Today I received a postcard from Canada. A picture of the Rockies.
I don’t know what it is that I like the Rockie mountains so much. Was it all the country songs that I listened as a child? Was it because of John Denver? I don’t know.
When I saw the post card, I wished I could take the kids for a camping trip to Golden!!

As I was driving home, I was listening to Bruce Springsteen..

I listened to Bruce Springsteen as a medical student..and each time I hear his songs.. I remember my youth..it feels nostalgic..

tonite we are having idi appam and egg curry.. ( Every time I make idi appam, I make two batches and freeze one half. The defrosted idi appam needs a quick steam to taste as good as if it is freshly made. Egg curry I made fresh today ( I have 4 chooks and get 4 eggs each day!)
For school lunch I had send semia pulao ( took 15 mints to make it this morning and for snack Spinach and ricotta roll ( Baked on Sunday). For Dessert I send a slice of mud cake ( store bought)

What did I cook today

I thought I will write what I made/cooked as a journal..

On Sunday, I bought a roast chicken from woolworth and served it with home made fries and spinach salad.
I find it economical to buy the ready roast chicken from the shop. I shredded the left over meat and stored it in the freezer.
I had half a loaf of left over bread and made bread pudding as a dessert.

This morning,I mixed half of the chicken with shredded cheese and pasta sauce ( no proportion..just add a bit of cheese and sauce till you think it looks good, spread that on to three puff pastry sheets, roll it and bake at 350 for abt 20 mints. cut each roll in to half. Send one half as lunch, froze the other half for next week.
I send bread pudding as a snack.

Tonite I will be making chicken pot pie.
Make a soup with vege, add the chicken in to it. Pour in to individual soup bowls ( narrow mouth), cut a piece of puff pastry, cover the soup bowl with the pastry, bake for about 12 mints till the pastry is golden.

Serve it with garlic bread on the side ( pound a clove of garlic well, mix with 2 tbl spn softened butter, add a bit of mixed herb. Slice a baguette, spread the butter, seal in foil, bake at 350 degree for 15 mints.
Note: I bake the bread and the soup simultaneously.

So from one roast chicken, I had two dinner..two school lunches and the cost for the chook was 10$

Tonite before going to bed, I will cook 1 cup of sushi rice. Yaya wanted to eat sushi and I will send Sushi for lunch tomorrow.
I have made apple pie on sunday. I will warm that as a snack
( Buy canned apples, add brown sugar, cinnamon and a bit of butter,,cook till it is thick. There was a time I made my own pastry. Now I use ready made pastry. fill it..bake it,,freeze it.

Chores

My mother had few unusual ideologies. One of it was never to ask us, her children to do chores. She felt since we are girls, it was inevitable that we will be doing all the house work when we are married. So she wanted to spare us from doing chores while we lived with her.
It was a policy we loved absolutely. Never having to do anything called house work/chores at home.
It was also easy on Amma’s part, cause we always had a maid.
This lasted till we stopped having a maid. By then I must have been about 13 and I did try to help her by sweeping the house and the courtyard each morning before going to school and stopped doing it (gladly) when she told Mrs Akashavani that I don’t do a thing to help Amma and that I am lazy.
I also helped doing the dishes once in a while.
But she did almost everything else.
She did the laundry, folded the clothes, put them away. She did the grocery shopping. she did the cooking.
I can honestly say that I remember bringing my dirty clothes from the hostel and going back on monday morning with all my clothes washed, ironed and folded neatly in my bag and my job involved only in the transportation of items from hostel to the house and back. Amma did the rest.

My daughter’s best friend in Canada had to cook dinner for her entire family every Thursday since she was 5. she had to plan what was going to cook, take the meat out to defrost before going to school etc. By the way, she is an incredibly good cook. Meanwhile, my child’s future plan involved living next to her mother’s house or having a house with a granny flat and make her mother live with her. ( so I won’t have to starve, so she said each time I asked her if I could teach her to cook)

I am extremely organized when it comes to housework and up until now never had to ask the kids to help me. I had a perfectly working system and I preferred doing things my way.
Now that I work and only have two days to do all the chores, I have no choice but to get the kids to help me.
They do help me,
My son did the dusting and vacuuming yesterday.
Yaya folded all the clothes ( Actually baby folded some of the clothes and I noticed that Yaya re did them..exactly the way I do, cause she is as pedantic as I am when it comes to folding clothes properly)
Kids take turns to do the dishes
and I feel guilty..for making them do chores when I myself never did anything while i lived with my mother.

2 weeks of full time work..
almost back in routine.
I have an exceptionally good childminder and the kids are very happy with her.

Work is challenging. I do have to work long hours. But I get TOIL..which I think is brilliant, cause I want to save my 1 month leave to take the kids to disneyland.

for the first time, I won’t be home when my kids have school break. I miss those days I could just take the kids and our camping gear and go somewhere. I miss long distance drives.
i cook the meals for the week on sunday and freeze them. that eases my work a lot.But keeping the house tidy has been a tough task. I am beginning to not notice the clutter.and the worst is mowing the lawn..the rain hasn’t stopped since Jan and the grass is happily growing..My vege patch is now a weed patch.

