In America

  Gafoor had come over sunday night and assembled this basket ball hoop. The black base is filled with sand that was in the brown paper bags.  The instruction asked to fill the sand by holding the base vertical which meant one of us would have to hold the base, and the other guy would have to carry and control the sixty pounds sand bag. Instead of that we decided to keep the base on the ground, empty the sand bag, and tilt the base back to push the sand down. This made the process whole lot easier.  But even then, holding a sixty pound bag of sand is no easy task. That is how the rolling table made it's way from the garage to the backyard. And then the cardboard sheet of the packaging was used to guide the sand from the tilted bag on the table to the hole in the base. That all felt like a lot of good optimizations that we did.  This was Gafoor's birthday gift to Kittu on his tenth birthday. He had called me on the day of the party, and said that he wanted to drop by ...

Curries just have a way to find us.  First, it was Shannu's chana dal and jeera rice. Healthy tasty homely food. Just as the fridge started to look empty, Manu rings the bell bringing in Anjali's super healthy jeera rice and beans curry.  Healthy controlled food that one would get in a high end hospital. Ok - how about healthy food that a diet strict movie star would get. Then it was Ramshi's idiyappam and egg curry. One way ticket to Kerala. The beef biriyani was there too but it is the idiyappam and egg curry that took me home. Relatively new to US, I had felt the same nostalgia effect with Ramshi's egg puffs at a community get-together earlier. Following week, we had Nithya's kappa meen curry, and chicken varutharachathe. When Vijesh brought it in, I thought the curries were already made. But when I ate it the next day, they just came back alive. It was a quiet day - time for lunch.  The fish curry just woke me right up. The feat was repeated next day with Nithya...

The traffic was pretty bad, and that let me see how majestic and beautiful the wind mills looked against the silver sky. A row of five six wind mill silhouettes rotating majestically against the silver sky plate. As I got closer,  the view reduced to one wind mill in all it's grandeur.  I was to start at 5:00 PM, and reach by 5:45 PM for the party that is supposed to start at 6:00 PM.  GPS lady told me to turn right and I turned and got into a dark  parking lot. I came right out, and took the turn right after the wall, saw "Sky Zone" on the building, and parked right next to the gate.  There were multiple doors all around the building, and I feared that I might walk through all the wrong ones before getting to the right counter. But no, I got to the right counter in first attempt. By now, it was already 6 PM.  Manu came in, and he had a very different perspective on the traffic. He did not enjoy the windmill silhouettes. Abil was there with his wisdom and s...