23 May 2008

I think the world is sinking

Yesterday a friend mentioned that he checked out a book from library 'The world is flat' and I quipped ..no..its sinking !
But then I realised its true...given the situation in China, Burma, Afraica .. the soaring fuel prices , the food prices , it does seem
to me that the world is sinking...and unless we take a consious step ...live more consiously this will just go on...
 
Do you feel the same way ? Are you doing something about it ?

16 May 2008

Going to try this today .. thanks Allrecipes !

Easy Pesto
Submitted by: Rebecca Jane Thompson
Rated: 4 out of 5 by 71 members
Prep Time: 2 Minutes
Cook Time: 10 Minutes
Ready In: 12 Minutes
Yields: 6 servings
"This is the easiest pesto recipe, using easy to find ingredients. It can be prepared in 2 minutes after you toast the almonds."
INGREDIENTS:
1/4 cup almonds
3 cloves garlic
1 1/2 cups fresh basil leaves
1/2 cup olive oil
1 pinch ground nutmeg
salt and pepper to taste
DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F (230 degrees C). Place almonds on a cookie sheet, and bake for 10 minutes, or until lightly toasted.
2. In a food processor, combine toasted almonds, garlic, basil, olive oil, nutmeg, salt and pepper. Process until a coarse paste is formed.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 2008 Allrecipes.com Printed from Allrecipes.com 5/15/2008

16 April 2008

Happy thoughts...far and loose

but here it is..another one...I was reading the FingerSmith by Sarah Waters yesterday and was deliciously surprised by the end of Chapter I !
I liked how it took me unawares...wanting for more..this is what reading brings gives you...unexplained intimacy into some strange time and period and people .. :-)

14 April 2008

Peace

equates happiness..isnt it...atleast for me..so I try to keep my mind at peace...banish petty thoughts....be clean...white..calm...

On other happier notes...yay...I finally bought and installed a bird feeder and added 4 flowering plants to my small garden :-)

11 April 2008

Tough one...

Its a difficult day to note any happy thoughts...quite a depressing thing happened at work today ...and though Im just an observer...it saddens me much...I cant say much more than this...

08 April 2008

6th April happy thoughts

Some holy time in the temple , a new recipe tried, a cute lunch bag brought and opened my birthday gift..15 days in advance :-)))

06 April 2008

Recently

5th April -
A nice relaxing day, a classic movie (Godfather), biking in drizzling tranquil park , a beautiful dinner (Fiamma's) and good talk with my dear hubby....there is nothing else this gal would want...

03 April 2008

Happy happening of the day

Spending time with my dear cousin and his sweet wife...good food...and some good laughs...

02 April 2008

Loving loving loving these

Happy Thoughts

This being my birthday month , I have decided to start blogging again and also note down what makes me happy each day (atleast this month), in a way be thankful for what I have...

Today - 1st April -
As learnt from Gretchen from http://www.happiness-project.com/happiness_project/ , money used in the right way can indeed make me happy - I got my house cleaned today first time by an external entity and that made me really happy...Im going to do this more often...it was just letting myself realise that I cant do it, and I was really hating not being able to do it and having the house untidy too...
The feeling of coming to a clean , lighted , warm house is amazing...hope I remember that..

A hint , rather actually knowing my bday present makes me very very happy !! :-))

Something I learnt today -
You cannot be in control of everything, even if its yours , and when you know you are not in control you have to let go, trust and be positive !

22 December 2007

The 100 most influential books by women - and how many Ive read

Which is not too many, maybe I will take some up in 2008..

1. Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

2. Anne Rice, Interview With the Vampire
3. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
4. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

5. Virginia Woolf, The Waves
6. Virginia Woolf, Orlando
7. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
8. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
9. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
10. Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

11. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
12. Nadine Gordimer, Burger's Daughter
13. Harriette Simpson Arnow, The Dollmaker
14. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
15. Willa Cather, My Ántonia
16. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
17. Erica Jong, Fanny
18. Joy Kogawa, Obasan
19. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
20. Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child
21. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing
22. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
23. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
24. Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
25. Lore Segal, Her First American
26. Alice Walker, The Color Purple
27. Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland
28. Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
29. Muriel Spark, Memento Mori
30. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
31. Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
32. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
33. Susan Fromberg Shaeffer, Anya
34. Cynthia Ozick, Trust
35. Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
36. Amy Tan, The Kitchen God's Wife

