Whats with the upstairs neighbors all around the country?

All the food has left blog owner way fatter than she left for Italy. The easy food (i.e. food that is served and not cooked by self/eater) also made her somewhat of sloth. Last 7 days have been tough on her. To avoid cooking she has been alternating between Maggi Instant noodles and Popcorn every SINGLE night for meal. And 2 times on weekends. Her palate is not able to come to the terms with the sudden change in fortune. Her friends think she is out of food. And out of money (which might be true, but then she spends $10 on coffee every 4th day and considers produce an expense to be avoided). Her friends decided to help her. They offered her food. She is grateful to her friends and moved by their generosity. Very very much (which makes her sad, as school is nearing end). She is also very embarrassed. She finally got some tomatoes and carrots and paneer and onion and ricotta cheese and sweetened condensed milk and fruit juice and milk to salvage her reputation. Hopefully, she makes good use of today’s shopping.

A) Why can’t I drag and drop the stuff to shuffle my playlist in YouTube’s QuickList?
I am no technowhiz but with all that AJAX stuff out there, it should not be that difficult.

B) And I am loving WordPress 2.5.1! Very nice and clean interface (on the inside). Its a party in here once you log in. However, as always I am still facing some technical problems with the blog.

C) Twitter has been partially useful to me in the past and have been annoying to me sometimes but yesterday I realized the power and importance of easy access it provides to your social community. {More later, (maybe)} All I can say is that yesterday I was thankful to be on Twitter and more than that being a part of my wonderful school.

Here is why.

Rough but accurate timeline of bulbs that (lived &) died in my room

Bulb#1 – when a friend visited. I was moving stuff around the room and knocked the lamp over. The bulb could not withhold the fall and crash
Bulb#2 – when I switched the lamp off and on really fast really early one morning
Bulb#3 – early evening, I came back from classes, switch on the bulb, decide to take a nap, switch it off, that was the end of it
Bulb#4 – suddenly bulb fuses
Bulb#5 – I was living temporarily somewhere for a couple of months, 3 weeks before I left for home, the light bulb fused
Bulb#6 – another bulb went kaput in the above mentioned house 2 days before I left it
Bulb#7 – I have a pretty paper lantern inside my office, poor thing is the only source of life and warmth in otherwise cold, scary but cool! office. The bulb fused one evening
Bulb#8 – I swear there was a 5 second delay between switch off and on, RIP again bedroom light

8 light bulbs. Quite a record in 2 years

I am one of those – reluctant cooks, the people who do not get heard much on internet. At least, I for one fail to hear their noise umm.. voice. All I hear is sizzles of food blogs. I used to proudly declare in school, “I don’t know how to cook.” I would have still be proud of the same and reared the rebel in me more but when I look around myself, my generation suddenly seems to be born with spatula and olive oil. Making me more doubtful of myself. Am I lagging behind or am I years ahead of them?

Anyways, that distraction apart, I focussed on what could be cooked. It is important to know what could be cooked, if you are in my situation. You cook for yourself, there are no flat-mates taking turns at cooking, and you are a sloth when it comes to cooking. So, you buy vegetables in puny amounts and just two or three of them. So, of course my fridge is not as stocked as it used to be last semester. I had bought green peppers/capsicum on this trip becuase potato-peppers would be nice change and I had bought zucchinis because I am suddenly in love with them. And of course bag of potatoes followed me home, it is the most loyal food-item you could work with besides rice. So, peppers, zucchini, potatoes and an intention to cook. What could be made out of this. Of course the plain old peppers-potato for which peppers were bought in the first place but voice in the heart said Naaaaah!

I was then reminded of Sunday Cook-a-thon by my friend Arnab who has just recovered from his milestone birthday on Ze Valentine’s Day! How Special! Happy Birthday Arnab. So, with his help and special tip and very timely response to my SOS calls, I succeeded in making myself a real meal.

Of course, now that I was making a big deal of it, I decided to photographically evidence it. I do not know how or why this idea came into my mind, but I did! So, my very firsht food blog entry. Kavi would be so proud. She is one of the people who could teach me how to actually do stuff in kitchen.

So, without further delay, here they are, my thoughts in order of cooking (i.e. when I was cooking and not when thoughts were getting cooked)
(Photos are not great, but they are not the point either. I am the point, and I am great)

1. Enter into kitchen. Wow! There already is a spread. Seems like my flat-mate is also planning to cook in a big way.
   
   I had almost fifth of mind to snag some of her stuff. I did not. Good sense prevailed. Oh! but I did snag the knife she had used to cut her stuff, but well then technically the knife belongs to “the house”. So, I have clean conscience so far. I would towards the end pluck and use 4 leaves of cilantro, BUT I WAS offered to do that. So, we can rest in peace, I did not have to resort to theft to fill up my belly.