Didn’t read much this week.
So all in all..life is good.

2 weeks

can’t really beleive it has been 2 weeks since i started working.

time flies !!

Work has been super fun.

House work is not so much fun.

Queensland is supposed to be the sunshine state. I don’t actually remember when was the last time I actually saw that yellow thingy in the sky. The weather is almost like it was in Vancouver. rain rain and more rain. Which also meant the grass is thriving and I live in a house with 5 acres of land..I am forever mowing the lawn.

I know hindsight is a bitch..but sometimes I wish life was simple..

Today I killed a dusky moorhen.

I had to be in Lowood ( an hour from Brisbane)this morning and my youngest had a historical day field trip. I woke up with sore throat and body ache. There was no way I could skip work and there was no chance that my daughter was going to miss the field trip she has been looking forward to. ( I got the costume, gloves, hat etc for her). So I dragged myself out of bed and by the time got my daughter all decked up in her costume I was running very late.
As I was driving ( read rushing) to Lowood, I saw this bird coming out of the marsh. If I had a bit of common sense, I would have known that it would be trying to cross the road and the simple thing to do was to slow down and let the bird cross. There was no cars behind me and few seconds of slowing down wouldn’t have caused me any major delays. I was already late anyway.
I don’t know why I didn’t slow down.
I am so heart broken.

I normally type the blog just as the thoughts come to my mind. I tend to be rather reckless when it comes to my thought process and as you can see I write about whatever I feel at that point.

This is one post I wrote many days ago and wasn’t sure if I should publish or not.

Ok, I have to agree, there was a time, I waited for this moment. The thought that a moment like this will happen kept me alive. I was 21 then, doing my internship, studying for the PG entrance. I had a great group of friends and life was good.
As an intern you really don’t get much free time and I went for a party because my MO wanted to go and she needed company and I owed her a favor.
I was actually on call that day and was planning to stay only for an hour or so and get back to the hospital before someone noticed that I was MIA. ( you usually get an hour right after the evening rounds are over, where no one notices that you are missing. You can get away by saying that you were in the ‘other’ ward or that you were having a late dinner or that you were send to another dept by prof etc etc)
I met him at the party.
He asked me if I wanted to dance.. and he was good looking.,really good looking.. So we danced..and we danced and then the clock struck 12 and I had to rush back to the hospital and my coach turned in to a pumpkin. Rather , my MO wanted to stay back for a little bit longer and I had no way of getting back to the hospital.
He offered to give me a lift.
I had no intention of spending an extra day doing my internship ( if you skipped night duty, you repeat a full day and night roster!)
I asked him to drop me at the back gate of the hospital and had to climb the fence because they lock the back gate at 7 pm!

He phoned me that night. to tell me that he still can’t believe that I climbed the fence to get in.
He was waiting for me outside the hospital after I finished work the next morning.
It felt good to actually being wanted..that someone cared enough to wait for me to finish my work..

I only knew his first name and only weeks later he casually mentioned his surname..He was the scion, the heir apparent to one of the richest family in Bangalore. His father was send to England to do his medicine.

His friends owned the pubs..restaurants etc..Everyone knew him..( it was a lifestyle very similar to what George had)
Life was good.
he was a good friend, then I fell in love with him..

I took him home.
Amma loved him.
He is tall, fair and had green eyes ( 1/4 Portuguese)..and money!

He talked about marriage. He wanted to marry me right after I finish my internship.( April). Because he felt spring time in Europe was a good time for honeymoon!!
He even told me that I should do my masters in O & G, He knew that is where the money is, besides his father was an O & G specialist..He gave me a diamond pendant for no particular reason as a gift. ( it wasn’t Christmas, it wasn’t my birthday. He just decided to give me a gift for no real reason)

There were so many things I couldn’t cope with. I hated O&G. Everyone in his family send each other flowers for birthday, even when they stay in the same house. They didn’t write with love on a birthday card. It was expected that you write ‘fondly’ or best wishes. Everything was done formally. They even had a calender for family dinner!. Then there were tons of parties to go to. Yes dear, no dear kind of parties with polite conversations that made me cringe each time. I was like Vivian in Pretty woman..who doesn’t know which fork is for what..( still doesn’t know and couldn’t be bothered to learn)
But I was in love..I thought I was being stupid for even thinking that I am making a big mistake. I could always get myself to like O & G. After all what he is saying is true. You can make tons of money being a Gynae.

