The optimist approach

I apologize for my last two posts being a little too nostalgic. Three days left and I still can't stop thinking about the last things I'll be doing. Like today-last time im walking my sister to the bus stop, last friday I'll be spending here etc etc. It might be pretty silly, I know. But I can't help but thinking.. sniff sniff
Time does fly by. All those things you wanted to say, should have been said by now, all those things done. Packing is almost finished. I'm just finishing the last minute stuff now. I still dunno how to stitch anything. Hopefully when someone will teach me there.
Now as I wait, I'm thinking, 3 days to go till I can feel the sand on my feet and in between my toes!

Do your own laundry!

Off late , I've been in a mix of happy-sad emotion status' that I cant differentiate between the two anymore. Seems so overwhelming. Well finally the time has come to say good-bye to good ol' Bangalore.
The happy parts are when one of my friends called and told me that living away from home is nice and that you get a hell lot more freedom than you did when you were at Bangalore, says shes become independent and her mom is proud of her. My mom was proud of me today when I actually did the laundry i.e put the clothes in the washing machine , and put it on. ha ha ... i know it sounds pretty lame. But ya, my mom will flip when she finds me doing my laundry, and my mom can finally be proud of me. I can almost hear her saying " oh my daughter, she's such an independent woman, she can do the laundry by herself, last week she couldn't find the jam bottle by herself even though it was right next to her!" (lmao!)
Yup that's me. The girl who currently went from not finding the jam bottle to sorta finally being able to zero in on the point where it might be! I'm seriously not kidding. But anyways I do know how to take care of myself and I'm sure i can start managing to do that. At least that's one thing I can go to college and make my mom proud about! Just kidding..
Then my other friend had called, she was leaving to Mumbai, wanted to say goodbye! I feel its easier now. Now that the first time is over. But ya I felt kinda bad. (sniff!) She was a really close friend and one of those people from Bangalore I wish I could kidnap with me and take to college in case my roommates turn out to be bitches. Yup that's why I'm worried. No proper definitions for what bitches are like, I'm sure everyone knows what I'm talking about.

Well the last one week, packing still going on, toooooooo many many clothes! I hope it really doesn't exceed the luggage limit! Oh I got the last harry potter book too. To finish off what I wanted to when i was eleven! lol.Other than that trying to catch a glimpse at what life has in for me!

Leaving on a jet plane

I loved that song, it always had a beautiful melody. Now .. its just sad . After I said bye to Nami for one last time , it struck me then that in less than two weeks I'd be air borne heading towards a whole new life.
Saying good-bye is the hardest thing. Packing bags just signifies and sets in to motion the whole set of changes we will encounter in the future. Having lived at home my entire life, being so accustomed and attached to this place I feel as though going anywhere else is the hardest thing to do, this change... Might not be that easy.
Sure we might meet new friends and have experiences worth a lifetime, but this whole human tendency or rather mine to sorta make it hard to move on is killing me.
The coming week, I hope things go well. And hopefully it won't be that hard to say goodbye...

All my bags are packed
Im ready to go
Im standin here outside your door
I hate to wake you up to say goodbye
But the dawn is breakin
Its early morn
The taxis waitin
Hes blowin his horn
Already Im so lonesome
I could die

So kiss me and smile for me
Tell me that youll wait for me
Hold me like youll never let me go
cause Im leavin on a jet plane
Dont know when Ill be back again
Oh babe, I hate to go

Theres so many times Ive let you down
So many times Ive played around
I tell you now, they dont mean a thing
Evry place I go, Ill think of you
Evry song I sing, Ill sing for you
When I come back, Ill bring your wedding ring

So kiss me and smile for me
Tell me that youll wait for me
Hold me like youll never let me go
cause Im leavin on a jet plane
Dont know when Ill be back again
Oh babe, I hate to go

Now the time has come to leave you
One more time
Let me kiss you
Then close your eyes
Ill be on my way
Dream about the days to come
When I wont have to leave alone
About the times, I wont have to say

Oh, kiss me and smile for me
Tell me that youll wait for me
Hold me like youll never let me go
cause Im leavin on a jet plane
Dont know when Ill be back again
Oh babe, I hate to go

But, Im leavin on a jet plane
Dont know when Ill be back again
Oh babe, I hate to go

