This is so true.....

So I have been following this blog zenhabits and they write about some real cool stuff....stuff that we all can follow in our lives. the recent one is this . It talks about starting slowly and how productivity is over-rated. I can totally relate to it. Not because I am fiercely productive and want to slow down but I have realised the importance of starting a day slowly and it brings peace...real peace!!

You all there...read it and like it and follow it and be HAPPY!!

My lights were on first...

Well there is this girl who stays one block away and she is always studying. Whatever time of the day I see her, she is studying. How do I know she is studying?  Her room is visible from our balcony and the lights are always on so I get to know. Not a good habit to look into other people's house but what do I do, its bang opposite the place I sit in the balcony during our morning tea that I can't avoid her and then noticing her persistence, I once or twice looked for her in the night before going to sleep and guess what she is always studying. Whatever time I get up, whatever time I sleep those lights are always on and I see her face dug in the books. I do sound like a stalker isn't it. Don't worry, I am not. I am just observing.
So I made a game out of this experience that without making the extra effort to wake up at odd hours in the night to see those lights off, I will switch on the lights in our apartment before she is back to her study table and yeah it happened today.  I had to get up like real early in the morning and wohoooo her lights were off. I win!

P.S. She came back to her routine within hour an hour of my waking up and let me tell you its real early in the morning and she doesn't sleep early as well. I wish she gets whatever she is studying for.

Is the world going to end soon...

There have been talks that nature has taken lot of beating through the hands of mankind and its going to take revenge. We have been noticing so many natural disasters within short spans of time and the scale of damage is increasing with time. May be all these are signs of what's left and like dinosaurs we may also become extinct. The environmentalists have been raising concerns since years that mankind needs to mend its habits and be more kind to nature else the future generations will face the brunt. And now with the theories of global warming and consequent rise  in sea level strengthening and depletion of resources coming in, we are forced to think that we are the ones to blame. May be the world might not end but we may face a drastic change, may be a catastrophic event or end of the so important natural resources. The immediate question is how will we survive specially with no natural resources on which we are so dependent. Well I have different thoughts on the concerns.

• Natural resources may deplete but we will never run out of resources. We may not use Oil as the major source of energy in the future buts that would be because we would become more efficient and we would find better sources of energy. We came out of stone age not because we ran out of stone but because we found better ways to light a fire or make wheels out of. And same happened to say coal. At one point coal seemed to be a very important resource and worth preserving at any costs but see we have found alternatives to coal.
• The ozone layer is damaged and which is increasing the global warming and we are facing the consequences. My question is are we sure we are doing this? Who knows if that's the course of nature. The poor dinosaurs did not use chlorofluorocarbons and still had to die because a stupid meteor decided to hit the mother earth. Since we have the capacity to think, we assume that we can control nature - the very nature who created us. We readily form hypothesis with the very little facts available to us and try to control the circumstances. We forget that what we know is a fraction of what the universe knows. We can't even use more than a little fraction of our brain even after being aware of the capabilities it has and we make the mistake of predicting the future. So my point is that we should stop beating our heads on what will happen in future and how can we control it. We can not control anything. We can not even control things that actually are in our control. 

So lets just chill out and enjoy whatever we have. I am not saying go and burn plastic because the nature is anyway taking its course. The nature will still take its course but plastics smell bad when burned so avoid it!

My road is crumbling down in front of me and at the same time its getting build..

Hope never dies. And hope keeps us alive. Just imagine a single day without a ray of hope. We always have something to look up to and something to achieve which keeps us going. I love a new day and fresh beginnings everyday.

Life is good!

To be or not to be..

Well its not exactly that serious a question but still an important decision point. I recently gave an exam and though people are saying its a decent score, I am at the crossroads of retaking the exam or using the score I have with me. I have been breaking my head over this and have to decide in another 2-3 days.
frankly speaking, I would have been much happier if I had got the score I wanted in first go itself. Now if I decide to retake, it means one more month of studying and hell who wants that. I have other things in mind which  I want to do and may not be able to take out time for them. Other things like:

1. Join mandarin classes
2. Learn how to swim
3. Read more and write more

Well buts that's how it is. Got to make things move and if I do decide to retake, I am still not giving up on the small list above. I may start them late but I am doing them in any case.

Wish me luck guys!!

Blogging month..

Ok...so since I have not been able to pull myself out of the laziness and have not been writing at all, I am committing myself to this blog for full September - yes one full month of blogging with at least one post a day. I will write about anything that comes to my mind - my feelings, whats happening or whats not happening, what I am up to, the weather and its correlation to the sleeping habits - you know just anything.

Also, I am going to change the look of my blog. I want a MAKEOVER..I am excited about it. Lets see how it turns out.

Cheers,
SM

The Baking Disaster...well pseudo disaster!!!

When you are a housewife and you have just one interesting channel to watch on TV and that channel shows Masterchef (US, Australia, Junior) thrice a day, you have to get inspired to cook. And not just cook, cook the exotic stuff and feel good about it. After the Vietnamese Pho's disaster and Chicken Snitzel's "save my reputation" performance, I really got motivated to bake. Baking sounds so sophisticated and technique driven that the idea of baking made me feel chef like from inside and I thought of trying my hands on the chocolate chip cookies. The first question is why cookies- well because they sounded easy and quick. And why chocolate chip cookies, that's because almost everyone (including my husband) likes them. I got a decent recipe and the ingredients from our own mustafa. If anyone of you have seen Masterchef, they always talk about being absolutely right in measurements and technique. So before really starting to mix the ingredients, I did my research on:

• 1 cup measurement - its actually 16 tablespoons
• Tablespoon is different than teaspoon
• How to preheat an oven - yeah, it was my first time with oven as well and my oven doesn't have a pre-heat alarm
• Difference between whisking and beating
• Difference between baking soda and baking powder etc.

To cut it short, the preparation was fine and upto the expectations. But even after doing all the research on measurements, I got it wrong at the time of placing the rolls on baking sheet and the result was huge cookies. On second thoughts, I think they looked like pregnant cookies. You know the base was normal size but they bloated towards the top. And to add to the disaster, they got burned from the bottom - really burned (I wanted to say overcooked instead of burned but that would have been an understatement of the condition) - you will need a hammer to break that. But on the positive side, the taste was decent. That's why I am calling it a pseudo disaster :)
Anyhoo, when my husband saw my effort, he said, they look like boiled potatoes. Yeah right, he normally doesn't say nice things just to please me. He gives an honest feedback - so my cookies looked like pregnant boiled potatoes but they tasted good.

Moral of story is: We all should try new things, it gives new experiences and memories and more importantly a shuffle to our gray cells. I not only got the experience but also a post out of the baking saga.