books, books, books...

a horribly hectic day... can't wait to go home and curl up with a book...

shopped at the strand today for FIVE books!!!
tagore's biography(lean hope of improving my history)
tales of saki(is the author male or female??)
moby-dick (better late than never!!)
out of africa (booker nominee this year)
love in the time of cholera (on my wish list for a long, long time)

and there's the library's
dilbert future (some light reading)
notes to myself (to help me figure out some confusing, thoughts in my head)

that's going to be my weekend...! interspersed with catching up with the friends visiting... mourning someone's anniversary... tutoring cousins... a little bit of TT & shuttle (if i can find some less inactive company than the ones i keep at home ;-) )...

no movie... no restaurants... certainly no shopping...(ok... just a little can't hurt...)

yeah, that's it... one more weekend... and plans that aren't meant to be kept...

ta ta!
happy weekend!

just another weekend...

the bright sun wakes me up at 8.30... one look at the watch, i throw the blankets off in a hurry... maybe i can still catch the bus... if i skip the breakfast... and the tea... the bath could wait until evening... maybe the late night brushing yesterday would hold for some time more... and then it hits me... SUNDAY!!! that's my favorite part... the hitting... i snuggle back into the blanket with a grin... back to sleep in 60seconds...

the phone wakes me up... it's 1pm... no exaggerations here... for skeptics, there is still a rare species that still manages to sleep >12hours a day or night...

once awake though, i get hyperactive... go around cleaning up everything... my idea of cleaning up though may differ from the others... for eg: if i see clothes strewn around, i pick them up and dump them in the cupboard, lean against it and quickly close the door, before anything pops back out... and then i go to the kitchen for a cup of tea...

"YOU WANT SOME TEA TOO???" i holler to deepa... she's trying to get her excels right for the 6th time... the supercomputer she's got from infy hangs every time she does anything more complex than add three numbers... or multiply two... she is trying to do some pivot tables... yeah, right... fat chance of that!!!

i prepare the tea... it has a unique flavor coz of the patented process i follow... maybe someday, i'll share the secret... okay, enough of eating and drinking... fast forward to 6pm...

we set out shoppping... walk to the JNC area... shop for hours... pants, skirts, jackets... a black dress i dearly wanted was vetoed... (deepa insisted they wouldn't let me inside infy premises... even on a friday...even if i paid the fine...")

dinner at 'coconut grove'... a highly brain-taxing menu... everything's in mallu, for heaven's sake!! but the food was delicious, not too shocking and we headed happily to dessert at a kwality walls place nearby... and then walked all the way back home... all the shocked stares kinda reminded us of the time... well past 10.30... envied the guys who strolled without a care... a mental note to put an ad for a boyfriend soon...

finally home... and some music and reading... oh, i did manage to read 'love in the time of cholera'... all of 68 pages... !!

so, that was a 2.78 starred weeekend... !!

health conscious...

i'm trying to get into the habit of writing a blog more regularly... until now it's usually been in Uzi-bursts... half a dozen in a week and then silence for quite some time... ok, here goes...

last night, with the stomach screaming in anguish, due to another missed dinner because the cook decided to call a strike, i ventured to the ever-green fridge... it looked almost empty... but a closer search revealed a packet of milk in the freezer... tugging it out of the freezer convinced me of its ice-age origins... i still wasn't sure how i would get its contents out into a more edible form... just as i was turning it around,

"that may be old... check the expiry date" piped a voice from behind...

neha... (the incurably health conscious roomie who secretly belongs to the cult who actually read the tiny script on every package)

"not again..." i muttered...

but she came around undaunted anyway...
"it is from the day-before yesterday, you know... and it's written that it should be used within 24 hours and then too, if stored at 4Celsius only..."

can you believe that??? no normal human would go about reading expiry notices for milk! and certainly not as if you would be grilled on the specs with life-threatening consequences...!

but then, that's hermione (harry potter ignorants are not expected to understand...) for you... and the above incident was more a norm than an exception... she has all kinds of suggestions...

