Camp rocks :)

Since I have already given you a clue about this in my last post, I don't think I have to mention that no, this post is not going to be about the teen movie :-p. After 3 years, we went on a camping trip. It was obviously Snugli's first camping trip, unless you count the fact that the last time we went I was pregnant ;-).

Well, the story happened on 13th August, Friday, that too pretty late in the day. We have been planning to go camping right since the start of summer, but something always came up (its funny how things always come up in summers and there's absolutely nothing to do in winters :-p). That day we faced a tug of war between going and not going. The weather was predicted to have rains in the night and camping is certainly not fun with thunderstorms (well, I disagree, but I digress :-D). When we checked at about 6Pm in the evening, the weather prediction had miraculously (yup, I am being sarcastic :-p) changed to clear skies :-D. After a little bit of to and fro, we simply decided to get going.

Packed up all we needed, bought the rest and got to the Lake Kincaid park (where we camped 3 years ago). We liked having the lake right next to the camping sites and thought that with Snugli around, the place would be a known devil scenario :-D. Plus the place has proper restrooms (albeit a bit far from the camping site). We were able to find a site (without advance booking) and started setting up stuff. Everything was smooth except that there were clouds near the horizon and it got dark pretty fast.

It was amazing how we put the tent together in a matter of minutes (another thing you never forget once you learn how :-p).




It was a little too dark to get stuff ready for cooking in the fire, but that part was manageable. The parts that weren't were the heat (it wasn't pleasant in any way) and Snugli's bewilderment. She was not really scared, just that being outside in almost total darkness with the sweltering heat was a strange experience for her. There were a few times when she hung onto me and refused to let go. But I did manage to distract her with the stars (that was one of the reasons we went - for me to try and photograph stuff ;-) :-D) and chirpy cricket sounds :-D. We somehow managed to eat up our usual camp diet of roasted corn, roasted veggies, roasted panneer and roasted burgers in the dark (we made a note of lanterns as things to buy for the next camp trip :-D). Later pumped up the bed and settled down for the night.

Or Sri and Snugli did ;-). I got up at around 2 AM to first catch some more meteors if possible (I saw around 25 meteors on the previous night, but no photos since I don't really have a lens wide enough top cover the entire sky :-\) and photograph the dark non-light-polluted skies. I did catch about 5 meteors, but again no snaps. It was literally Murphy's law :-p. So presenting the Deepthi's corollary to Murphy's law -

"If your camera is pointed to a specific part of the night sky, then the probability of meteors appearing in that particular area is much much much lower (almost close to 0) than that in the rest of the sky".

Sad, but true :(. Anyways I did manage to capture some pretty pics including this one of the Pleiades star cluster and emerging dawn (click to enlarge) :).




And one of Jupiter, the biggest "star" in the pic below (Before you jump to correct me, I know its a planet :-p).




I did take lots and lots of snaps (I think I was up for more than 2.5 hours! But the thing is without a tracking mount (which is helpful in contradicting earth's rotation), the only way to take good pics is by taking multiple short exposure photos (minimum 25 of each object!). I still haven't gotten to the post processing of images, so maybe will get back once I do :).

Went back to bed and got up after 8:30 AM :). After finishing our morning ablutions, Snugli got to play in the playground for a while..




And then we had breakfast at camp (yeah, I took the photo with a timer, had to run to and fro from the tripod :-p)..




Snugli enjoyed the morning camp much much more than the earlier evening (she surprisingly slept well and didn't fuss at all in the night). Here's her posing from the tent..




We then proceeded to dismantle the camp and head home :). All in all the trip was pretty much a success. It was great that the adventure lamp is still burning brightly within us and Snugli enjoying most of it was a bonus :). And photographically, it was another successful experiment :). Here are 2 daytime snaps I am pretty proud of :).







Very much looking forward to camping once again before winter sets in :).

"Fair"y tales :-D.

I've been meaning to write something other than a "birthday countdown" post for what seems like days. But have been busy - hopefully will get to one such post in a couple of days. Meanwhile thought of putting up a couple of pics of the local fair we get here annually (I wrote about it last year). Last year Snugli was a bit too young to enjoy all the bits and pieces and I wrote how it'd be different this year :-D. Well, yeah, it was different as in suddenly we were pushed into the role of spectators and she was the adventurer.

