The last 45 days

It has been a lovely last 45 days, three of of Phaedrus' and my friends got great job offers, Phaedrus and I finally moved together to upstate NY to the same city (and apartment!) after 18 years since we became friends in middle-school, and are finally fighting it out over choice of living room furniture. We might live to tell the tale yet.
In the last 45 days I also said good bye to many many friends in Durham, who helped me survive grad school, and became my extended family. Turns out Durham is colder than Albany today. So can't moan and use the line: "I miss NC weather" anytime soon, and have to admit to "I miss NC friends " instead when I am in a complaining mood. On the other hand, we've reconnected with old friends in the new place and made new ones, so it's not altogether bad.
In the last 45 days I also put my sister back on the plane to London, having met her after 2.5 years. The Lotstodo sisters had traveled to Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, Washington DC, The Blue Ridge mountains, New York City and of course Durham and up-state NY. Very eventful, as would be expected with 2 strong willed sisters and an "I know what is best for you"elder sister (ahem).
In the last 45 days I learnt that furniture that isn't sourced from Craig's list or the last grad student in the apartment actually costs $$, and 0% financing is a good thing while you are trying to repair your bank balance buffeted by the domestic airline industry for the last so many years (MSP, here I come!, RDU here I come!).
Phaedrus already started work....I still have a week more to go. So In the last 45 days I also learnt, that feminism or otherwise, it is great to have a guy pay for everything. He feels chivalrous, and I feel pampered. My feminist core doesn't seem to be taking much of a beating, so maybe I am not a feminist any more. In the last 45 days I also learnt that though I can cook decently if I put my mind to it (to feed the family and friends like a good wife should), I'd rather be doing something else, like putting a mean spin on a ping-pong ball or reading a book or agonizing over how ill-prepared I feel for a job that is designated "scientist". So post-grad world, umm... here I come?!

Another list of things

In the past 3 months....

1. I traveled to 7 cities
2. 3 of which were with my gori (white) advisor and desi (Indian) labmate.
3. I saw a tigress in the wild from afar.
4. And got growled at by a mother bear in the wild from very near.
5. Got hurled through time and space in an open jeep down a steep cliffy road at 60 kmph.
6. Haggled over a $850 silk rug and got it down to $700 by using the argument that we would have to walk (instead of taking a chauffeur driven car) and eat only glucose biscuits (instead of paneer and the works in room service)
7. Be driven around the Ranthambore forest by a guy who my advisor christened "lovely face".
8. Stayed in a hotel room where the bathroom walls were transparent glass (why?). In case you are wondering, we found electronically controlled blinds to allow us to perform our ablutions in private.
9. Stood in a temple queue for 5 hours, to glimpse the deity for 5 seconds. No kidding. (Tirupati)
10. Met a Duke alum on the other side of the counter at the US Consulate in Mumbai, who DID NOT give me my visa in spite of chatting with me about Duke basketball.
11. Enjoyed 8 straight hours of live Indian classical music performances.
12. And another 2 to the backdrop of a historic fort.
13. Barely made it back to the States. (involved a tire blowout, mixup of airports, delayed flights, and a suspiciously shaped box on my back that was my size)

All to the refrain of "May tori tori Hindi samaajtee HOONN" (The American way of saying "I understand a little bit of Hindi")

Each of the above deserves it's own blog post, but in the meantime, feel free to wonder.

All in a Night's work

Last night I did the following:

1. Helped the police in catching a murderer by tricking him into confessing.
2. Got caught in a tidal wave with a 100 other people and swam to safety to an island while taking out teabags from a cardboard box to dip in the sea. (The teabags seemed very important at the time)
3. Warded off a swarm of locust-like birds that were flying low over the sea.
4. Prevented a bunch of people from entering a painted sandcastle (more a sandhouse?) with a blue door. In actuality it was a time machine for the brain that caused you to think backwards.
5. Was pushed in a maze with multiple locked doors and multiple elevators. I found the right one to get out, to only be asked to play hopscotch on a terrace garden before I was allowed to leave. Playing hopscotch on a terrace garden is a difficult task, I tell you.
6. Learnt to hold my breath while sitting on my haunches, and sink to the bottom of a swimming pool for more than 5 minutes using a yogic technique which I am trying really hard to recall now.
7. Demonstrated some very intricate vintage embroidery techniques with big red beads and red thread. The demonstrations were held at the edge of the pool from #6 above, with short breaks when I sank down to the bottom of the pool again for practice.

As you would imagine, I am very exhausted. This weekend shall be spent relaxing after last night's adventures.

And the Mouse said to the Tiger

"Run! Else I am going to bite the back of your hind leg, and you know can't even reach me there."

So the Tiger ran away.


Moral: Valid logic can get you out of scrapes.

Pumping iron

The weight training class I joined this semester is, to use an overused sophomoric word, awesome.
We been throwing medicine balls, doing pull-ups, bench presses, free weights, squats with bands around our legs and uncountable crunches sitting on a Swiss ball. In the words of my instructor, "You are much stronger than you think you are. " Indeed.

