Started the 50th year this week! My family and friends made it special with their wishes and blessings!
Got to do yoga in the morning with my teachers pushing me as usual. When you are in a Bikrram yoga class, you actually expect that your teachers to be tougher on your birthday and my teacher didn't disappoint! It was also awesome to have my guru in the front row with me! Always makes me give it everything I got.
My wife made me some potato roast with paruppu sadam (that is all I wanted) and it was yummmmy!
We had already gone to the temple earlier and celebrated Karthigai deepam.
My Tamil birthstar is Rohini and this year there was a lunar eclipse which was specifically related to Rohini. So I was advised to stay put at home and eat light.. which I did.. in anticipation of all the good eats that were coming!
Now that I am part of a music family, which is a large family, they made my day extra special. Got some special wishes from the music group and got to show some progress in the singing. Still writing what seems to be a never ending post on my recent singing experience. Hope I get to post it during the thanksgiving break!
The best part of this birthday was my baby showed up for thanksgiving break. Having her at home after 4 months made me so happy!
We went to LED lights this year for Kaarthigai.. simply because it is rainy and windy out here. We respect the folks who can still pull off lighting oil lamps in Cupetino!
My not so little girl baked an amazing cake. She has a gift. Hope she keeps up her baking. I asked Jr. to blow a candle with me given she spent her birthday last week without us!
A rare photograph of the four of us. It is going to get more and more difficult to get these photos as years go by..
A day that was made very special by all my family and friends! I am lucky to have all this love! Lucky to be healthy and happy! Thank you for all the wishes!
Jr. came back from college but was mostly confined to her room, with her summer coursework. She also switched to a Noon to 3AM schedule, why I don't know. which meant I did not get to spend much time with her.
The only good thing was that I decided to work with her on one of her courses and that gave us a chance to talk more. The little one has been having stomach issues for a month now and we are asked to wait for few more weeks before we get to see a specialist. There is ONE pediatric GI specialist in Kaiser Santa Clara and one in Oakland, if you believe the nurse and appointment center! There seem to be more oncologists than GI specialists which I find interesting! We did spend time together watching Loki. We are both Marvel fans and that helps!
San has just started walking again and that is something. So what I am trying to say in an elaborate way is that this summer was a wash! We wanted to have one day, ONE freaking day where the four of us could go to see some nature, have a good meal outside and just have fun like old times (but with masks on, which I call fun with a mask discount).
We got our chance last evening. The summer courses are over as of last week. There was a good weeks rest. Now there were less excuses. So the kids agreed to sit in the car and drive an hour to SFO for the evening. They got to pick the eating. We got to pick the nature place. Given San has been to lands end many times and I have never seen it, we decided to go and walk down to the ocean.
The hole in the rock out in the ocean does look like a heart from this angle!
It was cold and windy and the place smelled like a sewer and dead fish. God works in mysterious ways. He really does. San swears that in her previous visits, she only smelled the ocean breeze! What we smelled was something to forget but hard to. Every now and then the breeze would come in and cleanse your nose.
The kids kept rolling their eyes going "this is why we don't come out!". We did manage to get a few pictures given this was our one day out. It was beautiful to look at and thankfully photographs don't come with associated smells!
There is also a tunnel you can walk through. However, we took three steps into this thing and realized that it was a smell concentrator. Masks are not enough to walk through this thing. You need a respirator. So we took a selfie and kept moving. This blog is doing a public service. If you just look at the pictures and decide to walk into the tunnel, not good. Read the sentences between the pictures and you can thank me later.
Watching the kids sit there and talk made me think of my brother. We used to be thick as thieves but we rarely speak now. Hope they do better than us when they get to this age!
After spending an hour here, we decided to go to our dinner at Gracias Madre. It is my fourth or fifth time visiting this place and we were in and out in 40 minutes. We came, we ate, we left.
Ghirardelli's is only 15 minutes away and we wrapped up dinner with some dessert.
On the way the kids who usually don't ask for anything asked me to drive there through crooked street, for old times sake and I obliged..they know I don't like to drive there!
I always look forward to that big glass for the hot fudge Sundae and was disappointed to see it served in a plastic cup. The feel of the warm glass and the cold ice cream was lost with the plastic. It is also not easy to scrape off the hot fudge with a plastic spoon from a plastic cup. It is like serving perumal kovil sarkarai pongal in a Crème brûlée ramekin!
The ice cream did taste as good as it always does.The two different textures on my forehead was the subject of an interesting discussion...the shiny part defines the boundary of where hair "used to be" is a theory!
we walked around a bit and drove back!
A video clip..
It was the happiest we have been in a few months! We have to wait till the years end to do the next "family" outing and all plans are already being rejected by the kids.
Sometimes I think all this school and college stuff is taking out the fun for these kids! My sincere hope is that after finishing all this, they get to be more "outdoorsy" and the "travel bug" bites them hard!
I for one will remember this as the one bright evening for the last few months!
We wrapped up the BIL's family visit with an entire day at Great America theme park which finally ended with some amazing fireworks..
Given all the walking San had done to that point, she was now on a cast and in a wheelchair. So that was interesting in itself. Great America is not designed to be friendly for people who have casts but the kids who manned the rides did their best to accomodate. They gave a list of rides that were safe for her and we took her only on those rides. San was actually smiling most of the time she was being wheeled around.. the irony of the situation was also making me laugh every now and then!
Great America is a poor mans Disney.. and you get to see that the poor man who visits this park is at least 3 sizes larger than the average person visiting Disney. 4 of 5 people you cross are walking with a struggle, are obese and in general show poor health just by looking at them. We saw many rides go down because the rides got stuck or people got stuck in the seats and had to be retrived. That apart, we went on a handful of rides which were in general safe and were not going to get stuck. BIL, me and Jr. spent one hour on a line when they shut it down and sent us back. We still put on a smile and went about the rest of the day.
The place is beautiful with all the fountains and floral arrangements..
The smile from the kids made up for all the standing in lines and josting for space with the wheelchair.
While Jr., the little one and BIL made it through some of the risky rides, the rest of us split up and did different things. My MIL and me went on the rotating tower and got a birds eye view of silicon valley. My old office is right behind this part and my new office was also visible.
the day ended with fireworks. We got great shots on an iPhone with the right setting..
A few shots of the fireworks in a slide show.. Most of them were taken on an iPhone
and a video of the highlights of this day trip.
We had a great time the entire day, except for the exit out of the park. The design of the exit and the procedure leaves a sour taste.. Everyone was trying to exit the park after fireworks. There were no traffic cops to get any order. It was a free for all towards the exit after being in a gridlock for 1 hour. Finally we made it out and home closer to 11:30 PM when the fireworks had ended at 9PM and we had sat in our car at 9:15! It is a 15 minute ride back home on a normal night! If there is one thing they could fix immediately, it is the directing of vehicles out of the park.
Our hope is that we eventually make it to Disney with the kids(?! at heart) soon, once the delta variant makes its exit. Till then, we will always have memories of this Great America trip, when it comes to roller coasters, fireworks and parking lot exits!
