land we are farming. Maybe this coming harvest time again we could reap more if not for the rat infestation on our ricefields.

I am thankful we decided to store and not let it milled these past few months after the harvest. The granary was from my grandmother which she told me when she was alive that it was my fathers'. I remembered what she said to me so I talked to my husband and ask him to repair holes and damages in it so we could try to store our food for our future since we can afford to buy commercial rice in the meantime. So you see, storing is not only in the form of money, it could be in the form of other material things.

Unfortunately, other parts of the country can't store their rice grains like we do. There are limits to the shelf life of their grains. Rice weevils attack the storage room in the other part of the country. Farmer's remedy uses insecticides to preserve the grains for the next planting season but not for future human consumption.

Here I fully sacked rice bundles and another sack was just 3/4 since my younger son can't carry a full sack. 1 sack of it contains 50 bundles. The other was 35.

They brought it to the millhouse just above our house. I realised we have a lot of companions because I find lots of sacks of grains standing in the attic of the millhouse so we waited another day before ours was milled.The incoming wedding explained it all.

At last, our rice container was filled again.

One problem solved. LPG was refilled, the second problem solved and the most important thing was the checkup done! The money left was for our home necessities and other bills. Perhaps next time I can give a down payment for my daughter's tuition fee, by God grace.

Thanks again for reading!

4/30/2021

>Xzeon<