The Thanksgiving Edition

Since it is always fun to make lists, here is a list of little things that I am thankful fo.r

1) S making breakfast for me everyday. I like to sleep in until the last minute possible. S makes a smoothie for me everyday and I just drink it on the way to and at work. It helps me sleep for 10 more minutes every morning and more thankful I could be not.

2) Going home for lunch everyday. I live 5 mins away from work, even with the parking. I love going home for lunch and having my lunch alone. It's my me time, when I can watch TV or play a game or just sit and stare at the wall. Even where there is nothing to eat at home, I buy a sandwich and take it home just so I can be alone for sometime.

3) My iPhone. I am often accused of drinking Apple's kool-aid, but it's seriously the best phone ever. It helps me keep on top of everything and best of all, when I press a button it immediately does what I want it to do without hanging.

4) Mini Reese's Peanut Butter cups at work. This is my all time favorite candy. I am both thankful and resentful that they stock this at work. But sometimes this salty gooey deliciousness in a cup can turn r mood.

5) My erstwhile DVR and now Hulu Plus - for letting me watch my favorite shows even when I don't know which channels and when they are on. I am mess without my dose of Parks and Rec! :)

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

The "I am Back" Post

Is anyone still waiting for me to post something? :) Please fill up the reason for my blog's sad state with your favorite excuse - work, travel, abducted by aliens.

It's that time of the year where the days become shorter and the air gets chillier. This year I have decided that I have to stop complaining about the weather and try to learn why Wisconsinites look forward to winter. I love summer is because every weekend we are usually out in the sun. Maybe I just need to go out more in the winter to enjoy it. During the winter we usually only step out to go to movies, restaurants, bowling etc. Internet, please hold me responsible this winter.

This is also the time of the year when I miss home terribly. Everyday I talk to my parents and I wonder what I am doing so far away from home. I should just pick up and move back home, but since I am too chicken to do that, I will do the next best thing and talk about how much I miss home. Sometimes you miss the weirdest of things. I miss my mother's cooking. Ok that didn't come out right, let me explain. My mother is a great cook when it comes to typical Tam Bram cooking. I am still not able to recreate her mor kozhambu to perfection. But she was pretty experimental in the kitchen when we were younger and she would try to make north Indian recipes, but somehow Brahminize them. She makes this awesome baby corn masala without using any garam masala or garlic. It tasted like nothing you would ever get at a restaurant and yet it was pretty awesome. (I used to think I inherited her cooking, but while I am a good cook, the results are horrific when I stray from a recipe and add my own substitutions.) I also miss the hustle and bustle of Madras. I am always looking for an excuse to go to State Street, because seeing people walk around me reminds me of T Nagar a teeny bit. Most of all I miss being around people who love me.

Now that the statutory missing-Madras bit is out of the way, let's move on to other things. I am enjoying the Nintendo 3DS very much thank you (you thought there would be a comeback post without any mention of Mario?) To give credit where credit is due, S never skimps on the gifts he gets me. Mind you, he still has trouble picking gifts (does everyone remember the robot incident from 2007?), but anytime I hint that something would be nice, he buys it for me the day after. while this sounds very sweet and romantic, it is very dangerous actually. People who know me in real life know that I have no problem buying expensive stuff for myself. And when I deem something is too expensive or wasteful, I have a husband at home who buys it for me. To add to that, we both like to travel too and never balk at buying flight tickets to somewhere. Coupled with some expensive hobbies and our love for takeout in lieu of actually cooking dinner, I think it is time for us to buckle down for sometime. It's going to be an interesting few months ahead. My plan is to blame S for everything and hope to win the lottery. I will keep you posted on how this works out.

In other depressing news, the number of books I've read in 2011 is shockingly low. Despite the Kindle! I squarely blame Angry Birds for this (see how good I am ) I would go through books in hours when I was younger and now I am reduced to this. I am taking recommendations for new books/authors, so suggest away. Warning: I will judge you, point at you and laugh if you suggest Twilight or anything similar.

So gentle readers, how is life treating everyone?

On Route to Maui

Hello Interweb peeps. I love you all so much that I am blogging from my phone at the Denver Airport. S is off to get me a panini from "Pour La France" and I decided to let you all know what's up.