37. Ann Beattie, Chilly Scenes of Winter
38. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
39. Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer
40. Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays
41. Mary McCarthy, The Group
42. Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps
43. Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man
44. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
45. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
46. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

47. Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
48. Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here
49. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
50. Toni Morrison, Beloved

51. Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
52. Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr. Fortune's Maggot
53. Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools
54. Laura Riding, Progress of Stories
55. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
56. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower
57. Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
58. A.S. Byatt, Possession

59. Pat Barker, The Ghost Road
60. Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
61. Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac

62. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
63. Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca
64. Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
65. Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
66. Barbara Pym, Excellent Women
67. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
68. Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
69. Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist
70. Nancy Willard, Things Invisible to See
71. Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
72. Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Disturbances in the Field
73. Rosellen Brown, Civil Wars
74. Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra
75. Harriet Doerr, The Mountain Lion
76. Stevie Smith. Novel on Yellow Paper
77. E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
78. Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem
79. P.D. James, The Children of Men
80. Ursula Hegi, Stones From the River
81. Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
82. Katherine Mansfield, Collected Stories
83. Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
84. Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen
85. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
86. Edna O'Brien, The Country Girls Trilogy
87. Margaret Drabble, The Realms of Gold
88. Margaret Drabble, The Waterfall
89. Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King
90. Marilyn French, The Women's Room
91. Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter
92. Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
93. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
94. Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle
95. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
96. Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
97. Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
98. Alice Hoffman, The Drowning Season
99. Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
100. Penelope Mortimer, The Pumpkin Eater


Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now.

20 August 2007

Harry Potter marathon

Starting at 4:00 PM on saturday , in flight from Boston to Baltimore , from Baltimore to Charlotte.. continued through dinner and till 1 am in the morning..
Start back on page 512 at 9 AM sunday.....skip breakfast .....and at 11:34 AM we have a winner , who crossed the 'HP and Deathly Hallows ' in record 10.5 hours !!! 3 cheeers !!!!
 
As for my thoughts on it... its a paceful story, but seemed a bit juvenile to me... but ofcourse as every other reader of the HP series I 'had' to read it.. so there...
 
 
 

17 July 2007

Toto and Alfredo !!

what a delightful relationship...in a delightful movie.. 'Cinema Paradiso' - saw it over the weekend and just looooved it...particularly the young Toto.. brings a smile to my face even now :-) .. A Classic !!
 

13 July 2007

Interesting fact of the day

Saffron comes from the saffron crocus, Crocus sativus. Each purple flower has three threadlike orangish-red stigmas, which form part of the plant’s reproductive apparatus. When these are removed by hand and then dried, they become saffron. The stigmas are very, very small, and it takes several hundred to make up a gram of saffron. Depending on their size, it can take as many as 200,000 flowers to make a pound of saffron. Only about 30 tons are produced per year worldwide.

24 June 2007

After dark


"But why should you be interested in me?"
"Good question. i can't explain it myself right this second. But maybe--just maybe--if we start getting together and talking, after a while something like Francis Lai' soundtrack music will start playing in the back-ground, and a whole slew of concrete reasons why I'm interested in you will line up out of nowhere. With luck, it might even snow for us."


--Haruki Murakami

22 June 2007

Why !!!

Why do White Shirts attract disaster ???
For no reason at all , I splashed coffee on my white shirt.........urrrrrrrrrrghhhhhhhhhhhh

20 June 2007

Excited about

this one..http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0419887/ .. I loved the book..hope the movie lives up to it..
Speaking of which http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433416/ is one movie which has gone beyond the book...seriously !
Also enjoyed http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0976026/ recently..

13 June 2007

Nigerian author Chinua Achebe

has won the Man Booker International Prize in honour of his literary career.
His first work, Things Fall Apart, is regarded as a classic of world literature and has been translated into 40 languages.(which I read recently)
Achebe, was once described by Nelson Mandela as "the writer in whose presence prison walls fell down,"
 
OTHER SHORTLISTED AUTHORS FOR THE AWARD :
Chinua Achebe
Margaret Atwood
John Banville
Michael Tournier
Peter Carey
Carlos Fuentes
Ian McEwan
Harry Mulisch
Doris Lessing
Alice Munro
Michael Ondaatje
Amos Oz
Philip Roth
Salman Rushdie
Don DeLillo

Who wouldve thunk

that orange + coffee aka Iced Orange Mocha would be such a delightful combination !
Come to think of it..Ive always loved orange...next step Orange Icecream !!