Dyson service

 I have been owning Dyson Vacuum cleaners for a decade or so now for they are amongst the best in Vacuums out there. And we own 2 of them, one corded and one cordless. Off late our work horse corded one was having issues and I being a "DIY person" I looked up on YouTube and did some cleanup to get performance back or at least I thought so.

A few days later I was told it is still broken or rather not up to mark. Now a quick visual inspection showed few more things broken and it seemed more involved than my simple DIY to replace them let alone finding the required parts.

There were 2 options, spend money and get a new one or see if there is an appliance repair person to fix this. The conservationist in me could not fathom throwing away such a powerful motor.

Thus began the search, I was hoping to find a local mom and pop shop who can repair vacuum cleaners and to my pleasant surprise I found an official Dyson repair shop here in Austin. The reviews seemed encouraging and hence took a chance and did the drive across the river to the shop.

There was another surprise waiting for me when I found 3 other people waiting before me 😊. The service definitely was courteous and cost was also not too much and service was very quick. They even had the spare filters which I couldn’t find anywhere else on the web. All in all a win and win and our beloved Dyson lived to see another day or lived to do more vacuum. 

Aiyyo Shraddha - comedy show

I had seen her reels on YouTube, mostly of her funny takes on tech industry, on Indian middle class family and had seen some of her challenge posts only to have doubts about her stand up comedy ability. I was proved wrong by her on the Friday evening when she stood on the stage here in Austin and performed comedy for a good 2 hours without even taking a sip of water.

When Sandhya told me that Shraddha (Aiyyo Shraddha) is coming and I will book the tickets, I first said yes and expected the whole event not to last more than an hour and on the day of the event we got lined up with 3 other things for our about to graduate middle schooler. But as though it was divine intervention, one after another things fell apart and we were able to go as a family and enjoy one of the best 2 hours of our lives.

Her comedy was so clean and she intertwined all the way past to almost today present with such ease that it was remarkable and for someone like me who grew up in similar background it was totally relatable. More importantly our middle schooler had the best time too, I could hear her burst to laughter almost the whole time.

Listening to her, it was like time and space travel back to my hometown, her ability to intertwine multiple languages from Kannada, Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and possibly Tulu was mind boggling. As they say, for those 2 hours she owned the stage. The show started sharp on time, I was completely expecting the opposite and had to stand corrected again.

Only grief is that we should have had given her a better welcome meaning a bigger auditorium and may be one more show. I believe she is still touring and if you do get a chance, take my word and go see her in action live on stage. https://www.sominithings.com/

An Engineer by profession and that too E and C (same branch as me) only to blossom out as a world renowned comedian made me question my own view points, I used to hold the view that people should stick with the fields they studied in, maybe they can switch to management. I guess that view point came from the lack mindset coming from India in the 80s and 90s. Anyways that is a discussion for another day.

ps: Daughter had attended another comedy show with Zarna Garg and when asked her opinion, she chose Shraddha hands down.

Sometimes solutions are simple

 The other day I was the vet clinic to drop off our pup for a surgery and it was an early morning (by my standards) drop off and while I was in the line, behind me came a gigantic late model ford truck and since it was a rainy day everybody had headlights on.

This truck the lights were so powerful (maybe they had in high beam) and it was reflecting on the rear view mirror and hurting my eyes. I was almost tempted couple of times to walk out and ask them to turn light off but resisted as it was veterinary clinic and people show up for umpteen different reasons. Besides, I was supposed to leave from there in a couple of minutes.

After a few minutes of this "torture" to my eyes, I realized I could simply fold the mirror towards me and avoid the torture and that's what I did. Easy fix and I did stay there for a few minutes longer than I expected :). 

He came and we meditated

I remember during the last days of my tenure as Secretary for the Austin Steering Committee, we all were furiously working on a proposal to bring Sri Sri to town. At that time when we thought we almost had him coming, it got cancelled and then it changed again.  In short it was very chaotic at the micro level but with all these chaos came the much needed visit of Sri Sri to Austin (almost a decade later).

