My 6 arai koodai

Here's one of my favorite purchases... No wonder I feel like cooking everyday, huh?

Email tales

Reading old emails is like opening one of my diaries for me... Its a potpourri of stuff that keeps me ever enchanted and wakes me up from the dreariest of days..

Today was the 4th installment of cleaning up my overcluttered Inbox and out poured a huuuge collection of memories - mostly good and some bad.. Mostly, I tend to read the good stuff.. Like a few days back I was reading some of the first emails my now hubby had sent me and they all brought a smile to my face. Today I was reading a lot of stuff I had "Starred". And I noticed a pattern... I had either "Starred" the important stuff like career/study related, the ones I needed to respond to or surprisingly, the ones about which I wanted to remember and forget at the same time.. Maybe its a Scorpion trait.. I wanted to forget the incident(s) - many petty and a few grave- but remember who had done it.. And the very subject of the email brought up fleeting memories - It soured my mood a bit. Has that ever happened to you?

I unstarred them all... time to grow up... Atleast the next time I read something, it would be all sweet.

Scientists everywhere..

The quad where my college is located has been aptly named.. On one side is Boulevard Newton, then there is Rue Copernicus and the third side is Boulevard Archimedes flanked by Pascal Boulevard and indeed the entire place is called Cité Descartès.

I was just joking to a friend that if I did something worth mentioning, there would be a street somewhere that read "Rue de la Jaya". As I said that aloud, it sounded like "Rude la Jaya?" (Jaya's rude, right? - in Tamil)

I wonder how many agree...

A 6 course meal

Today I have achieved what I believed impossible. Well its both what you think and what you don't know. I lasted a 6 course meal - you got that from the title of the post. But I also lasted an entire day of presentations in... FRENCH. Congratulations to me! I never thought it was possible. When my professor suggested that it would be "good for me" to attend the presentations given by the senior members and partners of the project and get introduced to them as the new stellar PhD student, I was excited. Then he revealed that they would be in French. Thats when I mentally tuned out and willed myself not to sleep. I have slept in many classes in the past and A will vouch for that a 100%.. But in a teeny conference room with 6 senior members all waiting to see that spark of brilliance come from me, it wasn't the best of ideas. But this post is not about how I survived 6 gruelling hours of making out an odd phrase here... a number there and the parallels between French and English on the screen ahead of me (scientific is scientifiqué - there are many words like that). Its about lunch. The French like their food. That explains why the initially decided upon hour-long lunch stretched into twice that length.. It can also be explained by the fact that there were 6 courses.

Before today I had no idea how any meal could have more than 3 courses -appetizer, lunch and dessert, right? Wrong! The French start with what they love most - bread. Our choices today for Course 1 were wheat bread and baguette... And then the chef brought in Course 2 - plates of salad for each of us.. Thankfully he was forewarned about me being veggie and so while the others crunched on their chicken/pork/lamb or whatever, I grazed on my carrots, cucumbers and tomatoes. The salad was soo huge that I half suspected that that was it. Wrong again! Giving us ample time to finish (everyone had scraped their plates clean except me), the chef cleared the plates and brought in the main courses - Course 3... Boiled ripe Roma tomatoes and boiled beans with basmati rice for me as opposed to chicken tikka masala for them.. Its an unfair world. The boiled beans had no salt or any flavour and I couldn't take more than two of them. The tomatoes were yummy and thats all I ate.. what was I to eat the rice with anyways? I was sure dessert was next after the Basmati disaster - wrong again.. And in came Course 4 - Cheese. Seriously, I thought it was flan or something on my plate - but it turned out to be 3 ample portions of what I identified as blue cheese, goat cheese and ambiguous cheese.. with guess what? Bread of course! I was mortified by then and barely chewed anything while others munched away to glory. I was hoping we were done once and for all. Of course I was wrong. Course 5 - Dessert - a fried banana pie. This was yummy with a delectable crust and everyone cleaned up their plates, thank you very much. Now surely it was over? Who could get back to those meetings without that last course? Course 6- A shot of espresso!! My first ever and I needed it to wake me from the lull of the 2 hour lunch. The caffeine didn't as much as the bitterness did and I was grateful for the dark chocolate that accompanied it to remove the taste from my mouth.

Off we all trudged into the meeting room. Waiting for us was what we'd started with at breakfast- coffee, tea, orange juice, croissants and pain aù chocolat.

