Green thumb?

I love plants. I remember my mother growing all sorts of plants during my childhood. The fact that my dad had a transferable job did not stop her, nor did the fact that we really did not have a backyard. She was a great container gardner. And when we did have a backyard for gardening, there was no stopping her. I guess I get my love of gardening from my mother. I certainly did not inherit her creative talent but I did inherit her love of gardening and love for animals. Which is why living in an apartment in Banglore and having a pretty hectic work schedule did not stop me from having a balcony garden. The one thing I hated to leave behind when we moved from Bangalore (apart from my maid) was this garden. Even now, I sometimes think about those plants and how they are doing. Wonder if the apartment gardener to whom I turned the plants over took good care of them.

Now here in the northwest corner of the US of A, I hanker for a nice garden. Knowing my love of plants, Adi got me a beatiful Gardenia. It had such nice glossy dark green leaves. It was supposed to be easy to grow, but I managed to kill it in a few weeks. That is when I realised that the flora in this part of the world is different from that at home and so is the climate. Here we have seasons - not just one or two seasons like we have back home; where it is tropical all though the year. Which means having a garden is a lot more work.

I am finally ready for it. On a recent trip to Sequim with a friend, I found this lady selling pots of Holy Basil aka Tulsi. My mind flashed back to how my mom always had a Tulsi plant and how my grandad put a few Tulsi leaves in his "theertham" every day. I could not resist the temptation to give a pot of Tulsi a good home. I was very apprehensive about my ability to keep this plant alive and well. But thanks to the good summer we have been having this year and a healthy dose of luck, my Tulsi is not only alive, but thriving. The success of my Tulsi plant has prompted me to think about what else I can grow. Forget the ornamental plants, I am thinking about growing my own kitchen garden. In containers of course. So I did some research and found out that Swiss Chard, one of my favourite greens, is quite perfect for container growing. More good news, it is quite hardy and tolerant of colder temperatures. Which makes gorwing it my next project. Imagine having fresh picked greens for every meal. Yummm... now all I have to do is head to the nursery and get me some swiss chard. I hope I am as successful with chard as I was with Tulsi.

List of 100 books you should read from the BBC

This might be old, but I came across this list today. This list is one hundred books the BBC thinks you should read but most people will have read only six. I disagree with some which have been included here, and I think there are so many more worth including. Forget subaltern writing, but some titles like Robinson Crusoe, The Illiad and The Odessy, The adventures of Don Quixote De La Mancha and Paradise Lost have been left out. I also wonder why Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn has not made the list. Is it because he said "A classic is something everyone wants to have read, and no-one wants to read" or is he too politically incorrect for today?

Mostly I disagree with the BBC's prescriptive "here's the intelectually stimulating stuff you should be reading" attitude. One prime example is the inclusion of the Bible. As a citizen of India (a former British colony) and a follower of the Hindu way of life, I do bristle at the inclusion of this book here. A part of me feels that this is cultural imperialism and cultural hegemony. The rational part, of course, tells me that almost everything is subjective and so is this list, and therefore not infalliable. All said and done, I couldn't resist seeing where I rank :)

EDIT: 65 out 100 isn't that bad! :)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x)

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (x)

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (x)

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (x)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (x)

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (x)

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (x)

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (x)

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (x)

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (x)

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (x)

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (x)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (x)

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (x)

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (x)

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (x)

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (x)

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (x)

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (x)

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (x)

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (x)

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (x)

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (x)

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (x)

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (x)

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen (x)

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (x)

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (x)

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (x)

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (x)

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (x)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (x)

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (x)

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (x)

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (x)

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x)

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (x)

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (x)

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth (x)

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (x)

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (x)

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (x)

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (x)

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (x)

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (x)

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (x)

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (x)

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (x)

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (x)

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (x)

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (x)

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce (x)

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (x)

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (x)

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (x)

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (x)

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (x)

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (x)

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (x)

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (x)

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Eupery (x)

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Aleandre Dumas (x)

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (x)

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (x)

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (x)

What this tells me is that there are several more books I should read and those need not be from this list as no list of a mere 100 titles can encompass all the 'greats' and 'should reads' of written works.

43 things

I took the 43 Things Personality Quiz and found out I'm an Extroverted Lifelong Learning Tree Hugger

Woolfu's back!

