Am back!

Three weeks away from home and what have I found out with myself?  That I am indeed a creature of habit and my daily routine was what I miss most, next to family of course.  I was feeling off kilter until I got back to my routine.  So here’s the daily routine I missed the most:

• Wake up @ 7 am.
• Hit the road @ 8, 8:10 at the latest, else I will not make it to my work on time.
• Eat breakfast at work while I check my voice messages and emails.
• Work, break for lunch @1 pm.
• Have my second cup of coffee @ 2 pm.
• Leave work @ 5:30 and run into traffic.
• Be at home by 6:30, fix dinner (usually reheating as we prepare all meals for the week on the weekends, less work), eat around 7 pm while listening/one eye watching Jeopardy.
• Watch a lot of tv while doing something else like washing the dishes, doing the laundry, exercising (I could use more of this), blogging. 
• By 11 pm watch the news and stay up late enough to catch Letterman’s monologue about those lame rats, squirrels, Bush.

Well, I will be posting about my three-week adventure to South Asia and Southeast Asia soon. 

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Winds are howling…

again outside my window, but this time it does not have the same power it carried with the past storm.  It is still loud though and now there is less rain falling.

I will be taking a short break  (around three weeks) as I will be travelling to South and Southeast Asia.  Hopefully, I will experience some things new that I will be able to share. 

 

Rainy Beginnings

Around here rain had been in short supply.  But the new year has brought us some relief.  Three storms in a span of three days.  The second one came Friday.  The winds were howling outside my window early in the day as I planned to go to work.  Decided against it as the winds were really gusting and the rain was coming down.  I am still recovering from whatever I had last week…..fever and vomitting.

I stayed home thinking what a good day I would have, rain outside and me inside with either the computer part of the time and the tv the other part.  But the strong winds must have knocked out some power lines somewhere that the power went off @ 11 am.   A couple of hours later, the phone line followed.  Thank heavens for cell phone.  With the power out, my main concern always is my fishes.  Especially my angel fish who couldn’t survive in water below 70.  Without power, no heater.  My husband who I kept calling at work assured me they would all be alright without heater or filter or air pump for at least five hours.  By 2 pm, I noticed that the angel fish was going sideways and belly up.  I frantically called hubby on the phone and he instructed me to add some medication to the water.  I did.  By 3 pm, hubby was at  home and we transferrred the angel fish to a pail with warm water – he began to swin right side up – and the other fishes still in the aquarium were showing signs of getting sick.  So, what should I do?  I blew air via a small tube into the water.  Yeah, I did.  I could not believe I did that, but one should do whatever necessary to save his/her pet.  As I was blowing into the tube, I was thinking how a dog doesnt really get affected by the outage, and I looked over my birds and they were fine.  Thankfully, by 5 pm our power was restored and not long after the phone line was back up, so was internet.  

The fishes were all fine and I learned how difficult it is to blow on a very small tube for about two hours,  taking short breaks.

Still raining but not as hard as Friday.  Forecast calls for more until Sunday am then some more next week.  We need it here, but with rain comes so do mudslides. 

 

Initial Post for 2008

So here we are, at the doorstep of a brand new year.   And what is there to post or share?  My lack of inspiration to post has bothered me last year.  By sheer stubborness, I decided to keep this blog, posting intermittently, which was a shame really.  I have always been a scribbler, writing a line or two in notebooks designed especially for this purpose.  However, life and work had eaten up most of my time in 2007 that posting took a backseat.  Since I don’t do resolutions, I better do a recap of the year that was, in my own way.

• Finally gotten married, 11 years with the same man I believe is enough time to take the plunge :=)
• Took my second cruise, this time to Alaska, what fun.
• Started to face financial situation straight up.
• Had a once-in-a-lifetime dinner at Masa’s (www.masasrestaurant.com) partaking of their 9-course sampler menu.  Bill was about $500 but hubby’s bosses footed the bill.  I could never ever afford to eat there on my own pocket.  After the dinner while getting ready for bed, hubby and I looked at each other and we both agreed the amount of money spent on one dinner for two people could feed an Asian family for several months.  We felt so bad.
• More on eating, this year I took my husband to his birthday dinner at the mecca of California cuisine, Chez Panisse (www.chezpanisse.com) where the mother of California cuisine, Alice Waters, presides.  Don’t ask about the bill, we felt bad about that but we thought it was well worth the experience.
• I reached my nauseating point with regards to christmas songs and carols.  Local radio station started playing all christmas songs 24/7 from the day after Thanksgiving to Christmas day.  We listen to it at work, I listen to it on the drive to and from work.  Midway through December, I could no longer take another rudolf sound.  So, I went back to my old reliables, THE EAGLES.  I felt so much better, felt relaxed and I could breathe. 
• We so love our family, but even inside our family circle we can’t hide the fact that stereotyping exists.  This all became known to us during one of our Christmas  family games where a family member would write on a piece of paper a secret that he/she thinks family members do not know about.  Then at the end, each family member guesses whose secret it was.  To a man (I thought, including his father), Ernie was credited with the secret, I love to get drunk—-it was my husband who wrote this just to see who people will think likes to get drunk.  And because my husband is Bangladeshi, he was credited with I LOVE SPICY FOOD—twas Ernie.  It was a game of fun, but it was a wake-up call to me.
• Low lights for the year—–two cousins died of cancer. 
• Ex coworker continues to battle breast cancer.
• Co worker diagnosed with breast cancer, she’s fighting it.

That is all for now.  I know that this is not a complete recap.  Will try to remember the rest.

Here’s hoping and praying we all be safe and healthy in 2008.