2. So, I am using boiled potatoes, corn, zucchini (of course, no?) onion. And aah! Pepper
   

3. Onions are fried in olive oil, corn cob is thawed in boiling water.
   

4. Zucchinis are thrown in and green chillies too follow with ginger and garlic. I have noticed these days, I am replacing red chilli powder with thin slices of green chillies.
   Of course, the photo is staged to get the pair of scissors in to tell you all about my brilliance. I use them to cut chillies as I use peeler to get thin layers of ginger.
   

5. And tomatoes, and corn!
   I tried to keep the amount of stuffing low. Per habit, I end up making more of everything. I can’t help it. So, I consciously decided to cook only small amount of vegetable stuffing.
   

6. And mashed potatoes go in. I am excited. I even put in some cheese. I intentionally did not photograph the cheese. It was simple Kraft cheese not some fancy one. You would have realized some of these photos have been carefully crafted, like this one to get the Seasoning Salt, and pepper and oregano in. Ooh! that was not done to tell ya they were used while cooking but I think I am growing vain. Well so, we can say these photos ARE serving dual purpose. Also, it was here, that I realized the stuffing would fall short of what is needed. Oh well.
   

7. So, I massage the inside and outside of hollow seeded pepper with olive oil as per Arnab’s advice. The stuffing goes in, the top of pepper goes back on top of it. And the whole package goes in an oven preheated to 350F.
   

8. Now, that I was getting so fancy, there was simply no stopping me. I cut slices of boiled potato spread some oil on them and sprayed some salt. This idea was given to me yesterday by another ex flat-mate, Jasleen who too should be acknowledged as one of the people who could teach me about stuff in kitchen. This potato had to had some of my touch. So, I threw some oregano and minced garlic on it. Now, this guy totally hates me for buying frozen vegetables and minced garlic. He somewhat understands convenience and cheapness of frozen vegetables for a grad student but he denies to understand need of bottled minced garlic. Well, just to let you know Ed, minced garlic bottles also have this watery garlicy thing which came in very handy while casually dropping some garlic and garlic-water over potatoes. Anyways, Ed also tends to be high-maintenance when it comes to cooking.
   



9. Things come out of the oven, looking mmm mmm and yum yum. I had kept them in oven as long as they needed to be in there. Kept checking “if they were there yet”. I guess it took pepper some 30 minutes and potatoes some 15 minutes.
   
   Oh! Oh! Pepper was also sprinkled with cheese on top of it before it went into the oven. The molten cheese looked awesome.
   

   

   And peoplefolk! the aroma was totally awesome. It was a successful meal.
   

But during the whole procedure, I got a few questions in my mind. So, people who actually take photograph of their food at every step, how do they do it. Sometimes, hands are wet, sometimes they are oily, sometimes they have mashed potatoey stuff sticking on to them. Washing and drying hands before every camera click almost tired me.
And of course, you also run in a chance of having your camera smell like an onion, or garam masala or worse, cauliflower. How do you guys do it? Do you have separate camera – one for food related photos, other for rest of the stuff/life. Even though I can’t answer that question, I am extremely thankful that you do it, whatever is the motivation. People like me benefit a lot. We the ones, who are adept at ruining something simple (yet profound) like tea. Well, who am I to say “we”, I have never heard rest of us. So, me. Me is confused but still thankful. And full of goodness too.

This meal was followed by Klondike’s dark chocolate ice cream.

So, in one of the chain mails with my friends which I am recently embroiled into is all about one oneupmanship in mastery of Hebrew. Two of my friends are arguing over the use of certain (and very basic) Hebrew words, and their usage. A lot of accusing each other to be using French and calling it Hebrew is also going on. So, ze ( ) thing is, the two of them are now trying to apprise each other of the pronunciation of the said words. And Hindi is being employed to clear out the dark pronunciation cloud.

All this happening over Gmail, and my sponsored links are in … Hindi. For all the fist fighting going on, Hebrew links would have been more informative, really.

I can make out recommendations are (mostly?) based on kind of feeds one is already subscribing to. Most of my feeds are from bloggers from the land of India, and a couple of feeds are commentary about recent happenings (politics, sports, movies etc.) in India or simply put blogs about India.

And, the top recommendations that I get…
Jabberwock
Youth Curry – Insight on Indian Youth
Sepia Mutiny

These three are actually quite popular blogs. I have read them quite a lot, but never frequently.

Maybe these blogs appear with alarming regularity on the blogs I already read or they are blog-rolled to each other. And that is where the recommended blogs were pulled from.

Double check ::
I have a subscription to 41 blogs, out of which 15 blogs (or blog aggregates) are from Indians outside India and 8 from India.
And 1 is of a non Indian who visits and writes about India amongst other countries frequently.

