Celebrating in Spirit

"I'll be celebrating with you in spirit, Sweetheart!"

I used to hear these words a lot from my DADDY, especially when we were still oceans away and he couldn't join us for special occasions.

Uncannily, now that he's passed on, that expression seems to have taken on a new literal meaning.

These past few days I've been feverishly working round-the-clock, trying to finish a labor of love in time for Father's Day. It is a new offering called "SIGHTINGS", a gallery of pictures I've taken of my family with mysterious orbs in them.

It all began when we bought our digital camera, in time for our daughter's birth a little more than a year ago. It wasn't anything fancy. Just a little Kodak CX6330 which we bought because it came with a little printing dock which, ironically, we have never used to this day.

We couldn't even afford this little thingamajig when we bought it because LORENZO was JOBLESS at the time, but, at the prodding of someone who promised to give it to us as a gift for the coming baby...

(but could we please pay for it first, and she would pay us back in the next two paydays?)

...we got it on a zero-down/zero-percent interest payment plan, against my better judgment.

Needless to say, she never paid us for it and now my Circuit City Card is maxed out, but that's another story.

So anyway, we were now stuck with a digital camera, and we lost no time using it to full advantage. Sure enough, just six days after we bought it, I gave BIRTH to Reanna. And the precious pictures we took of that unforgettable DAY made that whole Circuit City thing worth it.

I was unaware of it at the time, but a giant orb was captured among visiting family members in a photograph that we shot in my hospital room at DOCTORS MEDICAL CENTER.

And in fact, orbs continued surfacing in our pictures after that, but I didn't notice them until I saw an unmistakeable orb in my camera's display screen upon reviewing a shot I took of Troy, immediately after taking the PICTURE.

We were at the pumpkin patch for a kindergarten FIELD TRIP. It also happened to be my Dad's fifth death anniversary that day. I would later discover another distinct orb among the day's pictures, this time in a SHOT I took of Lance.

Well, just recently, we went on another kindergarten FIELD TRIP with Lance, his last one of the year. And guess what we would catch on camera again?

You got it. Another ORB.

How very much like my DADDY, who used to follow each of his girls on their field trips. When I went on my very first Girl Scout weekend camping trip to Liliw, Laguna, he went there. A year later, I would be crowned Miss International Night during our Girl Scout camping trip to Baguio. He followed me there too.

That last picture inspired me to start another blog, specifically to showcase the many mysterious orbs which seemed to turn up in our pictures around birthdays and special occasions. As I was toying with the idea, I was drawn to the simple black template being used by CERRIDWEN and NOTSQUARE, which would've been a good background for a blog with such a spooky subject.

I was looking it up in in Blogger when another sample template caught my eye. It was almost black, but not quite, and peppered with a lot of uniform floating dots. It was the PERFECT template for a blog about orbs! I decided to call it "SIGHTINGS".

"Sightings" officially debuted on June 19, in a post I made to my HUSBAND in our matrimonial BLOG, "Serenity". Since then I have been scanning all the pictures in my collection, adding a new entry whenever I would find another orb in them. And yesterday, I officially ended my search, which yielded no less than twenty-six entries in "SIGHTINGS".

I will be updating my latst blog as each new orb sighting comes along. So far, I've had at least one entry for each month after May 2004, with the exception of March this year. It is ironic that March also happens to be when DADDY and I were born, but I guess I didn't really take too many pictures that month.

I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that there is an elusive picture out there just waiting to be found, both with an orb in it and a time stamp bearing March 2005.

And when I find it, I'll let you know.