Month: December 2007

A Perfect Party

Someone from Thane just commented on my previous entry that I was ancient! I guess from a younger man’s perspective, in a world where everything from relationships to fun is seemingly short lived, I, at 41, am ancient but I can assure you that real fun starts at 40 😉

What the ingredients for my perfect party?

#1 A group of close friends
#2 Something to celebrate – I hate the senseless “let’s party” parties
#3 Awesome food – the prerequisite to applying the adjective awesome is atleast 3 types of kebabs or 4 types of Pizzas
#4 Lots of booze – for the record I no longer drink but I absolutely love to make people drunk 😛

Past few days have been a string of such parties with friends from school – some of the boys and gals I hadn’t met for more than 10 years but that hardly came in the way. We even sat in a circle and shared the bottle like we use to do with our lunch boxes.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Got the best Christmas gift I could ever hope for! Several dozen of my school friends are in town for the 25th year re-union of our passing out…

Jingle bells jingle bells, jingle all the way…

Not so sucky after all!

Saturday I wrote to someone
(06:47:09 PM) Tarique: life SUX – it is weekend and I am dreading it

After the *adrenaline and endorphin high* from foss.in of the past week waning, I was feeling kind of lost… Had planned to hook up with some friends to go a nearby village and see the Bar-headed geese but that fizzled out. So decided to sleep late…. 

Woke up at 9 which is late by everyday standards but still early enough to go bird watching – by 9:30 we were out, much to the annoyance of Swati’s hypothetical mom in-law. A three kilometer drive and we were walking the catchment area of Ambhazari lake. Seeing that the number of migratory arrivals has increased was heartening. We spent the next two and a half hours there and racked up a massive count of 104 species! including a pair for Bar-headed geese. Got very few pictures though as my D70 is now nearly dead and refuses to focus, doing a manual focus is too frustrating to be worth its while.

Between all this Swati could talk to her cook at home and we knew that there will be hot aloo parathas waiting for us. On the way we stopped at the DVD shop and picked up some DVD/VCD among them was 8 VCD set of “Yeh jo hai zindagi” and much to our delight Aasim is absolutely loving the series. Watched 2 episodes… post lunch time was spent watching the movie “Mumbai Salsa” an ok movie to watch once….

Evening? – thats best left out of a public entry….

Barbecue!!!

Finally it happened… the first barbecue party at the new home. While such parties were a norm almost every third week through out the winter at the old place it was just not happening here.

We were just three families with the kids. 

The fun part in any barbecue is making the kebabs and steaks, right from lighting the charcoal to putting stuff on the skewers and grilling it – everything interspersed with drinks and expert comments from everyone 😉

Apart from  the usual malai kebabs and chicken tikka – the marinade for which Swati has perfected – this time we had excellent steaks of Surmai fish and we also tried Thai style fish grilled over coals in bannana leaf wrap – we used a biggish Red Snapper for this. All this was washed down it lots of white wine, Oh! yes there was also some Roti and smoked Dal but  even the kids kept asking “Dal? – whats that!!”

flickr now has stats!!

If you are a pro account holder then you can now activate stats for your photo stream. Now only if these were also available in their API…..

foss.in/2007 pictures

Subject line says it all – here they are – about 220 of them….