I have been doing a 10 minute morning meditation for a few months. The instructors say a lot of things but, there is one that I found very appealing.

“Ask yourself - how are you and just observe the answer with no judgment or concern or need to change something”.

Never did that before without always thinking of a plan to act on it. I am really enjoying the meditations and feels like they bring clarity to my mind.

People usually say that as a young person, they were idealistic liberal and then turn into crabby old “get off my lawn” kind of conservative as they aged. My experience has been quite the opposite. I was much more conservative when I was young and now I have become a card-carrying liberal.

Finally, after a lot of hemming and hawing for years, signed up to get my genome sequenced and get some ancestry information.

2023 was the first year since 2013 when I did not do a century ride. The longest bike ride for 2023 was 55 miles. Have to plan at least one century ride this year - either sign up for an organized ride or do it by myself.

It is a little late but, want to get this post written. 2023 was a very busy and eventful year. It was a major shock for us when my father passed away in April. He was a big presence in all our lives and left a big void but, we have so many happy memories with him that we cherish. Ad: graduated high … read more

Rowing on Concept2 rower is so enjoyable and have been doing it for the last few months. All this while, I was doing intervals (500m or 1000m followed by 1 min rest, repeat). For the last 2 days, decided to try endurance training. Happy to see that I can hold a moderate pace for 30 minutes and rack up ~6500m. Will continue this for some time before going back to intervals.

After the pandemic hiatus, my airline traveling picked up significantly during 2023. Went on 4 international and 3 local trips. While flying for these trips, I used good noise-canceling headphones and realized what a big difference they make. The airplane noise over several hours is so exhausting. Eliminating that fatigue from noise, I felt that it was easier to recover from jetlag.

I was finally able to upload my Twitter archive to my Micro.blog account. This was one of my first few tweets.

eating chunky monkey

4/12/2007, 10:09 PM

Interesting to find that my first response tweet was to @pratik.

@patrix: aren’t you used to mosquitoes in your Texas swamp? :)

12/10/2007, 2:31 PM

Not a surprise, of course! I probably signed up on Twitter because he talked about it. Same reason why I signed up on Micro.blog. 😁😁😁

Yeah, I have known him for that long and finally had the pleasure to meet in person this year in San Antonio.

After resisting the urge for several years, I finally ordered a ‘23andme’ genome analysis kit on Monday. Then there was news on Tuesday about a data breach at 23andme and data for 7 million users was compromised. I guess I can just return the kit and get my money back. OTOH, I am not so … read more

Don’t remember if I got tagged here or on Facebook, but here we go… My left index finger was injured 2 years ago while opening a window and it is hurting again as it got colder. Here is my preference for seasons: Fall, Spring, Winter and Summer. Unfortunately, there is no monsoon where … read more

Recently, V bought a nice gift for Ashwini (and me). It is called, Butterfly Garden. The kit had a coupon to get live caterpillars by mail. They arrived here last Friday. We were all excited to see their life cycle unfold in front of our eyes. Here is Ashwini inspecting them very intently. Right … read more

With a loving wife, two wonderful kids, work and house/yardwork, my life is so full that it is bursting at its seams. Wish there were a few more hours every day to play with my toys or just to get some more sleep.

We had a little incident today. Ashwini’s daycare teacher arranged an outing for all her kids and their families at Chuck-E-Cheese. This was our first time at this place. I can’t imagine that I never went to this fun place during my 13-14 years of stay in US. On the way there, V took … read more

A’s teacher: Ashwini, what did you do for Father’s day? A: My say happy father’s day to dada. My do drawing on card. My give card to dada. I started off the day with golf at 7:04am. Had my best score of 58 on 9 holes. V made aloo parathas for me. Took a nap with Shwini. Went … read more