Thursday, August 23, 2012

A new experience

A long, long time ago….

Well....around 1 month or so, Lindo and I found ourselves with an unexpected long weekend since his parents had to go out of town and the boys had holidays from school….  While we were wondering about ways to make the day off worth its while, we hit upon a great idea. 

“Why don’t we paint the boys’ room?”

Yes, why indeed, any other person would ask him / herself…but then, we are not those sane people who do everything for a very good reason, or sometimes just because we haven’t tried our hand at it yet.

So out came the paints and out went the toy boxes and mattresses and everything movable except for the beds. The boys had their hair covered with old T-shirts and Tim became the official paint stirrer and Nathan was in-charge for the food…mainly eating it :)
 
















The previous paint was 3 walls of light yellow and one dark blue wall…we covered all the walls with fresh yellow. It was rather easy on the previously yellow walls, but the blue wall took quite some time. By end of day 1, we were done with the base coats and were wondering about how we could transform this yellow room into something that the boys would love.

Those who know our boys well know that they love vehicles, planes…any mode of transport, so that was what it would be…next came the green paint and we painted hills and some more hills. Lindo took the bigger wall while I was assigned the one with the window (maybe because he knows that I can’t draw???) We bought a sponge (Asian paint royale, none the less) and somehow managed a semi-decent sponge finish on one wall. 

2 days later we completed the project and I have to say, the nursery kid in me is pretty pleased with my effort. I agree that the sheep that I drew look kind of sinister (they kind of remind me of Bane from Batman…with the neck muscles and all), but the boys didn’t notice any flaws and just loved the whole room. 

My art (i know, i draw like my kids do...sometimes even worse)


 Lindo's side
  My side (there's an aeroplane too....i couldn't squeeze it into the picture)

 

So here we are with a room that looks as good as new while we had a lot of fun experiencing something new :)

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Sunday, May 20, 2012

How time flies…

Its 11 PM…I am about to bid good-bye the day that I still look forward to every year…..My birthday (who doesn’t? – not mine, but for their own)

But today, I spent some time thinking about how things change with time. Birthdays, for example, have changed a lot in the past 25 years… (No, I am not 25, but the birthdays before that hardly count :))

When I was in school (primary), birthdays were mostly about the number of children coming for your birthday party. My family wasn’t big on having parties with many children around; our birthdays were celebrated low-key surrounded by siblings and parents. But I remember going for my classmates’ parties and I think that the motto was “The more, the merrier”.

Going on to birthdays in high school (after we moved to India), it was mostly about the excitement of collecting the daily post to see how many of my friends have sent me cards. The cards would start coming in a week before the birthday and would continue to come till almost a week after the birthday. I remember keeping count to see whether I had made more friends than last year based on the number of cards. A phone call to the home landline on the birthday would be the icing of the cake.

Birthdays in college were again about cards and maybe even some small gifts from friends. Being in hostel and living on a meager pocket money which included TA, we couldn’t afford any big gifts, so a bookmark or a small gift item would be the special something to get from and give to special friends. Letters and cards from classmates, hostel mates, friends who weren’t in this college…that was the time of abundance. 

It was towards the end of college that we got ourselves email IDs and promised to mail each other long after we left college. So the first year or two after college, birthdays were less about postal cards but more about emails from friends and especially e-cards. Hallmark, Bluemountain…you name it, we’ve been there sending e-cards on birthdays and sending “thank you” cards as a response to e-cards received. 

Then we got jobs…life started revolving around new people, new friends. With salaries, we could now afford to buy better gifts and we were back to sending postal cards, only this time they cost more than 10 bucks and we didn’t feel bad buying them. Along with the job came the mobile phone, and birthday wishes started coming in the form of SMS and mobile calls. 

This trend continues, only now, we check social networking sites to get our birthday wishes. I spent a good time on Facebook today, checking messages from friends and family and replying to them. The feeling of being remembered is definitely nice, but I do have to say that I miss the old times. I mean, I am not going to log in to FB after 10 years to check the messages that I got today…but even now, I can open my cupboard and take out my collection of cards that I have collected since school days and see what my friends and dear ones wrote to me years ago. 

I think we should all try and make it a point and send cards (actual cards) at least to our dearest friends and family. We all know how it feels to get a card and open it and read everything in that card…the admiring of the pictures and the colors used for writing, the stickers used (we girls do that :))… No e-card, e-message or SMS is ever going to come close to that feeling. And as usual…I really do hope and pray that our children will once know this nice feeling.

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Friday, March 16, 2012

I stand before you...

So I have completed 8 years in my company. We have a great training program and a department dedicated towards tracking the trainings that you attend. I am not a great fan of trainings, mainly because I prefer doing my work in whatever time I am in office. And since we’re not a technical team, the trainings that we have to attend are mainly soft skill trainings.

To cut a long blog short, let me just say that I have been successful in dodging one training in particular for all these years. Presentation skills. Now you might think, “What’s the big deal about a Presentation skills training?” Those who know me well, also know that I am not comfortable addressing a crowd. And when I say ‘not comfortable’, I mean that my fingers go numb, my voice starts shivering and all I want is for the world to swallow me when it comes to having to stand up and do something as simple as introducing myself in a crowd (I know, when I say crowd you must be thinking 100’s of people – well sadly that’s not the case; a crowd for me is as much as 2 people that are not my best friends).

Fortunately or unfortunately, the “training gap” finally caught up with me and I was forced to attend this training earlier this week. I even woke up and told Lindo that I was going to call in sick. But he made a very compelling argument (If you don’t go this time, you’ll have to go the next time. Might as well get over with it.)….now that made sense.

So I reached the training room, met the co-participants and needless to say as you might have already guessed (or otherwise what’s the big deal blogging about it?) I managed to talk in front of people I didn’t know. In the beginning I was shivering and worried but by the end of the 2nd day, I was pretty confident.

Well, it might not be the same as when I will have to make a formal presentation and I am still in awe of people who seem to be able to do this effortlessly, but it was a huge leap for me. Yesterday I had to conduct a training for a few people from my team and I have to give credit to the training (the trainer and the other participants) for playing a big role in making this happen.

Coming around to what made me think so much about this and wanting to write about it is the fact that I hope that my boys will not face this kind of aversion towards performing / speaking in public. Children nowadays have the opportunity to do these things at a very tender age and this will definitely take away that huge monster that’s hiding in my closet – Stage fright. I hope they all make use of these facilities and implement them well in their lives.


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