Comments

Till today I never figured out that people were leaving comments in the new website. Was only getting comments on Google+ and Facebook cross posts and thought maybe "blogger" or blog sites were a dying thing.

Saw this comment from GV on old website, went to the new website and saw so many comments over the last few months and felt really bad!

My apologies to all of you who left comments in the new website. Will go over it tonight.

Have finally figured out how to get an email notification from the new site when someone leaves a comment.

Good news is that Blogging is not dead yet!

What a week!

After visiting doctors, labs and pharmacies for the front end of the week, the later part of the weekdays were just spent surviving the days. 

The routine was wheeze from 11PM to 5AM, go to bed at 5AM and be woken up by a work phone call or the kids, get some idea of time and space and go to work by 9, struggle through the day and come home. 

Survived till 2PM, 3PM and managed to work till 4:30 today. So that is improvment on the stamina side of things.

The breathing is still iffy at best and have found that sleeping in the sitting position till exhaustion takes over is the best strategy. 

Krishna Ummachi's birthday came and went without me doing anything of significance. Being able to partake a few of the dishes in sample quantities was my contribution to the function. As a rule of thumb it is very difficult to even be sick in this house with the parents and MIL present and having the kids in the house with no school.

You come home at 2:30 and want to go sleep and 

a. Parents come out all concerned and give you two suggestions every 5 minutes (usually the same suggestion with a time lag) on how to improve your situation. Most of these are not going to help in anyway as they will be things I have already tried or know won't make a difference.

b. MIL will either join with parents with the concern or try to push me the other way with some enthusiasm. "Let's go back to the hot room and you will be fine!" she will say and off I will go and barely survive the session. That is better than the first option to some extent. 

c. The kids who are not used to seeing daddy gasp for air will try to wake me up every 15 minutes in an attempt to cheer me up. Let's go biking daddy! Let's go to the park daddy! etc. etc. Their idea is that if I do physical activity the lungs will forget the problem. Little do they know that going outside itself is an ordeal now..

and of course how can we forget d.. or di or my own little Kolaveri di.. 

d. San will come home from work to check on me and declare "if you can pick up the phone and answer a work call or participate in a meeting even on mute, you can help the kids with the Kumon or go back to work. today is the last day I am losing sleep because you won't rest during the day and wheeze all night!" Well, she has her point and so does everyone else in the house.

The best thing I actually did was realize that there was no place where rest was possible.. not at work, not at home. So parked the van under a tree near the house and slept there one afternoon for a couple of hours. That was a great move! 

The weekend is here and for starters got my mind off of things and started browsing old pictures from the Canon Powershot S30 days with the kids. Found a few JPG's that were interesting and processed them on Photoshop and uploaded them to the Galleries. 

In case you only read the blog on reader... do checkout the Galleries tab at www.sundar72.com

Here are some samples...

Hanuma bay in Hawaii when we visited for two days en route to Australia in 2004!

Bryce canyon in Utah.. We were there the day the Tsunami hit and did not know as we were cut off from civilization!

Took this one with one hand while parasailing in Seattle right around Sunset!

There are more pictures. Going to start a new tab in the website called "The story behind the pictures" and explain the photograph in more detail. Maybe it will be of some use to other Photographers in training...

More tomrorow..

Until then, I will pray for better breathing, something we all take for granted all the time!

Likes and dislikes

Today our kids are easily impressed or turned off by things. They also have very short attention spans, considering the amount of time spent on DS and playing Temple run on the iPad, iPhone.

The six year old makes 1.5 million points in under 10 minutes of playing the game. I tried it a few times (okay a few tens of times) and cannot seem to cross 100k more than once or twice.. see, I digress as usual.

We do not have NBC, ABC etc. on our cable. San has signed us up for some special deal where we get only the Tamil channels so everyone except me can watch all the Tamil soap operas while I watch TED talks on the iPad for entertainment and get my news from the internet.

That means? We cannot watch the Olympics. So I keep showing the girls the highlights snippets on the NBC site for olympics.

They both can recite the Chevy Volt Ad by heart because it plays before every video. To top things off more than half the videos crash thanks to Adobe Flash and we end up sending an error report.

Today the six year old says "I hate Chevy volt and I hate Adobe" and she says "why cannot we watch this video in the iPad?" to which Jr. chimes in

"It is Flash. i things don't play flash because they crash"

I was amazed by their knowledge of this. Asked junior how she knew this and she said "We tried to play things on the Mac Mini and tried installing flash player also and we found out that flash cannot be used on Mac and that is why we get a ? in iPad for flash videos"

Technology has truly changed our world when a six year old can hate Chevy volt (for no fault of Chevy) and a 10 year old knows Flash doesn't work on Mac devices.

In another coversation yesterday, told the girls that after my time they can have the house. There was talk of "after my time" because the last two days have been busy with all kinds of tests.. x-rays, EKG's, heart ultrasounds, etc. etc. The good news is my heart is okay but my lungs are not, but will be in a few days with some medical help.

The kids had their usual discussion.

Jr. : What do you mean we can have the house?

Me: We will leave it to the two of you so you can live here

Little one: How can that be possible?

Me: Why not? You just live here till you are old!

LO : But only one of us can live here when we are old and have our own family! Which one is it going to be ?

Jr. : yeah daddy. we cannot both live here at the same time with our husbands and kids. That won't work. So you will have to give us two houses!

My Mom was speachless after hearing them say this. For a generation used to living in joint families to hear from a generation that living as an extended family is not even a consideration in thought was a shocker.

Told my mom that it is high time she understand why San and me have to save for a retirement home early enough! She still has a difficult time reconciling with what she heard...

Another conversation, this time with Jr. after I came home from work..

Jr. : (who happened to be doing her Kumon math on the couch with great difficulty) Grandpa keeps telling me about all his tablets every day . . .

Me : What is he telling you?

Jr.: He keeps counting his tablets, all 18 of them, tells me their names and they always have a number at the end of the tablet name and tells me what they are for. How come he needs so many tablets? and how can anyone have so many problems?

Me: Half the problems are because of the tablets themselves. He takes one tablet for his heart. that has a side effect. he takes another tablet for that side effect and that has two side effects and it keeps going...

Jr.: I am having so much trouble with this Kumon Appa. I really don't want to do it.

Me : If you don't do your Kumon and practice your math, you won't be able to count your tablets when you are as old as Grandpa!

Jr.: In that case I definitely don't want to do the Kumon!

Me: Why does Thatha (grandpa) keep counting tablets? Because he has nothing else to keep his mind busy. You might want to know your counting well because when you are his age and your body is weak, you might be happy that you have something to occupy your mind.

Junior smiled an understanding smile and got back to her Kumon. Not sure if she really understood what was said but at least she got back to the math..

The kids have been over nice to me the last four days because they have seen me visibly sick. They all breathed a sigh of relief when my heart tests came out good.

Today the entire house is in a happy mood that daddy is on the path to recovering.