Powers of Persuasion

A few days back, on a Friday, I had to work out of home because of back-to-back early morning teleconferences and as driving into Bengaluru is a nightmare after 8:30 am. El Niño was having a holiday and the first thing he said after waking up was 'Thum aaj office nahin jaayaengaey'. We wonder as to how he manages to 'think' and talk in Hindi fluently when no Hindi is used at home except for watching what the characters mouth in Doraemon, Perman, Ninja Hattori, Shin-chan, Beyblade, Oggy and the cockroaches etc etc. :)

After fueling up and realizing that I was still at home and on my laptop, El Niño persuaded me to come and play at 9:00 am in the morning. Barked back saying that I had work to do and hence no play. For around half-an-hour there was no sign of him and then whoosh!, there was a paper rocket flying over my head. I ignored it and continued. A few minutes later, another paper missile landed with a dire missive. "Do not speak to me. Until you say sorry I wont talk to you".

And then I go, to find him behind a fortified barricade of pillows, sheets and blankets, drawn from all the rooms. A few sorrys and cajoling did not get him out of his frown. And then the magic words, "Shall we go and play TT and squash?", did the trick. And off we went out for an hour or so, burning a few calories with sweat, tears (me being accused of cheating in TT) and toil, while the work waited.

A similar scene two days back on Sunday. We had played tennis for around an hour in the baking morning sun on a concrete basketball court and came home to cool down when there was trouble again in the form of the swimming pool. Looked out toward the pool and not a soul in sight with only the shimmer of heat waves floating. Tried to wriggle out saying it is hot and I do not have swim trunks. And he went in, dug into my 'junk collection' and pulled out two big rubber-bands, strapped them to my knee length shorts and said, 'your swim shorts are ready. lets go'. Not to disappoint, drove down with him for around 6 kms to a sports shop, bought swim trunks and headed back home for lunch.

The negotiation started as to when we enter the pool.
"4:30 pm, when the sun is lower", I said.
"No, 2:30 pm", he refrained, "I'll finish food by 1:30 pm and then one hour to digest".
"It will be too hot even then. Look at you, all tanned. Okay, We'll go at 4:00 pm", I persist.

After a few minutes of back and forth of watching puppy-faced at the clock and at me, I had to melt (is there a choice?) and move the time up to 3:00 pm as the pool rendezvous. Slipped into an afternoon siesta after lunch with the drone of some toon TV channel in the background when a loud noise startled me. The TV was still on and the time was 3 minutes to 3:00 pm and there he was, before me, ready with his swim-wear accessories, towel et al and asking me to get mine to go to the pool.

And off we trudged to the pool, after dabbing some sunblock, with the sun beating down, for my 2 hours of flotation and attempted breath control in the water. I know only one water manoeuvre, the back float. (Need to learn swimming, but the thought of water going inside my nose freaks me out to panic)

Don't know where El Niño gets his energy from; his usual day now has an hour of swimming classes, an hour and a half of tennis thrice a week, then the local cricket and swimming sessions and at times, playing badminton and TT, hide-and-seek games with the kids around, Wii gaming as a side-kick to La Niña and then watching the toon channels. And for La Niña, except for the swim classes, and thrice a week music, the days are spent at immense leisure, watching TV/toon episodes on youtube.com, playing Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii and arranging and re-arranging her junk collection (like father, like daughter :-)) and maybe an hour or so of playing with her motley group of friends.

And for Señora, I have to thank her for all the mercies! Her day remains almost the same. She did mumble, 'Hmmm I should have the persuasive powers of El Niño. You seem to obey what he asks and he can twist you on his little finger.'

Ah! the joys of the school summer vacation, Still 50+ days to go for us to cope. Looks like El Niño asked Señora yesterday as to why I do not have a summer/Dussehra vacation like what he has. I am so overwhelmed with that gesture. Hope I had that luxury. :-) :-)

Why is it so hard to let go?

Years of gradual accumulation of things makes it so hard to let go; they range from small to large, toys and games that are long worn-out or discoloured, old books, papers and electronics junk, boxes and bags, clothes and furniture. Making it miserable is the fact that memories cling on to a few of them.

Learning it the hard, difficult way, as we are in the middle of a home shift. A filtering of what we feel are not really useful further and needs to be dumped, is in progress. Makes me realize painfully (it is not sorrow, however), how things are squirreled away slowly, unbeknownst of the fact they need to be discarded one day as they are past utilizability.

Just letting the unrest pass before it settles down to an equilibrium of acceptance ... :-)

Running low ...

