2017 Indian republic day Weekend ...

The past weekend was spent in Movie and "Friends"(season 5 to be more precise) marathon. One of the movies I watched was "Munnabhai MBBS". I have loved both the movies in the Munnabhai series ... the innovative storyline and enthusiastic performance by the actors especially Munna-Circuit pair never tires me from watching the movie repeatedly. This time I watched it with English subtitles. I normally turn off the subtitles because it distracts me a lot ... even though I follow the language I end up reading the subtitles and most times the essence of the dialogue is lost in translation. The movies I have watched with subtitles in the past also have some word to word translation incorporated which completely destroys the punch in the dialogue. But this time I watched Munnabhai with subtitles and I was surprised that the title song translation was done quite well ....
The hindi version goes:
M - Master ke Master
B - Bindaas Doctor
B - Bemisaal Actor
S - ShaNa character

And translated version goes:
M - Master of Masters
B - Bohemian Doctor
B - Brilliant Actor
S - Slickest character

Not bad huh ??

Next time I watch movie, may be I will turn on the subtitles just for fun in analyzing it !!

US States - Party game - 6

There is an episodes in "Friends" where they play a game to write 50 states in the US within 15 mins (I forget if it is 10 or 15 mins ... but it is supposed to be timed). Ross initially thinks it is silly, but soon gets absorbed into the game ... he gets 49 towards the end of the episode and repeats one state to bring the count to 50.
 Well why did I write this episode ... I think it is a very interesting party game indeed ... as much as it sounds easy, it isn't. To add to difficulty, one may include State name with Capital as a clause.

My best score .... I am not telling anymore 😏

Capitol Vs Capital

As I was following the Inauguration, the headlines in newspaper said "Trump heads to Capitol" .  Something about the spelling felt wrong... I realized I had learnt to spell it as "Capital" and concluded spelling mistake in the newspaper.
 But as I followed the news in other websites / new papers found it was indeed "Capitol".
Curiosity got the better of me and I searched wiki.
Definitions are:
Capitol : A capitol is a building in which a legislature meets
Capital :

• Capital city, the area of a country, province, region, or state, regarded as enjoying primary status, usually but not always the seat of the government

Empty office ...

I come to office and leave early from my work desk as well. I am usually at my desk around 8:00am, latest by 8:15am. Most days I find very few people in office when I arrive, around 8:30am, I start seeing some folks ... today it is close to 8:40am and hardly anyone around.
 Looks like everyone is either busy watching President Trump inauguration or are enjoying the rainy weather outside ... either ways, I am already here ... might as well get done some tasks.

Party Game - 5 - Music

Here is a party game with a slight twist to the popular Ankakshari ...

One team/ person sings a song (only antara or song beginning), the next team picks up a word from the same and sings a song beginning with the chosen word.

Eg:
Team 1 : Mera naam Chin Chin Chu ....
Team 2 : Naam kya hai, pyaar ka maara .
Team 1 : Pyaar diwaana hota hai mastana hota hai
Team 2: Diwana hua baadal ...

Party Game - 4 - General

Last evening I heard this on radio and thought it would be a good party game.
This is played between 2 people. If there are more folks in the party, then they may be split into teams. Each team can send one member as a representative.

The game rule is very simple. One person asks questions while the other person responds.
Sounds simple ... but the twist here is the person responding should not "answer / respond" the question posed by the other player.

Eg:
Person 1: Which is your favorite sport ?
Person 2: It is going to rain tonight.

Person 1 : Yeah .. the gray clouds are gathering ... should start raining around 5:00pm
Person 2 : I think weather report says 7:00pm ...
    If person 2 answers something on the lines of above, Person 1 wins points :)
Person 2 answer should be anything but on weather. Something like "My favorite move is Sholay".

This could be a timed Q&A... 60 seconds should be ideal.
Person 1's challenge is to frame questions so you force the other person to respond.
Person 2's challenge is to put on "Special thinking cap" and refuse to answer any question posed.

