Life - or something like it

                                                                                                                                                                       Welcome to my 'how to series'. I know all of you are waiting with bated breath for my pearls of wisdom.  We have already covered ' How to make cottage cheese ' some days back. Today you will learn tricks on 'How to clean your Microwave’. If you don't have a microwave, go and buy one, you 18th century dweller! How can you live without one? oops....my foot is in my mouth, as usual. After being domes...

Friends, today I would like to pay my respects to those brave souls who faced the brutal regime of Nazis in their concentration camps. Today, 27th January - Holocaust Memorial Day. – marks the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. On this day, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust is challenging everyone across the UK to become part of a Legacy of Hope. Holocaust Memorial Day 2010: The Legacy of Hope On Holocaust Memorial Day 2010 – 27th January – we are asking everyone across the UK to pause for a few moments. Pause to remember the victims of Nazi persecution and those who were murdered under exclusionary policies in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur. Pause to honour the survivors of those genocides. Most importantly, we are asking you all to become part of The Legacy of Hope. We’re asking everyone to grasp the opportunity to listen to the voices of all who suffered in the Holocaust and under Nazi persecution, and to make the hopes of the survivors part of our shared,...

Has it ever happened to you? You badly need to go, you rush into a public toilet, do your deed and find out there is no toilet paper or water? What will you do in this situation? Interesting ideas are popping in my mind. Slow Down, 'gross idea' alert. People with a queasy stomach proceed with caution. 1) Call for help. 2) Cry your eyes out. 3) Clean yourself with the single handkerchief/tissue you carry i.e. if you carry one. 4) Just pull up your pants, walk out and run home to take a hot shower. Dump the clothes in the waste bin. 5) Just pull up your pants and walk out. Spend the entire day in the same clothes and wonder why people are running away from you like crazy loons. 6) Wait a sufficient amount of time for the mess to have dried out, shake your backside vigorously, wait till everything just crumbles and falls off. Pull up your pants and walk off. (I hope, you haven't chucked up your food, I warned ya....) What is it about public toilets? The twins, nauseous and cau...

Gotcha ! I know you are rubbing your hands gleefully right now. Calm down, the word to remember is 'COULD'. I am not getting sued by anyone right now, but I might after I become a really famous blogger. The past few weeks, I have been in cyberspace so much that I have forgotten what life is. I swear, ask hubs. Just today, I was about to throw a vase at him thinking him to be a burglar. It had been so long, I actually had forgotten his face. Jokes apart. To be a blogger is tough. Everyday you need to think of new posts to torment your readers. You also want them to come back and get tormented over and over again so, you need to be constantly evolving. I started blogging just as a hobby but am now caught hook, line and sinker. Its addictive, because readers like you, motivate me to write. The world of Blogging is full of bumps, potholes and stop signs. Words like link referrals, tweet backs, SEO and track backs are thrown at you at surprising speed. Most of the time, I am trying ...

Hey Sweetypie, come here my babyyyy...I love you a lot. Hey pumpkin, come on...I know you are listening, give me a kiss...mwaah...mwah He opens one eyelid and gives me a look of disdain, which says 'O Lord.. She is calling me again, give me a break, I have a life too'. I raise my hand and this catches his attention. I have his favorite treat in my hand. He gets up and eats it from my hands. BTW, this is not a conversation between Hubs and me, if you are wondering... It is hard to raise a dog from a puppy. The first few months are similar to raising a baby (Ouch!!! stop, all you mothers....it hurt, you know). Well, not so much like a baby...there is no diaper changing and feeding involved but the 'feeding every 4 hours' and 'pooping after every meal' are similar. All the growing pains are just compressed when it comes to dogs. There are different breeds of dogs that were bred to perform different roles to aide humans, like 'Alsatians' were bred as guard d...

