Astrophotos
August 16, 1991
India’s Independence day always reminds me of another important day in my life. For the first time in my life, I left my parent’s home to live on my own. I headed out to a place that couldn’t have been farther away from home. It was about 10,000 miles away on the other side of the Earth. I can’t imagine what my parents must have felt while saying those goodbyes. It will be very hard for me to do that with Ashwini, if I ever have to do it.
About 122,640 hours ago, I had arrived at JFK airport in New York. Can’t believe that I have spent 40% of my life in USA.
sing from benigan
Last week, Ashwini said the following many times while music was playing on the CD player in the car:
“sing from benigan”
I couldn’t figure out what she was saying. I thought she learnt some song at daycare and was talking about it. It took me a while, but finally I got it.
Play the song from beginning.Polite streak...
For the last couple of days, Ashwini has suddenly become polite. She always used to say, “I want to read this book”, “I want to sit in the chair”, “I want to eat mango”. It has all changed to “Can I read this book?”, “Can I sit in the chair?”, and “Can I eat a mango?”. Must be something that they are working on at daycare.
Also, she adds ‘miss’ before everything. miss Katie, miss Sara, miss Aai, miss Dada, miss elephant, miss ball. One of her teachers at daycare, Katie, taught the kids to call their teachers, miss Katie, etc. Ashwini just extended that to everything.
Veggie flowers
I was always curious about how the veggies start out on plants. Here are a couple of answers…
Okra
Eggplant
Disclaimers
Last night, while watching NFL, I saw an ad for CIALIS, one of the erectile dysfunction drugs. They had following disclaimers at the end of the ad:
CIALIS is for those who are healthy enough to have sexual activity. CIALIS does not protect a man or his partner from sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV.
Saw the same STD-related disclaimer for the contraceptive pill, too. Are these really needed? Don’t people have any common sense? The only reason for these statements to be in the advertisement is those DAMNED LAWYERS. (Sorry, Payal!)
Perseids 2005
Early morning of Aug. 12th is going to be the peak for 2005 Perseid meteor showers. I missed last year’s show because of cloudy skies and the weather forecast predicts clouds for tonight too. I am still going to wake up early and catch a few shooting stars tomorrow morning. Hope you have clear sky wherever you are to enjoy the show.
Bond... James Bond
Being a James Bond movies fan, I must have seen every Bond movie at least 5 times and some of them many many more times. I like all the Sean Connery Bond movies better eventhough not as technologically advanced as the newer films. If I have to choose my favorite Bond movie, it would be a tie between “Dr. No” and “Goldfinger”. What say you?
Happy 2.416667th Birthday, Ashwini!!!
Getting to know the Gorillas. Taken at the Toledo Zoo, last week.
- Ashwini's talking has been the focus of her monthly progress reports past few months. This month is going to be the same. Her vocabulary, making long sentences and use of proper grammar has increased by leaps and bounds. Here are a few examples:
She is getting the hang of using past tense. Along with the correct use of verbs, she comes up with lines like “I throwed a ball”, “I tripped and falled in the playground”, “The birdie flied away”, etc.
Same is the case with using plural forms of words: mouses, racoonses, ballses, etc.
She remembers the words by their sounds. For the longest time, she couldn’t remember “Toledo zoo”. She used to call it tomato zoo, burrito zoo. Finally, after a week or two, now she remembers the word, toledo.
Ashwini is starting to use “I” correctly. Earlier she used to say “my” when she meant “I”. There is still some confusion with gender-appropriate use of “him” and “her” when she is very excited and talking fast.
- She knows the whole alphabet and tries to identify the letters when she sees something written. She can count to 10 and with some help, can go upto 20.
- Ashwini likes to listen to music and songs. She demads music while she is in the car. When we watch "Thomas the engine" DVDs, she wants to fast forward the sotries and watch just the songs. While singing nursery rhymes or other songs, she is pretty good with getting the correct tune and tempo.
- TV is slowly working its way into Ashwini's life. Along with Thomas, her current favorite TV show is "Blue's clues". Thankfully, her short attention span limits her TV watching to 15-20 minutes.
- Her love for books continues. She can read out complete books without knowing how to read a single word. New books get memorized in a day or two.
- It is becoming hard to distract her from whatever she is doing. If she is crying for something and I try to make her laugh, she would laugh with me but, switches back to crying in half a second. Old tricks don't work anymore. Have to come up with new ones.