All right peeps! Woolfu's back after a long time! And this time Woolfu has some more success with weight loss to report. 10 pounds in 8 weeks. Success? Hell yeah! At least I think so, and the waistbands of my clothes are getting looser. If nothing else, that makes me happy. In these troubled times, being happy is a nice feeling indeed (as it is in other times too). At a time when coporates are looking at bottom lines and cutting costs, and you know you are not as productive as you would like to be, how could one not stress about losing your job and not seeing that nice paycheck coming in every two weeks? I went that route too. And I realized that it is not you personally. Of course it is a little difficult not to take it personally, but you do realize that you were hired in the first place for a reason. And that reason is that you have the skills and experience that the organization needed/needs. And when you are being "let go" the organization still needs those skills, but not as much as before. And it is just not sound financial sense to keep you on. Most organizations take these decisions pretty seriously and don't like to make decisions where they have to lay off people. There is nothing personal in those decisions. The organizations after all are in the business of making money and not trying to keep you happy! What you need to do is take those skills that got you hired in the first place, add the few that you have gained working in the past xx amount of time and market yourself. If you have the skills, you will find a job. It just takes time. On that hopeful note, it is back to work!

The next chapter in my weight loss saga

I know my next post was to be describe how my GM diet went. I am sorry to report that I have nothing to report. I have nothing to report because I have been spectacularly unsuccessful at it. I tried, I really did. Took watermelon with me to eat, had some cantaloupe in the morning, made sure that I was drinking plenty of water. By the time 3.00 PM rolled around, I had severe stomach cramps. I could hardly sit at my desk and work, let alone stand. I somehow made it down stairs to the cafe and got me some hot soup. The moment some food went down my throat, I felt miles better. It was then I did some more research about this diet. This diet is very low in protein and can leave people immensely fatigued. Not to mention other side effects like stomach cramps the first day, and headaches. Of course, it is still good in the sense that it cleanses your system, and you might end up losing weight, but medical experts tell you that the weight you lose with a diet like this is just water weight and cannot be considered real weight loss. So then I decided to stop this foolishness and started on a more healthy plan. I am pleased to say that I am sticking with it and it is easy to follow. My success: I have lost 6 pounds four weeks. Which is great news since it is healthy, sustainable weight loss.

Dairy of a dieter...prep day for the GM diet

I weighed myself after a nice holiday at home and discovered that I weighed a whopping er.... ahem, well let me just say that I am pretty large. So I decided that it is high time I do something about it, again. People who know me will roll their eyes cos they know that I have these ridiculous ideas from time to time. The last time I had a similar bout of enthusiasm about losing weight, I stuck it out for a decent amount of time. A month and a half of swimming 18 laps at least four days a week. The change was just beginning to be discernible when I broke it off as I had a vacation coming up.

Anyways, I am now determined to lose a few (quite a few) pounds. So I am starting this new diet in the hopes of kick starting my system into metabolising more. I heard a lot of good stuff about the GM diet or the Cabbage soup diet. I mean, you can gorge on fruits and veggies to your hearts content and no starving. And it lasts only for a week. As my friends will happily and very truthfully tell you, I probably would not even last for a day - I am a notorious foodie. Anyways, I am hoping that I will be halfway successful this time around - and by halfway successful, I mean at least last three out of seven days of the diet.

This is "diary" is in the hopes that since I am on a diet, I might be able to stick it out if I turn it into a sort of an experiment and blog through my experience. Tomorrow is the first day. Wish me luck.

4 generations of women in one photograph - priceless!

From left to right: My great Grandmom, Grandmom, Mom and me

Robin - a true friend and companion

This is Robin when he was a pup - boundless energy and the most mischivious brain!

Fellow blogger threatened - I support Inji Pennu

I logged in to my blog and wanted to add Inji's blog as one of my favourite blogs. I went to her blog today and was shocked to read through her latest post. She has been abused, cyber stalked and threatened with bodily harm for telling a website that they have violated copyright laws by publishing content from other blogs without prior consent. If interested, you can read the whole story here. And the site kerals.com seems to be completely unscrupulous.

It is scary how the concept of "freedom of speech" can be abused to such extremes. And how content from your blog can be used by others without your consent.
I support Inji in her fight against this blatant crime commited by the site by joining the protest.