Dissecting a Sunday…

So it was a Christmas Sunday… It started early with a resolve to tinker around in my so called photo-studio which was threatening to turn into a dumping ground for the household junk and thus had to be redeemed to its former glory.

Ahem! I love hyperbole 😉

It was nice to note that lights still work the backdrops had not accquired fungus during the rain and I could pretty much light familiar subjects with ease, though now I am want to aim for more elaborate setups with my up coming new project. By the time everyone else woke up and breakfast was done the sun was in the courtyard and Swati wanted to sit out so that we could warm our aging bones… Unfortunately we still havn’t got used to the luxury of not doing anything and Swati had the wonderful idea to practice her Sitar lessons, now that she is playing reasonably it was a pleasure to soak in the music along with the warmth of the winter sun, time eased itself effortlessly into the lunch hour.

Aasim had been wanting to go and check on the winter migrants since morning so Swati packed all of us into the car and we headed to the other side of Ambhazari lake, disappointingly there are comparatively very few migrant ducks this year in Nagpur but we did manage to see a flock of “Red Crested Pochards” from a very close distance – I have pictures which I will post at https://nagpurbirds.org but that project seems to have taken a backseat for a while. There was also a mixed flock of Common Pochards, Tufted Ducks and Lesser Whistling Ducks in the lake apart from the usual Coots, Egrets, Herons etc…

While during the drive back we got a call from a friend that they will be coming over for dinner – Swati did not want to serve anything ordered from outside so we got busy and quickly assembled everything needed to make Chicken Biryan as that is the easiest thing to cook once you know the proportions right. Desert was cake with ice cream, the cake has the juiciest of rum raisins which I plucked gleefully till I was banished!

After dinner all of us sat and talked till late….