Happy thanksgiving! Time travel weekend...

This year, my birthday was a simple affair with both the kids making a flying visit for the long weekend. 

After the celeberations were done, jr. and me decided to have some fun. She saw an ad for a service that gets old tapes , negatives etc. and gets them digitized. We had a lot of audio cassettes and video cassettes to be digitized.. but after realizing that the service was ripping us off in shipping fees, decided against using it.

We did however find the old Cassette to MP3 converter and put it to good use. It took us some time to download Audacity app on the Mac and then set it up right so it could read the device! Once we figured it out, it was fun to check what was in those cassettes. 

Most of them were tapes I had accumulated to practice dancing.. one was full of Latin songs, one was all waltzes, one was a mix tape that simply said "To Miss. Smooth, with love, Part 1" and Jr.'s looks at me with raised eyebrows and asks "so I take it that it is a mix tape you made for your girlfriend?". Told her it was for a friend and she did take the part 2.

Then I found two cassettes from Sruthi, an organization in Philadelphia which had organized a Lalgudi concert with his kids in 1993. Remember setting up the mics for it and getting free admission to the concert. We also got to spend the evening with the artists at a professors house. In India, I could never think of being up close and personal with greatness like that! 

Brought back so many memories of how my association with music has always been touch and go.

There was a cassette with Tamil movie songs which my Chitti's had recorded and sent me as a gift. Even today my Chitti's (mom's younger sisters) are my biggest supporters when it comes to encouraging me to sing in Smule! I recognize my Lalli chitti's handwriting on that list.. she would write so beautifully and fast! 

30 years later have sang a lot of those songs.. the ones I missed, will definitely sing! Did not know this cassette was still around till today!

 

Used to get 20 cassettet tapes as a package at Sam's club (think Costco in the early 90's). Had the habit of recording radio stations while sitting alone in the lab doing experiments.. kind of a time capsuley thing.. 

Some of them were from 1993/94, then 96, 98.. It was wild listening to the commercials from those times (mostly beer  and car commercials!). Jr. was having so much fun Shazaming the songs and got a taste of what music daddy was listening to 30 years ago! There were multiple radio stations in PHiladelphia/ Wilmington Delaware, then Albany/Troy NY.. and some Latin tapes that were too rare for the Shazam app!

Then we found some old gold!  There was a copy of me singing Kandar shasthi kavasam at 4 years old. It was the first time my voice was recorded on the cassette player that my Ambi mama bought. The whole family was impressed with the ability to record and replay.. and my reciting slokas was used as the trial run!

My grandpa had saved that cassette and given it to me in 1995. It had made it through all the moving over the years and is now an MP3 .. better a Youtube video. 

Then we found my Naadi Josiyam tapes.. which was one of the reasons for starting this exercise. A long conversation with my friends mom yesterday on how things seem to be predetermined to a large extent in our lives and the best way to use this knowledge wisely to navigate through life.. even if it is all meant to be! 

A separate post on that later!

It has been a fun weekend so far, going back in time with my kid!

Long weekend

After many years, we are staying put at home for the long weekend, helping my parents adjust to the USA.

Daddy and the little one are also recovering from their sore throats, surprise gifts from the weather change here. It was a 15 degree drop from the usual high temps the last two days.

We decided to go hit the one local indoor place where the grandparents could walk and the kids could have fun for a few hours! The Great Mall..

It took us a good 25 minutes to find a parking spot, but off we went with the sea of people shopping for "sale" items and got the kids some summer wear.

They promptly posed for my indoor photo shoot.

More tomorrow..

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Cabazon Dinosaurs - Photoblog

The original target location for the long weekend trip was to see the Concrete Dinosaurs of Cabazon. We wanted to go someplace where there was something for the kids and something for the adults. Websites told us that the Dinosaurs of Cabazon which were as high as 70-80 feet took 10 years to build and they were built with the help and consultation of top paleontologists and included a museum of sorts which educated kids..

We sure had some surprises!

Cabazon must be one of the windiest places in the US! We were almost lifted off the ground the minute we set foot on the parking lot. The high winds, the mountain backdrops and the large dinos in the middle of palm trees set an eerie stage that make it look like they could have walked the very area.

Very lifelike and life size dino's greeted us miles away. The kids and adults had fun posing in front of the dinos, climbing on whatever they were allowed to climb...

You could actually go inside the dino by climbing stairs and the belly of the beast was actually a gift shop! The surprise in the place was not the dinos but the propaganda. There was not much of the original paleontology or science left. Apparently the dino museum is under new management. Right wing creationists have taken over the place. So all the old posters have been replaced by laminated powerpoint slides and new boards which talk about how God created man and dinosaurs and they all lived at the same time.

