I’ve just been at home babysitting most days and that means weekdays and weekdays are Monday to Friday and that totals five days. Five. Long. Days. At home.

Much as I want to go out and breathe some fresh cold air that’s just going to dry up my nostrils a bit more, I just can’t because the baby needs looking after 24/7. It’s real work mind you. We get to go out on weekends; my sister, her husband, the baby and I, for one, went to Amsterdam last weekend.

Ahh that was great! I really could feel I was in a different place. It’s a city, like any other city, but always unique. Busy, a melting pot of all colors, tourists and locals alike, big structures, apartment houses that stand side by side each other with that quaint yet modern feel to it, trains stations loaded with people, lifts smelling like somebody just peed, shoppers looking for anything that says Amsterdam in it, and lovers kissing under the Anne Frank museum. (Why did I even have to see that!) I even just learned that Heineken is a Dutch beer, not German. We met some friends too and had a Filipino gathering at one of my sister’s friends’ apartment. We feasted on a sumptuous dinner of salmon pasta, lamb, and lemon tiramisu, drank the famous beers and wine in town, and sang some Michael Jackson and Phil Collins hits we could find from chordie.com accompanied by a bass guitar, a regular guitar, and an organ played by who-could-have-thought-they-could-all-play-and-sing friends of my sister’s.

Apart from that, it’s been boring.

Weekdays spent at home? That’s not what weekdays are made for!

And I’m not one who waits for the weekend to have fun. I’d do it now, to the ire of my pressing workload waiting for me in my email.

So, yeah, work got in the way, as it always does. I had to thoroughly think about how I could possibly work as efficiently and as uninterruptedly as possible, and I figured, it’s after dinner when my sister and her husband are both home and can bond with their kid. It’s been productive so far. I just end up sometimes sleeping at 1:30 in the morning, and then my other work, babysitting that is, wakes me up around 7am.

So now my nights here are spent working (while my colleagues in Manila are in their last set of snores before dawn dawns). And since I usually write at night when my mind is more open and creative supposedly, work, as I said, gets in the way. I am really sorry for my writing time.