We made it 2 times to the fair this year and this post is mostly about the 1st time (the 2nd time my camera was already poof and the iPhone taken photos don't really count :-p). The first time we did take passes for all of us, because we thought she might create a fuss and its better to ride with her. But she was totally at home :-D.




That was her first ride on her own, ever :) (well, the boy eventually did sit beside her, so on her own as in without us :-\).




We did go on the caterpillar roller coaster ride together (same as last year :-D)..




And the giant wheel (or the Ferris wheel as its called here) later..




I don't really like rides which go round and round, so Sri went with her whenever required (yeah I conveniently dumped the honours on him, hehehee).




And then there was a helicopter ride..




A dinosaur ride..




A bike ride..




The standard merry-go-around..




And a racing car ride which was her "favourite" (she says its so to this day ;-) :-D).





There was also a plane ride (no good pics to speak of) and this dragon roller coaster which she loved.




Phew! I think she enjoyed 12 rides in all. Seeing her enjoyment, I "absolutely" "had-to" take her there once more and hence the 2nd time (I pestered Sri until we went :-D). The 2nd time, we didn't even buy passes for ourselves and bought one for her, thats it. I was ready to run out and get one in case she panicked, but well, our little girl is truly growing up. She went on 12 to 14 rides without even giving us a second glance. I cannot be more proud, believe me, but some part of me was actually sad to see her be so independent. It was difficult for me to let go.

Its not like she's totally independent, but that day brought home the fact that time is slipping away. And no matter how hard we try to hold on, time always gets the better of us. Fortunately or unfortunately, there's nothing you and me can do about it..

P.S: On a totally different note, the Perseid meteor showers are this week, supposedly peaking on Aug 12th night and 13th early morning. I have already seen a couple of meteors in my pursuits of Astrophotography (thats the post I have been meaning to put up, so will be up soon) in the past week and I will be up on Thursday with my camera trying to photograph the pesky things :-D. Oughta be fun :).

Fair and lovely :).

Its been 2 months since the fair came and went and I still haven't written about it. Oh well, better sometime than postpone it again and again :-p. This is not the first time the Bluegrass fair is coming to town. Its been there for a long time and we have been there every year. Somehow all this time I never really felt like writing about it. One reason maybe that compared to the amusement parks we have been to, this fair is pretty small and the rides are also not that grand ;-). The last 4 years that we've been there, we have hardly ridden any rides. Yet this year's visit unknowingly turned out to be pretty special, you can guess why :).

We didn't know whether Snugli would enjoy the fair or if so, for how long, so we thought it'd be better to tackle it once she was fed and rested (:-D), so we went there after 4 PM. The fair is actually very close to our house (practically in the backyard :-p), but unfortunately, the road is round-about. But got there pretty quick.




One of the first things we did was to put Snugli on the Merry-go-around..




Next we headed to the giant wheel or the Ferris wheel as it is called here..




Snugli enjoyed the ride and loved looking at things from that height.




Once that was done, I wanted to take her on a small roller coaster that was there, but Sri was afraid that she might be scared.




I pestered him till he gave in ;-) and took her on it - its the caterpillar.




She absolutely loved it! The first round, I held her, but later I let her enjoy it by herself. She really liked the downs and her expression was as if she was on a swing ;-). When the caterpillar stopped, she made a fuss and actually refused to get down!! Hehehee :)).

From then on we enjoyed the thrills of a typical fair, the roaming around, the eating junk - boiled corn, softies (they are called cone swirls here) and funnel cake (this is like a big jalebi, only the floor-made swirl is not dipped into sugar syrup here, instead its covered with powdered sugar ;-) - here is a picture).

Usually the fair has some shows (in the earlier ones, we once saw a bird show - eagles doing the owner's bidding, etc and a cannonball show in which a person is fired from a cannon), but there weren't any setup on that day. But there was something new - a petting zoo. And I've told you several times about how Snugli loves animals. We went into a shed like place where she touched (more like grabbed-and-tried-to-lift :-p) sheep, goats, lambs, rabbits and a horse. But sadly since they were minting money taking photos, we weren't allowed to take any. But later we went into this barn where they had cows and we got to take this one :).




We roamed for some more time talking about how it'll all be next year, when Snugli would probably be able to enjoy the rides on her own (there were more than 10 rides just for kids, but not age/height appropriate for Snugli). And I'm sure it'll be lots more fun for her and a whole new trouble for us :-D. Anyways soon we said bye to the fair and headed back home. We did want to go another day, but simply couldn't make it before the fair shutdown for the year..

