KEYS TO MY HEART

Jun

Yummy

It feels like it has been forever since I last blogged. Jagadish would definitely agree (I can almost hear him say, “That’s because it HAS been forever”). But here I am. It was a generally good weekend. I did a lot of clean up around the house. I may (or not) be moving, but I’ve come to realize I have a zillion things I don’t need or use around the house, but that blog is probably for later. I made a scrumptious meal this weekend–one of my all-time favorites: Vegetable Fried Rice with Cauliflower Manchurian. Here is how you can make it yourself: trust me, it is not as painful or time-consuming as it may seem if you use the shortcuts I did! more…

Category: Cooking Tags: Cooking, fried rice, manchurian, yummy Leave a Comment

May

Fickle thing called love..

Jagadish

heart

Isn’t it weird how some people keep falling in and out of “love” at the drop of a hat? It has been one of those things that’s been bothering me a lot lately. I do not intend to be self-righteous but it is just ridiculous and irritating the way some people act.

One of my roomies is a complete womanizer. It is, of course, true that nobody ever gets along with their roommates and you could think that I might have some unknown agenda for laying such allegations on him. Believe me, whatever I say here is just the tip of the iceberg.

As I was saying, this guy had a girl friend in India when he came to the university with me. This did not dissuade him from adding a multitude of American girls to his Facebook and flirting with them into the wee hours of the night. He eventually found another girl living in New Jersey and would spend talking to her in the late nights spending all his minutes on the phone. He even met her when he went to meet his sister in NJ. But, apparently, nothing happened as she found out that he had a girlfriend (she saw her picture on his phone’s wallpaper which he forgot to change) and he never talked to her again or maybe she never wanted to talk to him more…

Category: Love Tags: abuse, Love, womanizer Leave a Comment

May

Go Green

Archana

Recently, just around Earth Day, I bought some seeds to plant. I did have plants before, but only 2-3 have survived my neglectence. I was determined not to let that happen to these seeds. I took care to peek at them everyday and water them as needed (but not too much). I planted sunflower seeds (those are the large leafed ones), basil, and some perennials.

If you noticed, these are all in little pots. I do have larger ones that I plan to transplant these into. I’m not sure when is the best time to do that, so any suggestions are welcome, but I think the roots have to be pretty strong for the plants to withstand the move.

It really is amazing how hard seeds, with just a little soil, water and sunshine can grow into these brilliant green little plants. I really, really hope they live to be healthy strong plants!

Sad Update: I discovered two fat little caterpillars feasting on my sunflower plants I got rid of them, but the plants are in dire state. I am not sure they will make it. Boo. I hate insects.

Category: Other Tags: earth day, green, plants Leave a Comment

May

An apology..

Jagadish

Dear Archana,

I want to apologize for my behavior last night. I lose control of myself every time I get on the red Poltergust 4000. It pumps my adrenaline and I want to drive as fast as I can bumping into everything that comes in the way. I agree that I should not have dropped all the banana peels on the road with the intention of tripping you. Worse, I should not have got my hands up in the air and jumped “Gotcha!” every time you tripped over them. I should not have shot you with all the red shells when you were about to win. I should not have braked and moved into the second spot so I could hit you with the devastating blue shell. Sorry I screamed “Ha Haa!!” every time I crossed the finish line.

I promise I will not put fake item boxes near the real item boxes to confuse� you. I also promise I will not say “Oh yay!” if you fall off the ledge. I will definitely not slow down to get better items. I hope you will forgive me and connect to WFC again. I will look for your yellow blinking icon. Please come back so we can play again.

Love,

Jagadish

(For all those who don’t get it. Go play MARIO KART)

Category: Gaming, Love, Technology Tags: ds lite, Gaming, luigi, mario kart, nintendo, online gaming Leave a Comment

Apr

I love Apple!

Archana

Here I am again, blogging about Apple. What can I say? It warrants a blog!

