The farce..

Have been working round the clock lately. For a guy who gets 5 1/2 to 6 hours sleep on an average, this pushes it to the limit. Even the weekends have not been spared with the tether getting stronger.

That automatically means catching up on lost sleep during weekends, no blogging, hardly any time with the camera, missed phone calls to India, etc. etc. There is always an optimization list where when it tilts towards work, the home takes a hit.

For the first time in 3 weeks have been healthy on a Friday evening and it continued into Saturday evening. Then the sun came out, it was 75 F outside today, the Magnolias started flowering in the first week of February (they bloom only in last week of March) and the pollen must have been everywhere.. allergy season just preponed itself by two months..

Took a few allergy tablets and dozed off this afternoon.. and had the most vivid crazy dream of all. Please note, part of this dream could be related to the Bread Bajji's the wife made to take to a friends place last night. The Bajjis were delicious but yours truly may have had one too many and was feeling very light.. that is another way of saying too much gas!

Anyways, on with the dream that made me wake up in a sweat in the middle of the afternoon today..

There is some kind of an event that happens right around my bed. There are Military folks running around in gas masks, machine guns in hand. Folks dropping off ropes from helicopters overhead.. Medical teams swarming with gas masks.. something of a cross between the Andromeda strain and the Outbreak. They find me in bed, alive!

One military guy puts a gas mask on my face and says things I cannot understand and my dream shot fades away..

Next thing I know, there I am naked in an all white 10x10x10 cell of sorts still wearing a gas mask. A nurse walks in and tells me that all of Cupertino is suspected to be dead including my family. I ask her why and she says (I kid you not)..

You farted a nerve gas and killed millions. Somehow you are immune to it which is the only reason you are still alive. They thought it was a terrorist attack but when they found you still alive in the middle of it, they brought you to a local hospital. They did not know what was going on..

I ask her what happened and she says "the hospital had a great air circulation system. you farted again and took down the hospital, but that is where we realized what happened and now you are here"..

"We are still not ruling out a terror threat because people just do not fart nerve gas.. that too the most lethal agent ever known to mankind, unless someone fed you something knowing that your system with react this way!" and I go "my wife knew that making bread bajjis was probably going to be a bad idea but I don't think she intended to kill anyone"..

Then the Nurse comes back after some time and says "well a lot of the folks we thought were dead have been revived by an antidote we came up with by doing more research on your fart but you are still a danger to humanity"

Ask with a muffled voice "so what now?" and she goes "we are moving you to a small island off the coast of Maine where the wind blows only to the ocean. . you will be relocated there"

"will my family ever visit me?" I ask with tears and she goes.. "yes. they will be wearing gas masks. We also have a canary bird cage every 100 yards going towards the house you are in to tell us if the area is safe! and you will not be allowed to eat bread or bajjis for the rest of your life. the government is deciding if we should remove your intestine and bury it under ground in Nevada along with radioactive waste" and at that point..

I woke up!

A diet of too many science fiction and germ movies coupled with a diet of bread bajjis, tylenol allergy sinus and this is what you get!

At least you all get to laugh at this and maybe some upstart comedy director will make a movie out of this....

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Six pack Sundar

Yes.. it can happen someday

even with a veggie diet!

There is always the starting trouble.

Then there is the dedication thing..

If it survives all that, there will be the occasional bugs from Jr. and little one that will demoralize and derail the whole exercise program and make one think "why do I even try?"

Still... still... there are those who inspire and encourage!

The family of course would like me to just get the six pack done surgically so no time is taken away from them.

If Jr. and the little one can be made to start working out with me? Make it an activity?

What then?

For starters going to take the "before" picture today..

6 months.. 6 days a week exercise.. 6 pack..

The devil cometh!

The worse thing that can happen is that the after picture looks just like the before picture, but we have plenty of experience dealing with that disappointment!

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Fear at four

I usually play some word games, joke around, tell some crazy stories to Jr. just before she goes to bed. It is a magical time for me because the two of us share a world that only the two of us can understand in those five to ten minutes. Anyone walking in on our conversations would think we are aliens talking in klingon or some such thing because we use a lot of words that we created from gibberish.

Jr. usually tells me all about her day and her plans for the next in a few sentences. A few nights ago, she tells me :

"daddy? I don't want to have any dreams daddy! I don't want to think about anything after I go to sleep. Can you make the dreams go away please?"

Here I was trying to teach my little one to be a dreamer and she hits me with this !! Jr. is dreamy by default, always in her own world, looking back and lost in thought as she walks forward, walking into walls, doors etc. in the process, a fact that has been noticed at home and school, something she probably inherits from my mom!

So, what would prompt Ms. Dreamz from wanting them to go away? I have not touched this topic for fear of bringing the bad dreams back, hoping that they will go away on their own or she will get used to it.

The funny thing is, I started thinking about my own childhood experiences. I used to get nightmares often. I have apparently had daymares too when I was young. My parents say I used to wake up during my afternoon nap in the weekends and cry! What happened after some time ? Did I learn to control my dreams, divert them, deflect them ? or somehow learned to turn them off and go into deep sleep ? I wish I remembered, so I could pass on some valuable infomation to Jr., but I draw a blank!

I still dream and sometimes they are horrible. I just turn in the bed to face the other wall and a bad dream disappers, or at least there is a pause (vaguely remember reading something in National Geographic a long time ago, that suggested this method). Other times a visit to the bathroom or drinking a glass of water disrupts it (maybe the bad dream was my body telling my mind to go pee or drink water, or else bad things were going to happen!).

For now Jr. is going to get a story on the benefits of dreams and how one or two bad ones are just a way to contrast the good ones. Something along the lines of "how can you appreciate light if you dont know what darkness is ?".

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