Of course, my perspective about a blog being [published] from India or outside it stems from a reader’s perspective (me, reader and not Google reader). I consider where the blogger is, and not where the blog is being hosted etc.

The new addition was quite interesting to me. I was very hesitant to use a RSS aggregator earlier mainly because I would not be able to look at the theme of the blog so lovingly put up by the blogger. Till today, if I find post extremely interesting or I like the pictures in the post, I jump to the blog from the reader directly (cut down the mediation, please). Obviously, I am also deprived of all the nifty little things people add to their blogs, and their blog rolls as well. When I had not overcome my hesitation, I used to blog hop a lot. Recommendations bridge that gap, but to a bit. People blog hop for reasons best known to them, and recommendations recommend blogs for reasons best known to Google (or others, at least not me in this hour)

And, when I am made to confront and undergo certain situations, the first and the most nagging thought that pushes its way through my mind is, “But this happens only to other people or people on TV”. And I am neither. And such moments are thick. Every second passes really s l o w l y, in fact refuses to.

To recap, I was doing my laundry tonight. And, I generally do laundry in nights. And generally, I choreograph these nights to be the nights when lots of submissions are due. So, I pop in the clothes into washer and dryer really late and I have to stay up to retrieve them and hence in bargain, I study, rather than giving in and sleep. I can’t say for sure at all, but lets delve into some maths, really elementary. I have spent around 15 months in this country. So roughly, lets say, around 30 or so laundry nights. And in none of these 30 times, did my load of may-leak-colors and require-cold-water and have dark hues ever accounted for more than a half or even a third of the washer capacity. I always feel bad when I stuff this load into the washer. Not only it is a a waste of my $2.5 (the money which would have otherwise funded my coffee, in that coffee shop in that building where without fail, I always get the coffee I did not want or request and is expensive, the few times the original request has been repeated, the money was politely refunded after lot of fumbling through with the bill/cash machine which always breaks down, delaying me for my meeting. This happens with such a regularity, that I no longer care as long as my cup has some caffeine in it), but also water and electricity wastage. The washer runs for a full load wasting too much water and energy. And on every laundry night, I have done my bit to destroy the environment a little more.

Of course, it irritates me and so much so that in my last shopping binge, I actually bought clothes which would go towards this load. Well, I think it was a perfect shopping criteria. To say it made me happy to see a full load of may-leak-colors and require-cold-water and have dark hues today for the first time in my life, would be an understatement. In fact, I did a victory dance. Of course, no one else washes clothes in vampire hours. “Full value for money”, I thought to myself, water chugging down into the bin did not make me feel guilty. Till, a friend of mine complained that I promised to call him yesterday and did not keep my promise. Uh-Oh, some thought bubble bursted. And, I woke up my roommate who had not slept entire day yesterday (I think I am a bad influence on her), grabbed her very cool iPhone, and sprinted down the stairs, two at a time.

And there, it was. Moment stopped, I am neither person on TV or the other person. This can’t be possibly happening. A very confused me with a totally confused phone motionless for five minutes. The phone does not work. :’( Room heater was employed, till my throat could not be any more dehumidified. Now dismantled phone lies near the laptop heat vent. Maybe, I should throw it in the dryers in which the whites are tumbling right now.

My hand, very accustomed to phone is feeling the loss already. What good can being phoneless bring and I can’t buy a phone till I have mulled for hours on end, the very hours that I don’t have? I am also expecting an important call on Monday, something regarding the trouble I got into because of my phone. This, anyways, was not the solution I was looking for.

Aarghness happening, I feel worse now. What an irony. And I am not even one of those people.

For last 30 minutes, I am being subjected to extremely loud and distracting music with very catchy beats. I forgive them for this act. I might have unknowingly done the same to others, though I am very cautious when i play music. But, when I start singing… that’s a whole new level. Hence, they are purged off their music sins.

But what really is unpardonable is their act of landing with a THUMP on the ground. People living above me, this act can’t be overlooked. Numerous times my heart has leapt into my mouth, so strong your impact is. I am never quite sure if it is a natural calamity or people-living-above-me-made calamity. You have to have to stop. Especially at 4 AM. What in the whole world are you even doing? Do you toss obelisks on ground to pass time and have fun? Seriously, I would not be surprised if you come crashing into my house through the roof. In fact, I expect it. And as a woman full of vengeance, I have strewn floor of my room with lots and lots of stuff. Sure, it is inconvenient for me, when I go away from my computer but you see, that is rare, very rare. The day you fall in my room, all the things are gonna rebound and land on you. You would be lying in the debris of wood & paint and books & print outs.

You have been warned. And very severely at that.