Pasta 101

This is my version of making good pasta. Since I've been getting a lot of free time and using it to experiment in the kitchen.
Firstly I never estimate anything. No measuring cups no tsp. etc. I know for a beginner this is pretty bad, but still. I call it "instinctive estimation". So first things first.
The ingredients would be:

• Water (try to take a little excess of this)
• the pasta of your choice
• vegetables (for mine I used carrots, capsicum, and beans)
• seasoning (oregano and green or black pepper preferably)
• Olive oil
• pasta sauce
• salt
  

So first take the water in a large container, add salt , add the pasta and cook the pasta in it for a while. After fifteen to twenty minutes check if the pasta is cooked , preferably by self tasting and softness checking)
Im all about time saving so till then keep chopping those vegetables. Carrots need to be pureed (cooked). So chop them first. Nice small cubes.
By this time the pasta would have been cooked. Be careful to ensure that it doesn't get over cooked or undercooked , the optimum here would be to endure the pasta is soft yet not gooey.
Drain the water using a drainer and put the pasta aside to dry for sometime. Next take to vegetables add a little cooking oil in the pan and toss those vegetables around while sprinkling seasoning . Mix properly. take the past in a big dry frying pan.About now , the pasta tries to stick together. Add olive oil and mix well. Don't add to much. As the pasta become too greasy.
Add the seasoned sauted vegetables and mix everything together well.
Next add pasta sauce, Now don't despair if the pasta become a bit too liquidy, tip the pan over and drain the excess liquid , or under desperate measures like what I went through, just put the entire pasta in water and this will drain the excess stuff.
After this mix well and taste, then its all left to you to estimate. What it needs in extra to suit ur taste buds or to suit the taste buds of the people you are catering to.

more on
Sautéing and Puréeing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saut%C3%A9ing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pur%C3%A9e

Entourage

One day before the show premier's in India and i can say... I'm such a tv addict... watching prison break season 2 on dvd for two hours straight and then episode reviews on TV.com i think i'm officially gonna lose it pretty soon.



Vincent Chase.... *drool*

The placebo effect

I always fell for it, as a kid. It would be the same routine, i get sick my parents give me something, I thought I was fooling them but it turned out it was the opposite they were fooling me, and then i would say "oh it worked I'm feeling better again". probably miss the smirk on their faces.
I, a child of eight cant understand what tablets for what thinking that as soon as i swallow it it makes me feel way better.
In my later years I did realize that tablets don work as soon as they enter your body, they need time. But i still I feel a bit of relief as soon as a gulp down a pill and say oh alright...
As they say its all in the mind...
And so I'd like to believe.
Placebo to me is a psychological state of mind.
In modern age , the placebo is used by psychiatrists to cure depression. My mom a practising gynaecologist says that for minor problems she usually uses a placebo, the patient dutifully reports back saying all is well, she says she hates it when patients get addicted to drugs which they wouldn't and didn't need in the first place.

there is certainly data that suggest that just being in the healing situation accomplishes something. Depressed patients who are merely put on a waiting list for treatment do not do as well as those given placebos. And -- this is very telling, I think -- when placebos are given for pain management, the course of pain relief follows what you would get with an active drug. The peak relief comes about an hour after it's administered, as it does with the real drug, and so on. If placebo analgesia was the equivalent of giving nothing, you'd expect a more random pattern ("The Placebo Prescription" by Margaret Talbot, New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2000).*

a young Seattle cardiologist named Leonard Cobb conducted a unique trial of a procedure then commonly used for angina, in which doctors made small incisions in the chest and tied knots in two arteries to try to increase blood flow to the heart. It was a popular technique -- 90 percent of patients reported that it helped -- but when Cobb compared it with placebo surgery in which he made incisions but did not tie off the arteries, the sham operations proved just as successful. The procedure, known as internal mammary ligation, was soon abandoned ("The Placebo Prescription" by Margaret Talbot, New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2000)

The idea of a powerful placebo in modern times originated with H K Beecher. He evaluated that over two dozen studies and calculated that about one-third of those studies improved due to the placebo effect.
The placebo effect may be quite harmful and dangerous in serious cases , may even be considered as a quack procedure.

