Crazy weather

Last week, we had some kind of a heatwave. Every day, we hear and read news about natural calamities all over the world. Just a couple of weeks back, it was raining cats and dogs and there were floods all over Germany. Last week was smouldering with temperatures going into late 30s. Today, it is back to normal German weather - overcast.

In the meantime, it is flooding all over India and unofficial estimates are that several thousand people may have lost their lives. It is humbling how the most underdeveloped regions as well as the most developed parts of the world have to bear the brunt of nature's fury. I think we cannot turn our back to the reality that we need to make drastic changes in our lifestyle and we need to do it now.

I am constantly looking at ways to lead a more environment friendly life, but it is sometimes too easy to succumb to the 'modern' way of living. This selfish way of living has to change! I hope to get more help from people who are more aware than me and hope to help people who have not started yet. After all, our children has to have a good place to live.

The Deadly Disease

I had a very long hiatus from my blog. There were lot of things happening in my life and I felt I need to spend time energy and focus on making sense of what is happening.

I was mopping a little bit about a certain health situation when I heard that my roommate during college days was suffering from cancer. Her condition was detected very late because she was pregnant and had just given birth to her second child. Most of her symptoms were attributed pregnancy or postpartum complications. She hardly lived for a couple weeks after the diagnosis. This has left me in a state which I cannot comprehend. She was one of the most pleasant, warmest and friendliest person I have ever come across. She always had a beautiful smile on her face. Now, barely two months after her second child was born, she is gone forever.

My heart bleeds when I think about her husband and sons especially her new born. To lose a loved is bad enough, but to lose someone who is so positive that she is the reason for your very existence - I wish no one had to ever go through what her husband is going through now.

It reminds me how important it is to spend time with people who mean something to you. We often put off spending time together for later. But sometimes that later might just not exist for us for the people with whom we want to spend time. I am trying to take a positive lesson (as my friend would have wanted me to) and manage my time better. I need to weed out a lot of unnecessary time killers and concentrate on enjoying, appreciating and expressing my gratitude for the very special people in my life.

Travel bug

The weather is suddenly so glorious in this part of the world. The temperatures are near 20s and the sun is shining so bright that it is difficult to believe that till a couple of weeks back it was freezing and snowing. I just  finished reading Around the World in Eighty Days and as easily influenced as I am, want to go somewhere again. Since I have a husband, a small child, a job and a hundred other things to take care of, I obviously can't  travel around the world in one go. Besides, I don't think it would be any fun to just travel the circumference of the earth without really seeing anything much, like the protagonist, Phileas Fogg does in the story.

There is a holiday coming up, the 1st May which falls on a Wednesday. So, we are planning to take the Thursday and Friday off and drive to Cote D'Azure for a short vacation. As usual, we haven't booked yet, but I hope everything will be in place by this weekend.

I have a busy week ahead at work and at home. There is an Indian festival Navratri going on at the moment and on the 8th day of this festival, little girls are worshipped, are treated to a meal of poori, chickpeas and semolina halwa and are given small gifts. In India, this tradition which happens twice a year is a worthy practise since there are many poor children and a sumptuous meal, gifts and money will mean a lot to them. They go from house to house collecting their treats and gifts. Out here in Germany, I am inviting some of my friends and their little daughters and obviously they will feel special, but they are all privileged pampered children from well off families. Anyway, I am going to enjoy the day as I really love girls (and hope to have one of my own some day).

Spring Cleaning

I am trying to spring clean my life. I see too much clutter and too many distractions. So, as a first step, I decided to take a hiatus from Facebook. I am addicted to Facebook like many people are these days. Very often, I find it extremely useful to send messages to friends and family, to organize an outing or a date with my friends etc. But I also found myself spending increasing amounts of time just browsing through the news feed. Since I already spend a lot of 'real' time with my friends, I decided to cut back on the virtual time with friends and acquaintances.

There are only 24 hours in everybody's lives and since I find myself rushing always to be on time, be it at work, be it something planned for Sunshine, be it personal appointments, I decided it is time I took a good hard look at my schedule and cut down on the unnecessary activities.

On a totally different note, I won a book giveaway on Marias Book Blog. It is 'The Last Doctor She Should Ever Date' by Louisa George. I just casually checked the blog to see if there are any new updates and suprise - I had won the giveaway. I have added her blog to my blogroll. She writes some amazing reviews about novels especially romance novels. I love reading especially romance novels and it is my secret (not any more) desire to write one on my own some day.

In the evening my very talented friend Vij is dropping by with her son who is the same age as Sunshine. Vij makes the most scrumptious the most detailed and perfect fondant cakes ever. She has taught herself how to do it and she does it better than even the bakers who appear on TV shows. It was her birthday last week and I couldn't meet her. But, I have a surprise gift for her today and I baked a batch of cupcakes yesterday. I am going to frost one of them today so that she can have a late birthday celebration.

I spent a lot of time with Ms Positive yesterday and she tried a lot to inspire me to chase my dreams and also create new dreams and goals in my life. She might drop in today when Vij is here, if she is free by then. Who needs Facebook when your life is full of such wonderful people.  

To be or not to be - a vegetarian

On Friday, Sunshine and I were invited to my friend Rumi's place. She bought her own house and moved there recently and she invited her girlfriends and their kids to celebrate. The main attractions for the evening were her scrumptious chicken biriyani and mutton curry. There was a small problem though - I am an on again off again vegetarian and I am in 'on mode' at the moment. The last time we met, I still ate chicken and seafood and I forgot to mention that I had turned vegetarian again, when Rumi invited me.