Yes he did make it to Austin this time, he addressed a gathering ~1000 people; with his usual innocence and charm he won over many more hearts than we ever imagined. There was chaos at the registration desk, there were concerns of “we need to usher in 1000 people in 25 minutes and make them comfortable”, there weren’t enough water mugs for the guests and all such small things. But there was one faith in me that kept saying, “this event is for Sri Sri, an enlightened soul, people will come, they will have a good time and this event will be long remembered” and I can have my registration lead to vouch for it, everything from the registration and ushering went as smoothly as it possibly can. All were seated, comfortable and ready to listen. The live music by Austin’s own Vishaal Sapuram was divine and while the MC’s were doing their best to keep the people entertained and engaged, the sun shone through when Sri Sri walked on to the stage. 

The meditation, the talk and the Q and A was addressed to an audience of close to ~1000 people yet the message felt as personal as though I am having an 1-on-1 conversation with him. He truly has the skill to bring spirituality down to a common man and make us feel we all are one with the bigger self. The lightening moment for me was when he said “make me a promise to look at everything from a bigger picture view”, at that moment I dropped all the complaints I had about the chaos, confusion, need-to-know information sharing and all negativity in general. It didn’t matter at all, it was all good and always good. The other best one was answer to an audience question “what is the sign of maturity to you?”, he said when all questions disappear that is sign of maturity.   

The best part for us was when his flight developed mechanical issues and he had to stay an extra night in Austin. I did get to witness him in a very personal setting and in an even more personal space when I was awarded the opportunity to drive with him to his hotel room. Since I am in the mood, one major take away from the intimate car ride were his words “you can’t put your hand in the fire and expect it not to burn you for you are a good person”, I will leave it to your interpretation.  

What is Focus

Focus, is to have your very good friend working out with you in the early morning hours and she repeatedly tries to greet you (3 times specifically) and you don't even notice that, let alone acknowledge her, for the only thing going on in your mind is, "will my left knee hold up till the end of the workout, was all that rolling worth it?". 

Second International Day of Yoga celebrations

They say everything is big and better in Texas, so why should our yoga day be an exception? you read it right, Art of Living foundation in collaboration with HSS and ISHA foundation along with ~45 partners celebrated the International Day of Yoga on July 30 2016.  Did I tell you there were ~800 people in attendance doing yoga. 

Back in May 2016, when one of our teachers raised the point that we need to celebrate international day of Yoga and it will not be done on June 21st when the rest of the world celebrates but on July 31st, I admit, I was one of the few who was some what disappointed and didn’t want us to sign up to lead the effort for I didn’t see us becoming another event management  organization.

Thankfully they didn’t listen to me and took it up in a stride to organize the event, soon enough we had a Facebook page, a website,  few collaborators and lots of partners which kept on growing over the next month or so. In the end we had over 40 partners and 3 other organizations which were actively collaborating with us.

Within the limited budget we were able to flyer, conduct TV interviews and unlimited sharing and advertising on Facebook.  The only avenue I think we left untapped was Twitter. In the end, all of these created enough awareness amongst Austin crowd that we had ~800 people showed up to do yoga on a hot summer Saturday evening. Needless to say we are thankful to all those who showed up to do the yoga.

The event day truly saw each organization bring out their expertise to the game. We from Art of Living brought our expertise of overall organization and had our hand in every single aspect of the event, be it on stage with yoga, music and meditation or the ground work of  crowd management. HSS and ISHA had the man/woman/student power to handle the masses of people who were heading to the capitol  (on a side note, volunteers of HSS had come from Houston and San Antonio to help out/assist the event), Agni the dance studio handled the whole stage setup, microphones, speakers, the yoga dance and the other logistical side of the event, last but not the least our yoga partners who spread out on stage and all around the capitol grounds leading the Yoga.    

Yes we did it, the second ever yoga day celebrations was a grand success beyond all metrics. We do have a lot of people to thank both inside our organization and outside and more importantly he Counsel General of India, Houston. 

Keep an eye on this area for I will be posting the pics and videos as and when I receive them.

