Intelligent but not smart

My mother always used to tell me "you are intelligent, but not smart!" and it would usually be in the context of how my people skills lacked a certain element of "guardedness" and a track record of my faith in the fellow human being placed on the wrong beings.

Recently the kids go on a spree, pointing out why Grandma is right!

We had to do passport pictures. San did the usual diaglogue of "you have thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment. take the photos yourself" and the photo session was done. 

When it came time to print the photos, yours truly said "Hey, I can get us all the photos in one print!" and put them as a 8x10 grid and sent it off to print.

It did come out nice and we were in and out of the local pharmacy photo printer area in 5 minutes. 

Then came the realization. Instead of printing it as a 8x10 and paying upwards of 5 bucks for it, we could have made it into four 4x6's and got it for under a dollar. 

The little one is smart enough to figure this out.  Going forward, will have to include her in any of my "projects" to put the smart factor in!

Traditions and Gorillas

In the mid nineties a friend at RPI told me a story (he said it was an experiment, but I am not sure if it was really done or just a story).. so let's just call it that for now.

It goes like this. The scientists put three gorillas in an enclosure which was moated on three sides and on the fourth side was a tall metal gate which was electrified but not locked.

Initially the first gorilla attempts to open the gate but gets a shock so it comes back to the middle of the enclosure. Same thing happens to the other two gorillas. Soon there is a baby gorilla born in the enclosure. They also add another new gorilla to the mix. When these two new additions tried to go towards the gate, the other three pulled them back with a lot of warning. 

Soon the original three gorillas were long gone and new ones were added to the enclosure. The fence was not electrified anymore, but not a single gorilla made it out. If anyone tried, the others would stop them from the terrible fate about to befall them. 

Now there may be many morals to that story or many inferences from that experiment on behaviour, but my takeway is that sometimes traditions are just formed along these lines and we do things out of context to present day just because our parents and grand parents did so.

Now why bring up all this now? This week has a special day in it.. aka Valentine's day. So "tradition" has it that the kids give a "Valentine" to all their classmates, irrespective of wheather they like the person or not. 

This translates to us buying a bunch of cards, envelopes, pre packaged trinkets and putting them in envelopes and getting them to school. They have nicely segregated the Valentines for boys and girls.. so if there are are 20 kids in the class and you have 12 girls, you have to buy two boxes of 20 valentines. 

To make things interesting, the envelopes and the trinkets don't always fit and we cannot seal the envelopes easily with the heart stickers provided. If there is one item on the shelves this week that has no concept of quality, it must be the valentines.

In spite of all this, the joy on the kids face doing this activity is worth the griping over the quality of these things. I am not sure if we will ever eliminate this "tradition", given that it provides much needed jobs to a bunch of factory workers and also given that it keeps the paper and pulp industry going again.. well, one can always try to find a silver lining in this somewhere ?! 

Every year I suggest skipping this tradition for our kids but don't succeed in it. We also have a shoebox for each kid where all the valentines they received over the years are stored.

The good news? The middle schooler does not have to do this anymore. It seems to be like trick or treating. Once the kid goes to middle school, this is seen as an activity for "small kids" or as Jr. puts it "it is for kids", which is a hint to us that she should now be counted with the adults. 

Happy valentine's day to everyone in advance. May your weekend be filled with cards, candies and flowers and at the least, lots and lots of love!

Hells Gate - A trip to Rotorua, New Zealand

On our recent trip to Australia and New Zealand, we got to spend a day at Hells Gate, a mini Yellostone of sorts with its own unique quirks which also happened to be a one of a kind "mud bath" and spa! 

When you get hot mud bubbling at 40C, the obvious thing a human being can do is to build a spa around it. It just so happens that this special mud full of sulphur may be bad for your lungs, but is great for your skin and joints! Yours truly had a rare experience sitting in the mud for 20 minutes followed by sititng in a spa for another 20 minutes. The mud bath left me weak for a few hours and smelling of sulphur for a few days, but given I am allergic to sulpha drugs, this experience did not leave me with any allergy symptoms. 

The place had very knowledgeable folks who answered questions related to the sulphur mud. Guess they have seen everything there is to see when it comes to side effects!

Enough about the mud! There was a lot more going on in this place. Rock formations made of sulphur, a mudcano, places that were simply out of this world and a beautiful lake which happens to be a crater. 

We had set up base camp as Lake Taupo and visited many places from there as day trips given we had 5 kids and a pregnant woman in our group. This was one perfect day trip. 

Here it is in pictures.. 

Apparently the whole place is full of mud baths. You buy a house, dig a little in your backyard and before you know it, you are a spa owner. 

One thing that we learned in this trip was that the Maori's showed up only in 1300's and the Europeans showed up a few hundred years later in New Zealand. Before 1300's it was pretty much uninhabited by humans. Given that we can see that no matter how long humans have stayed in a place, it takes only a few years for us to mess things up! 

The trails were beautiful and one walks a mile without realizing it! Then you get to see something like this.. 

The place was aptly named Hellsgate. This view was scary where it said "this can erupt anytime" and it looked like the place was going to blow!

That pit is huge and it was bubbling away! We got to walk through more greenery..

Catch glimpses of a "hot waterfall" which is apparently one of a kind!

and a few creeks which were "warm" as the cold rain water mixed with the hot water. 

We were told not to touch the water as there is no "guarantee" for the temperature in those creeks. So we made sure the kids stayed away from the creeks. What was more interesting was that there are some birds which literally walk on this hot surface and are picking something from this water and ground to eat! 

I could not even go closer to take this picture. Had to use the zoom at 400x. The bird was fearless!

We saw more out of the world scenery and most of them are visible only through a zoom lens maxed out. So if you go visit this place at least take binoculars with you!

This one location was surreal! It is a wonder that I got anything with all those fumes coming towards the lens.

The "mudcano" which is 5 meters in diameter and a "blow anytime" threat!

On the whole the place must be pretty unsafe and they keep moving the paths to accomodate the changing landforms. So hat's off to the owners for constantly adjusting the trails! 

What do you do with mud boiling and flowing over in different colors? 

The rest of the interesting photos go to the Gallery section of the website. You can catch them under landscapes. 

If there is one thing I will remember from this trip.. it is this!

A balding middle aged man goes into a mud bath with visions of Angelina Jolie walking out of a rejuvenating wax bath in Wanted.. and came out of the mud bath looking like.. his usual self! 

It did feel good, for a good four days after this!

Strongly recommend this to guys and girls who visit Lake Rotorua! 

Like they say in India, "paisa vasool"!