Publicizing events at Farmers Market – Event Day

By the time I reached the market, Sanjeev had already set up the table. Geeta came around the same time I reached. We had good neighbors on both side, on one side was the cloth seller and other was the community radio KO-OP. Here is a list of things I re collect from the day.

• The lady who organizes farmers market is truly sweet and very very accommodating.
• People who visited the market during the morning 9:00AM-10:00AM were mostly interested in grabbing veggies and fruits and very few stopped by our booth.
• For a lot of other folks it was a family outing with kids and dogs and they weren’t interested in us either. In short our target audience was pretty narrow.  
• Our neighbors from KOOP studio told us it usually takes a few weeks before it registers into people’s mind that we do exist. 
• I realized it is tough to get people’s attention, even with free food to offer. We started of by asking people “would you be interested in learning about yoga and meditation” and modified over time to “would you like to try our food” and tried to sneak in a flyer while they were enjoying the food  
• We encountered the whole spectrum in the market. Some donated generously for small things, while some took all we had to offer and didn’t drop a dime into our donation box.
• There was one lady who mentioned she has seen our center on N. Lamar Blvd.
• I remember one young girl walking from stall to stall asking stall owners if they were interested in the $2 hibiscus tea, I figured that was one way to keep the kids busy on a Saturday. I think she was an obedient daughter for she came around couple of times to see if we had changed our minds about the tea.      
• Texas heat was brutal, it was bearable in the morning but became real bane by afternoon. Thanks to our neighbors we managed to get some shade every now and then.  
• I was amazed to hear that our neighbor cloth seller lady was a barsana dham devotee and she moved to Austin for that sole reason.
• In hindsight I think people had trouble understanding vegetable puffs, we had to explain it as vegetable lean pockets but made at home (just my opinion).
• Juice became a dare, it was a big hit amongst us who were tabling the event and the few who drank it, but most people refused to try the juice. Those who tried were completely blown away when we mentioned the ingredients.  
• Henna was a hit, Geeta is really talented. She truly catered to her customers with each one getting a unique design to fit their personality. It seemed to me that she has already planned for a alternate career, if ever the need arises.
• By the time we were done, we had given away almost all puffs and devoured the juice ourselves completely.
• One last thing I learnt was it was not sufficient to buy the canopy sold in the market to get shade at the table, we need some heavy objects to ground the canopy and prevent it from flying. 

All in all it was a unique experience, would I do it again? yes, but not in the same scale and would like to get more people involved. It would have been really nice to rotate people at the table.  

 

Publicizing events at Farmers Market – Prep Day

The volunteers at the Art of Living Austin foundation have a long history with Farmers Market, every now and then we show up there to hand out flyers regarding our events and courses. A passive approach of handing out people flyers and trying to make people aware of us.

Our dear friend Sanjeev decided change this and made a plan to put up a stall at the sunset valley farmers market. The idea was, with a stall located inside the market we get to grab people’s attention for a few seconds than we would have if we had just passively handed out flyers. I had to agree it was quite an innovative idea and it hadn’t been done during my time the foundation. He floated the idea amongst the like minded people and the consensus came to “it is a good idea, but we need to sell food or do some activity. Just having a plain stall isn’t enough”. After some debate on what to do we decided to sell Bawa’s Juice concoction (Orange+Apple+Carrots+Ginger) and vegetable puffs and do henna painting for a donation.

All was well till Friday afternoon when we realized we need to have a permit to sell food items at the market. So, we decided to put all the items up for donation. After completing the shopping work by Friday afternoon, the crew (Me, Sanjeev and Sandhya) assembled at our place on Friday evening to start the prep work.             

 

We all had our work cut out, I was put in charge of the juicer and Sanjeev and Sandhya took up cutting veggies and boiling them for the puff. Despite some oppositions from dear Sanjeev, veggie pizza with bread sticks was the dinner. By the end of the night had cut and steamed a ton of veggies, had made more than a gallon of juice (no water added). There was some drama too with our juicer refusing to work half way through the process. I guess it needed some rest for it came back on after a break. 

Next day Sandhya woke up early in the morning and baked over 40 veggie puffs. I helped her a tad bit here and there, but majority of the work was handled by her.  

