Praise the trainer :)

It is not new, I have been with Camp Gladiator for almost 6 months now and my trainer has always been the most awesome Julie Burns.

Last camp after her trainer refresher program she introduced a new work out on Tuesday of week 4 known as CG Fight Gone Right, it is a series of 5 exercises done for a duration of 1 minute each and repeated 5 times, of course there is a 1 minute break between 5 minute sets. In total 30 minutes. 

The idea apparently is to repeat this every camp that way there is a benchmark to compare against and see how we are progressing, last camp when we did it for the first time I had made fun of it saying “if I don’t see any improvement, I can blame the trainer” and Julie had laughed at it.

After doing the exercises again today (2nd time) and recording the numbers I have come around to praise the trainer.

Julie Burns, you simply rock.

Here is a piece of great news, Austinites you get to train the next camp for $8 as part of a CG promotion.

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.

Refilled printer catridge update

A friend of mine said "a blog just is someone's opinion and may not always be a well researched truth", being a blogger I have to agree with him. For I myself am guilty of posting something on my blog and not providing an update to the same when the information I know about the matter changes. I can quote numerous examples, but I do take the credit for one case that of Lance Armstrong where I did come a full circle.

Anyways, I started this post because I wanted to update about the ink cartridges, remember the cartridge refill post? 

I followed the instructions from the website and was printing every week without fail the "printer status report" only to notice at the end of 3 months one of the cartridge went empty and promptly I got it refilled, only to notice that the other colors went empty within a couple of days. The surprising part was they went from all good to no good in more a binary transition than an analog one, as I expected them to be. 

One small thing I learnt is, just because the material I am printing is black and white doesn't mean the printer is using the black cartridge unless I specify to print black and white it would rarely use the black. 

This time around I am trying to keep the status reports more sporadic than fixed, so far 3 months over and the cartridges are still alive. Will have to see how long will they last. 

I personally don't have a feel for how long will the brand new ones last, will try that experiment just to see if the refill route is the cheaper way to go. 

The age of innocence

Most nights before going to bed, Avni and me read a story or two. Off late our favorite has been "Brothers Grimm fairy tales", we have the complete collection and I usually pick a random story and depending on the length we complete in 1 night or push it out to couple of nights. 

Last night we picked a story in which there was a war declared between land animals and all flying ones (including insects) and the pretense of the war was some bear had managed to insult some chicks. So, the birds (in my view smart ones) decided to spy on the animals to find out about their battle plans and managed to find out that if the red tail of the fox, animals commander in chief is high they will fight and if it is down they will retreat. With the advantage of this information the bird army used their hornets to attack the fox's tail which in a short while gets tucked between its legs and hence causing animals to retreat and hence the birds won the battle.  

For me it was a nice and funny story but for Avni it was otherwise. She declared that what the birds did was cheating and it is wrong and should not do it. She added to begin with why did they fight and not talk. I had no answers but to tell her it is one of those pretend stories and just a funny one to imagine the fix running with its tail tucked in. 

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. 

Building a kids lego table

Avni is a big fan of Lego, such a big fan that if we ever need to got to the mall, one and only way to convince her to join us is a promise of Lego play time at the store and a promise of Lego bricks. Over time we have bought enough and more and have been thinking of providing her a platform or a dedicated table where we can store all the bricks in some form of "order" that she can play and build.

We explored lot of commercial possibilities and even spent money on a few, they either turned out very expensive or too small enough that they didn’t meet our needs/specification.

After some brain storming and internet searches, we narrowed on a plan to have multiple storage drawers and mount a big thick wooden panel on top and make one of our own (credit goes to Sandhya). The storage drawers were readily available in our favorite container store and we bought 6 total, 3 for each side. The wood was the tricky one.

Being a novice in buying lumber, I had no idea what to ask for when I went to Home Depot to buy the wood board. All I knew was I need to buy a board that is about 4ft long and about 20" wide and about 0.75" thick. When they asked what do I have in mind to do, I said "I am building a Lego table for my daughter", that almost threw them off balance. In the end they were helpful and showed me the available boards and I picked one of the decently expensive ones (don't remember much).

The board dimension was 2' X 4' and as per suggestions from the internet, it was supposed to be cut to 20” width which is the size of our drawers, I would have gotten it done but the saw at Home Depot was broken and I picked the piece intact, I am glad I did that for the 4” extra space is pretty nice to have. 

Then came the challenge of priming the wood and painting the wood, by Avni’s choice we had to paint one side pink and another side purple (considering it would be mounted on drawers, I could have saved myself time and money by using 1 color of paint, oh well hind sight). the tedious part was waiting for the paint to dry before applying next coat and the spillages from 1 side to another and those touch ups, all said and done it took more than a week to get it all painted. Few things I learned were that to get quality paint on the wood use the smallest possible brush that your work can permit and  use painters tape to save time (most importantly, apart from spilling of paint to other side it would prevent paint accumulation along the edges).

The last step was mounting to the storage drawers, per recommendation from the Home Depot Gorilla glue, here is where I should have listened to the experts. I should have put really low amount of glue instead of spreading copious amount for the glue did expand over time and it started spreading everywhere, I had to go with a knife to cut out the unwanted glue. I did manage to get most of it out but for some areas I just had to make up my mind out of sight mind.

One thing we did was to use electrical tape and taped all round the corners and the edges to make them smooth.

  

The finishing touches came from Sandhya who did awesome stencil work. One thing for sure, after the table and all blocks in 1 place Avni seems to be playing with her lego’s  more than before. All in all it was worth the time and effort in creating it.

Below are some pics, from concept to finish and the fun in between.