Do try ....

Beware of questions like "Are you ready to play the game?" or "I think time is up" or "What is your name?" that Person 1 can ask .. do not fall trap to these questions :)

Weekend that was ...

The last weekend was eventful. The girls and their dad were busy in Badminton tournament and I was busy with "Yellu" preparations for Sankranthi. I stopped making "Sakkare achhu" (sugar candies) last year and I continued with the same this year as well. It involves an elaborate procedure, and the kids at home do not favor it, so I find the effort not worth it. Anyways husband helped with "Kobbari" scrapping (dry coconut), cutting jaggery and coconut proved not a simple task. I used the special tool (adike kattari) for the first time to cut jaggery and the tool simplified the task considerably. Prepared yellu to distribute to atleast 20 folks.
 We had conveniently decided to use "Kitty party" for yellu distribution.

The girls performed better than other tournaments they have participated in. But sadly they had tough opponents and could not win medals. The achievement for both the girls was sweet revenge in the form of game wins against opponents they had lost to previously. Personally they were very satisfied. We watched "Moana" movie monday evening, before wrapping up the long weekend with a delicious stuffed capsicum / roti / jeera rice dinner.

Next long weekend is in May ... with the Martin Luther weekend, holiday season officially comes to an end ...  

Dinner Conversation

Last night dinner conversation:

Kid 1 : Amma, can you ask some logical problem for me to solve ...
Kid 2 : (Noding enthusiastically).
Dad : OK ... Before I ask, tell me if you know the meaning of these kannada words. What does "Aadu" mean?
Kid 2 : Playing ... play ... alva?
Dad : That is one meaning, it also means "Goat"
Dad : What does "Nari" mean?
Kid 1 : It means "Walk"
Mom : Walk is "NaDi" ... not "Nari"
Kid 1 : Oh .. right. "Nari" means "River" ... right?
Mom : River ??? Nadi is river ... what is Nari?
Dad : Nari means fox ... got it? What is KoLi?
Kid 2 : quack quack ...
Dad : That is duck ... KoLi is hen.

After sorting out the meaning, now, how many legs does "ordinarykoLi" have????

Rain Rain all day long ...

It has been raining non stop for the past 3-4 days. The weather is so gloomy outside.
The result:
* My already lazy body refuses to co-operate. The very idea of getting bundled in a cozy corner is tempting.
* Hard to gets things done outside of the house like grocery / pay bills etc.
* Kids catch up on this mood very soon ... thankfully the kids still enjoy Badminton practices / classes. They have been prompt with their studies as well. (touch wood) ... when I think about it, I think its me... not the kids.
* Never ending hunger ... I have been snacking at very regular intervals.
* Garden maintenance has been postponed.

Coming back from warm Cancun to rainy California, this weather is not making it easy to get back to routine.

Party game - 3 : Baby Shower

* Hand paper / pen to the guests.
* Ask them to list the Mother / Child pair from Hindu Mythology.
* Time the guests.

Eg: Kunti - Arjuna, Subhadra - Abhimanyu etc. Some smart guests will take the name of each Pandava and few Kauravas with their mothers. Allow them to :) They will feel accomplished with their long list :)

Party Game - 2 - Mythology

Indian Mythology party game

Select an Indian Mythology epic like Ramayan / Mahabharata. Make chits of alphabets.
Make teams. Have the teams with down the Mythological characters beginning with the chosen chit alphabet. The writing part will is of course timed. Each correct character written will fetch 10 points.

Eg: Say letter K is picked ... Krishna, Krishne (Draupadi), Kunti, Kamsa are some of the characters that may be written by all teams ... characters like Keechaka, Krupacharya, Kalinga (the serpent) will be surprises.

Try this game ...