When we finally made it to the airport this morning, I was sure that we were going to miss the flight. But we didn't. However the bag we checked in was overweight and we had to stuff some stuff into our carryin. Which was of course flagged at security and they took everything out to make sure we weren't carrying anything suspicious. So S had to sit on that tiny suitcase and close it twice at the airport. Nothing else interesting happened at the airport, except for the flight desk guy asking if we were going back "home" to Hawaii. :)

Am going to wrap it up now as S is back with my eggplant panini. Expect more updates and pictures the next few days.

The Contact Lens Saga

I am back to doing what I do best - ranting. This time you get to read about how to order contact lens that you will not get in time for your vacation

As I wrote in my last post, I am going on vacation next week. About six weeks ago, I realized that I was on my last pair of contact lens. I tried to order them online, but my contact lens prescription was too old. So I tried to setup an appointment to get fitted for contact lens and was told that I need to pay for an eye exam to do that. I was really angry about that because I had had an eye exam just eight months ago and I couldn't understand why I had to pay for one again. But I decided to let things slide and asked to make an appointment. The earliest appointment was a week away. I mentioned my upcoming vacation and said that the reason I am making the appointment was to get contact lenses before that. I was assured that my brand of contact lenses would definitely arrive before that. So I went for my appointment and met the doctor. She was really nice to me and I told her about my need to get contact lenses before my vacation. She gave me a trial lens and said that she would order another trial pair and another pair of the one she gave me so that I would be covered for my vacation and after coming back I could order a year supply of the one I liked best. I was wary about this, but agreed to go along because the trial she gave me was different from the one I used before and I was not sure if I wanted to order a box of them. I have astigmatism, so I know and understand that it takes time to order and get lenses for my prescription. But she assured me time and again that I would definitely get the lenses in time. When I didn't get a call from her office, I called them last week to ask about my trial pairs. The person who picked up my phone told me that she hadn't gotten it yet and had no information about when it would arrive. I was seething with anger, but I didn't want to create a scene and hung up politely. So this afternoon, I called them again to be told just just one pair of trial lenses were ordered for me (though the doctor told me she was ordering two). She said that that particular lens usually takes 2-3 weeks to come in and that I could probably expect them sometime next week! When I told her that there was to be another trial lens for me, she said she would put it in now and I would get that in 2-3 days. When I persisted and told her about my vacation and she said that I do have that one pair of trial lens that the doctor gave me the day of the exam and that will have to do.

Gentle readers who have been following the story so far, am I wrong in being angry at the situation? I feel like I have been blindsided here. When I called 1-800-CONTACTS they told me that if I took an eye exam at Walmart, they would get the prescription from them and I would get my lens in a week or 10 days tops. I wanted to support a local business and order the contact lens from the nice local doctor and this is the kind of thing I deal with. While talking to the doctor, I told her that I would be wearing my lens while snorkeling and I was worried that I would lose them in the water and so I wanted more than one pair to tide me over that week. I realize that the doctor's office is not responsible for the delays in getting the lens (unless they forgot to put the order in rightaway), but a little empathy would be nice. Or atleast not promise me 2 pairs of lenses when only one has been ordered. I am eligible for a free eye exam in a couple of months and I would have just waited instead of paying upwards of $100 for an eye exam and no contact lens. Next time I think I should just go the warehouse route and swallow my feelings about Walmart and just get my eyes tested there.

Updated : I got a call yesterday saying one of the trials had arrived. I was ecstatic. When I went to pick them up this afternoon the other one had come too. So this is what I had planned exactly. The only caveat is that, the lens that had taken longer to arrive (the ones that are supposed to match my prescription better) are expensive and they want it back if I don't decide to buy a box. Which means I can't wear them while snorkeling. I can deal with that :)

Mish Mash Post

Hello my dear lovelies. I forgot to sign up for the Indie Ink Challenge this week. I went through the archives of past challenges and I picked one - a story of how I fell in love with my husband. But as I started writing it, it was too long and mushy and not very interesting (think Ross and Rachel from Friends). So I thought I could do a general post about what's happening in my life right now.