Hmm, anyways thats it about the fair. But thats not it about Snugli. So many things have been happening that I thought that I'd include a Snugli update in this post itself :). Well, its my blog ;-). I don't even know where to start..

1) Her vocabulary is growing leaps and bounds. Its simply amazing to see her brain process things and her speaking words she simply didn't even know till the earlier day! She can say so many words these days that I can't even count. She also started to string 2 words together - she says "Dood maani" (Good Morning), "Appy budday" (Happy birthday), "Yech papa" (Yes papa in the Johnny Johnny poem), No papa etc. Yesterday she actually strung 3 words - she said "Amma mammu khaali" (Mom's food is over) when she saw my empty lunch plate! Moreover, she understands most of the things we say (me in Kannada and Sri in Telugu), but its another story whether she obeys or not ;-) :-D. I have to concede that she obeys for 75% of the time :)).

2) Sometimes its difficult to understand her. As parents we are able to differentiate between the empty blabber and the actual words and translate it to our kith and kin, but sometimes some words stump us too. We have to make her point and somehow figure out the context and then in turn figure out the word. Recently I bought a Legos Duplo set for her (it has bigger blocks and right now she's only into putting the blocks in and out of the box rather than play with them, anyways) and she started referring to the box as "Chakki dabba". We understood the dubba (means box) part, obviously, but not the chakki part. I hardly give her chocolates so it certainly didn't mean chaaki. We pondered over it for 2 days, until Sri finally realized what she was talking about. During Janmastami I had made Chaklis, put them in a big box, kept them on the dining table and we told her that it was "Chakli dabba" :-D, hehehehe. Now we are trying to correct her to refer to the Legos box as "Lego dabba", but its still chakki dabba :-D.

3) Trust a 1.5 year old to destroy something you viewed as indestructible. A few days ago, Snugli erased all the data from my digital diary. I thought the "Delete all" functionality was complicated and very (over)confidently handed the diary to her many times for her to play with it. The fault is mine. I guess the probability of 3 keys being pressed in a sequence out of 100-odd keys by a 1.5 year old is not so low after all :-\.

4) Its strange how things change from one day to another. Till about sometime back, Snugli absolutely loved the slide and started to climb/slide on her own. One day suddenly it all changed and she was petrified to slide down. She'd climb the steps on the slide, but refuse to slide down! And she didn't really fall or anything. Its a sudden fear of heights that too only for the slide (she climbs down stairs at home without any fuss). I was simultaneously amazed and frustrated (its a new instinct generated in her, but its like a taking a step back for us) :-p. Well, now I have to sing songs and somehow distract her when she's sliding down and it usually works :-D.

5) A new thing we have introduced her to is drawing. As you can very correctly guess, the drawing is more on doors, chairs and tables than on a book. Thankfully I've gotten washable crayons, yet don't know how the washable part of it will work on walls and the carpet (she somehow has missed "drawing" on them so far). Also, I'm extremely proud to announce that one of the crayons has narrowly escaped from being swallowed by the little one, though unfortunately it did lose its tail to a bite from those powerful teeth :-D.

6) Another thing I've introduced her to is a show called Teletubbies (it used to come in Doordarshan earlier, don't know whether it still does - its that 4 different coloured alien like creatures doing all sort of things - I used to simply hate it earlier :-p). One of my friends told me that its targeted towards toddlers and that her boy enjoyed it, so I thought I'll give it a try. Well, it didn't work for a long time, she used to watch for 5 min then run away. Recently she's become very interested. She loves watching the thing - says 3/4th of the words from the title song, jumps when they jump and imitates them in a lot of ways. Whenever she wants me to put the DVD on, she says "Teli Tubby" (she doesn't get the wish fulfilled all the time ;-) :-D) She also says "lala" and "Po" (names of the characters), "Thump" (Jump), "Appai" (Up high) and dances to the songs. The video I have has a song called "Head shoulders knees and toes" in which they point to various parts of the body and she imitates that :-D. Its kind of fun to see her do all that but I'm also worried it may become an obsession (the worry started when she cried "Teli tubby" in her sleep yesterday :-D). Oh well, bring it on :-D.