Then the other shoe dropped
He found out about my sister.
It was my off day and I was home.
He send his best friend to my house to pass the message that his mother isn’t happy with me and he will not hurt his mother.
I don’t think there is any words in English language that can express what I went through.
it was like I had built this enormous castle and in one swipe he removed the foundation and I had nothing to hold on to and watched my dreams shatter in to a million itsy bitsy tiny pieces
I hated my sister
I hated my mother
I hated my life
it was like I was never going to get a break from the hell. It was like I was being punished for the sins of others.
I tried to call him so many times. He would hang up the phone the moment he hears my voice.
I went to see him. His mother told me that he didn’t want to see me. She was so rude..yet so polite. ( I had the urge to shake her, just so the bloody shell that she has around her would crack)
I not only had to heal my bleeding heart, I had to deal with the curious staff and colleagues at the hospital where I worked cause they all wanted to know what happened to my beau..
My ever loving mother was also hot on my heel for she felt I must have done something wrong. She also sang every minute of every hour of every single day that no one will marry me now that all of Bangalore has seen me going out with him!!

I jumped out of the frying pan straight in to the fire !!!

Few weeks ago he mailed me. He must have gone through a lot of hassle to find my email id cause I never kept in touch with anyone from Bangalore.
He said, i was the best thing that ever happened to him and he think of me ‘fondly’ and that his marriage didn’t work out and his mother actually suggested that he finds out what happened to me.
There was a time I thought one day I will have my chance to get even.
Yet when I had my chance.. all I felt was the sum total of nothing.
But I must say, I like Europe in Autumn..and that I was lucky.. I only suffered one episode of broken heart.. Imagine a life time of ‘fondly’ suffering.

No Regrets

This probably is the first time I can honestly say that I do not regret going back to work.
All these while, I hated the thought of leaving my kids with someone else.
But I know
I was there when my children were young.
I breastfed each of them for a year.
I saw their first smile, I watched them take their first step
I never missed a single milestone of their childhood
I was able to feed them healthy meals
I was there to guide them, play with them, nurture them, scream at them..the whole 9 yards.

Now it is time for me to nurture my rapidly diminishing grey matter.
Technically my children only have to spend 2 hours after the school with their child minder.( sometimes I have to go for board meetings and conferences, then they do have to spend a lot more time with their child minder)
I don’t feel guilty that they have to spend 2 hours with their child minder, because now they are older. They don’t have to depend on me any more.

It feels so good not feeling guilty.

It feels good to be the boss again!

Dear VR,
You joined the college almost a month late, by then I was already thinking of quitting my studies. There were 14 students in the last batch and Shaz and I were the only girls and when you joined Shaz and I were pretty ticked off that you were a guy. We wanted a girl!
I was not the kind of student who came back to the hostel each day and studied. I was the kind of student who was busy reading novels each evening and hence I was the only student in the batch who had no idea what was going on at the dissection hall.
Then you came along. Because you joined late, you also had a lot to catch up on. You and I were the two Dr T loved to use as the ‘role models’ for the rest of the class.
I remember how you had to stand next to our skeleton model as part of punishment for the whole duration of dissection. 2 hours!
You were a tough nut, cause that day right after the class was over, you came to get your books from the desk we shared and asked me if I wanted to go to the canteen, I admired your guts.That 2 hours of standing next to the skeleton in front of the whole class was nothing but a standard practice for you.
You gave me hope.
Each time I got in to trouble, you would invite me for coffee as if getting in to trouble was a routine matter!
You didn’t stay at the campus and like me you were never a morning person. How many times we snuck in for the morning rounds!
We shared a mutual hatred for Dr. Bala’s classes and how he caught us drinking coffee in the hospital canteen. That trip to the Principal’s office was pretty interesting.

You scored the second highest mark for anatomy and I scored the highest mark for Physio that year. You so very badly wanted me to get good marks for Anatomy and how many times you sat with me and tried to explain surface anatomy to me. I didn’t want to get good marks for anatomy. I just wanted to pass.I knew my attitude drove you nuts.

My roll number was 143 and you were 141. After your viva, you always stayed back for me to finish my viva. because we were the last few students in the last batch, it was pretty lonely to be the only girl in the whole dept during viva..So when you stayed back, it was a relief. I never asked you to stay back. You just did it.

You described Arjun and I are as dynamite and match stick and you were sure I was the dynamite.

the first year I begged you to tell me when is your birthday. You always said, you didn’t believe in birthdays, yet you gave me a card on my birthday.
Remember how I gave you a card on your birthday in 1990?
You asked me so many times how I found out.
It was pretty simple. I paid Narayana swamy 10 rs to check your records!! It was not that difficult!

You never spoke about your parents. They never came to the campus for a visit and I guess we got along well because we shared a lot in common.
But you never could see what I saw in story books. That was our major difference. I tried so many times to get you to read. You were adamant..Now that I think, you were as adamant as I was when I didn’t want to study anatomy.

It hurts knowing that you actually felt there was no need to live. It hurts knowing that you became a mere number in the statistics.
I will never know why.
But I hope you knew..that you were my friend..that I adored you and that I probably wouldn’t have survived the medical college years if it wasn’t for you.
I miss you.
Dynamite