A while ago I had posted about Apple’s excellent customer service. There is nothing like that to keep a customer going back again and again to the same retailer. This, I think, is a big part of what distinguishes Macs from PCs. I had a Dell Inspiron before my current (very beloved) MacBook. Bigger screen, and I spent almost an equivalent amount ~1k on its purchase. It was a top-of-the-line notebook at that time. I was quite happy with it for a while, but as almost everyone would agree, it slowed down considerably with use, and that is really not unusual with any computer, I’ve noticed, but more about that later. So, there was this one time where the darn comp entirely crashed and refused to boot. I had to call Dell, which of course took me to a center in India. Not only was the rep entirely unsympathetic, but refused to do anything about it. After several unsuccessful attempts at dealing with the issue, I finally found a person who was willing to abide by the warranty coverage. However, this was the deal: they would send me a hard drive, I’d have to install it all by myself, and I’d have to send back my old one. I’d never done a hard drive installation, and how was I to recover any of the data? Sorry, no help there. Anyway, after that debacle, I soon bought a MacBook. Now, Jagadish is not an Apple fan and he will say they have problems too. Sometimes very bizarre ones! I mean, a melting adapter? Hmm. That was only the beginning. The Bluetooth had a mind of its own and came on and off as it pleased, and a fairly visible crack developed along the side of the right palm rest. Worse, it was just barely out of warranty! I should have gotten AppleCare, I kept telling myself. Splurging another $1200 on a laptop and not buying warranty seemed like a silly thing to have done. However, I was more than pleasantly surprised with the awesomeness of the customer service at Apple. While it did take persistence, after gently reminding me that the comp in question was indeed out of warranty, I was allowed to send it to Apple to be fixed, free of charge. Now, that did not fix the bluetooth problem, but I was happy the crack was gone and felt I could live with the bluetooth going on and off (sometimes though I’d wonder, why me?!). I have to admit, I was incredibly happy when Apple offered to REPLACE the MacBook. Wow! It was a problem they could not fix, they admitted, and simply replaced the out of warranty MacBook with a new one. Yay! more…

Category: Technology Tags: apple, gadgets, macbook, new ram, service, Technology Leave a Comment

Apr

God bless the weekends

Jagadish

After a long and hard week of work, weekends usually mean getting some rest and catching up with the rest of the world. Being grad students means working on the weekends sometimes, but it doesn’t have to be the same as a weekday, so we can take it easy. I actually like to start working starting Sunday afternoons, whether I have any work to do or not. It actually helps me get over the “I hate Mondays” syndrome really quick.

Archana and I have a really lazy way of spending weekends. We spend most of the time catching up on the TV shows and picking movies to watch. It actually takes us an hour to pick a movie to watch and we usually end up not liking it. We don’t watch horror or drama, so that limits the choices. It’s almost always romance and comedy that wins the vote. Unless we want to get some regional flavor, we watch Telugu or Hindi movies and it’s difficult to find a good Hindi/Telugu movie that is intelligent and devoid of all the hyping up of the hero.

In Indian movies, the hero can hit a 100 people single-handedly without even using a weapon. It seems believable in Kung-fu movies where Jackie Chan jumps around taking a few blows but still managing to beat up a few thugs using the environment as props. It is also quite believable if Keanu Reeves fights 100 Agent Smiths in Matrix, because it is a fictional world. But, in Indian movies, the hero punches every thug into the air with just one mighty blow. Worse, the hero is almost always a lanky kid (who is probably the son of a veteran actor). The Indian hero is Superman, without a cape. Even in movies that does not involve a lot of action, the emotions seem unreal and over the top. more…

Category: Movies, Television Tags: heroes, hindi, matrix, Movies, prison break, telugu, tv shows, weekend Leave a Comment