7) On the PT side, things have improved a bit. She almost always poops in the potty now and sometimes says "Potty pee" when she wants to pee or when she wants her diaper changed. Not everytime, mind you, but its like once or twice in a day, and very rarely in the night too. We are really proud of her and ourselves for keeping at it. The awareness seems to be coming in and hopefully is in the right direction :).

Thats all I can think of right now. Will come back with more soon, I hope :).

On the cutting edge..

The relationship has always had its ups and downs, its lefts and rights. After all, it has been a really long relationship. It has not always been all hunky and dory, but many a days, it has certainly been a pleasure to the heart and a comfort to the soul. There have been some days where I can proudly say that I have fought for this to work.

Usually most relationships undergo changes as the years progress. But this particular one hasn't had any changes at all for more than 8 years now. 8 years back, it underwent a major makeover to my complete satisfaction. But since then, I have been happy to let it be and let it flourish. It has been going on and on and I wasn't really keen on making any changes at all. Maybe I was comfortable with the whole thing, maybe I had gotten used to the monotony of it all. Maybe I was too lazy to do anything about it, or maybe I was afraid that things may not remain the same.

But recently I decided it had gone far enough the way it was. I couldn't go on like this. It was getting difficult to maintain the the basic foundation for the relationship. And when the foundation flounders, where does it stand a chance? To put it plainly, the relationship simply lacked the lustre it had before. So I wanted to take a risk and deliberately bring in a change again. And now I am really glad I did it. Since the change, everything looks marvellous and it has been making waves :).

Still wondering what the heck I'm talking about? Scroll down to see...










..a bit down..














..almost there..

Before	Now

Well, the "NOW" is not exactly now, but 2 months ago. I got it cut again a week back :-D.

Nibbles, who?

I lovvvvvvvvvvvvvvvve Tom and Jerry. I can watch most of the cartoons again and again without feeling bored. In fact, to this day you'll find me in front of the TV if there's a Tom and Jerry show going on ;-). This video "The Little Orphan" is one of my favourites. If you have already watched it, you know Nibbles, the little orphan that comes to Jerry for dinner :-D. And I especially love the Nibbles-pointing-to-its-mouth-licking-its-lips-and-rubbing-its-stomach-to-indicate-that-its-hungry part :-D. So watch out for it :)).

Thanks to YouTube and user CelestialCatnip for the video.

Guess who Nibbles reminds me of these days? :-D.

How to Camp - US style!

Camping in India is wayyyyy wayyyy different from how its done in the US. Yeah the tent and the campfire are same, but everything else is totally different.

Firstly, the campgrounds are usually accessible to roads and each site even provides a car parking! This is unless you are determined to go into a forest, trek a bit and then camp. Thats the only situation where you need to do donkey work. Otherwise, your car will carry everything. So whats advantageous is that you can stuff all necessary as well as unnecessary stuff and take it along :-D. Also since its accessible to road, you can get firewood, fuel and even ready-made food if you don't want to cook in open fire ;-).

Secondly, you get camping accessories of all sorts. One major example is a air-filled bed! In India, the couple of times I went trekking, we hardly had blankets to sleep on. Here a bed is almost mandatory :-D. You get a pump which needs to be charged before and all you do is place the bed in tent and pump it up :-D. You also have camp chairs, battery-lanterns, coolers (for cold drinks), fire-grills, gas-powered grills (if you don't want to cook directly on the camp-fire) and people actually use these! Believe me, I've experienced it when we had been river-rafting.

Thirdly, you can rent a campsite in which water/power outlets are provided! These make much sense here as people own trailers which they bring to campgrounds to enjoy the "camping" experience! Worse, this time I actually saw Television sets and even dish antenna receivers on a few campsites!! Looks like the definition of camping is not what I thought it was :-p. Camping and luxury go hand in hand here.

Lastly, the most important are the restrooms! Most of these campsites come with pretty good restrooms, which also have showering facilities! Personally, I like this luxury, but again its not "camping" according to me ;-). Well, who am I to protest when facilities are available :-D!

Coming to my story now (finally :-p). We have been wanting to go camping for a while now. We had bought the equipment (tent, camp chairs and bed ofcourse :-D) last year itself, but never got around to going camping. After dilly-dallying away half the summer, we finally managed to go on 30th June 2007.

Since this is a how-to story, here are the steps to successful camping:

1) Buy equipment:

To camp you need a tent. As I said before, this does not change no matter where you are. Choosing a tent is pretty important. You have to carefully judge the height/width you require. Also you sometimes get good deals ;-). Rest are optional. But camp chairs and an air-bed are good to have :).