"you should not eat white bread everyday... maida is not good for stomach, you know... that is why i eat only brown bread..." the ironic point ignored here was that during this discussion, i had a healthy ignorable stomach while she... well, couldn't claim the same... (more details will lead to me being murdered in my sleep tonight...)

then there is the amount of milk in tea we can never agree upon(loads of it for me... 2.54 spoons for her)...

ah! as exasperating as anyone could be!!

but infrequently though, she manages to get something right... like the most gorgeous laptop... an ivory white macbook...
the only reason i pretend occasionally, to be nice to her...

funny smell...

this happened a long, long time ago... when i was still in college...

i was in the library... now, don't get me wrong... i am not a member of the species bookus wormus... but the exams were on... and the library, with it's imposing shelves with untouched books created an uncomfortable environment which kinda helped me cram the precious pages into my head... besides, it was one of those subjects that i learnt for all of 3 days... never before that and never after that was i ever venturing near that again... 'strength of materials'... or something like that... i wasn't in the habit of buying every textbook on the list and so went to the library, as a last resort... even managed to locate the book amidst all the irrelevant ones... (i have still not been able to learn the logic behind the arrangement... probly coz there is none...) anyway, i settled down with the book, in the darkest corner i could find...

just as i had gone halfway down a page, i smelled something funny... not nice funny... disgusting funny... since the toilets lay just across the walls, i figured, people had stank up the place so bad, it was reeking through the wall... so i picked up the book, the papers, the biscuits, bottles, and the rest of the picnic basket and moved to the other end of the library... i settled down after some subdued commotion... and glares from members of the species, bookus wormus... (you know how noisy a packet of chips can be... especially when someone else is hogging them...)i had not read more than half a dozen lines when the smell was back... now, i panicked... i began to check out one thing after the other... since i walk quite a way, and you never know, nor want to know what's on the roads, i checked the underside of my shoes... thankfully nothing... i opened my bag and scrambled the things around for any left-overs from the last-sem that might have finally hit the critical-decay-point... again, nothing... and so it continued with every item around... finally, i was ready to give up... and the smell had gone down a bit too... or was i just getting used to it??... anyway, i decided to just ignore the smells and opened my book back... AND THE OVERPOWERING SMELL WAS BACK!

though i felt a little foolish smelling a book, i did just that... found to my enlightenment that it had been the book all along! seriously... the book was an old one... with pages coming apart at the seams and had recently been bound together with glue... the smelly glue whose side-effect was the fatal smell!! mystery solved by shirley holmes!!

with a grin that set me up a notch higher on the strangeness-scale, i finally settled down to assessing the strength of materials...

kleptomania...

a self-confessed hypochondriac... that's me! i have imagined myself to be afflicted with the whole spectrum of ailments possible... the knowledge of being a hypochondriac doesn't really count those weeks/months... though i have 'suffered from' fatal, serious ones, i am currently doing quite well... just a bit of bipolar disorder, but other than that, everything's just hunky-dory...

except the kleptomania... i seem to have gotten into the habit of walking away with any pen that i lay my eyes on! i recently set out to clean up my handbag(that will be discussed under a different chapter..) and found i had seven pens... and none that i remembered as belonging to me... there was saini's pen that i had picked up when he forgot it at the restaurant... another that i remember belonged to the guy who sat left of me at a client location, and a couple more pens of the template-kind, supplied by the client... and others, of more untraceable origins...

my affliction might have progressed unnoticed had it not been for the morning encounter with the boss... i had a meeting early in morning and after a lot of discussions and noting down points(with the boss's pen), it was time for me to leave... i did... halfway to my desk, i realised i was still waving the pen about... though i did consider depositing it in the handy handbag, i decided to return it... i turned around to find the boss...

"here's your pen!", i exclaimed with all the innocence of the guilty...
"Oh, thanks..." and then he remembered..."did you take my first pen too??"
i was indignant! how dare he accuse me of something so unjust! and replied...

"yeah, i guess so... ", i managed...making a mental note of the origins of one of the mysterious pens in my handbag...