Cancun - 2016 Winter Vacation

We have established sort of tradition over the past few years where a friend's family / sister's family and our family head out for vacation during Christmas break. We are a group of like minded people with similar priorities and kids in almost similar age groups, so it has worked out well thus far. (tough wood).
 After some discussions, we narrowed Cancun has our vacation destination. (we are running out of warmer destinations to visit during Christmas ... unless we agree to increase our budget:) ) Resorts / flight tickets were booked in early October and we thought we were all set. So the day of travel dawned bright and we were welcomed with a text from United airlines that our flight itinerary was "Rescheduled". Per our original plan we were to reach Cancun by 7:00am via a red eye flight ... but per the rescheduled itinerary, we were going to reach by evening 4:00pm. We were essentially going to miss out almost a day of vacation. That wasn't the worst part ... our new schedule routed us to Denver where we were going to spend 10 hours in airport (without lounge facility) before we could catch the flight to Cancun. It irked us to no end. Sister's husband in whose name the booking was spent a good 4-5 hours trying to negotiate with the United flight customer service, but their tone / understanding of the passenger plight was pathetic, to a point of being rude. It was almost as if without explicitly stating it the message was "This is the best schedule we can offer... take it or leave it. And if you leave it, no refund". We could perhaps have negotiated on the "Refund" part ... but we truly had our heart on the vacation and did not want it cancelled under any circumstance. So after much grumbling we took the offer.
 Once the travel part was done ... the vacation was as good as it could get. We departed cold SF to be greeted in Warm Cancun. The humid weather reminded us so much of India and our spirits were up the moment we landed..the lost night sleep soon forgotten. Our resort was lovely and rooms tastefully designed. The next 4 nights we thoroughly enjoyed the warm weather and delicious desserts / ice creams.

Day 1 : Visited Xcaret : A surprise package : Previous night lack of sleep, led to delayed start on Christmas morning. Having not much choice since most tourist places were closed, we went Xcaret. Thankfully, the place did not disappoint us a bit. We enjoyed clay moulding, butterfly garden, lagoon swimming and the beach side lunch location. Special mention to the scuba diving experience that my older kid thoroughly enjoyed.

Day 2 : My favorite visit : Chichin Itza : The Mayan temple - Reminder of the mayan culture. It was such a lovely experience to learn about the Mayan "Warrier" culture ... we bought some artifacts after much bargain and I was pleasantly surprised with my skills ;)

Day 3 : Rio Secreto : Group favorite : Never in my life so far have I walked in river water flowing inside underground caverns. Such a unique experience ... the caverns are maintained spotlessly clean and the water temperature is pleasant at 25°C. Our group was split into 2, with the dads taking charge of younger kids and mom with the slightly older kids. The irony being older kids in mom's group who could swim were going to help out the non swimming moms :( Anyways, our guide turned out to be a superwoman, she managed to drag all 3 floating moms at one go when required. We felt accomplished, when we learnt we had managed to cross almost 13ft deep water at times. This place is a must go for adventure seekers ... walking in the river water is such a refreshing experience.

Our vacation ended with us waking up at 4:00am to catch 8:00am flight. There was a minor flight delay again, but thankfully not as bad. Our travel adventure did not end with just landing in SF. We managed to keep up the adventure going by exploring bart / caltrain / uber to reach home 3 hours past our flight landing. A scrumptious South Indian Thali from Saravana Bhavan was such a delight after eating continental food for past 4 days ... a great way to end our 2016 vacation. 

Party Game - 1 - General

This game can be played with folks of all age group. Not much prep work needed and provides a lot fun to the all ...
 Prepare chits of situations to suit the audience. Have the audience pick a chit and narrate an incident related to the situation they picked.
 We played this game in our Chiti party and boy what fun we had. Some of the situations given were :
* How did you meet your spouse?
* Recollect an incident that brings a smile on your face even today.
* Share a kitchen disaster
* First movie experience with your spouse
* If you could change one thing about your marriage, what would it be?
* Your favorite cook in the family
* Share an incident with your bestie
* How did you spend your summer vacation growing up?