2) Buy food and accessories:

Depends on what kind of food you eat. Since we are vegetarians, we carried corn cobs, veggie patties (Indian store ones, as I have said numerous times the American store ones taste like rubber tyres :-p), burger buns, various veggies for the burger and for grilling (like onions, capsicums, tomato, cucumber and lettuce), panner and lemons. We also carried paper plates, water, knives and grilling accesories (to roast the corn/patties). And yeah, you need firewood if you plan a campfire. But usually firewood is available at the campsites.

3) Book a campsite:

If you are in US, another advantage is that you can book a campsite online. But you need to do this atleast 2 days in advance. We didn't do it in advance but drove straight to Kincaid State Park (which is about an hour's drive away). Thankfully they did have some spots available. We were ready to come back if there weren't any.

4) Put up the tent:

Well, if you want to sleep, then you need a tent. Unless you want to sleep in the car. That experience will not be camping but car-ing :-p. The instruction manual is usually available with the tent, so the main thing is to follow the instructions ;-).

The first step is to spread the tent on the ground.




The second step is to take the long curved rods provided (these will be a collection of small sized rods whcih you have to join to form a bigger rod) and insert them diagonally to the top portion of the tent and fasten them. This helps in raising up the tent like this:




The next step is to fix the roof (this will have smaller rods similar to above) to the top of the tent. The final step is to attach hinges to the floor of the tent and hammer them to the ground so that the tent cannot move (slide off or blow away due to heavy winds if any :-p). Finally the tent looks like this:




And this is how the entire campsite looked like after putting up the tent:




Note that it has ample space to park the car, place the tent, space for a campfire, camp chairs and a wooden picnic table :).

5) Enjoy the surroundings:

Once the tent was up, we took a stroll around. Our campsite was almost next to the lake.




And the lake was absolutely beautiful. We sat near the lake for sometime before sunset (Sunset currently is at 9 PM :-p) and later returned to the camp.




6) Make a campfire:

Now that the living quarters is taken care of, next thing to worry about is food. For food, you obviously need a campfire. So better start off early and get the fire hot enough to cook food. The equation is simple:

Firewood + some starter fuel + matches = FIRE!!

We already had the starter fuel as we do some vegetarian barbeques sometimes. So Sri, with some amount of help from me in arranging the firewood (well actually I also gathered some wooden chips and sticks to start off the fire :-D), successfully had the fire going.




7) Cook the food and enjoy:

As I said, we roasted corn, grilled veggies and later grilled burger patties and had a comfortable meal (didn't really take photos :-\). Moreover since we had some cool drinks in place, it was nice to have in the hot weather. We put some soft music in the SUV and basically enjoyed sitting in front of the fire :).

8) Get the tent ready for the night:

Two important things here - one, don't forget to take pillows and two, make sure the air pump for the air bed is funtioning and recharged. We didn't do both and had to struggle a bit. Sri did recharge the pump for 2 hours, but it wasn't enough (its supposed to be recharged for atleast a day). The air bed was almost flat by the time the pump gave out, so to say the least, the bed wasn't comfy at all. Another important thing is to find how the waether will get in the night. For us, though we had taken blankets, it got really cold in the night, so we could have done with a couple of extra sheets ;-).

Morning, we had a breakfast of croissants, packed up the tent and left. The camping was only for a night, but it was worth it. It was basically a relaxing time without TV/Computer/internet :-D. Well, we all need come time away from the gadgetry :).

We are planning to go camping again probably this weekend. And yeah this time, the air pump has been replaced and checked :-D, so hopefully there'll be no further troubles :).

Boring hoardings :-p

Whenever you are on a freeway in US, one of the most common boards you'll see almost before every exit is this:




The reason is pretty obvious. There are thousands of McDonald's in US. So many that almost every exit has one. Unlike India that is. In India, McDonald's is considered sophisticated what with only 1 or 2 each in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore (well, my info is limited to that, don't know if there are more :-p). So going to McDonald's is considered a big affair :-p. But in US, you have a McDonald's per galli galli. Its more like our pani puri gaadis. You have one in every street kind of a scenario.