What it took for Google to fix our address

When our Art of Living Austin center relocated to a new location one of our over enthusiastic volunteer created a point of interest and in his/her enthusiasm entered the wrong address. Only a couple of days later we realized the mistake and I don't know what that person did but Google started to call our place as permanently closed even though we have been thriving and operating since February 2016. 

Every one searching online used to complain that our address cannot be found. As secretary it became my job to get it fixed. First I tried the crowd sourcing approach and requested multiple people to suggest to google that the place address needs an edit and also indicate that the place is open for business. I can't say that this approach was a complete waste of time and effort for Google had fixed our address and called us open (for couple of days) only to revert back to wrong address and close again.  

It was mind numbing to say the least, I was clueless. Google answered itself and pointed me to mapmaker.google.com and I started proposing edits there only to be rejected in a couple of days after suggesting the edits. But unlike other places, this one has a regional lead and whom you can contact by posting on a forum, the process led to some revelation. 

Per Google guidelines any change to an address would mean that they would call it permanently closed until they some how completely verify the new one and apparently that was what was happening to our location. 

They suggested I remove the present location and create a new poi,  I couldn't get that to happen and again went back to forum. This time the regional lead took mercy on me and looked through the history and after verifying with me that the first entered address was wrong and all we were trying was to get the right address in, he made the change happen and in less than 24 hours after that both Google maps and Google search had our place as open and we were in business. 

The other interesting thing I noticed was that Apple maps uses Yelp for its poi (luckily for me Yelp was an easy beast to handle). 

Camp Gladiator - 1st camp

There is a general understanding that exercise is a must and everyone must spend a few hours a week on exercise. Some prefer to hit the gym, some like running and some do like to have exercise machines at home and some crazy ones like me try out Camp Gladiator.

I had tried all the above mentioned before giving the camp a try and I admit I am not the first crazy one in the family, I took motivation from the fairer one.

So what is Camp Gladiator or better known as CG amongst it's ardent followers, in my thinking it is a boot camp but without the boot camp structure of trainer yelling in your ears, instead you will be doing exercises to nice loud music and constant encouragement from the fellow campers and the trainer itself. Of course the sound track varies from trainer to trainer (in my 8 classes, I have heard from GNR to macarena).

CG claims you can get unlimited workouts but in my 4 week experience, I was happy to get 2 in a week. Each workout is an hour long with non stop activities for the whole duration, be it running, jumping, walking side ways or backwards and so on. To an extent it reminded you of all the games we played as kids, only difference being, then we used to do in the name of playing and now in the name of exercise :). From what I could gather the trainer's aim is to keep you moving every single minute of the full hour. 

For me personally, as I stated earlier I got motivated to try it out from Sandhya and secondly my home machine workouts were getting boring at some level as I couldn't incorporate new exercises and in turn I was losing my motivation. Thanks to Sandhya, she got me a free 4 week camp to try out and loaded me up with all tips and tricks that I needed to be successful. 

I wouldn't say it was a breeze of 8 classes but it was well worth it when I surpassed my own benchmark (set during the 1st class) in the last class. I could see a big improvement with just 8 classes.

I would be doing injustice if I don't thank Julie Burns our trainer for keeping us motivated, following up after the workout, giving us tips on stretching and other exercises we could be doing to help ourselves during the recovery between workouts. 

One world meditation

The title might seem off but no it was an actual event hosted by Art of Living foundation on January 17 2016. The event was a curtain raiser for the bigger event World Culture festival to be held in Delhi, India from March 11-13 2016. As you may already know we in Austin are also planning our own local curtain raiser and our folks decided a face to face meeting to be had right after the meditation.

My mind was completely occupied with the logistics for the event and how best we could make this event a grand success and so on, on top of it somehow we didn’t have the right link and when we tuned in for the meditation it had already started. This I believe was the first time that Facebook was hosting, unlike the previous times when youtube used to host and there were some delays in the audio. All in all when everyone else in the room was feeling wonderful after the meditation I didn’t pack the punch.

