I am home again!! I love my home and went around each room (most of the them empty), just to make sure everything was in its place. It was. Thanks to my neighbor, my herb plants are doing really well. Basil is growing strong, tomato plant has baby tomotoes, the chocolate mint is growing strong. And all the pothos (indoor) are growing nicely.

I was great to be a part of my sisters move, but I am happy to be back where I belong. My Home!

My 6-year old nephew runs over to me and says: "Why don't you get married, so, you will not be alone and will have a family like ours?"
Completely taken aback with this question, I asked: "Why do you want me to be married?"
He responds without a second of hesitation: "So, I will have cousins to play with".

How does one respond to something like this. I had absolutely no idea where this question came to his mind. So, I told my sister that her insightful 6-yr old wanted me to be married. She laughed and told me what transpired between the two of them, before he ran over to pose the question.

(Setting: My sister and her family just moved from an apartment to a large and lovely single family house. She and my nephew were sitting in the living room, while I was in the kitchen)

Nephew: "Ma, I am scared"
Sister: "Scared? What has scared you?"
Nephew: "This is such a large house and and I am all alone"
Sister (trying to explain that he is not all alone but we are all together in the house with Ma, father, little brother): "You are not all alone, but we are all live in this house, and we can see each other in, even if we are in different rooms."
Nephew: "How many rooms do we have?"
Sister: "Lets count how many rooms we have, shall we?"
My nephew and sister, count the number of rooms and come to some random number 7-8 rooms. To which my nephew continues
Nephew: "How many rooms does aunty (aunty = me) have?"
Sister: "She also have 6-7 rooms"
Nephew: "Who lives with her?"
Sister: "She lives all alone"
Nephew: "All alone?! She does not see anyone in another room?"
Sister: "Yes, she stay in her home, with no one else."
Nephew: "Why doesn't she get married, so she can see someone else in another room?"
Sister: "Why don't you ask her?"
Nephew: "No, you ask her"
Sister: "No, you have the question, you ask her."

At this point (my sister reported to me), my nephew walked out of the living room, and into the connecting dinning room, wandered around in circles for a few mins and then dissappeared. This was the point where he came upto me asking me to get married.

Gosh! Professional movers are fast. Within 3-4 hours they had loaded the truck and after a short lunch break, they unloaded the truck at the new place. Boxes all over (again! just different location). I found myself in the morning, packing the last minute items from the kitchen, all marked as "open immediately, if you want to cook". And in the afternoon, I found myself, unpacking those boxes. It was just weird.

It is everything a colonial house could want and has. It has gorgeous entry way with fantastic flow of the house to the living room and dinning. My sister thinks the kitchen is outdated. I agree, but still love it. Kitchen is connected to a wonderful pantry that looks over the backyard.

In short it is lovely. I loved it, and for a short time was willing to trade mine for it. But a week later, I got home sick and wanted to get back to my own home. :)

The closing went smoothly, while I was packing more boxes. we move tomorrow.

Packing, packing and more packing. Also having fun playing with my two nephews (one 6-year old and the other 2-year). Boy! They have tones to say and tell me.

More packing! Boxes and packing materials everywhere.

I am in New York helping my sister and family to pack and move to their new home.

A true vacation, finally. I am headed tomorrow to New York to spend some time with my sister. The start of the vacation was rather great, with the company summer picnic on private lakeside up north near Canobie lake. For the first time I rode the water jet ski, after being pursuaded by my boss. It was thrilling, exciting and a tad frightening going that speed over the lake. Over thunder squalls, cold beer and hot burgers, it was a great way to spend the afternoon.

Not too bad for few days of furious knitting. The pattern is so simple, no really, it is simply four rows of perfectly easy knitting. After a few rows, I have the pattern in the head. I did not have the Allegra yarn, so I substituted with Shine (60% prima cotton, 40% modal). And changed the color to a vibrant apricot.