What is nice about this game is not only do you learn something nice about the person sharing the incident, but others also recollect their personal experience in this minds :)

Next time you are pressed for time and have a party, try this game. You are bound to have fun. 

Lunch out .. restaurant review

Hubby and I explored this new Indian restaurant called “Bikaner” for lunch today. It is a very modest restaurant with not so pricey dishes.

The service was OK, could have been faster. We ordered Kashmiri Kofta and Subzi mela along with Naan. The Naan was crispy just to our liking. Kaftas in Kashmiri Kofta were not very appealing, we like ours when it contains, paneer and cashew. The gravy though was very tasty. The Subzi mela was average. 

Overall would give the restaurant 2.5 stars. 

Party Hosted ....

I am part of a group of friends who meet every month in the name of "Chiti". As part of "Chiti meet" each of us contributes $25 every month to a "Prized Pot" and we pick the winner of the pot via lottery. Previous winners are eliminated from the lottery pick. We are a group of 15 and so every one eventually wins the pot. The idea behind this is to meet friends regularly and have fun. 

 So I won the coveted pot last round which meant, I was going to host the party in our house to pick the next winner. Traditionally we meet, greet and eat ... once that is taken care, we gossip and play games. 

 The most difficult part of hosting a party for me is the menu decision. I have to consider the day of the party (to evaluate if I will have time to make trip to grocery), scale of the party (cannot plan on items not scalable), time of the party (mostly avoid frying if lunch party) and the crowd type (helps determine cuisine). 

 After much deliberation the following menu was narrowed down. 

Tomato soup with bread crotons, Bell pepper and Menthya Bhath, Bell pepper tambuLi, chapati, avial, mosaranna, Baasundi, Ripe mango with salt+khara. 

 

What gave me immense satisfaction is that all guests thoroughly enjoyed the food. The effort was completely justified... the leftover food ensured no dinner cooking, could it get any more better 😊

More about the games in my next post ...

Back from hibernation ...

I didn't realize how difficult it is to string two simple comeback sentences together until now. Few friends have been urging me to come back to blogging world and I decided perhaps I should give it a try. Only now, when I start typing the comeback post, I understand, this is hard for me ... I don't like to share too many details with people anymore. I am fiercely protective of my personal and professional life. I don't like to write about my regional / political inclination ... so that leaves me with most generic topic. Let me see how regularly I am able to blog... but hope to target atleast couple of posts in a month.

Cheers to me !!

Snow tubing

We went snow tubing the first day of this year ... yep ... on 01/01/12 !!

Funny how learnt about this ... daughter had a playdate with her friend. The friend's mother casually asked if she could borrow daughter's snow suit. I asked her if they were going skiing and she mentioned about this farm ... not too far from home, where they had arranged for snow tubing using artificial snow.

This year, Lake Tahoe has not had as much snow and we had cancelled our annual ski trip. But this farm sounded like a good alternative. The only problem was that we were going there on the last day before closure and we were invited for lunch at the friend's place on the same day. Determined to go there, we booked the tickets online for 5pm ... managed lunch and left home around 3:15pm. Luckily the traffic was not bad and reached the farm well on time. The girls also got to enjoy some hay stacks / climb up tire stacks before tubing.

The tubing gates opened on time and we managed to go down the slide to our heart's content. We were back to our area by 7:45pm and headed straight to Sitar Express... a quaint Indian restaurant. Packed food. .. went home .. showered and enjoyed a lovely dinner. (must add rich ... because we ate Paneer tikka masala and Shahi panner and Naan for dinner)

The first day of the year was well spent.

Office stories continue ....

This person comes to office :

@10:00am - Tad late ... but not too bad.

Immediately goes to get a cup of coffee ...

while loudly saying Hello to everyone in the path between his cube and coffee vending machine.

Once done with coffee ... starts calling his friends ....

discusses about stocks, vacations, lunch, dinner etc etc .... LOUDLY ... very very irritating

Time for lunch now ... and goes to heat his food

Lunch done in an hour.