By Saturday 8:30AM we were all set with vegetable puffs, we buried the juice in 10lbs of ice, loaded up our cars and headed to the market.  Geeta joined us directly at the farmers market with henna. 

The simple idea that Sanjeev came up now looked real. What we learned during our time in the market?, I will write about it in the next part.

No wonder they are called fanbois

“No Phone is perfect but IPhone is more perfect seemed to be the premise of what Steve Jobs was said during his press conference last week.

While I was browsing the tech usual websites I came across the article “RIM, HTC say Steve Jobs is full of it”. There is not much fun in the article itself as it quotes the statements from HTC and RIM regarding Apple’s statements. The surprise was waiting for me in the comments section, where some person has collected all(most) possible videos on YouTube and  other websites that show the signal degradation for different phones and posted it.

I didn’t know if I should appreciate the persons work and dedication or to think some people are so jobless. But wait these are apple fanbois we are dealing with, we should expect this kind of stuff from them :).

I was concerned the link might go away so decided to put a picture of the links this person has posted.    

Responsibility brings joy

Last weekend we had a get together party. After the food was served and most people had left, some of us old timers decided to hang out for some more time and do what we do best, “HAVE FUN”. While some were enjoying singing and dancing and others were busy catching up with things, me and a few others were entertaining some of the kids who still hadn’t left the party.

We were using all kinds of props like white board markers, balls and pens to keep the kids occupied and entertained. During one of these activities with the pens we started demonstrating how to catapult a pen, one of the kids who I must say is really smart decided that it is more fun to catapult more pens at once. It was fun and the pens flew some distance and “only the flying pens” caught the attention of the Mom. In no time the disciplining session started and the kid was protesting against it, I watched for a few moments thinking I shouldn’t get in between mom and kid. But some how I couldn’t digest the fact that the kid was being punished for no fault of its own and I went up to mom and told her its not the kids fault but us(adults) and convinced her to let go. May be she walked away with some anger towards me and I was feeling bad for the whole situation. All of these vanished away the moment the kid smiled and hugged me when I told the kid that there won’t be any punishment and I have told mom that it was my fault.

Later in time, when I was reflecting on the events for the day, I realized the reason I rose up to mom and confessed my wrong doing instead of the kid facing the brunt is because I had been in the receiving end myself quite a few times. I now believe all those situations could have worked out better only if the responsible adults had done what I did.

It truly was nobody’s fault, the kid did not commit a crime as it thought it was having fun, we thought we were having fun and mom thought the kid was acting frenzy without knowing the complete situation. For me it was a situation of “responsibility brings joy”, (want to know more about this, do the August YES+).

I hope the kid got the balloon it was promised earlier in the evening.

Windows Live writer

For my fellow bloggers, specially who use blogspot. We know how painful it is to use the editor that is built in to blogspot.  From my personal experience I always had trouble with inserting images into the blog and adding text around the image without getting into the HTML or I want to insert 1 line between paragraphs and I have to take whatever blogger decides to give me, more I try to modify the worse blog looks (this doesn’t apply to people using Google reader though).  

While I was doing some research I came across this great editor just built for blogging, called Windows Live Writer. I think it is the second best tool developed by Microsoft (first of course is excel).

The editor is pretty light, loads fast and will directly link to the blog and can do a 1 step publishing. What you see is what you get. No 2nd   guessing on line spacing and paragraph spacing and all. 

The image controls are also way more than offered by blogger (I have inserted a test image and tilted it just to prove the same). I could link more than one blog to the editor and could switch back and forth.

Unlike Blogger, where you need click on “preview the post” to preview the blog, the Live writer has a preview tab right next to the “Edit” tab (sweet). Less than a day of using it and I am already a fan. Try it and I am sure you will love it too.

Just like any other Microsoft products it is compatible with windows only and hence will not help my buddies who use “Open Source”.     

Dog entertaining a kid

Another example of a domestic help, dog entertaining a kid. I wish I could get one of these. 

Parrot doing Laundry

Ever Wondered you had a domestic help like this?

Thing that caught me was the curiosity of the parrot.