It was as though the universe heard my dilemma and on screen Sri Sri started talking again (we didn’t realize then but were re telecasting the meditation event) and out of curiosity the volume was increased and lo behold there was one more meditation to be done and this time with no breaks in the telecast and don’t know however many minutes later I opened the eyes and it was a peaceful and beautiful moment.

In case you missed the meditation and the Q and A that followed, don’t worry you can find it here. 

Merry Christmas

Christmas Eve

Merry Christmas

A piece of knowledge from Sri Sri RaviShankar-ji on occasion of Christmas.

You are the Christmas tree that points upwards with branches on all sides. At the time of year when other trees are barren, you are green with many gifts to offer. - Sri Sri Ravi Shankar 

Christmas gift for the homeless

Yesterday while driving back from office I got stuck at a signal, I had barely missed the signal because the car in front of me had slowed down a lot to make the left turn. 

While I was silently cursing that car/driver and was in the process of accepting what happened, I noticed another car on my left which had a green but had stopped conspicuously. I started to wonder what was wrong with that car and then the car slowly made a right turn and stopped.  The lady sitting in the car was waving towards the homeless guy begging at the signal. My small mind was saying, "why is she waving towards the homeless?," and "doesn't she know that she is blocking the traffic?" and so on. To be fair, the traffic was fairly light and she wasn't really bothering the traffic movement. 

Once the homeless guy reached the car, it was my turn to be awed. Out of the car came a big nicely packed gift box and after asking the guys size a jacket too, I am sure she wished him merry Christmas.

I was amazed at the lady and her organization for doing this charity. 

Now I know why I was stuck at that signal for an extra 2 minutes.

Our Art of Living volunteers also took part in a similar endeavor few days before Christmas. 

ಪ್ರತ್ಯಕ್ಷವಾಗಿ ನೋಡಿದರು ಪ್ರಮಾಣಿಸಿ ನೋಡು

ಪ್ರತ್ಯಕ್ಷವಾಗಿ ನೋಡಿದರು ಪ್ರಮಾಣಿಸಿ ನೋಡು is a famous Kannada proverb, hard to find an equivalent in English but loosely translates to don’t believe whatever you see with your eyes, have patience and investigate before forming your opinion. Now, what is the link between this proverb and my daughters playschool/pre-school?

When we moved to Circle C back in 2012, Avni had barely turned one and time flew while we were settling in the new home and poof, she was close to 2 years. Considering all our known parent friends were sending their kids to some sort of playschool for a few hours in a day (at least that’s the perception we had), we also as dutiful parents decided to do the same. So, went around exploring the possibilities in the neighborhood.

The first place we checked out was Xplor, it is a commercial location with branches all over the city and some of my friends had already enrolled their kids there and they offered cool things like video feed from the child’s classroom and flexible hours and the teachers had uniforms and so on. All in all they had a good marketing team and front desk and we were smitten by their technology and facility. We were impressed by their facility and almost immediately made up our minds to try this place for our daughter.

Right next door was Circle-C CDC (Child Development Center), we went there just to inquire and the appearance of the place gave a gothic feel with dark hall way and not so well lighted reception which was instead of being clearly visible from the entry door was located half way down the corridor. To top this there was an angry receptionist who was mad at us for showing up at the door without making an appointment. All of which somewhat discouraged us and what choice we made is fairly obvious.

In Xplor, my daughter lasted barely 2 days and we had to pull her out of it. She did not like it at all, the impersonal treatment of kids, teachers busy making notes to handout to parents at the end of the day and their insistence on them providing lunch, all together combined with the fact she fell terribly sick at the end of day 2 made us pull her out of it. To top it off, they had big time teacher attrition. If there is 1 day I regret not taking the right action in Avni’s life, her day 2 in Xplor would be on top.

After pulling her out of Xplor we enrolled in some home day care for a few months and meanwhile scheduled a tour of CDC. When the director Shaun C gave us a tour I realized this place is wonderful and they had a lot to offer than dark hallways. We couldn’t enroll Avni then but had to wait for next term before enrolling her and its been 2 years since then and 1 more year to go before she goes off to public school. There are a lot of things to love about CDC, to start with the fact that the teacher visited our home before school start, the kids stay together for the whole year, very low attrition of teachers (almost zero), lots of games and learning, a fun place for kids and lot more good things. Since day 1, Avni has loved to go to this place and has almost never said she doesn’t want to go to school that day.