You are in the shower, happily scrubbing away the grime and cleaning your pores. You are covered in soap and at that moment, the phone rings (Why does it always ring when you are in the loo or shower?). You scramble to grab a towel, come out of the bathroom dripping wet and shivering with cold. You take these efforts, so that you do not miss a call from a friend or family. You rush and pick up the phone to hear a debt management agency on the call. You feel like reaching inside the phone and socking the guy on his face. Not that, I do not acknowledge the fact that the telemarketers are just doing their job. But unsolicited calls can actually cheese you off. Most are selling stuff you will never buy. The enthusiastic way in which they try to sell you things which you don't need, can really grate on your nerves. Plus, the wasted time attending such calls can exhaust anyone. A few days back I had a really weird chat with a telemarketer, that too an Indian with a fake British accent. T...

I first heard the word 'makeup' while reading novels. The sentences in the novels 'expertly applied makeup' or 'flawless makeup' always intrigued me. While growing up, my mother had a 'solitary' lipstick, which she promptly forgot to use. That lipstick was used on my elder sister and me as a 'rouge'(hideous blobs of red) to stain our cheeks and also as a lipstick. This was the makeup for the many school plays and dances, in which we participated. My first brush with actual makeup was, when I saw my eldest sister using a compact, lipstick, kohl pencil and mascara. I was not fascinated by it so much...just thought it as a natural part of being a grown up (I still had some catching up to do). That indifference slowly waned as I grew a bit older and started going to college. That time, my elder sis and I shared whatever bits and pieces of makeup we could buy. We shared our lipsticks and nail polishes. Having a separate arsenal was not viable as makeu...

The other day, I asked hubs a question. Me: Sweety, do I nag a lot? Hubs: (A perplexed expression on his face) I am sure, I caught him off guard. I tend to do that most of the times. Not being a novice himself, he recovered quickly and said not at all dear. To tell you the truth, I was just doing live research for the post...ha In a relationship between any man and woman, we have already set our stereotypes. A beer drinking, football watching man, who does not give any heed to the woman. A harridan, whose main pleasure is to scream at the man to do chores. We do come across such people in our lives but there are people who have some tricks up their sleeves and do not have to convert their home & hearth into a battleground. You come to know of each other's likes and dislikes after living together for some years. You might on occasion want to escape from the mountain of housework and chores both of you are putting off. The problem happens when one of the parties has a different i...

For all you globetrotters, here are a few pointers for people planning to travel to the queen's country. Each country has its own peculiarities. For e.g. India is a vibrant throbbing mass of humanity. It is exploding with colors, customs and smells. Travelers to India have to deal with a lot of customs they find curious. Similarly, if you are coming to UK you need to keep some things in mind. 1) Language : Yes, they do speak English here, you've heard right. There will be times though when you will shake your head and start feeling little bit like a blockhead. The local accent colors the language and makes it sound nothing like the 'Queen's' English. The farther you go away from London, the weirder the accent. God only will help you with the Scottish and Irish Accents. Do not get offended and bash someone up because they called you 'Lov' or 'Lovey'. This is not eve teasing. These are just terms of endearment used by people. 2) Cities : London is not ...

The pain was unbearable. It was coursing like a knife through her and all she could do was bite her lips and endure it. She kept waiting for relief and prayed feverishly for the end. Suddenly she saw a figure dressed in white moving towards her and she closed her eyes waiting for Salvation. She knew the end was near and was glad for it to get over. And suddenly the figure spoke 'please open wide', she heard a wrenching sound, blood gushed out and finally the rotten tooth was out. This is how one feels during a visit to the dentist. I have a love-hate relationship with the breed called Doctors. Not that I despise them, maybe hate is a strong word. Let's say I am unnerved by them. They are peculiar creatures, if you ask me. I have a strong doubt that along-with medicine they teach doctors, 'How to push the patient over the edge by giving blank expressions, after they ask you questions about your illness'. Very few people can shake a Doctor to his core and my Mom is on...

I know most of you will raise your eyebrow looking at the title. After all, you know of my fiascoes with Cooking 1 & 2 . In spite of many years of cooking (palatable food), I still am uninitiated and clueless about a lot of cooking skills. It so happened that nearly a litre of milk had survived near the expiration date and something needed to be done to finish it fast. I keep getting pearls of wisdom from friends who are excellent cooks and know all the tricks to make excellent food. One of them is my eldest sis and she suggested that I make Cottage Cheese (Paneer) from the milk. Here are the tips for the Recipe (For Disaster): 1) Firstly never ever go for suggestions from great cooks. My sister made it sound as if it's a 'game for my left hand'. I, in the heat of the moment actually started believing this nonsense and took up the challenge. 2) Always use a thick saucepan which is deep enough to hold the milk and leave an inch or two of empty space for the milk to boil...