- On the food front, she still likes fruits and eats her vegetables without any problems. Lately, she has been ODing on mangoes. Also, these days, she wants to eat from our plate and wants to try whatever we are eating.
- Ashwini can hop like a bunny from one end of the room to the other. Just a couple of months ago, it was a struggle for her to lift both her legs together while jumping. She also wants to do physical tricks like balancing on one leg and walking on the lines in a parking lot, etc.
- No big news on potty-training yet. She can make some peepee in the potty, but, it doesn't always work. We still need to do a lot of work with this.
Water fowl
Found this in a pond/swamp near A’s daycare. Don’t know exactly what this big bird is. I think it is a blue heron. Could anyone please confirm or correct?
Page 3
Finally, the search for a likeable hindi movie is over. It took more than one year since “Ab tak Chhappan”, but, “Page 3” was quite good. The movie spans a few months in the life of an upcoming journalist. Madhavi Sharma, starts off as a reporter for page 3 stuff (covering parties and events of rich & famous) of the newspaper. Then, moves over to cover the crime beat and stumbles onto a story that is too big for her to deal with. Very good story and screenplay. It is well directed and holds interest till the end. The heroine, Konkana Sensharma was perfect as the reporter. All the actors have performed very well.
V didn’t like the end as all the bad guys went scot-free. I liked it because on top of presenting a good story very well, it didn’t have all those annoying things that are part of almost every hindi movie. No melodramatic screaming, no lovers running around trees, no songs, no overacting and most of all, no comedians like Johny Lever or Kader Khan.
I highly recommend it. I think I am going to watch all Madhur Bhandarkar movies in the future.
237 channels and nothing's on...
The situation is quite pathetic when the best choice of program to watch on TV is a crappy movie like ‘The Independence Day’.
Here is the current roster of Indian Cricket team:
*Rahul Dravid
Sourav Ganguly
Virender Sehwag
VVS Laxman
Yuvraj Singh
Mohammad Kaif
Jai P Yadav
Suresh Raina
Venugopal Rao
+MS Dhoni
Anil Kumble
Harbhajan Singh
Irfan Pathan
Zaheer Khan
Ashish Nehra
Lakshmipathy Balaji
-
What is Ganguly doing in the official team when he is banned from playing by the ICC?
-
Ever since I remember, the Indian cricket team contained one or two or sometimes even more players from Mumbai. They have always played major roles in successes and failures of the team. In the current team, there is not even one player from Mumbai. Is it because suddenly there are no good quality players from Mumbai or is it politics?
First harvest
Fresh from our veggie garden. Tomatoes, Cauliflower and Okra (Lady’s fingers) are on their way to mature soon.
A visitor
We found an uninvited visitor in the veggie garden this evening. Ashwini was happy to see a real life version of the hero of her favorite book, The very hungry caterpillar
Yellow stain
I was standing front of the mirror, brushing teeth, this morning and noticed a yellow spot on my t-shirt. Realised what it was right away. Must have spilt some juice while eating mangoes last night. Just a look at that spot, and I had a severe flashback to childhood summer days that I spent in Konkan wearing white malmal (thin cotton) shirts stained with mango juice.
Don’t know how long I was standing over the sink with toothbrush in my mouth, dreaming about childhood, summers and mangoes….
ye re ye re paavasa
Finally, I captured Ashwini singing Marathi songs. Click here to hear. The english translation of the song doesn’t really make much sense, but, here it is anyway…
| ye re ye re paavasa tula deto paisa paisa jhala khota paaus aala motha ye ga ye ga sari majha madka bhari sar aali dhavoon madka gela vahoon |
come rain come I'll give you money money turned out fake rain got stronger come rain come fill up my pot big rain came running down pot overflowed |
Yesterday
- Woke up at 5:45 am to find thunderstorms and rain. Had to cancel 6:30 am tee-time. The rain stayed on through most of morning. We had to keep the lights inside the house on even at 10am. I just love days like this. Wish we get a few more.
- By afternoon, it got sunny and hot like hell. Evening was so hot and sticky. Standing outside without moving a muscle was good enough to get soaked in sweat. Yuk! Thank God for airconditioning.
- V and I cooked two new dishes. Recipes from Sanjeev Kapoor's book, Khazana of Indian Recipes