Pumpkinography continues..

This year the Halloween weekend has been a hectic affair with Grandma traveling, an exam week at Tamil school and Jr. having her annual day function at her music school.

Got together with the cousins for a couple of hours as the weekend got to a close and carved a pumpkin.

It has become an annual event since BB started this as a tradition of sorts in 2005!

This years effort..

and the lineup photo!

Work is hectic but interesting and the busy schedules have kept me from doing a lot of things like Blog at least twice a week, call family members on phone more regularly, take more photographs, check out DPS etc. In a few weeks will get used to the new routines and will get back to these missed things more frequently.

One thing though that has changed is that I am not checking facebook status anymore. So much that Facebook sent me an email saying "Hi Sundar, here is some activity you may have missed on facebook"... Guess when you are trying to find time to go take a bio break every now and then, Facebook activity is not going to be on the priority list!

On the bright side, back in the Yoga room. Was sitting out a few poses the first few classes post surgery, but yesterday tried the entire sequence. There is great progress with the hand. Has been one month since the surgery as of today and managed a locust pose today without any pain!

The festival and birthday season is here and things seem to be on the right track. What more can one ask for?

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Busy bees...

It has been a very hectic work week with not much time for family, leave alone updating the blog.

This morning while standing in the backyard trying to catch an AT&T signal on the iPhone to call work, a dead bee was spotted on the concrete!

Having made several unsuccessful attempts to catch the bee live on the rosemary and sage bushes, this was an indirect blessing (for me , not for the bee) to capture this using the macro.

So put a drop of hand sanitizer on a piece of paper, plopped the bee on that drop and took pictures with the macro..

Then saw my own busy bees sitting in a dark room with dark glasses and clicked away..

Here are the big busy bees, up close and personal

When things get tough, you can always be happy that a chance encounter with a dead bee or catching your kids at play can put a bright spot in an otherwise hectic day.

We had friends and relatives over for dinner and that was really refreshing. Have to do this more often.

The economy rant needs a post in itself..

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An interesting week

The temperatures dropped this week significantly. The hand which is still trying to close the gap in the bone, is feeling a lot of pain because somehow the metal pieces inside are stressing out the bone.

That has meant no sleep from 4AM to 6AM the first few days this week. Wrapping the entire arm in warm fleece blankets helped a lot.

Then the wife fell ill and between work, the kids calling me a "bad parent" and more pain in the wrist trying to exert myself, it has been a challenging week to say the least..

Going to do some camera accessory shopping tomorrow to cheer myself up.

This weeks photo homework assignment is "Bokeh" and it appears that I am way out of my league here.. Spent two hours to understand the concept (which is to highlight out of focus objects to create light patterns in the background)..

But here are some interesting results (going to work on this some more.. how they manage to get the object in the foreground in focus while still creating the shaped Bokeh is beyond me.. at least for now)

Cut out a star shaped hole on a cardboard and taped it to the focus ring..

Every point of light takes the star shape..

Notice Jr.'s eyes.. even her eyes show the star pattern (reflected from the flash).
Every light point on her necklace takes the shape of the star..

Cannot understand the physics behind it either. A flashback...

When we were going to IIT Physics coaching class, Balu Sir (god rest his soul) told us to go practice with MIR publishers book by Russian Authors "Tarasov and Tarasova" to master Geometrical Optics. There were no copies that we could get our hands on, but the platform book seller who used to have a shop at the bend near Nalli in Pondy Bazaar told me "Tarasov-aa thambi. Oru copy irukku pa.. aana Tamil copy, paravaa illiyaa?" (I have a copy kid, but it is in Tamil, you still want it?)

Two of my friends who saw me buy that book thought I was nuts. Understanding geometrical optics by reading a Russian book translated in Tamil?

Spent the next week understanding the terms for convex, concave, focus, object, image, radius of curvature etc. etc. in Tamil and figured it all out. It was actually very entertaining and rewarding.

But this Bokeh thing, beats Tarasov and Tarasova..

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Whirlwind week

The last week went by very fast. It all started when San hydroplaned her car and survived a crash. She came out in one piece with minor bruises, and yes, she is fine and back to her normal self and to prove that point, she will yell at me for mentioning this to the world. That will bring her "percentage normalness" from 95.6% to around 98.9%. In a couple of days, we are confident that she will reach 100% !

Work went from hectic to unmentionably busy at the same time. Almost worked two days straight with a few power naps of 30 to 45 mins towards the end of the week. Then slept for 12 straight hours to compensate and the weekend almost disappeared.

The only saving grace was my college roomates visit today! He came from the east coast and spent most of the morning with us. It was a treat to watch him play with the kids. He told my wife and MIL old stories of me, but they always beat him to the punchline! He was so disappointed to see that my behaviour has stayed consistant over the years and that my wife and MIL could guess how the old grad school stories ended! For me, it was a joy to watch them make fun at my expense.

The best part? He could not believe that I don't go near the kitchen anymore. He told my kids "your daddy cooks really well, you know. He cooks great food for you everyday right?" and they had the deer in the headlights look. If Jr. was 16 she would have said "our daddy? cooks all the time? which parallel universe are you from, dude?"

fun, fun, fun, to make up for a nasty week.

On the plus side, we now have a new car, now that the old one is totalled. San has a new algorithm for driving the car:

Pray
Sit in car
check everything before opening garage
open garage
carefully ease car out
check dimensions all around car (this reminds me of how saastrigals ask you to put darbais in all four directions around the fire during a prayer!) San looks at all diagonal points to check for something.
drive out extremely carefully

Everyone at home was upset with my busy schedule at work the whole week. Jr. did come to me once and say "Daddy , look I did something very different!"

She had come up with a novel way to assemble the rings on the toy, just out of pure boredom.

So I promised to tell everyone how she did something differnt. So here it is..

She might check on me tomorrow.. This blog is slowly being taken over by the kids!

This week promises to be less busy, and that means a few posts that never made it out of my head into the draft, will actually get out!

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All is well

posting resumes in three days.

:)