I have a difficult relationship with non-vegetarian food. I love seafood and like to indulge in indian preparations of chicken once in a while. On rare occasions, I have eaten lamb and enjoyed it too. But it troubles my conscience to eat non-vegetarian food. There is the obvious problem that you have to kill a living thing to eat meat or seafood. I grew up in a coastal region and seafood was part of our diet almost every day. So, though having to kill an animal does not exactly make me happy, it doesn't trouble me enough to turn vegetarian. What really troubles me is the hunger that is so widespread all over the world. Every time I eat meat, the images of hungry children's faces haunt me and makes me think of all the resources that had to go into getting that piece of meat on my plate. A small percentage of the people in the world gets to consume such a large percentage of the resources. I know that this is true for almost everything in life, but when it comes to something so basic as food, it seems all the more unfair. It sometimes makes me loathe myself that I would willingly cause more environmental degradation and consume more resources while so many people starve, just to satisfy my palate. However, I am a foodie and the glutton inside me wins many times. Since I am too weak to become a vegetarian permanently, I try it for a few months at a time.

Rumi was mortified that I didn't inform her about my food preference. But I enjoyed her vegetarian starter dahi bhalla (lentil fritters) and I even had some gravy from the mutton curry and ate some rice sans chicken from the chicken biriyani. Rumi and her other friends were curious about my on again off again vegetarianism and asked me about the reason for it. I actually felt very embarrassed while explaining my reasons. For one, I sounded like an environmental nutcase to myself. The other reason was, I did not want to sound preachy or superior or worse still condemning about other people's choices.

Sunshine loved the mutton curry that Rumi made and asked for several helpings. He loves chicken and his caretakers at the daycare have told me that he eats eagerly when there is fish on the menu. I wonder if it is because these are things which he does not get to eat at home. In any case, for the next few months atleast I do not plan to eat or cook meat or fish.

When it rains, it pours.

Ms. Postive always accuses that I spend way too much time on meeting friends and socializing and that I should cut down and find time to improve myself and pursue my interests. Although I usually refute her allegation or make a joke out of it and tell her that my interest is meeting people and talking to them, lately I feel she may have a point.

Yesterday, Ms. Positive asked me to come over so that Sunshine and her son could play together and we could spend some time chatting. While I was about to leave for her place, DH called me to say that he is bringing over Sunshine's best friend AT in an hour as her dad was caught up with something and could not pick her from the daycare. Since the boys were already excited about their playdate and I obviously love spending time with Ms Positive, I decided not to cancel and took Sunshine to her place. When we came back home, I brought her son along so that all three kids could play together.

Sunshine and AT can be best described as little devils. On the other hand, Ms. Positive's son is a well behaved, sweet little boy. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see the little devils hugging, kissing and pacifying the little boy when he started crying because he was missing his mom. They even tried reassuring him by telling him that his mom would come soon and he need not cry. For added measure, they said the whole thing in German as well as Hindi. I couldn't help feeling a little proud about my son and AT because usually they are aces at bullying each other and other kids.

So most of yesterday evening was spent with Ms. Positive and her son, AT and her parents. On my way to work today, my friend D called me to ask if we could meet up. Since I had to be at work the whole day (I generally work from home) we decided to meet in the evening. Tomorrow, we are meeting AT and her parents again to celebrate Holi, the indian festival of colours. Ms. Positive wants to meet once again this week before she leaves on a long vacation to warmer places. Also, my friend P, the warmest German ever, wants to take the kids to the Zoo. And just as I was writing this post, in the train, on my way back from work, my phone beeped. It is another invitation from a friend. I guess Ms Positive is not entirely off the mark about me atleast this week.

Environment friendly period

A few years back, one fine morning I decided that I am going to live a more environment friendly life. DH was sceptical because I am easily influenced by a new idea when I talk to people, but very often, it is just a passing fad for me. I do not know how serious I was when I started off, I have not given up on the idea and am definitely a lot more earnest about it now than when I started off.

When Sunshine was born, my mother in law got us a huge set of basic cloth diapers - thin cotton towels which could be folded and tied like a diaper. Almost all of my friends with young kids discouraged me from using cloth diapers because they were too inconvenient with the weather here. I eventually used a mix of disposable diapers and cloth diapers. I bought some cloth diapers from a company called Popolini and my mom in law got me another set of diapers and diaper covers from India which were a lot thicker than the first set that she got me. Popolini's diaper covers completed the set and they were very effective. Of course the diapers had to be changed every time Sunshine peed and washing and drying them was some work, but it rarely leaked and I would use cloth diapers again if I have another kid.

The cloth diapers however set me thinking about my own sanitary napkins. I found a few companies which sold reusable sanitary napkins online but the stack of unused cloth diapers kept beckoning me. So, finally I decided to give it a try. Of course I had no intentions whatsoever of using them when I had to go to office or be outside for a longer period of time because I am a heavy bleeder and I did not want to be caught in wet pants. Eeeks! I just folded these diapers into a rectangular shape similar to the commercially available napkins and started using them whenever I am at home. I don't have enough words to express how comfortable they are. Once used, they have to be soaked in cold water and then washed in a high temperature cycle. Of course it is a bit more work than just chucking them into the garbage bin, but it is really not that difficult. This simple solution can be used only at home because there is no protection from leakage and who would want to carry around a soiled sanitary napkin. This month, for the first time, I relied exclusively on cloth napkins because coincidentally I did home office during my entire cycle.

I love the soft feeling of cotton on my skin, but I have to figure out some way to use cloth diapers when I have to be away from home for the entire day. Hopefully I will manage to get over my aversion of carrying a bag of used napkins and I can do away with disposable napkins altogether.