time travel to my alter universe

I was reflecting on the past decade and realized how much my life has changed from what I had dreamt. Almost everyone of my friends lives has changed too! I have become engrossed with my family, career and so many social activities that I forgot that I had this beautiful blog world that I left behind.

Call it the Covid blues or catching up with your "past", I decided to dust out my old blog and check-in on my old pals. It was a bitter sweet moment. Most of my "Nanbargal" blogs had an old post dated 2008-2009, some gave error message and few are blocked. I was surprised and happy to see at least a couple of blogs with posts dated 2015-2017, but was thrilled to note that "Gils" was updating his blog regularly. :)

We keep running in this busy hamster wheel life, that we sometimes forget to stop and rest, stop and reflect, stop and relish what we have. Nature has given us mankind this opportunity to slow-down and rethink our priorities. I did! Did you?

Jenal oram

Vaazhkai oru rayil payanam pol
Poi cherugindra idam arindhum,
payanathai anubavika yen marakindrom?

Jenal orathil amarandhuvitu,
peru moochu vittal Padmini
Parandhuvarum pattampoochi ya parthu rasithaal
Padminiyin pathu vayadhu sirumi
Pakathu seat-il irukum pennai nottam vitan anda
vaalibavayasu paiyan
Katti vandha samaan paigalyai seriparthar middle berth Mahadevan
Ivargalin paraparapin naduvil, than parkal anaithayum ezhandha
andha periyavar, thanadhu payanaseetai badhrapadithikolla
than kaiyil irundha photo albuthin kadaise pakathil vaithuvittu...
Puriyadha pudhirukku vidai kidaithadhupol... punnagaithar!

Talking to myself

Sometimes when you feel you need to say something to someone, sometimes when you wanna cry & sometimes when you wanna shout at someone, its better you don’t. When you turn emotional, I’ve always felt you are losing control over yourself. Its better you think about it & even if your mind is filled with those thoughts…its okay…just leave it.Every damn thing in this world is a matter of time…after some days the thing would not be of any concern to you. Believe me, when you get engaged in some other thing more important, these damn thoughts of yours just vanish ! But if you feel you are not able to concentrate just take some time for yourself…talking to yourself is even better than talking to your closest of friends. Even when you have hundreds of people who can comfort you at any point of time, you will always find that you are the only person who is gonna be with you at all points of time understanding all your emotional turmoil..no one else does it as well as you do! dude you are always the greatest strength for yourself... forget it & you search the whole world for someone to comfort you, then you are a loser. Believe in yourself, only then others will believe you! If not you, who else… Solitary moments can reveal more meaning to you when you start enjoying yourself. If you don’t find pleasure in your own company who else will? think about it! you’ll find the bliss am talking about!
Found this in a friend's blog! Amazing!

Dreams

How many of you still dream about your school days? I do! At times my dreams are so scary that I wake up with jolt just to realise that Im way ahead of my school days and in few years my kids would be on their way to school !
Here are some of the dreams I had.
1. Forgetting to do my homework and not taking the right workbook to class.
2. Missing one ribbon and searching for it at 8:45am when the first bell will ring at 9:00am
3. Wearing a wrong uniform. (we had two uniforms in our school- White and white on days when we had our games period and normal brown uniform on non P.T days.)
4. Not polishing the shoes and getting caught during prayer.
5. Getting up late on Saturdays, when we had a special Havan period that starts at 8:20 am
6. Losing the calendar book that has the time table chart in it and not know the classes of the day.

Some times I wake up crying badly from these dreams! Glad that these dreams are never going to come true! :-)

Funny Fondue Experience

Its been more than a year since I blogged and I have come to realise that I have lost even the little writing skills that I (if any at all) had!

Anyways, wanted to share this experience somewhere and remembered my old sweet blog :-)

We had been to Minneapolis recently as Shyam had a conference there. Its a really cool place to visit. People there are very friendly, sweet and helpful. Its the land of more than 10,000 lakes and if you are a nature person, its amazing place to roam around.

We went to dinner at a place called Melting Pot. Its a fondue restaurant. Those who are wondering what a fondue is, in simple terms "you are asked to pay a fortune to cook your own dinner!" but yeah it was really a very funny and expensive experience.

So here it is. Its a four course dinner. First they provide you with a pot. To be precise its our "eeya pathram" and they have a inbuilt stove in every table. For the starters they gave us some cheese, jalapeno peppers, salsa, salt, pepper and a cup of bread, tortilla chips and some fresh cut apples.

We have to melt the cheese, add the peppers, salsa, salt and pepper and once done dip the bowl of chips and bread and fruits into it and gulp down! The second course was pretty simple. We get to choose either a soup or a salad. We opted for the salad and so don't know if we had to cook our own soup.

Next comes the main entree. Here we have to select a cooking style first. They have four options - Two had some wine in it and one was canola oil and the other was using vegetable broth. So we decided on the vegetable broth. They gave us some basic green vegetables like potato, mushroom, tofu, broccoli, some pasta and some green peas and some basic sauce and asked us to cook by ourselves! We have to dip the vegetables into the boiling broth and eat it!

Finally comes the dessert. Another pot of boiling chocolate sauce and some fresh strawberries and a tong to dip it into it!

For a total check of $90, a totally different experience and a good quality time spent doing something together :-)