This year was very promising and was the one with most travel in my life. It was very satisfying with many ups and very few downs. We moved from Houston, TX to Waltham ( a Boston suburb), MA. Made plenty of new personal and professional friends.
Few major things I would like to remember this year for
Switched the job and moved on to full time consulting. Picture 1: Driving a Mustang convertible on San Diego, CA beach.
Visited New York. This city had charmed us since our childhood with multiple Bollywood and Hollywood movies shot in New York.
True Autumn colors of North east USA were visible specially in Vermont. We had loads of fun exploring them.
Winter of Boston/North east. Got to play with good amount of snow almost after 6 years. Enjoyed every bit of winter rather than just tolerating it.
We have been living in Waltham, MA which is a suburb of Boston Massachusetts. We found turkeys in multiple places. Rishab played with one turkey in Waltham a months back near my office.
Today we found soe of these wild turkeys crossing and stopped by to watch them. There was a lady who was stopping all the cars to make sure that the birds could safely cross the road.
Boston is a beautiful city. I took some great pics recently around the city. These flowers were found in a national heritage park. A honey bee made the picture all the more attractive.
Flowers in a park
Its June month and Spring is over, we can still see flowers all over the city. There is also lot of greenery around the city. This blue flowers were found in my apartment in Boston.
And finally one picture for the beautiful lakes in Boston. Lush greenery around these rivers, lakes and almost ever corner of Boston city makes it beautiful.
Rishab is always playful and makes every picture a beautiful one.
From last 1 year we have been playing volleyball. Cypress lake's indoor game center was very handy specially during winter season. On summer days it was even more fun to play on the sand. It was always more challenging to play outside as we need enough people to play and need to close the game on time to avoid mosquito bites and darkness.
In the picture from left to right Leslie, Deepak, Udai, Me, Anshul & hari. Anuj was taking picture :). Another picture of our old volleyball team (this picture was missing many regular member).
from left to right Chaitanya, Prasanna, Leslie, Manoj, Sharad, Vibhor, Shashank and me. Also posing are Venila & Abdulla.
I and Leslie always looked forward to play volleyball as often as possible.
This skill has been one that had never paid attention to and often sounded as one of the important one. Some of my friends here in Mandeville are real good cooks. After getting inspired by Praveen, I started cooking one sunday evening. Tried preparing Onion Pakoda - a snack. It was a rainy day and Pakoda's were really tasty, they were all over in no time.
Next week i tried preparing Biriyani. Although this was not easy one to prepare as it had lot of things to be done very accurately, i ended up cooking it quite good.
I would keep exploring to cook and hope to claim to be a good enough cook.
I havent been able to spend time to learn all the tricks of professional photography, but definitely learnt a few basics. I would like to share the simplest trick of all Focusing....
Tip 1:Focusing Where you focus while clicking your picture matters most if your camera is on manual setting. This is specially true on DSLR (I do not know if any one of you still use SLRs, I guess they are obsolete) camera's.
If you focus on light source(the brighter part of the picture), your camera captures more light but will not capture the finer details as in this Photo.
On the other hand If you focus on darker parts of your frame(In this case i focused on the darker bulb holder) you get to capture fine details along with nice colors.
On the other hand if the camera is on auto mode, based on camera model, it uses some algorithms to find the best possible focus/setting (But these pictures generally do not turnout to be as good as they can be).
Conclusion : Learning these tricks will help you captures some great pictres even in the very ordinary setup.
Post Katrina, Flood damaged numerous homes in New Orleans. Some people never returned to the city but some were determined to stay here against all odds. Many of these home belong to seniors who lived here for a long time and do not have any means of fixing their damaged homes.
Rebuilding New Orleans is an NGO which helps the new orleans comunity rebuild many home that were damaged by Katrina hurricane. Chevron partnered with this NGO to help the community. I shared my last year's blog post on Rebuilding New orleans with my collegues and almost all of them joined me this year.
Even though i had hectic business travels back to back this week I didnt miss this event. As always it was loads of fun and a great learning experience.
These days my favorite time pass is to walk with Rishab and my new Canon T3i exploring nature. We are never disappointed and we either meet some cat, some bugs or something else.
Rishab gets to learn and see something new and i get to show him and i get some great snaps along with something to fill his blog :)
This is just about half a mile from my home. We come here some times in the evenings to feed birds and turtles. Ducks and geese do not hesitate to pick from our hands and Rishab likes it a lot.