Here is the back and the detail picture of the pattern. Put on some dark glasses, this yarn is meant to brighten anyone's day.

I received an email from my father couple of days ago, regards, the english language. It had its usual nutty phrases and gotchas. But the the following excerpt is priceless! Enjoy! (and thank you father!)

There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is "UP."

It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP? At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?

We call UP our friends. And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car.

At other times the little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses. To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special.

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP. When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes things UP. When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP.

And this UP is confusing: A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP . We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.

We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP! To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP
almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions. If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.

One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP , for now my time is UP, so.......... . Time to shut UP!!!

Do you ever get that feeling that you are running so hard to catch a train that is hurtling away from you. And how hard you try or how hard you run and it is always just out of your grasp? That's where I am at for the last few days.

I believe that this train is going in some direction, dunno where, and going pretty darn fast. It is challenging and taunting me to try and catch, and me like a dufus am trying to. My fervent attempt is to run alongside, reach up and catch the handle bar sticking out back of the train. There are days when I can almost feel the metal of the handle. Those days are the most frustrating; because, I feel that it is so within my reach, when train pulls away just a tad faster. There are days, when I give up and sit down along the wayside. Funnily, when I am sitting the dopey train is just at the horizon, taunting to pick up and start running again. When I do sit down, that's when I get all philosophical about even trying to catch the darn thing. What's the point? Am I even meant to catch it? Maybe it is not my destiny (Whoa! don't even get me started on destiny/faith or beliefs).

I have been running for a long time now, and need to probably sit down and rethink this whole thing. Whatever that thing is! Perhaps that is where I should start.... what is this thing that is making me so overwhelmed!!

What did I do over the long weekend? Hmmm long? It was not a long weekend, but a normal weekend comprising of one Saturday and one Sunday. I needed to catchup with work, so, I came into work on Monday. It was fantastic, with not many people in office, I could concentrate, get work done and get out at a reasonable hour, without my ear being chewed off with "can you get this done?", "can you do this today?", "can you help with this?" so on and so forth.

4th was a working day for me (shame on me!). It is independence day, but since I am just a poor US resident, and not a citizen, I guess I have gotten very patriotic as yet. But, if I were a US Citizen! I would probably have taken the day off, gone to a bbq or two or three within walking distance from my house, so I could roll or totter back without causing undue grief on the mean streets with my driving. I would have a bbq at home, which would solve the issue of rolling or tottering back, I would already be there. I would have watched some movies, ah! played some board games, stayed up late, and in general be merry. But I did none of that. I suck! It was a lack-luster day, leading up to a lack-luster evening and it did not help, that it rained cats and dogs that evening. What a waste of a day! Was it? Not really, I got plenty of work done. So, there was something being done, unfortunately that something was not fun (normal definition of fun).

Anyways, Happy 4th!!

All this morning, I have been patiently moving concrete blocks from my friends house to mine. It took two trips, one car, couple of chipped nails, cuts and bruises all over my hands (I was wearing industrial strength gloves) & legs and one very tired back, to move roughly 50 blocks.

The process was:

1. Drive to friends house about 10 miles.
2. Crawl under the deck space, sort out broken and unbroken blocks, move them to door. The deck crawl space opened to the lawn and I wanted to take care that I did not mess up the lawn and hostas in the neighboorhood. So, the blocks got moved from all over, under the deck space to just near the door.
3. Move block from door to car. Like a priceless dufus, I parked the wrong way, and had a longer walk to get the initial blocks loaded to the car.
4. Organize the blocks in the car, so it is not loaded on one side and just sufficiently loaded to reduce number of trips without having the car to breakdown.
5. Once loaded, drive back 10 miles.
6. Unload the block to the garage. To get to my garage is a fairly sloped driveway. So, I did not drive the car (it wouldn't climb!) up the slope, but manually lugged it up.
7. Repeat from step 1, for one more time.

After that workout, I took a well-deserved afternoon nap!