The girls go sky diving with Varun uncle..

This weekend was interesting. Came back from Asia and was still recovering from food poisoning and jet lag. Sangeetha's baby cousin (not a baby anymore, just like how the Little One is not little anymore!) came to visit us. I decided to make the most of his visit and cheer myself up. This kid was seven I think during our wedding and somehow I still see him as a seven year old. . . as usual I digress.

He came for a weekend visit from Melbourne. So we decided to go take him bowling and then Indoor sky-diving.

He won the bowling by a wide margin and beat everyone in our house. Then came the sky diving..

he did great! He was startled at first but adapted well and went up the wind tunnel! 

but we had some unexpected surprises.

We learned that Jr. is a natural at this!

The little one surprised us as well.. 

Jr. went up the wind tunnel on her second try and that was something to watch! 

They all came out with certificates and coupons for future visits. Something tells me that we will be going there again. The place is 35 minutes away from home and if we can reserve a spot (which was available that morning) it is a good deal.. especially if you have had a rough three days and just want to watch some smiling faces and family members have a great time! 

Have not been in this tunnel in almost nine years! "Damn I looked young once!" was the thought that came to mind after looking at that old post from 2008.. maybe will go again to celebrate 10 year anniversary of first indoor sky-diving experience in January.. and maybe, maybe, will take Sangeetha with me!

At this rate, not sure if I will ever get to post things from the Pittsburgh trip. It is going to be another hectic week.. maybe this weekend... lots of tea, sit outside and blog! 

Yeah, there is an App for that! Is there?!

The girls are glued to the i-devices every chance they get.

When daddy travels, they get the devices back.. think of it as a grown up girls pacifier of sorts. Something to keep them from creating new issues for mom who has way too much to juggle!

Issue is, when daddy comes back, they don't even bother to look up from their screens.

Sometimes we have to call their names a dozen times from the kitchen to just get a response or acknowledgement!

What if there was an app that you could run from your iPhone and have that as the master device and every other idevice designated as a slave device? 

When the kids are "engrossed" and have literally gone inside the screen, we send an interrupt which will stop everything they are doing and broadcast the parents via video to their screen so we can scream at them live?!

When the little one was pitched with this idea, her response?

"if you do that, I will press the home button, cancel out that app and do something else which does not involve the ipad!"

My response ?

"Great! then the app worked! now that you are out of the iPad you WILL hear me call your name and most likely show up to the kitchen!"

Daddy 1: LO  0 

These moments where my logic wins over are few and far between these days.. today I am savoring this till it lasts.

Someone should make an app like that, if there isn't already one. If you know of such an app, do let me know!

The arab and the camel

My mother used to tell us a bedtime story called "the Arab and the camel". In that story an Arab is pitching a tent to keep him warm in the cold desert night. His Camel tries to get in the tent and he says "no". Then the camel puts is head into the tent and he goes "okay, will let him do that".. slowly the neck comes in... and beore he knows it, the camel is in the tent and he is outside! It was an elaborate version of the "give an inch, take a mile". Why bring that up? 

My iFamily of devices kept screaming for an OS update to iOS 8! I do not risk doing OS updates while traveling abroad. There is a back story to that which is better off untold. 

Came back to the US and hit "update" only to get a message saying "This update needs 5.1 GB more space. you have to delete items from your phone and retry" or something to that effect.

Seriously?!

I got a 16 GB iPhone 5S a year ago. The thing has hardly a few hundred songs, 30-35 Apps and NO videos permanently stored. At any time I have 0-50 pictures on the phone and a few videos in the Camera roll. 

Slowly the OS upgrades keep taking up so much space, that it is almost one third of the storage space. That is tragic. 

For now I am sticking to the old OS. I hope there is a way to turn the "reminder to upgrade OS" off ,as it does not make sense to upgrade right now. 

If the OS upgrade is a must, and it needs more memory, we should get that addiitonal memory for free, no?! 

Had the same gripe with Windows ten years ago with all those "patches" taking up space. Now it is Apple.

Someday memory will be cheap enough and we will have enough of it on our phones for it to not matter. Till then, we have to budget for a phone with more memory than we think we need, just to accomodate future memory grabbing OS installs that tout bug fixes!

Sigh!