mommy and me

me & my mom in 1984

[i have no idea why i'm so scared of the camera person. ]

today is my mom's birthday. i'm lucky in that i was blessed to have two very awesome parents. a really cool thing about my mom though - besides the whole raising me and sister thing - is she's not the stereotypical filipina mom.

my mom grew up in the small rural town of sablayan, mindoro. eventually she went to college in manila and graduated with a chemistry degree. when she moved to the states, she found a job as a chemist with a local water company. this was pretty cool because i had a nice little upper hand when i had to do my mandatory science fair projects in grade school.

i mentioned that my dad was away a lot when i was little because he was in the navy, but even so my mom was able to work full-time, tend to us girls, and take classes at the local community college to learn computer programming. my mom introduced us to a computer back when you needed to memorize DOS commands, when 4 inch floppys were normal, and the dot matrix printers always woke the house up. we were the first amongst our friends to have a computer at home; my mom knew this was a trend that wasn't going away. and boy was she right.

fast forward to present day. my cool mom is her moved up from chemist to the office's lan administrator (or something techy like that). according to my friends, she also is one of the few parents that can 1) use a computer (as in, not just email and word) 2) has a blog and 3) has a twitter (she's going to kill me for linking those). in fact, she always jokes around that the only way she keeps track of me is by my twitter and blog [DM: yes, mom, i've landed in portland safely]. isn't that neat? she's so cool.

happy birthday mom. [thanks for addicting me to the computer & internet.]