This Halloween, my artist wife Sandhya did this pumpkin carving, it is princess Sophia the first (a Disney character). This was her first time at carving a pumpkin and I must say she aced it.
The photo is truly not doing justice to the art but had to try.
Sweet berry farm, I thought I had already written about this, but looks like I have missed it. Considering I have been visiting this place for the last two years on an average 2 times a year it does deserve an entry in my blog.
It's an hour drive from Austin near the city of marble falls. I came to know about this place through a friend of mine. It's one of those well managed commercial farm which opens twice a year for tourists, once in spring and once in fall. In spring season they have strawberry picking and in fall they decorate the farm for pumpkin festival.
It has always been a blast for my daughter, for she gets to do her favorite activities like berry bounce, sand art, tractor train ride, face painting, feeding and petting goats, and this time we spent time running through the corn maze and lastly her most favorite, pumpkin painting (only in fall). In short we easily spend a day there.
If I need to pick one gripe about the place is that the food part is a bit scarce out there but they do have a ton of picnic tables for those who can pack from home and if you are there for the pumpkin patch don’t forget to try their wonderful pumpkin ice-cream and the very addictive strawberry lemonade (I think its the sugar).
Between strawberry picking and pumpkin patch, I feel pumpkin patch is slightly bigger for they open up the farm on the other side of the highway for the same and is more fun than the latter one.
One great thing for me is to see my kid grow, every time I have been there I have seen her doing the things slightly and some times much better than she did last time. I think the study is fairly scientific for she gets to do the same set of things but done over period of time.
The farm does not charge entry fee or parking fee and we pay only for the activities and food. The staff is very friendly and helpful. Of course needless to say, go there with decent amount of cash for it is a cash or check only place and they do have an ATM but not sure what they will charge for the fee.
If you plan the pumpkin patch, I recommend to visit before Halloween.
Last Saturday (October 11), the Circle C Indian community had organized a diya painting workshop for kids on account of Diwali. Please don’t get confused when I say the big name “Circle C Indian community”, I would prefer it to be read as organized by 2 individuals Kirti Joshi and Meenakshi Matai. The event was organized in a nearby public library and thanks to Sandhya I got signed up to be the official photographer for the event.
All the supplies required for the workshop was provided by the organizers including 2 diyas per kid. The kids were divided into 2 groups (I am guessing it was done based on age initially and latecomers joined in where they could find space) and the instructors were giving detailed instructions about the painting. It was fun to see the little ones listening intently to the instructions and following to the extent they could. There was a noticeable difference in the way smaller kids (3.5-4.5 years) approached vs the bigger kids (5 and above) approached. The younger ones believed in colorful palettes to start with while the older kids believed in more professional approach and were meticulous with their details.
For me personally it was double bonus, for one I got to document the entire event from beginning to end at the same got the opportunity to catch up and hangout with some old friends. It could also had been an opportunity to enhance my photography skills too but passed it up for good pictures.
At the end of the event, most everybody had painted their own diyas and in some instances parents took up the brushes on behalf of their kids and painted the diyas. Either way everybody had 2 well painted diyas with them.
The event was so good that it was initially announced to be a hour long event but ended up being close to 2hours. I will be the first one to say, some of the diyas painted that day could have competed in the professional league.
I don’t know if Kirti and Meenakshi had organized such events before but this one was professional grade. Kudos to you two for doing this.
Below are some of the pics from the art studio.
A year and half ago while shopping at Walgreens I saw the notice "by city of Austin ordinance, use of 1 time carry out bags will be banned". I wasn't sure what it meant and when asked the store clerk he said the plastic bags I had taken for granted for ever cannot be used anymore and people are encouraged to bring their own bags.
Came home and told Sandhya the same and she was glad to hear this. As it turns out we had quite a collection of plastic bags sitting in our garage (this collection was from last 1 year or so since we moved here to our new place).
Yes, once upon a time we did try to use them as trash liners but considering a lot of them will tear at the minimum amount of stress we weaned away from them specially for the kitchen and then occasionally used to use them sometimes for bathrooms. Frankly speaking they were a pain to use, I was glad to find the 10-gallon size trash liners at Costco.
