Today StarLife takes a bow, now necessarily to take an unheralded exit. We are moving to the "home page" so to speak.

Starting next week, your StarLife Sunday will be published as part of the Visayan Daily Star editions for Wednesday and Saturday. It will be a centerspread location for the paper, perhaps, in keeping with the nature of our content - features, which are considered "the heart" of  newspapers.

The cost-cutting reason carries a more positive note: our writers will have more readership considering that weekday issues have wider circulation than our Sunday edition. A matter of you lose-some-you-win-more situation, indeed.

For followers of our writers, we retain the regular column-features  of  Dr. Cecile Genove, Ian Casocot, Carlo Leonardia and Chicago-based Nelia Dingcong-Bernabe while also focusing on more news-oriented features and other human interest  stories.

In our 'last issue', we focus on a Canada Day-based articles - a first-person account by former DAILY STAR reporter Gerry Gumban and now a Canada resident, on his adopted country. We are also finally running the earlier solicited materials - meant for a post Winter Olympics  story - based on testimonials of four Filipinos and Negrenses who witnessed the games in February. 

Caught in the traffic of summer stories and festival-related events, the story, we believe, has more relevant appeal now, with the July 1 occasion in Maple Leaf country.

The past summer has been a season of sports activities and so is the start of the schoolyear and what better subject can we think of for a discipline thriving in the just-ended season and the hub of  than the operation of a fitness gym in the city. Fitness gym owner Samuel John Solon, himself a body-building buff, shares his observations on the growing fitness awareness in the city and how his enterprise is doing its share in making people aware of the need for a sound-body-and-a-sound-mind philosophy in life.

In one of our summer issues, we focused on the need for public support for the survival of the Negros Museum, which is doing its best to keep afloat these days. The museum management launched a series of fund-raising activities to ensure "that the soul of the people's culture" remains preserve and operational as a showcase of the Negrense way of life - past and present.

The Museum has found a partner in the Central Philippine University Handbell Choir, which it will feature  on Friday  in a concert fittingly dubbed "Saved by the Bell", an expression which stemmed from the situation of a boxer on the brink of  defeat but gets consolation from the ringing of the bell, thus giving him a much-needed extension and fresh breath  for  him to survive his ordeal.

 We are featuring the Handbell Choir, a one-of-its-kind musical group in the country, which traces its beginnings  to the Western influence of the Christian university in Iloilo City. The choir, which is a vital part of the Sunday service of the CPU Church, aims to uplift and inspire the soul and spirit, in the words of its organizers, for God's greater glory.

Saving, no matter, what kind,  is all about survival .  Just like our soul and spirit. Just like the museum. Just like StarLife, when it takes its maiden appearance in the weekday issue after eight years of Sunday circulation. And we welcome it. See you Wednesday and Saturday next week.