Hubs and I made a short trip today afternoon to a town called Penrith in the county of Cumbria. It was a spur of the moment thing. Penrith is an hour away from Lancaster. We saw some spectacular views of snow covered terrain and mountains on the way. Here are a few pictures for you to enjoy. Misty Mountains The Journey Highway Paradise Vanilla Ice Intriguing Ruins Please do appreciate the fact that I have clicked all these pictures from a car moving at 80 Mph.

We all hate chores, but like all adults we cannot run away from them. We have to behave like dutiful adults but all this pretence definitely gets tiring after a while. I am dropping my guard and ranting about it with passion. I am bad at doing some stuff around the house and I have to holler for hubs to rescue me from the mess I make. You can call me a nerd, opening a can of soup gives me heart palpitations. Same with pouring stuff like sugar in storage cans. Without fail, every time, I manage to drop half of it on the kitchen counter. Oops Clumsy me. As a child, I always ran away from chores to be done around the kitchen. It still gives me the heebie jeebies when I have to chop onions. I hate it from the bottom of my heart. My entire day is ruined, the day I cannot rope in hubs to chop them. My eyes are blood shot and I look like someone with a massive hangover. Give me cleaning the loo any day over ironing. Another dreaded housework. Who likes it anyway? Its pointless...a few minu...

Alcohol, this is the hot topic in news these days after a recent report published by the House of Commons health select committee about Binge Drinking. Binge drinking is defined by Dictionary.com as : the consumption of dangerously large quantities of alcoholic beverages in one session. UK has one of the highest Binge drinking rates in Europe according to the Euro-barometer survey of 2007. It has now become one of the most serious health concerns of the country. This country is immersed in Alcohol. You get booze right from supermarkets, newsagents and not to forget the innumerable pubs, clubs and restaurants which are scattered in every nook and cranny in this country. Plus, Britons love their drink. You will often find British people with a drink in their hands.Even the University, where Hubs did his MBA has around 7-8 pubs on the campus. I have often wondered with this country's obsession with Alcohol. It is an intricate part of the national culture akin to Jam and scones and t...

For some, sleeping is a way to restore body and mind. For others it is a means to escape from the reality called life. When I was younger, it was a much loved pastime. My mother had a hard time waking me up in the morning. 'Just 10 minutes more, mom' used to be my slogan. I tested her patience each morning. I bet, she used be just short of yanking my covers and throwing a glass of cold water in my face to wake me up. As a child, I had a habit of rolling in my sleep. I was ace at jumping hurdles in the form of sleeping humans and do a crash landing on the floor. Be it at home or in a fast moving train (you know, I am permanently brain damaged because of those jumps). In an attempt to stop further damage, my mom used to build a fort of pillows around my mattress every night. Even that was not a deterrent for me. Life after marriage is totally unimagined. After marriage, the entire concept of sleep, changes. I bet, you are holding your breath now and waiting for me to out some ju...

Well, Hello! Welcome to the New Year. I am sure you all had a great time on New Year’s Eve. I certainly did. There must be burst of New Year resolutions, new do's and don'ts and that entire hullabaloo. Resolutions are made to be broken, so I never waste my energy on them. Pleasantries over, now let's move on... One of my hobbies is reading. Even though I have kept it as a safely guarded secret on the blog, I read every day before I fall asleep. I started by reading ‘Enid Blyton’ when I was in school, a personal favourite even now. Progressed to ‘Sidney Sheldon’ and got most of the info about 'Birds and Bees' from his books. During my Sidney Sheldon phase, many of the girls my age were devouring 'Mills and Boons' with voracious appetites. I read a couple of them and vowed never to touch them again. 'John Grisham' is a wonderful author. His books are a window into the world of American law and class action lawsuits. I have read and re-read his books an...