Humour – Page 72 – Nourish-n-Cherish

New Year Resolutions

I think New Year Resolutions are over-rated. Take mine for instance. I had two:

The first one was: no strong tea or coffee. This rash one came to me at 4:35 a.m. on 1st Jan 2014, when I was struggling to fall asleep. What happened was this: I was enjoying a perfectly lovely New Years Eve party and eating steadily through the evening. Of course, I got carried away after all that food and excellent conversation during the party and reached out for a strong cup of tea at about 10:30 p.m., forgetting that I was not a teenager anymore. I could not safely drink tea just before hitting the sack and snore like a tiger.

I had my mind buzzing with things irrelevant, fantastical, impractical and downright nonsensical till sleep finally allowed me into the crowded room at 7 a.m. the next day for a couple of hours.

So, I said rashly that I would not drink strong tea or coffee.

My “resolution” was sorely tested in less than 10 hours. The next day, after a lunch with our friends, I found myself yawning widely and had to amend the damn thing right away. I said that I will not have strong tea or coffee after 6 p.m. That sounded more reasonable didn’t it?

It was around 6 p.m. that evening when I had to go in for the second amendment. You see, all that lack of sleep meant that I was walking into people, or walls. So, the husband and I went in to a coffee store for a spot of coffee. I was true to myself and chose something that had a low level of caffeine in it. The husband scoffed and went in for his grande, double shot , extra hot or whatever he goes for usually. Everything was fine till my coffee came. Mine tasted like muck – it was watery and smelled every bit like strong coffee. I pushed the thing away and laid my head down on the coffee table and emitted a mild snore. The husband threw his mind around to the problem of getting me out of the store and into the car. He may joke about being the hero, but when it comes to carrying his heroine to cars, he draws a firm line. So, he gallantly switched his coffee with mine. I drank about half of his before I gave up that too. It was simply too strong. But the damage had been done.

I was up till 3 a.m. with my thoughts for company. It was then, that the second one came to me: Maybe I should meditate everyday. Meditation will help me relax and put myself in a calm state of mind. I reached for my phone to jot down the profundity of the moment. Then, facebook-ed for a while, checked emails for a further while, switched on the light, read and fell asleep again.

My thoughts during this activity period also managed to convince me that the tea/coffee thing was not exactly a resolution, since it was a wild thought that came to me when I was most anti-caffeine. Therefore, I have knocked it off my list.

I am now having fun with the Meditation one. I have a blog coming up soon on its progress.

Resolutions or no, may your days be filled with love, laughter and life! Happy 2014 to everyone.

I fancy a cup of tea now. So, I shall take leave.

Miss Goodie Two Shoes

In an act of rare wisdom, the daughter and I bought ourselves matching boots. We squealed uncharacteristically in the store and paraded in front of the distraught husband (Don’t ask me why, but the husband always looks distraught while shopping. He has a lost, resigned look that we don’t like, two minutes into entering a store. After that, it is all downhill, unless there is a stop at the food court involved.)

The shining boots came home and occupied positions of honor on our shoe shelf. The daughter was found peeking at her boots discreetly every few hours. The next morning, we were running late for school and the daughter in her usual manner dismissed all panic by saying it was only 8:09 a.m. and there were still two minutes in which to linger about the home. ( “We will even have time to show my friends the new boots if we leave at 8:11 a.m. Appa – relax!” After all, what is a post about the daughter without one of her quips?)

Turns out, there was a bathroom emergency involving the still-being-potty-training-toddler in the house just then. We looked at the right clock and it was 8:13 a.m. Now, we looked like ducks running around looking for their chicken feathers. The daughter screamed that she would put her shoes on in the car and charged with her boots into the car. I flung the school bag after her. The lunch box was caught mid-air, the homework bowled into open windows and the car left for school with heads hanging out the window screaming to one another to have a good day. The drama I tell you.

It was probably an hour later, when I was taking out my own boots, that things looked odd. The shoes looked too right. I mean two right. I mean, there were two right boots gleaming at me from the shoe shelf. Two right shoes of different sizes.

