Miracle League of Massachusetts

Volunteered at another event this morning to help an event for children with special needs. Miracle League of Massachusetts organizes base ball league for these children.

Cradles to Crayons at Brighton, MA

Cradles to Crayons is an organization that provides essential items to clothing to kinds in need. We volunteered at one of their locations in Brighton, MA to sort out the items.

As always, it feels great to give back to communities.

Building playground for Foxbury, MA kids

Melted Crayons Art by Kattimani Boyz

It was a lot of fun melting these crayons with Rishab.

Melted Crayons Art by Kattimani Boyz

Here is a post to his blog with further details along with a time lapse video of how we created this art form.

Exploring Painting

I have been painting for a while and it feels so relaxing to put my mind into some creative work. Oil paint that I use are lot more difficult to handle (dries very slowly) but are worth the time and effort.

I choose different type/style/subject every single time. Painting something new each time also means that I was making plenty of first time mistakes. 

I do not know what do I want to perfect on and hence trying out all forms of painting.

Most of the time, I paint along with my son Rishab.

All my paintings are in the name of "Kattimani Boyz". That's because Rishab also adds some of his magical touch to all my paintings.

And finally a time-lapse video of the whole painting process. Its lot more challenging to paint along with recording a video of it but its worth it. 

Cambridge Reservoir in Waltham, Massachusetts

Cambridge Reservoir in Waltham is very well preserved. Since there are no vehicle stops or parking spots near this reservoir, its not easy to shoot or any pictures of it. Most people know Cambridge reservoir from its view by I-95. Its lot more prettier when you go around it and walk in a bit to get its beautiful view.

Its breath taking beauty unfolds in autumn. I visited this place multiple times to get near to the location i wanted to get a great view.

Cambridge Reservoir looks mostly dark green for most parts of the year but gets the best possible colors only in Autumn, towards end of September during peak fall season.

My first 5K run and Runners high

Instigation

I am approaching 40 years and was feeling the need of some physical athletic activity. Few days ago, one of my colleague Chris talking about triathlon and I mentioned that I never ran more than 0.3 miles on treadmill and he encouraged me to take up a 5K run that was coming up. I looked up the details and it was just the right challenge for me. I signed up for Brian Honana's 5K run on the same day (8th Sept) and had roughly 2 weeks to prepare.

With Chris, after we finished the run.

Preparation 

Preparing to run

    First thing I did to prepare was to look up about all information related to the preparation, planning and motivation. Started running with RunKeeper app to keep track of my progress. I was running 3 miles in just 3 days. First 3 days I had a lot of pain in the legs but a little rest on alternate days fixed it immediately. On the third day I could hardly lift my legs in and out of the car and had to support them with my hands. Did i feel that I should stop running now? Hell No.! Runner's high was all over my mind saying "Pain is temporary pride is forever". I did not tag along with any friend who could have motivated or demotivated me with their pace and distance.

Reward

Conclusion

I was reading an article that said "Once you start running, you become an athlete for life". With that comes a good health, conscious healthy choices in everything that goes in your body. Go out, run and discover healthy way of life.

Building a dream.., a home, a Dream home.

It has been a dream of my parents to build a home of their own ever since I was a kid. Since we were constantly moving to different cities/towns throughout my dad's career, we never felt settled until we moved to Bengaluru aka Bangalore.

Mom and Dad looking forward..
Place where they will have their future home.

We waited for this land to be developed for over a decade now so that we can start building a house.
We kicked off the construction project in August 2014 and lined up all activities. One of the first one was to get electricity and water to the site so that construction can begin.

Borewell water

Construction project is scheduled to end somewhere towards October 2015. Looking forward to the most prized procession.

Bomb on Western ave Boston/Brighton, MA #BostonStrong

A bomb was found near my office today on Western Ave, Boston/Brighton, Massachusetts.

We were watching cops blocking the the road and wondering what was going on. We saw one of the cop wearing bomb disposal suit. We instantly knew there was a bomb. As we all watched eagerly from our office, they connected the wires to detonate the bomb. 

There was a small explosion and the there were was no damage to any vehicle or property. Needless to say everyone was safe.

Take a look at the video that was shot from my office.

 Street was full of cops and they had cordoned off the street. Multiple firetrucks and emergency vehicles were ready.

This may be to dampen the spirits of next month's Boston Marathon. None of these can affect the solidarity and the strength of our community. #BostonStrong

Summarizing 2013

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.

Looking forward to another rocking year in 2014.

Turkeys in Waltham, MA

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 Flowers

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. 

Country side - Spring, TX

Went out to see a pumpkin patch but ended our journey with a country side dive. We stopped by a hay bale and here is me and Rishab.

Memories of Volleyball

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. 

My first painting - New orleans, Louisiana

As part of official celebration of a project go live, we painted New Orleans logo at Corks n Canvas, Mandeville, LA

The picture i was drawing is a logo of New Orleans city, which is also used by many other such as New Orleans Saints.  

It was my very first paint. With instructor and wine along side, my first painting was a great memento of the project, people and #Louisiana.

Sanjay explores Painting

Chevron made our team lunch much more interesting by organizing it  in Corks N Canvas at Mandeville, LA. Part from 

Cooking

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.

Light & Photograhly - Focusing

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.

Want to learn more?

Rebuilding New Orleans 2011

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.

Backyard Photography

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 :)