It took me a while to get used to the no carry bag concept as I would end up at the store without the bags (on the way from work or some such things) and end up either carrying the items in hand or buy their newer/thicker bags.
For the thicker bags, previously we used to have 2 to 3 designs for the carry bags that would cycle through and new designs take their place once in a blue moon but now a days the designs keep changing every few months, it appears as though a new industry has started because of this (In my opinion, Whole Foods carry some of the cool designs ). Now, we have an assortment of bags and some of them are permanent residents of our respective cars.
I am sure it was a big ordinance and the city must have faced a lot of opposition as no other city in Texas including our next door neighbors have implemented the same. I am proud of my city Austin for taking this bold step.
Frankly we have been trying for a few years before the ordinance to use less plastic bags but I admit we had failed miserably. Now a days it feels strange when I shop in our neighboring cities and they bag the items in those white plastic bags.
I think it's one of those things in which a strong ordinance bought a good change, In my opinion the next thing to tackle is the Styrofoam carry out boxes.
When I lost my beloved iPhone 4 I was devastated, I replaced it with a new look alike iPhone 4s.
Fast forward 2 years later, the phone started showing its age. First evidence was the lack of voice in FaceTime and then came the day I realized I couldn't plug my earphones to the phone. The last straw was when the power button on the phone broke, imagine not able to lock or power down your phone, it was a night mare for few days.
All the above and the imminent launch of iPhone 6, I had almost made up my mind to wait for the launch and buy the new iPhone. But the new phone looked more Androidsh and to top it off my service provider threatened to hike price if renewed.
All said and done, to get a new phone I would have to pay $400 extra plus the equipment cost over period of 2 years and $180 year on year from there.
That pushed me to look into nexus 5, but after owning nexus 7 I am not a fan of bare bone Android any more.
So, I looked at the last option of repair and resurrect my existing phone, a quick Google search led me to icracked.com, a few phone calls and a day later, all my iPhone problems were fixed and it is working like a champ. The total cost was $65 including the cost of a new battery. Thankfully only 1 part broken and rest of it was just cleaning and removing lint.
While the guy at 10:30 did not confirm back, a lady called and asked if she could come and take a look at the car. I was hesitant as there were others who had inquired before her but she was persistent and I decided to give her the 10:30 slot. It appears she was in a big rush and she showed up at 10:00 itself. She and her husband looked at the car inside, outside, under the hood and inside the boot, did a test drive and said they want to buy. They asked for slightly lower than I was asking and when I declined to negotiate, they agreed for the whole price, paid in cash and signed all the required paperwork and we were done by 11:00am.
I must say, a few things worked to my advantage, considering it was my wife's car it was almost dent free barring a few scratches at few places and well kept both inside and out, another thing was that the car was mostly dealer serviced and hence every single detail of the service was posted on Carfax and it made my selling easy.
I am not vouching for service at the dealership all the time, I do have some bad experiences with my VW dealership.
I have come to rely on Google maps for everything related to travel, so much so that I no longer carry my stand alone trusted Garmin gps with me. It works fairly well in most cases but did utterly bad in one case. The recent example was when Google maps was showing my destination to be in the middle of an elevated freeway, while my actual destination was on the access road of the freeway.
Made me think about the addressing schemes, if the address is something like xxx on yyy freeway, then can I really blame Google for asking me find my destination on an elevated freeway. Another possibility is that the address of the destination existed and the freeways had a make over and became elevated to add more roads underneath. At which point, may be the address ought to have been updated to reflect the change in road schemes but didn’t for some reason, Again benefit of doubt Google. But considering Google is smart and it’s applications like Google maps are one of the best it should realize the destination can't be on an elevated freeway. Yes, I tried both Android and an iOS device with the same result.
All the above being true, the irony was, the blue icon for destination was showing the right location (on the access road) using which I used to reach my destination by manual navigation but the automated routing was telling me to jump off the freeway.
I think its the case of not so smart Google for once :).