I don’t think there is any point in saying anything or trying to explain, so I moaned a low, hollow groan and picked them up to inspect. I tried to say that she deserved it for being a smart boot, but did not have the heart. How was the child supposed to manage with her right foot in a larger left shaped boot the whole day?

So, off I went to the School office armed with a pair of sneakers and the strangest request I’ve ever made of authority figures.

I walked into the School office and said, “I am sorry, this may sound strange, but my daughter wore two left shoes(one larger that the other) and came to school today. “ Then, I burst out laughing looking at the bewildered look the lady behind the desk gave me. She looked like she’d seen it all, that lady. So, I told her between bursts of my own laughing and blushing, that if she could call her out during recess and give her the right shoes, I’d appreciate it.

The kind lady looked at me and said, she will call her out of class then itself because it might be hampering the child, and then twinkled her eyes kindly and said, “Don’t worry dear. We’ve seen much worse haven’t we Mrs. Dee?” To which Mrs Dee replied most graciously that this was not the strangest request she’d heard in all the years she has been teaching. She assured me it was a tame one compared to some wild requests she’d seen.

Really, what goes on in Schools?

On that note, I recently read Miss Read’s “Tales from a Village School”, and had the time of my life laughing about her tales. If you haven’t read it, please give it a try. (http://www.amazon.com/TALES-FROM-A-VILLAGE-SCHOOL/dp/0718100700/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1387484159&sr=8-1&keywords=Tales+from+a+Village+School)

The Cal-Oh-Rie Boss

I remember feeling as a child waiting to grow up and see what I will do. (I knew it was great fun being a kid, but I was curious about the future). Naturally, I asked the daughter what she thought about life as an adult. She said that our lives were cool. Among other things that make our lives cool, was a point mentioning that we got to boss our kids around. That was news to me. I felt like the bossee more than the boss so often.

While having this riveting conversation, we walked past a pastry shop that sported all things cream and sugar in those sparkling windows and the daughter wondered whether we may stop in for a snack. Really, all that cream and sugar could not bode well for the body. So, I used my skills of persuasion and said we want to go for something healthy and moved towards a Starbucks (I know! But it was the only one in sight that had a semblance of a trail mix pack in there) instead.

I walked in to the coffee store in my usual state, you know? Calm and collected. The moment I walked in, I knew I was fighting a losing battle. There, gleaming from the confectionary box were those blasted cake pops looking like dynamite balloons. I was trying to convince the daughter not to go for those, but everybody knows by now that she only wanted cake pops. I was wondering whether to belt out my healthy-eating-talk or not, and decided against it. We had stepped out for a Holiday afternoon after all. I caught the billing clerk’s eye and she saw my moment of resignation and was there a smirk to her face? Or was she simply smiling at me? I wasn’t sure, and I wanted to be the mom-in-charge and the cool mom all at once to impress Lydia (I think that’s what her name tag said, but it could have been Lysha)

So, I tried again with the daughter, “This is nothing but sugar, do you want to try something a bit more healthy?”

The daughter looks at me and says, “Amma. You said to look for cal-oh-ries too right? See all the things with healthy stuff in them like this pumpkin slice or this apple slice all have more than 400 cal-oh-ries, but the cake pop is only 150 cal-oh-ries. So, it may be all sugar, but it is less sugar.”

There was no point: I gave in and slumped my shoulders a bit.

Then I remembered that I recently saw an article in which the speaker asks us to ooze confidence and fresh from the reading, I oozed. I acted like the totally-in-control-of-daughters-diet mom and said “Hi. I would like a cake pop please.”

“Good job Amma. Maybe you should get yourself something healthy too.” said the daughter smiling in that sly fashion.

So I bought two cake-pops.

“Is that all?” Lydia (or Lysha or Lyma) asks.

“Yes.” I said meekly and then ‘Yes!”, a little stronger.

We stepped out smartly before any more judgments could be passed by Ly-dash, and picked up the threads of the conversation where we’d left off.

Cake Pops Are Dynamite
Don’t Mess with Dynamite

“Like I was saying, it must be totally cool to boss your kids around and do whatever you like. Like you just walked into Starbucks now instead of that pastry shop.” said the daughter.

