Bay Area Pictures































Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Locked alone!

Image
So NZ is in the middle of its 4-week lock-down. I somehow slided into a routine of sorts once the lock-down started – waking up by sevenish, reading the latest on Corona, some mild exercises and as Nitish calls it “open the shutters” by nine. We call our laptop, reference notes, books a dukan (shop). The dukan is a mess but there’s something quite comforting about mess – the familiar marker, the unfamiliar receipt, the sanitizer, the stray sheets of paper, the keys, energy bar wrapper, the three cups of coffee mugs… From then on, the war begins juggling assignments with long periods of failure followed by a small triumph. In the evening I break for a walk to the park and on the way listen to the whispering leaves and sometimes to the tender sound of the violin coming from the brown house.   At the park I run watching the familiar and new visitors every evening – families playing soccer, people walking their dog, infants rolling on the grass and stray people like me doi...
Read more

Finally...

Image
After a year, the final  results were up. The course was above my station. Anyways, am happy it’s over. I am not sure though if I am relieved. The course kept me on my toes, there was knowledge gain and self-discovery, there were challenges and deadlines… I will miss them. So here are the main take outs from the perspective of a middle-aged person after doing a full-time course away from home. Note: I believe that retrospective stories, specially of successes, are over rated. Most of them are dramatized and would be very different if they ended in a disaster. Those stories inspire many but I cringe at them. So, I will try to be as realistic when I am narrating mine:   I had not imagined getting As in all subjects but I think there was some leeway in marking owing to Covid. From the age POV, there was no stigma, at least in NZ or in my course. Few students were older to me and everyone got interesting skills on board. Some excelled in coding and software and others in applic...
Read more

Mt. Ruapehu

Image
Technically speaking, winters ended last month. We have spring now and rightly so as you can see wild flowers sprouting on road sides. Soon the barren trees will have leaves and it will mean that I would have witnessed all the four seasons of this beautiful country. So when we were at the peak of winters last month, the boys and I planned a trip to Mt. Ruapehu to witness snow! A five-hour drive , Mario and I took more than seven hours as we kept taking detours, passing through quaint villages and stopping over for coffee and muffins. I got to know more about Mario, a charming and happy young fellow, loves and plays soccer for a local club here. But one second, Mario is not from Brazil but from Borivali. Anyway, we took a shared bus from the foothills as it started to rain and only 4WD or cars with snow chains were allowed on top. Our bus driver was a funny talkative guy named Jongo to told us not to expect too much on the top as most activities were closed owing to the weather. He ...
Read more