From morning, all of a sudden, my brain is working only at maybe 1/4th of what it can and 1/2 of what it does usually. There is an emptiness which I cannot quantize or characterize and nor do I want to because I could end up melancholic, lots of cris-crossing thoughts, sunk motivation and energy levels down. Is it bad weather? Not really. But it is not a good start to this week, anyway.

Last week, had action at work. Was active and found it really challenging to keep up with the amount of diverse, maddeningly long discussions, but time really well spent. Some actions heaped on me as well. :)

Mmm. Let me get my moorings. Have to immerse into work to get out of this rut. First, a cuppa Cappucino or a shot of Espresso to kick me out of this stupid stupor.

The Collector Of Small Things

Forget what the some of the anthropologists have to say about gender roles like 'hunter-gatherer', with the males being hunters and the females being gatherers and yada yada yada which was maybe true once upon a time. But whatever be it, the female of the species do have a mothering instinct that is rare in the males and they can immediately smell it out if something is amiss. :-D

Anyway, noticed that I do have a lot of the gathering and accumulation characteristics, mostly what can be categorized eventually as junk (by those who don't understand it :-D). Old papers, notepads with notes taken eons ago, photocopies, unnecessary bills/receipts, old tickets, pens with no caps, used refills, manuals for things long gone bad, books, bags and not to mention an array of electronics spares which are almost never used, wires, cables, non-working items, boxes, nuts, bolts, drill bits, screwdrivers etc which are squirreled away and intended to be taken out on a rainy day which may or may never come. :-) The word "useless item" never appears in the vocabulary of a species like me. :-D

Not an easy thing for me to throw anything off just like that. I save and guard things like the worker ants in "A Bug's Life". A lot of brooding happens before a decision to throw certain things out, if any. When a cleanup and dump happens at home, it happens in my absence. I get to review only a few items before they hit garbage. I audit and cleanup my collection(s) once in a while and do it with immense glee as I immerse myself in that with all the material strewn around rankling everyone as it takes hours for this exercise to complete :-)

Guess that all these have crossed over to the software side as well. On an inventory of the software on my laptop, here is what I found installed additional to the standard software, and that is not required for my work.

Web Browsers - Opera 10, Safari, Google Chrome, Iron, Mozilla Firefox
Mail and Messenger Clients - Yahoo! Zimbra, Yahoo! Messenger, Skype
Audio/Video/Images Management - VLC Media Player, MP3Tag, Kate's Video Joiner, Videopad Video Editor, Bink and Smacker Video Tools, Audacity, Paint.NET, IrfanView, Picasa, DVD Styler, Movica, GIMP
Indexing and Web tools - Google Desktop, uTorrent, Free Download Manager, Privoxy
Editors/IDEs - Gvim, Notepad++, NetBeans
PDF Management - PDF-Xchange PDF Viewer, Ghostscript, PDFill
PC/Desktop Management - Sysinternals Suite (Microsoft), FreeCommander, VirtuaWin
Emulators and Virtual Machines - Cygwin, Sun VirtualBox (with Solaris 10 VM), VMWare Player with 2 VMs (Ubuntu/Fedora Linux)
Transliterators - NHM Writer, Baraha Unicode
Other Tools and utilities - RocketDock, 7-zip, TrueCrypt, XMind, JetStart, Direct Folders, MagicDisk, TeraCopy

Not that I don't use the above, I use at least half of them regularly and are in fact lifesavers (Hurray! to all those open sourcers and freeware folks) All the tools are useful in one way or the other. There are tons of other app installers which get installed and then are removed, but stay in my downloads directory or in a backup portable hard-drive for a potential reuse.

And on mails, used to subscribe to umpteen journals and could not cope up with the deluge of newsletters every day of the week. Accumulation inevitably happened and my Inbox(es) swelled mad (peaked at close to 2000+ Unread status with another 500 unread, but with read status :-)), but I have a policy of not deleting any mail before reading. And so, I just moved the mails off to a sub-folder every now and then on a guilt of having a cluttered Inbox and there they sat, for the all important <Enter> on the mail and a roll of my eyes over it and a hit on the <Del> key or the appropriate mouse clicks for their 'vimochanam' (redemption) from their trapped lives. Used to religiously move mails into appropriate folders once I read them, but laziness has gotten the better of me and they all stay in a single folder. Personal email account mails do get sorted into folders still. Some traits remain.

Guess learned habits die hard and wired behavioral habits die harder!!! Mmm... Let me go and see Linda Goodman and see if I can blame it on my sun-sign. :-) :-)