Having exhausted my conversational brilliance, I agreed and bit into my cake pop like an obedient mother.

Lord Love a Glove : CIM Relay 2013

The toasting weeks of the summer are just giving way to the crisp days of autumn, when we say, “Maybe we should sign up for the California International Marathon Relay. “ (Henceforth referred to as the CIM Relay folks)

There is little (if any) resistance to the suggestion: after all, what greater joy than going for a run in the cool morning air and getting to be part of the relay?

No points given to guessing who came up with our team name: Rainbow Dashers.

The misgivings start later, much later. It is when the trees are barren, having shivered all their leaves off in the cold, when the winds are vindictively fierce and the nose feels like it has just visited a dreary corner of the freezer in the refrigerator that one begins to doubt the wisdom of undertaking a run in these conditions. A run, not only threatened by abysmally low temperatures, but also requiring the exchange of a toddler between the runners.

When we headed out to Sacramento for the CIM Relay, I remember thinking that we must be nuts to do this. However, that feeling has never stopped us from doing things. Even so, the temperature forecast was showing a bleak 24 degree fahrenheit, and the winds whipping around us the previous evening were not friendly. The next morning, we headed out to start the car with a very sleepy toddler weighing thrice what he normally does because of the layers he was wearing and sat in the car for a good ten minutes before the defrost button could do its work and show us the path ahead.

By the time I started my run, the sun was out. I took the chip from the husband and handed the toddler over to run. (There was a deja vu moment here when we realized we had switched the daughter as a toddler at the same point before) The deceptively bright day meant there was ice on the road and that made running slippery. Hmm.

Then something amazing happened: There was little chance of my slowing down because if I slowed, I would freeze. So I ran, and then I felt a soaring happiness in my heart, a certain nimbleness to my being. My soul leaped and my mind took in the people, the signboards, the cop cars, the fruit trees, the beautiful houses along the way. I ran along listening to people chat to each other while running. Crowds energize me more than I realize and I increased my pace. I batted the cold away and in this elated state, senselessly took off my gloves. Within minutes, my fingers were numb and I could not use my hands to put them back on. What an idiot I must be? I worked up quite the sweat before I got feeling to creep back to my fingers, and then resolved to take in the beauty of the surroundings with the gloves on. Lord love a glove.

All too soon, I rounded a bend and saw that my turn was over and I had to hand the chip over to the last runner in the group. All I knew was that I could have just gone on. The Rainbow Dashers put up an impressive show both at the relay and the buffet afterward.

Go Rainbow Dashers! (Not doing this -> So doing this -> What was I thinking? -> Just do it! -> Gotta do this again: the CIM 2013 )

I am waiting to do it again. Thank you Rainbow Dashers Team (Viv, Sri, Sur & Self).

Dining At Home Discounts Maybe?

“Maybe we should go out and have dinner tonight.” says the husband clearly intending to help. In any other family, a simple statement like that will either be met with a simple acceptance or a refusal. I am sure no more would have been said about it. Of course, in our family, a statement like that wrenches the spanner into the corner of the brain where the horrors of restaurant eating reside and ply it open.

“Do you remember what happened at that Italian restaurant?” I ask. “I mean do you still want to go and press our company on restaurants. I say we take the broad minded view of ‘Live and let live.’ ”

The husband looks at me like I have a point and agrees. What happened was this: We found an occasion to dine out, and took polls to see what kind of cuisine was most voted for. It did not help that the toddler in the house thought it was a game and stuck both his arms up for everything. A vote was taken, numbers counted, tallied and thrown out the window. We settled for Italian which had one vote (the daughter’s). So, off we went looking for an Italian restaurant. Just before we entered, I checked their hair and told them to behave. It was one of those places that I’ve heard people gush about. What I had not expected, was for us to enter one of those snooty, high eyebrow places with a touch of hospitality, not overdone and a spot of hauteur, quite overdone.

