A renewed festival season

Last year there were no celebrations or festivities in our house. It was a year of “remembering dad”.

This year we started celebrating again with the Varalakshmi, then Krishna Jayanthi, Aavaniavittam, Ganesha Chathurthi and finally we are ending with the Navarathri festivities. Life has thrown a few curveballs in the last few months and every event ended up with memories that made it not blog worthy.

Finally getting to share some photos from those events in the blog, before we get to the kolu padis..

Let’s go one step at a time..and I made them all collages..

Food that completely covers the carb, fat, sugar ternary phase diagram..

Then there is photos I send to my mom after completing each poojai or prayer… you can see the improvement in my knee from the smile on my face after sitting down cross legged for an hour at least for each of these prayers.. This morning I managed a smile and drove to work without any additional swelling!

A few other photos (the Onam spread would have required a wide angle lens that is yet to be developed)..

Now that brings us to the Navarathri festival that needs a special post or two..

The not so little one gets her first degree

San and me went to India for two weeks to perform my dads passing anniversary ceremonies and then did a pilgrimage to a bunch of temples and came back. Right after coming back we had the little one’s graduation.

In my eagerness to finish clearing my iPhone photos and writing blog posts about the Japan trip, never got to post this important event!

The little one followed her sister in the deal making process and finished her 4 year degree in 3 years. We were obviously happy because she gets to work from home for a year before she goes to medical school like she has planned.

Her opening experience at UCSB was a tough one, as she caught a virus the very day she started dorm life and ended up in Urgent care. Three years later she actually liked the place enough to miss it. Guess it was the friends more than the place.

Was happy with the way her friends all came together, including her two childhood besties. All of them are growing up. All three are “little one’s” in their houses and it was tough to see them talk like adults. All those three kids think their dads and the uncles are probably idiots and they have their respective dads wrapped around their fingers.

We drove the morning of the graduation, cleaned out her stuff from her apartment, attended the ceremony, hung out at the beach for a short while, walked around campus for an hour, had an early dinner with her friends who could make it and drove back same night. There was a caravan of three cars from UCSB to the bay area with Jr. driving a van full of stuff and coming back solo. San and me were mostly silent and staring at what seemed like an endless freeway, occasionally reminiscing about the last 27 years!

This blog started when Sangeetha was pregnant with the little one!

We announced her birth on this blog!

Now a blog post about her college graduation! How 20 years flies by!

Here are some pictures from the days events..

The top photo was after high school.. we can complete the series with the next degree..

and a video highlights reel

Now we pray to all the gods we know and all the gods we don’t know ,that she gets her wish to do what she wants!

I am just happy that she has what no degree can offer….

Lifelong friends!

One last morning in Tokyo

The previous post in this series is here.

We came back from Shinjuku and packed for a good hour.

The next morning we were planning to relax, go around the malls near the Tokyo Dome Hotel, then take an Uber to another Indian restaurant for one big meal before making it to Narita.

We got quite a scare when checking out. My friends son was walking right next to me, all happy that we were going back home that day. I made the mistake of letting him walk ahead for two seconds only to see the elevator door close before I could get in. The Tokyo dome hotel does elevators do not show which floors they are stopping at! So we had no idea where the kid got off. After some frantic searching, we were finally back together as a group. I kept kicking myself for a few hours for that mistake. Apple maps should also automatically have a feature to track which floor a person is in with the Find Me app. Showing everyone standing on top of each other in same location doesn’t help!

After checking out and leaving our luggage at the hotel, we had a nice breakfast at a bakery right below the hotel. Then we walked to a local mall and shopped some more! Then we made it to this Jain restaurant which was cramped but had great food. We were the only ones that early at the restaurant and we ended up talking to the employees for some time and heard their life stories.

It was then time to get an Uber back to the Tokyo dome and make our way to the train station. Had to take 3 trains (we got on a wrong train first!) and eventually made it with plenty of time to spare at the airport.

That helped because we all had extra Yen left in the SUICA App we had loaded just that morning to help with the wrong train situation! We could have listened to Jr. and done it on day 1.

There is a store in the Narita airport that accepts Suica cards. So we shopped that the store to account for every last Yen on that app which ended up being a fun exercise. here are a few photos from day 8

The entire trip was a great experience! Only wished the little one could have joined us. We will get her on our next family trip!

8 days in Japan, a good three months to blog about it!