Checks emails and strolls around for few more minutes ...

Coffee break again...

In between attends one or two office calls for 30 mins ...

WHEN DOES THIS PERSON WORK ??? grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

The choice she made ...

My colleague usually goes home for lunch. Today, there was a lunch out planned by her team and she was looking forward to it. But as luck would have it, she had to attend to some thing important, at the very hour when she was supposed to go for lunch. So decided to drop out of the group lunch.

She was done with her work in the next 30 mins ... now had the option to go for lunch. She had our office cafe, subway, home and other restaurants and drive through as her options. She also mentioned to me that her hadn't had her breakfast that morning and was really hungry ... "Go get a sandwich" I suggested. She listened and pondered about how to deal with her hunger. (The time she spent thinking about this, she could have got herself a sandwich)

She then stepped out ... went to the vending machine and bought a packet of pretzels. The lady in question is on the stouter side and tells me she is trying to reduce her weight. I have seen her cave in for sweets / pizzas / donuts when offered by others in the office ... and when she was really hungry she bought Pretzels ??? WHY ??

Should I remind her of her weight goals ?? Should I remind her of the healthy food habits ? Should I remind her that skipping meals is not the best idea to lose weight ??

ps: I didn't say a word ... just looked at her pretzel packet and asked "Is this lunch?" and she smiled back.

2010 -Winter break

The Winter break was eventful. Mom and dad left on 21st Dec ... so I had took off from office on 21st and 20th. Working on 22nd / 23rd was not easy ... the house felt strangely quiet. Hubby had taken off for 2 weeks to spend time with family. The kids were home and noisy as usual ... but still missed daddy / amma.

We had plans of skiing on Christmas day at Lake Tahoe... but the weather played spoilsport. We decided to go to Monterey instead and enjoy the Aquarium. Before we drove to Monterey, enjoyed breakfast at Komala Vilas. Aquarium was good and the kids co-operated, but I felt it was slightly over priced for what it had to offer. As we walked towards our car, we noticed folks biking by the bay ... my sister insisted we check out bike rentals and we did. And boy, what a lovely experience it turned out to be !! My little one and nephew (chunnu and munnu as they are affectionately called) were seated in the front row and took up the responsibility of ringing the bell when instructed. It was very cute to see them ring the bell everytime someone requested "Bell please" ... my little girl would ring immediately ... and nephew followed suit.

The bike had 3 rows and was perfect for 2 families. We biked for an hour and headed home.

On 26th, we hosted dinner for one of our friends' family who are moving back to India. The menu was Methi paratha, Chole, Bende Kayi gojju, Kayi sasive anna, mosaranna and Badaam Halwa... and oh, the cucumber - tomato - carrot puri chat was delicious.

Cousins and their families visited us on 28th for dinner. We went out to "The Jungle" before having garam garam Masala Dose, Avare KaLu saaru, mosaranna, Basundi (prepared by sister) and fruit salad for dinner.

I was just browsing the weather site when I noticed that Jan 1st and 2nd had snow storm predictions in Tahoe which meant, our Ski trip would further get pushed. So hubby made instant decision to go skiing on 31st. The only problem was we had already committed to a New year get together for the evening. After some browsing / consulting, we booked a room for 30th and headed to Tahoe. We spent the night at the hotel (played Sequence after a long time) and headed to Tahoe on 31st. It was a bright sunny day ... perfect for skiing... if only the kids co-operated and rentals did not have long queue. We braved all odds and still managed so go tubing and kids enjoyed snow rides after much persuasion.

We came back home around 6:30pm and went for the party at 8:00pm. We played Dumb cherads / 20 questions ... and had yummy food and welcomed new year by cutting a nice cake. We were home around 12:30, wished family members and hit the sack.

Apart from all the activities above, managed to watch some movies (all movies were watched late night starting at 10:30pm)

Overall a great break ... and the grind begins now :)

Happy 2011 !