I havent been adding anything to this site but has been updating Rishab's blog regularly.
Chevron's XYZ network is working with Rebuilding together NGO to rebuild houses that were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Katrina was a category 5 (speeds up to 175 miles per hour) and killed close to 2000 people and left thousands homeless. Before.... After...
I have never done any painting or labor work in my life before. India has labour that does all such work for a very affordable price, so i never had to work on any such tasks. Now was a chance to learn that and it was fun.
Our assignment was to continue working on an unfinished house. I learnt painting and also to cut plywood accurately to fit them on the exterior walls. Check out the photos above.
Although its quite a physical work, contributing like this once in a while makes us feel good that you are doing something for the society. The homeless family will remember. Chevron also donated a large sum to rebuilding together foundation.
We see lot of Canadian Geese in Covington. Canadian Geese start nesting during spring time. Our office has few small ponds and few Geese nest here. Canadian Geese defend their nests very aggressively from humans dogs and any other animals. This pond is one of the many ponds in Covington, Louisiana
Many employees jog along these ponds and since some of these Geese were nesting in our office premises, there were some incidents where these Geese chased any one who wanted to jog or walk around these ponds. Our nature friendly Management issued a notice to block all walkways that lead to the nesting area to avoid any further and posted signboards to educate everyone and also sent out a notice to all employees.
I remember we had nominated an employee as a egg monitor and use to check the health of eggs. They even tried to have a live web camera fitted so that everyone could watch them live. Because of firewall and other issues that idea was dropped. But it feels good to be working with an organization that is sensitive to nature.
Yet another Mardi Gras season. This year we attended Mardi Gras in New orleans, Slidell, Mandeville & Covington. Undoubtedly New orleans hosts the biggest Mardi gras parades.
We attended Endemiyon in Mid-city. Indeed, its at much larger scale compared to Covington or Madeville. Whole new orleans gets filled with flood of cars during Mardi Gras. We attended following parades this year.
Eve in Madeville
Olympia in Covington
Dionysus of Slidell
Orpheus in Mandeville
Endymion in Mid-City
Lions in Covington
As always its a wonderful time to be in Louisiana during Mardi Gras season. Dont miss it if you happen to be in Southern part of America during February.
New orleans Saints are NFL Champions. Saints won the by 31 - 17 against Colts. Whole of Bourbon street is crowded with Saints fans in festive mood. This Mardi gras is going to be very special and crazy.
Driving in USA was much different from driving in Canada But mostly that earlier experience made me feel more confident about my driving.
Getting driving license from Louisiana (where i am living now) was hassle free. With our indian driving experience lets us get american driving license easily. All we have to do is first clear a written test and then take a drive test. thats it we get a license with no restrictions.
Previous driving experience in any country counts specially international driving permit. Indian or any other country driving license will also do.
Canada and US driving rules are mostly same. Biggest difference is all the numbers are in miles in USA and Canada and most of the world uses Kilometers. Its cautiously driving for a few days is whats important and eventually you will get used to it.
A recent scary incident.
Recently tried my hand on a 12 seater van while driving to Miami. At first it all seemed same as a car, real trouble started when i was overtaking a huge lorry at 70+ miles an hour speed. It could be just one of the defective van steering that we hired or may be all of them are like that. You need to constantly keep adjusting the steering wheel to keep it accurately on the road where you want. I was overtaking the lorry in on a bent road and hardly had enough room to. Van was shaking and i was literally scared & scared everyone to before taking good control of it. Also it always rained when i drove, which made it all more difficult to drive.
You can checkout this van and all other cars i drove on my wikipedia page of My & the cars i drove But soon i was one of the very confident drivers who drove that van in the night at 75+ miles constantly for hours together crossing 4 US states Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Diving had never been so pleasurable, I love US highways.
Lake Pontchartrain Causeway is the longest bridge in the world. Its built on lake Pontchartrain thats between New Orleans(South shore) and covington(North shore). Some facts
spanning 23.9 miles from Metairie on the South Shore.
Speed limit 70 miles per hour.
We did not notice the first time we crossed it in the midnight. But now its a feast to the eyes every time we cross it. At the same time its a bridge where we have to drive very carefully as only 2 high speed lanes are the on each side.