So, ಪ್ರತ್ಯಕ್ಷವಾಗಿ ನೋಡಿದರು ಪ್ರಮಾಣಿಸಿ ನೋಡು :)   

Pumpkin Pumpkin

When my daughters school put out their fall Halloween party wish list, the easiest one I found was a bag of small pumpkins. How hard would it be to find a bag of pumpkins? or that’s what I thought.

Thankfully due to other priorities amongst other distractions, it totally slipped my mind that I was supposed to get the pumpkins till the day it was due on Monday morning. Even then, I am used to such things and I figured I would walk to the nearest HEB and pick up couple of bags or that's what I thought. In the end it took me close to an hour with stops at 3 HEB's, 2 Randall’s and 1 Whole Foods before I could declare victory. Yes I picked up the last 2 bags from that store. In the process I learnt a lot about pumpkin sizes, they are almost like dress sizes XXL, XL,  L, M, S, XS and XXS (my search was for XXS) of which XXL and XXS are hard to find. 

Moral of the story, Halloween and pumpkins especially the small ones go fast and faster so plan ahead.

Sri Sri yoga – a honest experience sharing

Two of my dear friends recently became Sri Sri Yoga teachers and have decided to organize a course here in Austin. I thought what better way to publicize to an event than to share my own experiences practicing the same. 

What is Sri Sri yoga?
In my humble words, it is a sequence of poses that would take around 30-40mins to complete and if done on a regular basis can improve the quality of the day and life in general

What makes it different from others?
I have explored other yoga studios in the past and none of them offered any take home practice and everyone wanted me to come back to the studio to practice in the studio. With Sri Sri yoga, we have a take home practice. The best part, in the 2 weekends (format could be different now), we were given enough knowledge to take our yoga practice as deep as we wanted to, essentially saying one can tailor the practice to their needs and time availability.

Can I elaborate on it’s impact?
I did the yoga course almost 3 and half years ago but never ever practiced it, let alone regularly. What was the excuse?, very simple, it is hard to find that 40mins of alone time to practice.

But, in 2013 when I was in some sort of low phase (relatively) and wanted to get out of it, upon a friend’s suggestion I took up the challenge to practice Sri Sri Yoga for 40 days and I saw the difference in my energy levels on the very first day.

Ever had the feeling of “floating in the air” or “things are getting done more efficiently” or the feeling of “I can handle this”, yes that is my state of mind after completing the practice and I carry that throughout (most of) the day.

Since then, every time I become aware that my energy levels are not up to the mark than what I expect them to be, I know the trick to get out of it.

If my memory serves right, somebody had asked the question as to what is the difference between this Yoga practice and Padmasadhana and SriRam-ji had said both have similar set of postures but one is designed for a healthy and happy state of mind while other is meant for deeper meditation. I have no knowledge about Padmasadhana but yes Sri Sri Yoga will help you to have happier state of mind. 

The blog post won’t be complete without thanking Sandhya, who pushed me to do the course. Rewind 4 years back, my excuse was, what is the point of learning something when I do not have time to practice?, but she proved me wrong and showed me that one needs to learn when they can as one never knows when it would come handy.

At the outset knowing your Ayurvedic body type and tailoring the yoga practice accordingly would make the practice better and enjoyable. More about that in a later post.

So, good luck friends and have fun co-teaching the course. 

ps: I was told the course has been renamed to Art of Living Yoga and no longer advertised as Sri Sri Yoga

Rangi Tharanga

I had heard a great deal about this movie called Rangi Tharanga and when Sandhya told me that the director Anup Bhandari was her classmate once upon a time, I definitely wanted to see the movie. In general I would Google the movie before hand and would have had an idea about the plot but this time around I made an exception to the rule and went to the theater blank slate.

So, what is the movie about? 

