July 2004 Archives

I won! I won! I won!

My first win on eBay. Now that I won, I am of course suffering from buyer's remorse and wondering if I paid too much. Then I tell myself that it was something that I needed and that I had paid less than I had budgeted. Now as long as the item arrives safely and works well I promise to be satisfied.

I went through at least 2 months of buyer's remorse after we bought the condo. I would check the listings at least 10 times a day -- more times than when we were looking for a place. We found our place after only a couple of weeks of house hunting. I wasn't ready to get out of buyer mode.

So I bought a Canon Elph S200. I always liked that camera and I didn't need and couldn't afford the latest and greatest 5 megapixel model. I am paying less than $200 for the camera, a 128MB flash card and a camera case.

Funny how one feels remorse regardless of whether the amount is a few 100 dollars or a few 100 thousand!

Now that I have a camera (keeping my fingers crossed for safe arrival and functioning) I hope to post more images on my blog.

Life is like a skewer- well it's actually like the veggie skewer I made for Savitha's birthday bbq. I envisioned beautiful fresh veggies and paneer, marinated in tikka masala, with yoghurt, composed artfully on a wood skewer. Anirvan went off to Safeway to get my list of things that I needed to create this masterpiece. Not having access to paneer (the day may not be far that Safeway starts carrying items to please my demographic but it wasn't time for that just yet), I asked him to look for mozarella balls that come in little tubs. He probably spent a good few minutes trying to find them- they weren't in the cheese section.

I hummed a tune as I cut up the onions, green peppers and cut up the soft white mozarella into bite sized pieces. I threw in mushrooms and cherry tomatoes into the marinade with the other vegetables. The colors were beautiful. With 15 minutes to catch the bus I hurried to make the skewers. I was really pleased with the way they turned out. Visions of red, green and white with a little brown and translucent pink thrown in and covered with orangish sauce. I packed them up in foil and we made it to Savi's house just in time to throw them on the grill.

And then life happened. As the mushrooms, onions, peppers and even the tomatoes rose to the occasion by browning themselves and enhancing their flavors the mozarella, horror of horrors started to melt!!! But that wasn't supposed to happen. For people who saw it afterwards the skewers looked like they had huge gaps in them. The cheese wasn't supposed to melt?! I was so enamoured of my vision that I had wiped out from my brain my knowledge of mozzarella.

Live and learn and know that there will always be mozarella meltdowns in the skewer of life. Life may not look like the way you envsioned it, but it still tastes pretty damn good.

After almost 5 years of living here, experiences of India and especially of my childhood seem almost surreal. We lived in the same house for 12 years, since I was 2 years old. One of my favorite stories of growing up in India has to do with the plot of land next to our house in Shantinagar, in Bangalore.

The plot of land went through many avatars, the earliest one that I remember is the "cow shed". During that time, us kids ran around and played among cows. The place smelled of dung and urine and the cow shed was dark and dingy. There were maybe 30 cows in there..and chickens. Little chickens that arrived in round baskets, balls of yellow fur that we would cup into our hands. Just to put it in context, this wasn't farmland or suburban, it was pretty much in the center of the city. I guess zoning hadn't made it's way out there yet!

One days the cows were gone and replaced by vermicilli, lots of it. The cow shed was now a vermicilli factory and the courtyard that we used to chase chickens in, was now where the vermicilli was dried. Long lengths of the pasta were hung from a framework made of rows of iron pipes. In between eating the raw pasta we also hung from the pipes using them as monkey bars. Sometimes we would tie coir rope to the pipes and make swings.

In the last few years that we lived there the plot of land became a saree dyeing factory. The rows of pasta were replaced by colorful sarees in hues of red, orange, green, purple and so many more. When the afternoon sun came into our house, the light would come in filtered through the fabric, washing our interior walls in the colors of the saree of the day. It's one of the most vivid visual memories I have of growing up.