Not to mention that we have been told to groan if we need to when lifting weights. Now I see.

The biography of a rag, a scrap piece of silicon, and a holey pocket

It is enlightening when I discover traits that I used to tease my mother about are the same set of traits that I cannot seem to shake off from myself anymore.

The basic philosphy carries in from my grandmother who told this little parable in Marathi, which roughly goes like this:
My mother had a sari which she wore for many years. When it became a little too worn to be worn, then she cut it up into two, and used them as light sun-curtains for two windows in the bedroom. When the curtains became a bit faded, she took them off, and used them as hair-drying towels, as they were soft cotton. When they got a little threadbare, they became dish-rags. The dish-rags turned into a floor mop, and finally when only strips of stringy cloth remained, they got thrown into the ragpicker's bag.

As is to be expected, the little story when told in its original colloquial Marathi, sounds much better than this dry version.

This is not as much of frugality as about innovation. Of finding multiple uses for a single item before its life is considered to have ended. Not use once and throw. But, use, reuse, use, reuse, recycle, use, reuse. My grandma and mom were using environmentally sustainable practices much before it was the new in-thing to do.

At least a fraction of it got retained into my generation. In the unavoidably resource-intensive field of semiconductor fabrication, I grin to myself when I use a single cleanroom wipe through a 6 hour process, use smaller pieces of silicon saving the scrap pieces for other dummy/test runs, reuse pieces when I can, and wonder what the heck is wrong with me since this is not even coming out of my pocket. Which reminds me, that I have a hole in this pocket I need to fix before I get too lazy and just go out and buy a new pair of jeans instead.

Books = $2.50, Enjoyment = priceless.

Reader's Digest's The Last Two Million Years : $1
Rodale's No-Fail Flower Garden: $1
Steinbeck's The Short Reign of Pippin IV: $0.50

Okay, so it is not like I found a rare book, and will make a million off it later, but there is nothing like spending only $2.50 on three books, and the pleasant anticipation of spending many quiet hours reading history and gawking over photographs of man-made artifacts of the last two millenia, contemplating new approaches towards sowing the perfect flower bed (once I have that perfect house!), and chuckling at the sad state of affairs M. Pippin finds himself in.

Life is good with a book in hand.

What were you doing on September 11, 2001?

The morning the political landscape and our lives in the US changed, I was getting ready to go to school. Driving from my house to my classmate's who was carpooling with me, I turned on the radio to my favorite music channel, 100.7, The River, I think...or was it NPR? No music. Two radio hosts were talking about a major attack on the WTC in New York. "The jet plane got flown into the twin towers, and while were thinking it was an accident, a second plane has hit the towers. This seems to be a terrorist attack." Picked up my friend and told her something major was up in New York.

School: Dr. H's VLSI design class. She started the class with saying, "I hope you are aware of the ghastly terrorist attack that has occurred in New York this morning. Please pray for the victims."

Came down to the student commons after class. The small place was very very crowded, with gray haired faculty, freckled freshmen...the whole lot. All looking up at the wall mounted television sets replaying the disaster. The room was, and continued to be very quiet, as the actual magnitude of the attack became clearer.

Went to my lab, and my labmate SD was trying to reach his mom on her cell phone. She went to work every morning taking the subway that passes underneath the WTC. We all sat and brooded and worried, while he kept trying to call her every 10 minutes or so. He didn't get through to her till the evening. She was safe but had walked most of the day to get back home after the subway and other public transport grinded to a halt.

How panic can spread, is evident by all the phone calls my parents in India fielded from concerned friends, asking if I was alright. Heck, I am in the midwest, and even they knew that. But they panicked with all the phone calls and kept trying to call me all day not getting through till the evening as well.

Gas prices hit the roof (went above $2) that night, we came up with strategies for car pooling.
The next day the city mayor ordered gas pump owners to keep prices under control, and we went back to our convenient single-car-occupant selves again.

I made history today

That was easy.

Help! Neverending days of Summer!

A plan to watch a historic outdoor 70th anniversary screening of Gone with the Wind got washed out with the thunderstorms, so we ended up watching "500 days of Summer" at Carolina Theater. I wish that had got washed out with a late summer thunderstorm too.

Here is how the story goes:

Boy meets girl.
Girl has different expectations of relationship.
Boy has different expectations of relationship.
But he makes out with her anyway because he is in Love. And for any Bollywood fans out there, there is even a group song and dance sequence with an animated cartoon birdie perched on Boy's shoulder. He has a Spring in his step, because he fell for Summer!

Girl says I told you so and gets married to someone else.
Boy keeps moping.
And moping.
And moping.
And moping.
And moping.
And thinks about all the oh-so-cute things (playing pretend house in Ikea?!) they did when they were together.
And then he mopes again.
And thinks again about all the oh-so-cute things they did when they were together.
And mopes.
And mopes.
And...zzzzz.
Oh sorry, I need to finish this neverending story, don't I?
One day he meets Girl again, and has the aha moment (he wasn't THE ONE!).
The End.