So basically, if, say, there are 10 exits on a freeway, 9 of them are sure to have a McDonald's. Then pray what's the point in wasting so much money in 9 hoardings such as above? Its cheaper to put one hoarding before the exit that doesn't have the McDonald's. Something like this:




Hehehe :-D. My hands have been itching to do something like this ever since I saw the 1st board :-p :-D. By the way, if you are a McDonald's representative who is impressed with my idea and want to steal it, let me tell you buddy, that this idea is copyrighted :-p. If you really want it, then you can give me atleast some percentage of the money you've been wasting away on all the unwanted hoardings :-p ;-) :-D.

Car Wash :))

After a happy Time zone crossing, a worrying fire alarm, now its time again for a happy car wash incident :)

Sri wanted to get the car automatically washed on Friday itself after work. But he remembered that I had shown enthusiasm in seeing a car wash and so insisted that we are going on saturday together. So sweet :). Since we had movie plans in the evening, we decided to leave about 2 hours early (we didn't know how much time it would take). We bought the tickets to the movie on the way and reached the car wash at about 3:30 PM :)

From the outside, it looked as shabby as an Indian garage, but it was a bit more clean :). Sri asked for a deluxe exterior wash and was directed to another place where a man was standing with a hose. I admit I was a bit disappointed on seeing him. Is it gonna be only manual and not as shown in the movies? :-D But he simply washed off some major dirt, removed the radio antenna from the car, gave it us and waved us off. The car was directed to a building and I knew then that it was gonna be just like the movies :-D. As soon as we reached the inside of the building, Sri had to maneuver the car onto a conveyor belt! He simply switched the engine off and we aaram se started moving on the conveyor belt.

The first step was hosing down the car. We had obviously made sure that all windows and doors of the car were closed (otherwise we'd have an interior wash and an unwanted bath as well :-p). There were about 4 guys who sprayed the car from all the sides with soap water. Bechaare, all were drenched totally. But I absolutely loved the concept. Imagine to a kid who loves playing with water, that would be the ultimate job :-D.

After the soapwater spray,the conveyor belt moved to a huge mop like thing which was moving to and fro and was scrubbing every part of the car. At one point of time, it was covering the whole car and it was looking something like an octupus with 100s of legs :-D. I even grinned, pretended to be scared and said dramatically, "Help! help! There's a monster on the car". Sri also seemed delighted at the whole thing :). This process continued with more water spraying and scrubbing.

The next step was pouring water on the car like crazy!! It was as if we were sitting in the car during heavy rain. You can't drive as you can see absolutely nothing :-D. Next, we went towards 3 spinning bottle-brush-like brushes which were moving to and fro ominously. They rubbed the the car from the sides. I guess they were for rubbing the car a little dry. But I am not sure :)

At this point of time Sri had to start the car again, get off the conveyor belt and was directed to a place where 4 more guys were waiting to towel dry the car. They towelled the whole outside of the car and wiped the inside glasses clean. Our Nissan Sentra was dry, shiny, clean and looked like new after the vigourous towel-drying :-D. The whole process took only about 5 min (:-D) and 8 dollars, but was a whole lot fun :). I have already asked Sri to pull me along whenever he goes for a car wash again :).

The only problem was that we still had more than 1.5 hours for the movie. But that turned to my advantage as we did some window-shopping and had delicious ColdStone icecream :). My German Chocolate Cake flavoured icecream with pecans and brownies was awesome!! Later we went to the movie which was Jodie Foster's Flightplan and I absolutely loved it :). We also had dinner at an Italian restaurant :).

Now you may wonder, why I enjoy such small, not-very-important things like a car wash. Its because I believe that such little fun moments make up life. We are so busy with the bigger aspects of life that such small moments are squashed like ants, unnoticed and then forgotten. But I don't want my life to be like that. The wonder I feel at these small things is comparable to the wonder that a child feels at seeing new things. And this is the wonder that keeps me young at heart, that makes me more lively and keeps me alive :). Hehehe, Sri even calls me an "enthu cutlet" seeing the way I enjoy these moments :). One bit of advice from Prof. Deepthi - Treasure little moments in your life and you'll see that unhappiness is suddenly a smaller factor, the reason simply being that there are many more happy moments :).

Alrighty, that's enough of my blabber. Wish you all a very happy day filled with many many little fun moments :).

Happy Fools' day :))

Finally, the day when we can be our natural selves is here :-D.

P.S: "A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married." - H. L. Mencken.