On the flight

I am on my first work related trip. All very sudden and as usual a huge amount of running around given that I was the only one who had to get a visa done .. in two days where the normal process takes 3-4 weeks!

Packing was done in half hour (just bad planning) and barely any time to get excited. In fact I can barely believe that I am on my way. And this time, my flight luck has reached rock bottom .. or close to it.

I am on a window seat and there is a lady on the window seat across the aisle and is so loud that she is giving me a headache. She has been talking non-stop (including the one hour we were sitting on the run way thanks to the flight taking off late) and has covered every topic from where she likes to party to places she is going to visit to source clothes. She seems to work as a buyer for some chain/clothing company and I now even know of the little buttons they were going to get along the calf of some new design. I wish I had some mute / volume control button for her.

So I decided to listen to music while working. But I have tried two headsets and neither are working. I am giving up on that before I attract any more attention of people around me .. ofcourse with Ms Super Loud across the aisle, I may not have to worry about that.

Given up on work, movie, music .. I could catch up on sleep. And as I drifted off to sleep .. some child shrieked the plane down and that was the end of sleep. Why do parents not give that 1 tsp of phenargan or whatever ıt ıs called which could buy peace for an entire aircraft... and themselves.

Now the food comes along. Ofcourse the person in front me has chosen this very moment to push his seat back .. slam into my laptop and have his headset on so he can’t even hear me!

Six years ago

Today at work someone is my group got around to asking everyone where we were on this day six years ago. Flash back to six years back and working in Bombay. Seems so long back ..yet so recent in some way. Anyway .. so it was an interesting exercise to hear where the others were. Of course I won hands down in having 'moved' the farthest in 6 years - 7209 kilometres! The shortest move was by someone who was working with the company and in the same department .. only difference being that they used to sit 10 feet away from where we currently sit. As usual, the grad recruit has to make every feel ancient by mentioning 10 times that he was in high school 6 years back!!!

Can't believe my luck ...

A friend of ours just called to offer to take us for the match at Lords tomorrow. It still hasn't sunk in!! I have never watched any game at a stadium .. so its going to be quite a first time .. hopefully a good one with India winning.

There's hardly any time for the excitement to sink in ...

Fingers crossed that nothing goes wrong (I'm quite a pessimist!!).

Playing catch-up

Started on 3rd September 2007:
Playing catch-up, that's something I am doing a lot of these days.

Work has been crazy, crazy, crazy. Carrying work home, late evenings and general chaos. In the course of my current project, I have also discovered the wonderful world of gathering many useless and useful facts from the National Statistics website. Like, did you know that Indians are the second largest group of immigrants entering UK. They used to be the largest till Poland beat us by miles after joining the EU. Of the Indian's who came to UK in the last year, the local area with the highest percentage of people settling in was Brent (5.8%) compared to the 2.2% of all new immigrants taking up housing there. Then there are lots of other facts on number of people getting divorced, reason by vintage of marriage (!!) ...and the list goes on. Some things ofcourse seem suspect, like this time use information from where it appears that men in the UK sleep for 8.04 hours a day but work only 3.45 hours a day. How do they now this, apart from the fact that the ratio between sleep and work seems worrying.

August also had two trips out of town and a friend staying with us for a few weeks. So its been both fun and busy. The bank holiday weekend involved nearly 40 km of walking over three days. Super tiring.. but in good weather and a pretty place its not that bad. Descriptions and pictures in due course.

Infact, today the only reason I am home so super early is because of the wonderful tube strike. Paranoid as I am, I refused to wait till 6pm (that's when the strike was supposed to start) to find out what happens.

Continuing on 6th Sept:
Given that I did not even get time to complete this post should give you an idea of how things have been.

Actually its a little better now. Work is a little more under control - for now. I had the most terrible stiff neck which lasted for 5-6 days and was so bad that I would wake up in the night when the pain killer wore off. That's a lot better now. And ofcourse when everything goes wrong, it all happens together - so along with 'pain-in-the-neck', there's been a crashed computer and other woes to deal with. The house has also been getting messier and messier and messier as we've been getting busier and busier and busier. Its at the point where we need a whole day to scrub and scrub and to feel like we can live here again.

All I wish for is a few uneventful weeks to catch-up and then I'll be ready for the roller coaster again .. not really ..is anyone ever ready for roller coaster weeks?