I am most excited about our trip to Hawaii next week. This is the first trip and S and I are taking together that is longer than 4 days (not much longer, it's just a week) I feel so nice and adultish to tell everyone that we are going away to Maui for a week, especially since our honeymoon never happened. S and I are the kind of people who take their travel booking very very seriously. We stayed up an entire Friday night (till 6am, no kidding) arguing and trying to decide which island to visit. S won that round (I wanted to go to Oahu), so if anything goes wrong in this trip, I can always blame him. When we picked the island, we had the harrowing choice of picking the hotel. Do we pick a resort or a condo? Do we want to cook during the vacation? Will the island have enough vegetarian friendly restaurants so that we aren't eating salads for every meal? Finally my parents came to our rescue and my Dad said that he didn't want his first born princess cook while on vacation (He actually said that since we do so much takeout during regular days, he didn't foresee us turning on the stove while on vacation. He also said Oahu has a lot more historic significance and to go there for our first visit, but we chose to ignore that) Once we figured out that we were going be staying on a resort, I had my heart set on this hotel on Ka'anapali Beach (The reason I liked this hotel was because it has a gigantic kickass pool - I know the beach is just a few meters away and I am weird for fixating on the pool, but humor me). We were pricing the vacation on Priceline and it gave us a number slightly more than our budget if we left on that particular week in August. S okayed it (the man has a problem saying no to me, he would buy me the moon with his credit card if he could) And then Priceline turned on us, it kept telling us that this price was not available though it turned up on the results. We started looking at other, more affordable hotels on the Ka'anapali Beach and me finding faults with all of them and wistfully going back to the website of the one I liked to ooh and aah at the pictures. After two hours of this, S put his foot down and booked this hotel on expedia (Yup I am that spoiled :)) And this is how we came to book our most expensive vacation to date which cost almost 2 months of my paycheck.

So we are off to Hawaii in 2 weeks and I am most excited. I will be taking my laptop with me and I am planning to post a picture everyday. We are planning on snorkeling, snuba diving, taking a rainforest and waterfalls hike, watching the sunrise from Haleakala Crater, driving on the Road to Hana, rafting the sea caves at Kanaio Coast and taking in a luau. So much for a relaxing vacation. But we may end up not doing all of these, especially considering my limited swimming skills. I hope to write a recap when I get back and I guess that will cover what we did do.

In other earth shattering news, we canceled our satellite TV service. I can hear a collective gasp from all cable stations right now! It's not because we want to cut down on our TV watching (honestly, we don't watch a lot of TV) But I would DVR a lot of sitcom reruns and all we were doing was watching Seinfeld, That 70s Show, Will & Grace and Frasier over and over again. We figured getting rid of cable would force us into watching shows that we really want to watch, but we don't because we don't want to hunt for it on Netflix or iTunes - like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Pushing Daisies etc. Also S and I are huge fans of Lost and we are thinking about re-watching the series. And if we save some $$ every month by doing this, why not? We connected one of our old laptops to the TV and bought a nifty little wireless keyboard and mouse the size of a remote and use that to stream what we want to the TV. We plan to get a HD antenna for the TV so that we can watch the local channels. People tell me that it is possible to build your own DVR on your laptop and if the antenna works out well we plan to build one as well. It's been working well so far. I am more motivated to go to the gym in the evenings now since I can watch TV there. There are some things I miss - like Conan on TBS. But they upload the entire episode on teamcoco.com the next day. I will survive. The icing on the cake - no commercials.

If you have been reading so far, congratulations, you are now at the end of the post. The only thing you need to take away from this post is - I am going to Maui in a week and you are not :)

Fool's Gold

Another week means another Indie Ink Challenge. This is my first poem for the challenge. The challenge is at the bottom of the poem.

--

I look at his face
Brown eyes, misshapen nose
An unruly crop of hair
As rebellious as his soul.

His eyes meet mine
I melt in the warm embrace
A smile from within
Twisting my under belly.

I lean into his shoulders
Dark sinewy tattooed
A throne for my weary head
I rest like I never do

I take a deeper look
Into his heart no less
I see love buried
Almost as much as in mine

Fingers intertwine in a clumsy knot
My ringless finger feeling naked
I trace an outline in the sand
Of the undefined future

People call him a drunk
A player, a gambler
A fool, they taunt me
Why can't they see what I see?