Apr

Catcher in the Rye

Jagadish

catcher I can’t say this enough, but life has been busy in the past couple of years. I am really ashamed to say that I haven’t had time to read any books other than textbooks, journals and papers. I love to read and I decided that I will spend at least one hour every day doing something that has nothing to do with computers. I even ventured out to buy a few books until my friend suggested that I could borrow some from the library. I immediately made a list of books I wanted to read and promptly borrowed them. I have about 8 books on the list and it took me about 2 weeks to finish the smallest of the books. I picked “Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger to start with because it was on the ‘favorites’ list of all my friends. I have been wanting to read that book for a long time now and I couldn’t wait to find out what the fuss was all about. I have to say I really wanted to like this book even before I started it. Maybe it was the expectations I had, but the book was really quite hard to sit through. The English in the book was old American slang and I had trouble ploughing through it. It also seemed like a monologue where the guy would go on and on about the things around him without giving the other person a lot of things to say. It took me a week to get through the first 100 pages and I dropped it for the next 5 days without the intention of finishing it really because I did not know if there was any point to this story. If the guy in the book would stop being such a whiny little teenager and get his life back on track. more…

Category: Books, Review Tags: catcher in the rye, humor, jd salinger, novel, Review, teenage Leave a Comment

Apr

Tomato, Basil & Mozzarella=Yum!

Archana

They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Now, I don’t know how true that is, but I do like cooking and trying out ’something new’. And Jagadish is game for anything that comes off of my stovetop or out of my oven While he is away working hard and finishing up his MS, I am learning and perfecting some new recipes I’ve picked up on of late. Most of these are also quick to make, as long as the ingredients are available, which is great, since I don’t have much spare time these days.

Okay, I love cheese. I’ve been trying not to eat too much of it of late, but I saw fresh mozzarella at my local grocery store and just could not resist buying some. Fresh mozzarella is very different from the hard grated variety you find in Kraft bags, or the kind used most often to top pizzas sold by commercial brands. It is very soft, very white, almost like freshly made paneer, and is usually stored in water or whey to keep it fresh. One of the easiest things to do with fresh mozzarella is eat it Yes, as is, it tastes great, but when combined with the flavorful herb basil, and tomatoes, it really is awesome!

After a long, hard, tiring day at work, there is nothing like being able to make a fresh meal under half an hour. Seriously, that beats frozen or instant cooked pasta any day. Here’s how you can make it too. You will need, as the title says, fresh mozzarella (although regular old mozzarella might do too, never tried it myself), tomatoes (slightly firm ones), basil leaves, fresh garlic clove, onion (optional), whole wheat bread (I prefer wheat, but white or ciabatta should do too), salt & pepper. more…

Category: Cooking Tags: basil, Cooking, food, mozarella, recipe, tasty, tomato One Comment

Apr

Update!!

Jagadish

Just an update to all those who are wondering what is going on. I am considerably close to graduating but since the economy “happened”, finding a job has been quite difficult. That means I had to postpone my graduation by one more semester, so I can stick around and hope the economy gets on its feet in the next couple of months. I am also looking at the possiblity of a PhD but that is a distant second priority and would only really consider if I can’t find a job soon enough.

Coming to the site, we are really trying to keep up and blog as much as possible. But obviously that is not happening as often as we would like to. We think its a good idea to update the site as much as possible, considering the amount of money we spend on it every year, it will be a really bad idea not to use this platform we developed together in the past couple of years. So expect at least a couple of blogs in a week. We really hope that more people will learn from our experience and make their relationships work.

We also updated the theme again. The colorful and vibrant theme kind of signifies the time and mood we are in, where the possibilities are endless. There was also some significant behind the scenes update, everything must� look much more organized now. I think thats about it for now.

Category: Personal Tags: education, Love, relationships, themes, update, website Leave a Comment

Apr

Cooking Healthy & Yummy

Archana

I love cooking. Or rather, I love experimenting with cooking. Of late, I have been trying out recipes, from my imagination, and the internet, that incorporate a lot of goodness (read healthy) into you. I was fairly impressed with this version of stir-fry that combined a recipe I found online, and the ingredients I had at home. It tastes like something from Panda Express, except it’s all vegetarian (for sure), and is made with fresh veggies. Does this look delicious or what?