Patients can become dependent on nonscientific practitioners who employ placebo therapies. Such patients may be led to believe they're suffering from imagined "reactive" hypoglycemia, nonexistent allergies and yeast infections, dental filling amalgam "toxicity," or that they're under the power of Qi or extraterrestrials. And patients can be led to believe that diseases are only amenable to a specific type of treatment from a specific practitioner (The Mysterious Placebo by John E. Dodes, Skeptical Inquirer, Jan/Feb 1997).

From then ... to now

What they do say is true... time does fly by sometimes, you hardly notice, especially the last few months which have just gone by in jiffy.
Seems strange when you look back those past few months and you look at things now they seem very different and totally unexpected in ways.
Like ... i never thought I would patch up with this one friend and always thought that when I meant never I really meant it. Well i'm really glad that i didn't and things worked out between us in the end.
I was filling up her journal today and thought of all the things we've been through, the good , the bad and the ugly. How time changes the perception of things and people...
In ways these changes can be viewed as a really good thing in other ways bad.
And then theres the whole going away to college. I had probably anticipated it. But only when the realty of it hit me did a understand the true meaning of what it meant. It meant, leaving home after living here for my entire life, it meant sacrificing something, saying good bye to those moments where you had your mom make you a strong cup of tea and comfort you when things went terribly wrong, saying goodbye to those times when your dog slept at your feet or even on them in those long wintery nights to keep your toes warm, staying up late after everyones slept on those summer nights staring out the window and the silence on the streets and the soft rustling of the leaves in the breeze these are to mention a few of the things that I will miss and always will cherish no matter where i am.
But change should be viewed optimistically no matter what.
And cheers to those good times with family, friends and of course my beloved canine, who would put a smile on my face when i was down and low.

Love , live and laugh... always

productivity this summer

All day I sit around doing absolutely nothing wondering why in the world am i not doing anything.
There must be something at home to do.
So i decided since the garden was so full of weeds and snakes that rules gardening out. I'm no good at repairing stuff, ( i guess its a job for every person with a Y chromosome and not me.) so ruled that out. Teaching my dog some tricks,( even the lion handler at a circus wouldn't be able to do that!) then i realized ohhhh!!! Cooking! Of course.
The only real stuff i know to do is probably maggi noodles, chai and pizza.
So i started off on paratha's. Stuffed aloo parathas. I kneaded the dough, flattened into actually circular chappathis and stuffed it in! All it needed was patience and persistence. Everyone said it came out rather well. Well thats a start!
Earlier this week I had been to the grocery store buying jelly, custard and cake mixes.
So my alternate career plans will probably include becoming a chef. Not that i'm in doubt that i'd ever make it as a surgeon, but just on the assurance side!


This is my favorite dish though, and soon to be made by moi
Palak panner-


Ingredients:


500gms Fresh Palak (Saag)
100gms Paneer How to make paneer
2 Onions grated Ginger, Garlic paste
5-6 tbsp oil
1 tsp pure ghee
Garam masala to taste
Red chili powder to taste
1 tsp cumin powder
Salt To Taste


procedure:

• Clean and wash palak (spinach) nicely.
• Boil the spinach in water and cool it.
• Now mash it in a mixer.
• Heat oil in a kadai. Add ginger-garlic paste and stir-fry for a minute.
• Now add onions and fry till golden brown.
• Add all spices except red chili powder.
• Now add the spinach (palak) and little water if needed and cook for 4-5 minutes.
• Cut paneer into pieces (Paneer can be fried to golden brown in a seperate pan or can be used as it is).
• Add Paneer pieces to the gravy and cook until done.
• Take out in a bowl.
• Just before serving, heat pure ghee in a small pan.
• Hold the pan over bowl, add chili powder and immediately pour on the indian palak paneer.
• Caution: Don't allow chili powder to burn .

what dog would you be?

I took this quiz on what kind of dog i would be-
hahaha... so funny, to people who know me, do you agree?

Jack Russell Terrier

This pint-sized explorer is the Magellan of the canine world. Always ready for adventure, the Jack Russell Terrier is known to wander off at a moment's notice. Her life is never dull, and entertainment is key. Accepting in nature, she makes friends easily and is usually the center of attention wherever she goes. Her high energy and upbeat personality make the Jack Russell Terrier a fun-loving part of any family.