--

I was challenged by Alison Newton who writes a wonderful blog here.Go check her out. Her challenge was
"You always see things as you want them to be instead of seeing them as they really are."
Alison, hope you like this. I see lot of people fall for someone unworthy of their love. I often wonder what they see in them that the rest of the world doesn't.

I challenged Headant (two weeks in a row now) to write about "magic". Can't wait to to read it.

The Real Victory

This is my 11th Indie Ink Writing Challenge. The challenge I received is at the end of this post.

--

Jack threw his notebook down in frustration. Ten years ago if someone had told him he would be a researcher spending his nights and weekends at a lab, he would have laughed it off saying he was not mad scientist material. And yet here he was on a Saturday night, meddling with his numbers and trying to make his Matlab program give him the sinusoid graph he wanted. He banged the keys of the computer in frustration, but no graph yet.

It had been a long rocky road, the way to a PhD. Picking a research topic had proved a lot more difficult than picking a major in college. And the Professor he worked for did not make anything easier. He wouldn't let him defend his thesis and graduate, always wanting more proofs, more publications and more results. Jack had been an A student right from kindergarden and to have someone constantly criticizing did nothing to improve his attitude. He thought about quitting, for the hundredth time in the last few days. There was this symposium coming up in August and his professor expected him to present a paper on his research there. It was quite a prestigious convention, and he realized that making a good impression there would go a long way in improving his academic standing and help with his prospective career. But his Professor laughed it off when he said he wanted to include a section on his findings and had mocked him that he had nothing of value to show as yet. It became imperative to him that he needed to prove that his mettle not just to his advisor but to himself.

"Take a grenade for ya" his phone sang, with his sanity on the other end. Sweet sweet Ally always called every two hours to check on him. He answered the phone and mumbled some expletives in answer to how his research was going. Talking to her always calmed him down and he often discovered that a calm mind accomplished more.

Jack couldn't believe his eyes. The screen showed a perfect sinusoid curve. He leapt off his feet and screamed out in happiness. It worked, it actually worked. His first thought was not to call Ally and celebrate, but to fling that graph on the face of his snooty advisor. Of course he was right, he had been right all along. His near perfect GRE scores and his 4.0 GPA were not flukes like his Professor hinted. He called Ally and told her that they were going out for drinks to celebrate.

He gathered his papers, saved the program to his email and external harddisk before leaving the lab. Ally gave him a hero's welcome and bear hugged him in the driveway. This was another reason why he loved her so much. Ally was far from being an intellectual, she was a kindergarden teacher who loved simple things. But she understood the nature of his work and always encouraged him to talk about it at home.

They came back home at three in the morning and Jack was glad that it wasn't because of a late night at the lab. He kissed Ally goodnight and told her that he would come to bed after typing an email. He went to the tiny nook he called his office and loaded his program into his computer. He wanted to see that sinusoid again. He was absently going through his papers, when he noticed it. The miscalculation that had caused the sinusoid. He couldn't believe his eyes. He furiously scribbled on his notebook, desperately trying to prove that his miscalculation never existed. After an hour, the truth slowly sunk in. He had no results to show. He needed to retrace his steps and move his research in a different direction altogether. Tears threatened to moisten his eyes and a million thoughts crisscrossed in his mind - his two years of wasted effort, his advisor's face, the conference for which he had no paper. He cringed when he thought about the conference. And then a thought struck him.

Ally knew something was wrong when she heard Jack typing furiously. His ashen face was proof enough.

"Ally, I made a mistake, a tiny but fate changing mistake"

"Calm down, it's going to be alright. You will fix it before the symposium, you always do"

"Not this time. But the good thing is, only I know about this. My imbecile advisor will never find this out in a million years."

Ally looked at him, with her head bent and giving him the look she gave one of her kindergarden children when they did something naughty.

The next morning, Jack had an uncomfortable talk with his advisor. Like he expected, there were some jabs and he had to withdraw his paper from the symposium. But it was going to be alright. Wasn't it Albert Camus who said "An intellectual is someone whose mind watches himself" ?

--

My challenge this week was from Sir.

"An intellectual is someone whose mind watches himself" - Alber Camus. What does this mean to you.

I hope I have answered your question. I think the quote means intelligence without ethics does not make a man an intellectual. A sharp mind should watch itself and prevent it from going down the wrong path

I challenged Headant with "And then there were none" and she has a moving piece up here.