Home Sweet Home

Its such a new n refreshing (and fatiguing) experience to set up a new home all for yourself (and your husband of course!) Having never really bought furniture for a house, it was a brand new adventure... Me, S and a couple of friends went to a furniture super store, a certain brand name beginning with I. Having never been to the store before, we had no idea how it worked... For on the ground floor, we saw a vast expanse of warehousey space with stacks of furniture, all in boxes, arranged over expanses of shelves ready to be shipped we assumed. But we also saw a bunch of people refer something, pick the required boxes off the selves, load them on carts and head to checkout. Spare parts, we assumed. On enquiring, we found out that we didnt have to pick stuff off the racks this way. Instead we could go to the top floor and view the assembled furniture and pick what we desired. What a relief.. And so we went.. I went hyper seeing some of the stuff they had on display and S and I disagreed on almost every piece of furniture. So Day 1 turned out as a Disaster Day considering the store was closing early that too. We reached a consensus to go home, browse the website, make educated decisions and come back the next day to place the orders directly.

After a productive evening of finalizing all the furniture, we went back the next day... While waiting for S to arrive, me with my broken French and excellent charades managed to get most of the stuff listed for billing... The guy upstairs in his broken English told me that now we had to go downstairs and pay for everything and arrange for the shipping. Sounded fairly simple... To our horror though, later we discovered that the list that the upstairs guy was merely the reference paper we'd seen many poor souls refer and lunge huge stuff on carts. And sadly Day 2, it was just S and me. Panting and puffing we lunged all the damned furniture onto the carts with me actually putting my foot down (under the weight of was it the cupboard or the bed - bah who cares?) After the lengthy bill, the bank account depleted, we were still not done!! It so happened that the bed being huge wasn't kept out there with the rest of the stuff.. We had to wait an eon before they called our number and delivered the huge bed n mattress to us and another eon while we gave them back everything and paid them to have them deliver it home the next day.

Thought we were done? Not quite.. The delivery man appears a half hour after the hour stated and dumps all of the stuff from a truck right on the footpath in front of our house (I'd actually opened out the French windows in the hope of coaxing him to dump them into the house). Now me n a friend lunge back everything into the house and my foot gets caught once more, this time under the bed. Feet sore, all samaan in? Now we're done?? No baby, this is the beginning. For now, we had to fit everything together to make it look like the catalogue from mere cartons.

3 days hence..... a couple of more trips, a couple more stores... 90% done.. a bit more to go... the house is finally taking shape.. Yeaaaaay!!

A non-Hindy filmy experience

Hindi movies have spoiled us thoroughly. I realized the gravity of that yesterday evening. Me n the husband were going furniture shopping for our new home and were going to get there individually from our places of work. As usual, I got there first and was waiting in the partially deserted parking area in front of the entrance. It was raining in mild sprays and the sky was turning purple. Come on now, you know this scene from Hindi movies, don't you? This is when the heroine is looking in the completely opposite direction and suddenly feels a prick on her neck and she palats and there's the hero with widespread arms. The film bug bit me. I looked in the opposite direction too hoping to feel the prick announcing S's arrival... It must've been the 2 layers of clothing that pricked so much.. coz I turned about 30 times either to stare at strangers or the emptiness of space.. but No S. The rain had gotten steadier and my hands and the tip of my nose were numb from the cold. I palat-ed one last time in vein and then made it into the store in peals of laughter at my own filminess.

And then unexpectedly, as I pored over the kitchenware inside while smiling to myself, I did palat and there was S with his trademark half-widespread arms. :)

Note to self: Earth to J.

Back to School

Remember those days? When we were children and we started school after a 3 month summer vacation? New textbooks and notebooks... all wrapped smartly in brown paper. I remember how choosing labels was a big deal. We had crisp new uniforms, sometimes a new school bag we couldn't wait to show off and sharpened pencils and new ink pens. Plus meeting many friends after a whole 3 months (we weren't used to calling them over break). Thats what made school reopening very exciting... at least for the first week when we didn't have homework, classwork or assignments to do.

Guess what? I joined school today. After a whole 3 month wedding break. After 9 months of working. A year after completing my Masters. This time for a higher objective - a PhD. And no, I don't need to take classes or give exams. I just have to do what I like best - research. And so its begun. I have my new desk (though temporary), my computer access and I've started reading up on what I might be required to do... And now I realize the importance of the environment. While at home, I couldn't read 2 lines of a paper without distraction or without switching over to something else, here I've already read 3 papers in my 2 hours here (hence the break, hehe)... And whats more surprising - I'm excited about this. Its a different kind of rush. Maybe it has to do with the two little prefix letters these three years will earn me superceding the 2 letters behind my name currently.