I wanted to scramble and flee, but summoned the warrior spirit and pressed on. The maitre-de came up with a gleaming suit, coattails and all, looked us up and down and asked us how he may help us. I have never understood this. Would I be standing there in the luxurious lobby of a restaurant wanting to be helped with goading a herd of sheep into a waiting truck? No. I want to be seated for a meal. Thank you.

There was some brow lifting and all this while, the toddler is sitting quietly in his chair and not saying a word. The daughter is playing with him, and the two of them present a picture of a serene advertisement to entice more humans to procreate. The maitre-de, in the meanwhile, decides that he does not really need to spoil the atmosphere of a good dining experience for his patrons and comes out wearing a thin look (He may have been trying the apologetic expression, but thin is what I thought at the time). The toddler smiled at him and said, “Tar?” and showed him a toy car.

No reaction.

“I am extremely sorry Sir and Ma’am. But there is a half an hour wait for tables at the moment. Would you like to be kept waiting?”

The choice of words really! What a clever man he was too. Not wanting to take the good behavior picture, but not wanting to let us in and find out either. Could be a diplomat that man.

We said we don’t like to be kept waiting and turned our back on the man in a dignified silence. “Come children!” I said and they came. We stepped out the door and then expressed all of our relief and anxiety at once. What if they had seated us? Maybe this is for the best. Let’s go for a family friendly place. Nothing fancy.

We proceeded to a familiar restaurant. The cashier there smiled at us and welcomed us. He has seen us there often and still manages to smile when he sees us. That is the kind of place I like. The fine dining can wait for a decade. I breathed freely in there, sat down and looked at the husband and asked “Where is the boy who behaved so well?”

The husband points under the table and there he is: playing with his toy car. Things may have been quiet for possibly 3 minutes or maybe 4 after the food arrived. We never make it to a full 5 minutes. There was mayhem. The toddler had put his hands into the spicy curry, and I sent the water cascading over the table while pulling the napkin underneath to wipe off the toddler’s hands before he rubbed his eyes with it. He did not like that, One would think his life’s dream was to dip his hands in spicy curry and rubbing his eyes with it, and I, the evil mother, stepped in and squashed his dreams. He screwed up his face and turned a valve that let loose a torrent of very loud tears.

The husband tore out of the room carrying the toddler and stood outside in the cold for a good 3 minutes before bringing him back again. We gobbled the dinner as fast as we could and came back, shaken a bit by the smile the cashier gave us. Maybe he needs time before we pay him another visit.

The next day, the fates decide to show this news item to me. Apparently, there are restaurants that offer well-behaved-children discounts.

http://moms.popsugar.com/Restaurant-Offers-Well-Behaved-Children-Discount-27335732

I think I would like to be kept waiting on that discount. I am not sure I am strong enough to try them just yet. Dining-at-home discounts maybe?

The Kitchen – Part 2

The parents left last week leaving me to raid the kitchen pantry to assess inventory levels, come up with reorder lists etc. No more of asking for grocery lists and shopping for them on the way back from wherever I went.

So, I snuck in there wearing my ‘Back to Work’ expression, lighted a few scented candles to keep me company and throw me light and joy and all that. It was so close to Diwali after all. I must tell you, the brain felt a bit dim like wanting to curl up with a good book and coffee. However, work is first and I persevered.

I remember the mother running a factory in there a week before she left. Give her a festival like Diwali and throw in a few grandkids and that is all she needs. She was set to run away with the menu and make twelve different types of snacks. I had to put up a valiant fight and stop her at (one moment, I am counting) eight. Good Lord! She made EIGHT different snacks in 5 days and I ate them all. No wonder I feel like I have a tractor in my stomach. I told her not to knock herself out. Sigh. I really am not as efficient as I think am I?

Anyway, back to inventory management, I noticed several different kind of flours and powders that I don’t even know the use for. Apparently, they are what gave flair and flavor to whatever I so gratefully ate in the past few months, For instance, I now have about 4 pounds of rice flour in the kitchen (I rattled my brain and found that I might use about 100 gms of rice flour in all the recipes I knew)

What am I supposed to do? Give a person a problem like this and it could have them flummoxed for days on end. Not me. I have always been known to be a problem solver. So, I deftly picked up the rice flour, and all the other packets that looked alien to me and threw it into the freezer. It can be dealt with when the matriarchs visit next, or if I find the expiry date has been reached before then.