• A horror, romantic, suspense thriller with slight amount of action
• A movie that throws curve ball after curve ball towards the audience
• A movie that keeps you on the edge of the seat from start to end (no, not like Bourne series) 
• A movie that re-defines suspense thrillers
• A movie with some wonderful songs
• A movie which doesn’t add songs for no reason
• A movie that has the fewest technical and logical flaws
• A movie that has the best cinematography along with best story and best direction
• A movie with the original story, last one with this level of intensity was Kahani in hindi
• A movie that for the first time ever in my life-time in Austin had 4 shows in a theater and almost all shows were packed
• A movie that had a good blend of old and new talents
• A movie that had brand new artists who performed like veterans
• A movie that is definitely not a family (I wouldn’t recommend for kids) entertainer
• A movie that in my ratings would be a PG-13    

Great job Anup Bhandari, hope to see more work like this in the future.

If you haven’t seen it and there is a chance to see in a theater do it, its worth the money and time. 

Doggy camp and boarding

Recently when we had to go on our vacation, most of the stuff related to vacation like tickets, accommodations and attractions were done in advance. But this time around unlike last time we had a family member who wasn't going to accompany us on our trip and of course she is not able to handle herself by herself either, no she is not old or bed ridden, in fact she is young at heart and in body too. Yes you guessed it right, it was our pet daisy.

Thanks to our Circle C Ranch Facebook page I found a few dog highly recommended dog boarding places that I short listed to checkout

In general

• There are a lot of dog boarding places in and around our neighborhood
• 4th of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas are the busiest times and
• The cost of boarding is in the range of $30-$35/day
• I can’t comment about the business side but almost all the places I visited had decent number or a lot of dogs
• Most dog boarding places are plain boarding places and that means they provide a semi private indoor place for your pet and let them out every 3 to4 hours for 10-15mins and put them back inside
• They in general won't allow group play for dogs or more than required time outside the kennels
• Some places were ridiculous, they were quoting extra $15-$20 for 10-15mins of group play in a day.
• One of the places even offered a doggie massage and also human time instead of group time, that would be $10-$20 for 15mins
• The same place also offered nature walk for the pup but 10mins walk would cost $15, considering I take my dog out for 40minute walk in the morning and something similar in the evening, 10minutes sounded ridiculous
• After seeing the other places out there, day camp and boarding at our neighborhood petsmart looks very primitive (no outdoor space and cramped play space)
• Of all the places I visited best I liked was Dog Camp in Dripping Springs and next one was Bobby Colorado training camp

Since I couldn’t get Dog Camp, I had to board her at Bobby Colorado. At the end of 10 days, my pup looked happy and I admit had lost some weight but nothing to worry about.

International Day of Yoga Celebrations in Austin TX

Some came because Narendra Modi, PM of India had called
Some came because Sri Sri Ravishankar called
Some came because it's adventurous
Some came because they were organizing it
Some came because it is probably the one and only event they were looking forward to (for personal reasons)
Some came for they were tasked with documenting the event
Nature said, I can't be left out and it rained and poured before and after the event

Yes, I am talking about the first ever International Day of Yoga celebration at our city Austin, TX. In case you missed it, it happened on Capitol grounds on Sunday June 21st at 10:30AM.

75 odd yogis from Art of Living, Bea Love Yoga and more importantly from Austin showed up to celebrate the very first ever International day of Yoga here at the lawns of the Capitol of Texas.  

We have a saying in Art of Living, “from chaos comes creativity” and this yoga event was no different. On Thursday before the yoga event scheduled for Sunday we were not 100% sure of the logistics and with rain in forecast didn’t have a plan B, to top it off nature wanted to do some rain dance for the event and on Sunday around 10:00am it started raining cats and dogs.  

But, when 70 odd yogis decide to do yoga on the first ever International Day of yoga, nature had to listen and give way for yoga. Come 10:30, the rain turned to drizzle and the lawns started to drain out just enough for us to get on with the yoga. The parking was free and plenty (I guess the rain turned some visitors away) and all other finer logistics, didn’t really matter. Can you imagine the state senator joining us at the yoga event.