Guess there are a lot of people who are offended by being related to monkeys! The kids were reading the boards and had too many questions which were funny.

I guess we can call ourselves creative evolutionists?! We teach our kids that god created everything. At least my grandpa taught me that when the celestial beings (Deva's) did a sacrifice many things came out of god including different castes of humans, the sun, the moon, the stars, wind, fire, water, animals, birds etc. etc. which gets passed on to my kids thanks to occasional temple visits, India trips, slokam learning and Amar Chitra Kathas! So there was no issue with god doing the creating part.

As people who are very open to evolution, genetics, DNA, carbon dating, archaeology and paleontology, ie., science in general we believe that the dinosaurs were there a long long time ago before humans were there and were wiped out long before we showed up and evolved into modern day reptiles and birds. The new displays at the dino museum pretty much questioned all of the above!

They even sent T-rex to church which was hilarious!

Guess we all have to get ready for Sarah Palin sooner or later or accept these alternate realities because money can buy everything.. especially science!

Next thing you know the sun and planets will be going around the earth, which happens to be flat and the likes of Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo will be turning in their graves!

As for Watson and Crick, well let us leave those poor souls alone!

Still strongly recommend the Cabazon dinosaurs. You should have no problem if you are into right wing creationism and want to go to church with T-rex!

Otherwise, be prepared to answer questions to your kids. At least they get to know there are people who believe in things that are different and that is a good thing.

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Palm Springs - Long weekend trip

We went to Cabazon to see the life size stone dinosaurs and followed it up with a trip to Palm Springs over the Memorial day weekend.

There are over 800 photographs to check and edit and after an almost non stop drive back yesterday was too tired to even wake up and go do Yoga this morning.

Did a quick glance through all the photographs for one good snap to share for this post and here it is..

There were 4 hummingbirds outside the kiosk on top of the Palm Canyon parking lot. Two of them were doing aerial acrobatics and Kissing? Was lucky enough to get this shot.

and yes, finally got the 70-200mm f2.8 L to close out the camera bag! This picture was taken with that lens set to 200mm.

There are some really cute pictures of our own two hummingbirds, which will be posted later!

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Happy 4th !!!

Or should we say "belated" happy 4th, since it is already past midnight!

This year, the 4th of July was celebrated at "Roaring Camp" which included a nice train ride through redwood forests.

This was followed by some activities for kids (you can see Jr. and the little one trying to do some Hula Hoops in the video.. note the little one trying a hoop with a diameter larger than her height).

Then daddy took the kids to watch Fireworks with K. while the ladies went to watch the latest Hindi Movie with ARR songs, which for some reason is sold out, playing in the local english movie theaters as well!

All said and done, a fine day.. but.. but.. but..

Daddy made the mistake of formating his CF card just before the fireworks, forgeting the fact that he never downloaded the roaring camp photos from the camera! All may not be lost as there are apparently some software out there that can retreive the formated photos, provided we buy a card reader that can show up as an external drive on the laptop!

We have our fingers crossed..

In other news, Bush and Bush Sr. of the house have mandated that daddy edit them out of the video for this blog post!

That was not easy.

1. The guide told us so many interesting things on the train and I wanted to have all that in the video.
2. The ladies planted themselves right between me, the kids and the driver and made it next to impossible to get them out of the frame!
3. I could have been that dude from the next coach taking a video of the whole thing with GWB and GWBS who is possibly posting it on youtube right now with them in the frame!

It is high time the democrats in this house came to power!

Seriously, learnt so many new things today..

a. Switchbacks and how they work
b. redwood tree seeds lay dormant for upto nine hundred years.
c. The seeds germinate only after a forest fire. A forest fire is almost a must to get the next generation of seeds to sprout. Had no idea! For some strange reason this got memories of Gavaskar and Tendulkar .. on a freaking narrow gage train up a mountain!
d. I still love cricket, somewhere in the back of my head!
e. Most of the trees we saw today were 300+ feet tall and were >1000 years old!
f. Butterflys love a steam bath or at least excess moisture. From out of nowhere a bunch of butterflies came to enjoy the steam puffs from the engine.

and much much more, like how to switch from standard to night vision in my camcorder, how to possibly retrieve images from a formatted CF card, etc. etc.

A day well spent. Here is the video....

Next years July 4th will be interesting.

A different president!
A different US of A!
A different world?
A more powerful daddy?

Only time will tell!

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