If, in the meanwhile, anyone has recipes for using rice flour in a risk-free, short and easy manner, please shoot them recipes to me.

Stringing a Guitar with Green Beans

I coast along and then I suddenly realize that my cooking has reached an all time low. This usually coincides with either the parents or the parents-in-law leaving our home and going back to India. Some friends I know tell me they are quite possessive about the kitchen. Not me. When the mothers come and start looking comfortable in the kitchen, that is when I gracefully bow out and let the matriarchs reign. I am not mean: I simply let them do what makes them happy viz, deplore how poorly children eat, and tell me how I must learn how to mix food the same way that our Great Aunt on the Mother’s side used to. I smile, dodge, and mostly hover around the edges, doing the side-cleaning, verandah maintenance and the like.

Obviously, it is with trepidation that I don my chef’s hat again. This time, I decided to undertake foreign cuisines in the first week. I tell the husband that it is because we have been gorging on Indian cuisine long enough, but the truth is that my shortcomings in the Indian cuisine department will be more forcefully brought to light given the recency of the mother’s cooking.

I rummaged through the cupboards and dug out Chinese Manchurian Noodles. That sounded nice. So, I started to make it. I rattled the pots and needled the frozen and sang to the vegetables to cut to my tune. The problem was that the cooking was done before I started the second line of my vegetable song. The Chinese Manchurian Noodles turned out to be a different name on an Instant-Noodles-type-of-packet. The whole thing was over in two minutes flat. I had planned a 5 minute sequence, and I did not notice the noodles was done and let the thing go on a bit.

Overcooking instant noodles brings about a unique texture : it still looks like noodles, but feels like glue and looks like ripped out shards of faded cardboard paper.

I took a sorry look at the mess I had made with 2-minute noodles and decided that what was needed to be done to bring up the bar once again was to make sesame-green-bean. It might have tasted all right if the beans had been edible. It turns out I had a stringy set that would have made great guitar strings, but poor sesame-green-beans. Also, around the time I put the sesame seeds in the oil, I went off to answer the phone and came back to find the sesame seeds an elephant-gray in color. Never one to give up, I threw the beans in and sautéed till they could be sautéed no more.

The family usually has a quip ready the day after the grand-parents of the house leave, but this time I left them tongue-tied with my noodles. Anything that they wanted to say as an after-thought was dealt with firmly by the string beans.

Like the daughter said, “You can’t even joke about this Amma, it is that bad.”

PS: Tomorrow is Italian Cuisine (one can’t go wrong with a simple pasta and soup can one?)

The Art of Braggarts

“Do you like to feel important and busy?”

I can rely on the daughter to ask me scorching questions like this, at the most unexpected of times. I hemmed and hawed, for truth be told, I have a paragraph answer to this question. I told her that I did like to feel a bit important and be busy doing the right things. Before we could go down the path of what classifies as the right things, I send the question back to her in the same tone she asked me: mildly curious to see what the answer will be. I mentally prepared for either a serious conversation or a perfectly goofball-ish one.

“What about you? Do you like to feel important?”

She laughs with a sound that reminds me of a train on a bridge. “Everyone likes to feel important and busy amma. Do you know how kids like to brag about how busy they are?”

“No..how do they do that?”

“Some kids brag about their homework. We honestly don’t have much, but everybody likes to say ‘Oh! we have 6 pages, we have 9 pages.’ Some of them even take empty sheets from the printer, so their stack looks bigger than the rest amma! Like it matters.”

Wow…I had no idea that training starts this early. She is, after all, still in Elementary School. From there to walking around with print-outs looking important in company hallways does not seem that big a step. I am now agog to know more. “What about you? Do you brag?” I ask her.

“Sometimes, but not much. I do a little bit of homework bragging. Everybody is a bragger in some way or the other, you know?”

