It is bone chilling -8F (-22C) right now here in Itasca. But it will slowly warm up as the sun comes up. That part I get. But look what happens after the sun sets. The temperatures keep rising thru the night. Of course, there is no sun around. Lake Michigan water cannot be that warm – after the last few cold days – to explain that.
How do you explain that?
In American football, any drive can end with the following points – 0 (ball turned over), 2 (safety), 3 (field goal), 6 (touchdown with failed point after or failed two pointer), 7 (touchdown and successful point after) or 8 (touchdown and successful 2 point conversion).
Assuming no team scores more than 50 points in a playoff match (there has to be a winner), what are the different legitimate combinations of scores that a match can possibly end with? (e.g. a game can end 14-2 but can never have a 27-1 score).
Original plan was to use the downtime during year end to get all the handwritten letters that I still have neatly organized by person and in chronological fashion. Of course, Covid took my year end away. However, with the long weekend here, I finally got it done.
Some of the letters are from 1984! The “inland letters” of India are ready to just crumble up. Had to use a lot of caution to restore them. You can see some of the olden days “postcards” too.
The earliest letter is from my dad in 1984 followed by my best friend Avijit Bose’s. The latest one is from Madhuri Agrawal from Singapore from a few weeks back.
Some of the letters from my parents were too difficult for me to hold my tears back.
I told Sharmila about my project.
“I have organized the letters that I still have and some of the ones that I wrote”
“How do you have letters that you wrote?”
“Well, for international letters, I take a photocopy. Just in case they get lost, I email the photocopy to the recipient later.”
“How come you do not write any letters to me anymore?” was her next question.
“What?”
“You used to write to me before marriage. How come you write to others still but not to me?”
“Why would I write to you? We live under the same roof. Moreover, we are on talking terms.”
Apparently, that did not convince her.
Maybe that Covid-time realization on silence might be not too futile after all.
I can foresee a day when she would ask me “How was dinner?”
Vowed to silence, I would furtively pen a letter and mail it. (BTW, our new house is bang opposite the post office.)
She can open up the wax sealed envelope a few days later and read out loudly “Needed a little more salt!” Or something like that!!!
From an earlier post, you might remember how I had run into an old bartender friend – Tathagata – in Westin hotel in Kolkata last month. If you carefully notice the picture in that post, you will see a small jar of some black stuff on the right bottom corner.
That is one of the tricks I learnt from Tathagata that day. Those are butterfly pea flowers. He infuses them into gins which renders the gin a dark blue color. Here is the cool thing… as you pour tonic water into the gin, it changes its color to pink!!
Instead of getting butterfly pea flowers, I found a gin – Empress 1908 – made in Canada that actually uses these flowers in the latter stages of the distillation process. The result is a dark blue gin. Since gins usually do not have color, you might mistakenly think that the bottle is blue in color.
I was making the usual gin and tonic for Sharmila last evening when I decided to try out the trick. You can see how the bright blue gin slowly becomes lavender in color and then becomes bright pink. Pretty awesome!
Incidentally, it is a great gin too!!
BTW, I should have used white background for these pictures and not black.
Lost 10 pounds quickly during the few days of Covid. Which is fairly exceptional for me. Most of the last 15 years, I have stayed within a narrow band of a few pounds – even that variation coming mostly from water weight (salt consumption the previous day or not drinking enough water after long runs).
On the brighter side, I think I am going to consider myself having overachieved my New Year Resolution! And now that I can check that box off, I am going to totally take it easy for the rest of the year đ In fact my goal now is to put so much weight on that next year it will take me much more than one week to meet my annual goal đ
