I am in a field, walking toward an enormous object. It is a spaceship shaped like a giant flattened pumpkin– its camouflage. I am lured inside as I ask someone what it looks like inside; I’m told it is just like the farmlands of Pennsylvania where the Amish live. I venture inside; it looks nothing like farmland. It looks like a high-tech version of the cave-turned-hotel room in New Mexico called Kokopelli’s Inn. It is dark and difficult to distinguish features. Three of us entered the craft and I’m aware that we’ve been tricked into entering, which can only imply something sinister is at hand. The angst is because this is a place where whatever lives here eats people. Emerging from the shadows but still lacking definition is the creature. It reassures us, but the fact remains we are likely to be food. As we follow the creature, we come across skeletons of former meals, which only heightens the anxiety. Occasionally, we can see outlines of the creature; it looks friendly enough, so we determine that it is best not to be afraid and find a way to befriend the creature so we may not end up on the menu. After a short while of guessing what will be dining on us, a picture begins to come together; this thing is really too fun and huggable, looking to be a menacing man-eater. It is a cross between Solly from Monsters Inc. and the cat bus from Totoro. At once, I’m intrigued and horrified that this overgrown cartoon might ultimately decide to launch on us. We continue talking politely with the creature, sharing why it has to eat people while we try to concoct stories about how it doesn’t want to eat us but that we could help it get others. This seems futile as I realize that others have probably already entered into this relationship; that is why I was told the interior of the giant pumpkin looked like beautiful farmlands. The dream starts to loop into an impossible hope against the reality of being eaten or surviving. I awake.
Dinner At Our Place
The girls dressed up for our dinner of Pani Puri, a definite favorite of all of ours. From the left of the photo is Savita, who came with her husband Harish; next is Renu, then Rinku, who came with her brother Krupesh. Srujana came with her husband Ashok, and on the right was Caroline. I made the Pani Puri as everyone agrees that I make it the best – thanks to Jay Patel.
Just Sunday
Just finished watching Long Way Round with Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman; this was a really inspiring, wonderful documentary about the two guys motorcycling around the world. Caroline and I had caught part of an episode on Bravo during our Thanksgiving trip and had been looking forward to seeing the rest of the episodes, which we thought to be six. Well, the English broadcast was shown with seven episodes, and eMule helped us find and download them. Even at seven episodes, the wish for the show to go on and on couldn’t be more hoped for. It was even nicer watching the English broadcast as the rest of the world market must be considered a more mature audience because the raw language, the killing of a bear, and some parts with naked butts were all left in compared to the American bit we saw that has been sanitized. This is a show to watch again and again.
We visited Lee Lee’s Asian Market early in the day to pick up a lot of mint and cilantro for making Pani Puri tonight. Rinku, Krupesh, Ashok, Srujana, Harish, Savita, Raenu, Caroline, and I squeezed into our tiny living room with our makeshift blanket-on-floor-dining-room table and ate nearly 250 puri’s before going to P.F. Chang’s for dessert. We are planning to go bowling on Wednesday.
New Years Day
A stop at Denny’s to share a banana split.
Update: It’s September 28, 2018, and I have now published 1,930 blog entries since this banana split. This entry on January 1, 2005, represents my very first blog entry when I decided that instead of just doing a “POTD – Photo Of The Day” blog, I’d force myself to write a little something or other about what I was photographing. That didn’t always work out. At one point over the years, we even had a server crash that necessitated our pulling as many blog entries back from the mysterious world of various caches and archive services where we could find them; it was imperfect.
During this time, I found a passion for writing and only wish someone had somehow forced me to start blogging because, as Caroline and I have looked back over the years, we have discovered little treasures of memories that would have otherwise been easily lost to time. By the way, that very short sentence of 9 words about sharing the banana split was the best I could muster back on my first entry.
Update: All blog entries that show up here that are dated prior to this day were all added after 2005, such as the entry dated in 1963, shortly after my birth, which should raise a red flag considering the Internet didn’t send its first data until October 1969.
End of 2004
We closed out 2004 and welcomed in 2005 with some friends over dinner. From the left clockwise are Harish, Mandanna, Gautam, Shashi, Ashok, Caroline, Srujana, Rinku, and Savita. Although Jay, Raenu, and Krupesh couldn’t be with us, they were well thought of.
Santa Barbara, California – Going Home
I thought nothing would ever change in this house Tata and Woody have lived in since they left Buffalo, New York, back in the late 1960s, but they redid the floor and had the walls painted.
Nothing else changed, not the stove, not the dishwasher, the countertops, or these old chairs my family played pinochle in while smoking up a storm. I think they all smoked back then.
In the 1970s, it was pretty frequent that family would all come up to Santa Barbara for weekends with the Burns. Tata and Woody would buy up a bunch of Tri-tips before anyone else really knew what that was, marinate it, and then grill it out back across from the jacuzzi. Back then, a jacuzzi was a luxury and seriously uncommon.
We, kids, could take their bikes out or head down to the nearby school that had public tennis courts or sit in the living room and watch their fancy TV that had a remote control.
Time for us to say goodbye as we pulled away with a car full of toilet paper, juice, soda, paper towels, dish soap, pens, and other stuff Tata pilfered from her job, and probably some cash she threw at us to cover gas. This was our first time spending Christmas with them, but it won’t be our last.
It’s been foggy/cloudy all day, so we didn’t spend too much time here at the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
We did spend a good amount of time in Covina, stopping for dinner at my old favorite, Clearman’s North Woods Inn; I’ll never tire of their amazing salads. It was late before we ever pulled into our parking spot at home, but it was a great weekend and well worth the effort.