Well, I knew some people are better at bragging than others, and also that tools such as Facebook are always there to give the reticent a little nudge. I hmm-ed meditatively.

She continued, “There are Homework braggers, Dress braggers, Thinnest braggers, Fattest braggers (mostly boys by the way), Can-break-pencils braggers, Im-the-Smartest braggers and I-am-the-fastest braggers (also, mostly boys). One boy in my class: he is a can-break-pencils bragger. He bragged that he can break pencils on his nose. So, we asked him to do it, and he said he needs to go to the bathroom. He goes there, breaks it, probably on his leg, and comes and says he broke it on his nose. But his nose wasn’t even broken! ”

I am sure there are more bragging classifications as we mature. The Busy Bragger, Award Bragger, Most Liked Bragger and so on. What brag types can you think of? The Art of cooking up more bragging categories? I am sure this will be an interesting exercise.

The Car Chase

The morning was pure adrenaline. We witnessed a high speed car chase. One of the cars navigated a steep bend at speeds best not attempted,and plunged into the deep, watery depths below. The rescue team that arrived with a great deal of noise onsite was not happy with the scenario. Luckily, the driver was fine: slightly wet and disturbed about the car, but otherwise perfectly fine.

The car was a blue car, probably a spy car, and the curve it was navigating before hitting the watery depths below felt like it was straight from a movie. Wait a minute. It was. There is a scene exactly like that in Cars 2, the Disney Pixar movie, where the spy car Finn plunges into the ocean. That is the scene the toddler was hoping to recreate this morning I am sure. He was driving the toy car at a great speed around the toilet seat, and the car lost its balance and plunged into the (thankfully clean) toilet. Before he could flush the toilet and create more fuss than was already reigning, the rescue team comprising of the grandparents with sticks and gloves arrived on scene, blaring their sirens er.. instructions.

The car was picked out of the commode gingerly. It was then washed and cleaned in Dettol. The same treatment was accorded to the driver, who unfortunately had watched the car splash impressively into the toilet from a close angle, and had water splashed down his shirt. The car has since been dried and put to rest in a comfortable position.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I would like to get back to some normal tasks.

The Affectionate Amby

I suppose this always happens in the world of fashion. You look at skinny models in high heels tottering with the confidence of a skyscraper on skates, and you see the perfect lines, and flatbeds where ordinary people settle for curves. Then you stop to wonder what the competition is about. Sometimes, you pause enough to look down at your own feet and the sensible footwear below the matter-of-fact trousers with extra pockets for carrying the cellphone. Then you think, why isn’t there glamour in practicality?

Why aren’t the world’s most stunning personalities cased in things that the everyday man and woman wear while they go about their lives?

I often think that way in the world of cars too. I remember the first time I showed my mother a Ferrari on the streets of USA. “Where else in the World, other than California, would you find a Ferrari parked on the street between a BMW and a Mercedes Benz?” I asked her, clearly excited to be showing her the sights.

In her typical fashion, she looked critically at the car, and said, “Looks like an expensive car.”

“Of course ma! Do you know how much it costs?”

“Doesn’t matter what it costs! It looks like we can’t fit our groceries in the trunk. So, what is the point?”

Sigh: There is a reason, I find glamour in practicality. It is called ‘instilled values’ folks.

Anyway, applying practicality to cars, it looks like the show Top Gear finally sees sense in my argument. Those who have traveled in an ambassador car in India would be thrilled to note the humble car mentioned. For what else is a car by looks, a horse by power, a bus by capacity, an optimist in attitude and a dog in loyalty?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/top-gear/10157181/Top-Gear-series-20-episode-2-BBC-Two-review.html

The Hindustan Ambassador is the King among Taxis. The only car where restaurant signs can be reused in a car: Seating Capacity: 30

The Car, that in most families, is known affectionately as the ‘Amby’.

I have a story about the time my grandmother came to my sister’s wedding in an ambassador car, but I will save it for another day. That is an entertaining read for sure.

P.S: I have since seen the video clip of the Amby winning that race and it seems to be because all the others crashed into something or into one another. Nevertheless, the Amby it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbP-GhH5Ci4

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