The yoga was beautifully led by 3 senior yoga teachers from Bea Love Yoga. I have full respect and regards for Bea Love for if there was 1 person who was 100% sure they will be doing yoga that day, I would say it would be her. Once the yoga started, the event moved on with clinical precision, the teachers taking turns to lead the yoga and before we knew it was time to do the chanting of om and final resting. At which precise time, nature decided to join the party and started to drizzle and it poured again.

Later the party was moved indoors where folks from our own Art of Living band filled the rotunda with ancient chants and hymns.

It wouldn't be fair if I don't speak about the precursor to this event, it was called the sun never sets yoga which happened a week ago Saturday as a gearing up event for the international day of yoga, around 20 odd yogis gathered on the banks of town lake in the morning at 7:00AM and an hour long yoga was lead by our own graduate yogi Ritesh Seth.

All in all, a grand successful event for the Art of Living Austin. Kudos to the team for pulling this off in a very successful manner in true Art of Living style.

ps: yes, picture speaks 1000 words and yes I will be posting them soon 

pps: here are the pics 

Good job coach

The last day of the soccer league got rained out but that didn't dampen the spirits of the kangaroo team coach. He made a plan to get us all to Waterloo ice house on a Saturday morning.

We reached around 9:00 and most had reached before us and a few much later. As with kids once they reached a critical mass they ran out to play and we had to drag them back once the breakfast was served. At some point along. our coach wanted to say words to his team and I teased him that he had only 2 minutes and I will be timing him. I admit, I didn't time it and he made a wonderful speech, the best part was he had something unique and positive to say about every single player in the team.

One more thing I admit shamelessly, I have gone to almost all the matches over 8-9 weeks but I didn’t pay attention to the team as much as he had done, in spite of the fact that his own daughter was also playing in the same team (and probably one of the youngest in the team).

Come to think of it, if it hadn't rained out on that last Saturday we wouldn't have gathered for the festive breakfast or got to see the oratory skills of our team’s coach. I wish we could do this more often . 

It also showed me a new place for breakfast tacos other than rudy's bbq.

ps: In my previous post I had said our team lost all matches, I was corrected apparently we had won one match 

The tendency of mind is ....

Back in December, one of the parents from my daughter's playschool started the initiative of kids soccer. They said they were enrolling their kid to soccer camp starting in April, a 8 week camp played one weekend every week, they suggested if all kids could join in it would be lot of fun. We all got excited with the idea and jumped on it right away.

Since most of us were enrolling, we requested all the kids to be together in the same team. The wonderful folks at the camp honored our request. Even better, some of the dads became the coaches for the team. Keep in mind the whole idea behind was to let kids have fun outside school and some socializing for us too. The kids are truly having fun, specially since the soccer practice ends with donuts and drinks (snacks provided by different parent each week).

It's been 5 weeks, the kids are enjoying the games and having fun. I would definitely say, they have been improving every week, but our team hasn't won a single match. To put it bluntly we get our butts kicked by the opposing team each and every week. We would be lucky if our team makes 1 or 2 goals in the process and don’t self goal during the match.

I think the reason is simple, each team that we have played against so far has 2 to 3 kids who are much older than the kids in our team and also have played multiple years of soccer. If only we hadn’t made the request during enrollment, may be our team would have gotten couple of older kids too and we would be tough competitor too but if that had happened it no longer would have been team “Kangaroos”, would it be?.

Now, the real point of this blog post, I realized I am going away from the original intent of the whole exercise "having fun" and getting to the mode of winning and analyzing why our team isn't doing as good as others.

I think this is called awareness which my good friends were trying to drill into me a decade ago. Of course life is such "aha" moments and that's what makes it fun.The secret is simple, to breath, want more information visit artoflivingaustin.org

Happy Earth day

I walked to my daughters school for her “Art in the park” day and noticed the following on her class room door.

As usual I was impressed by the artistic expressions and impressed with the teachers and their creativity.

Later in the day I heard on KUT that today is “Earth-day”. Now the art made perfect sense.

Great job teachers. I wish I had known this before I would have taken the picture of the entire door.