A Cousin a Day keeps the Boredom Away

Posted on January 14, 2015 by memoriesandsuch

“Nobody will understand the craziness of your family better than your cousins”

Cousins are your friends by blood. Not everyone, especially these days of smaller families have cousins who are with them through thick and thin.

My mom is the oldest of four sisters and my dad is the oldest of a younger brother and sister. We’re closer to my mom’s family. My dad lost his sister when I was in school and his brother moved away when I was real young and now we are not in contact with him or his family! I feel real sad that I don’t know my cousins from his side – I have not met them (two boys) in the last 15-18 years and they must be adults now (I last saw them when they were 4 & 8!) I sometimes joke with my dad that if I ever pass them in the street, they would be random strangers to me, that’s how out of touch we are!

I’m the oldest of eight cousins from my maternal side, dominated by girls. Between me and the youngest there’s an 11 year gap. We’re six girls and two boys.

Growing up, we were close, but since we’d meet maybe once a year if lucky, it was not that “tell you all my secrets” type of closeness. Plus, because of the eleven year gap, when I was say fifteen, my youngest cousins were like three or four! I even have memories of my second last cousin’s birth! I remember seeing her as a new-born in the hospital and since she was born in early March, I distinctly remember going to my grandmother’s home for our summer holidays in April/May and being with her. I have memories of begging my aunt to let me hold her and I would sit patiently with her on my lap when my aunt went for a bath or did something else.

However, as we grew up, the age gap somehow closed and we could relate to each other and instead of growing apart, we grew closer!

Thanks to Facebook, emails and social media we got even closer, sharing photos and milestones. It was great, but somehow we were not able to meet due to distances, schedules and what have you. Currently, we’re scattered all over the world – Hong Kong, Singapore, India, UK, USA and Canada – you get the picture right, when someone is free in one part of the world, the others are busy in another!

However it was last year, when one of my youngest cousins got married, we really started connecting with each other. Before the wedding, we started a Whatsapp group to discuss what to give her. This was something we started when the first one of us got married. In addition to the family gift with the parents, we wanted to give something special to our cousin and at that time, with hardly anyone working, it used to be small. Now that we can afford it, it’s more expensive.

It was great fun at the wedding – we had the time of our lives and missed the one cousin who could not make it. Then we decided to keep in touch more since it was so much fun and since then there’s hardly a day when texts are not pinging their way across the globe.

Cousins brighten up your life so much, that I hope BB & GG also have the same relationship with their cousins, both first and second (aka children of my cousins)

2015 Week 1: Weekly Update

Posted on January 11, 2015 by memoriesandsuch

I thought of putting down what happened this week here so I have a kind of running update on my life!

This week was a mixed bag one – on one hand work has been good, but health is not so good.

Work: A good week, where my views for our forthcoming event was considered. So far 2015 has started well and my fingers are crossed that this continues for the rest of the year. A project I have been working for almost a year is seeing completion and I hope this will auger well for me.

Health: I had a good number of health goals for the year and this week was not a very good one, need to step up to the plate on this! I exercised 5 days this week while my goal was six days, so need to figure how I can incorporate this over the weekends. I also lost a bit of weight, though not the 1 kg I was hoping for. I missed taking my diabetes medication one time, should not do this again. Also food choices were not the best, so need to work on that too. I also started meditating this week, and could do that twice this week, which is a plus for me.

Writing: Not bad, managed to post almost every day, especially in my other blog. I need to work more on posting here!

All in all, a not-too-bad start to 2015. If my life continues in this vein, life’s gonna look good by the end of the year.

Meditation….Bringing the mind home

Posted on January 8, 2015 by memoriesandsuch

One of my New Year resolutions was to learn to mediate and I tried doing that on Tuesday night just before I went to bed. I quickly Googled ‘how to meditate‘ and looked up this site. It looked quite easy to me – sit quietly in a place for 2 minutes and concentrate on your breathing.

Meditation has lots of benefits I learnt – physical mental and spiritual. You can go to the Art of Living site here, here and here for more information on meditation and its benefits, but my favorites are:

Meditation removes accumulated stress from your body and prevents new stress
Lowers blood pressure, anxiety attacks, decreases tension-related problems, improves mood, behavior, energy levels and the immune system
Increases creativity, happiness and intuition. You gain clarity and shapens your mind which also grants peace to your mind.
Lastly meditation makes you aware that your inner attitude determines your happiness!

Well, I set my phone alarm for 5 minutes and tried to concentrate on my breathing. Along with that, I tried to focus on an image – usually for meditation, you focus on OM, but I decided to focus on the image of my favourite God – the idol of Lord Ganesh as Siddhi Vinayak at the Siddhi Vinayak temple in Mumbai. It worked for about 3 minutes, when my concentration broke and I peeked at the timer to see the amount of time left.

Going to try it again tonight, maybe start at 3 minutes and work my way up. Maybe see if there any meditation apps I could use? I am also using the Clear app on my phone to remind me to do it – I’ve set a three times a week target, but my real target will be eventually to do it daily.

I’ll come back and report maybe halfway down the year if this has made any difference to my life, but I slept well last night – so much that when S was dropping me to work, I was closing my eyes and dozing off….

2015 Life Goals

Posted on January 1, 2015 by memoriesandsuch

Displaying image.png Another tradition I have is to put down my goals for the new year on Jan 1^st year. Now whether or not I follow through it is debatable….

This year I want to be my breakthrough year with no Resolutions, instead what I want to do is have Life Goals for 2015. These are more like goal posts of my life and I want to steer my life towards them. Resolutions seems something everyone says they will do on Jan 1 and promptly breaks it on Jan 02^nd!

So without any much ado, here are my Life Goals for 2015

Use the treadmill for a minimum of 30 minutes for a minimum of 6 days a week
Eat healthily with minimum junk food – no foraging biscuits in the office either!
Lose a minimum of 10% of my body weight as on 1^st Jan (which shall remain a secret here, but let’s just say that I do need to lose 10 20 kgs to reach my ideal BMI range). With this 10%, I still will be overweight, but slightly better than where I am today
Get my 3 monthly HBA1c count to between 5 and 6
Work with BB & GG to help them get good PSLE scores and get admissions into the schools of their choice.
Start working on revamping my resume. Talk to some resume experts and rework it. Start applying for jobs with the new resume in 2015 Q4, even if it’s where I am currently working in.
Take time for myself. Complete atleast 5 courses in Coursera – I have already signed up for 3 courses, which start sometime in March/April 2015, so this is one goal I should be able to reach easily.
Try to meditate once a week, increasing it to a 2-3 times by the time the year end rolls by.
Try one new hobby – something I always to try, but never had the courage/time/pick your excuse to do…
And the most important one – atleast here – write more often – minimum three times a week on both blogs!

There! A fairly big list of things to complete in 2015. Hopefully, now that I have put it down on paper, I will be forced to do it.

What do you think? Do it think they are doable? Am I trying too many things at the same time? Too ambitious?

2014 Reflections

Posted on December 31, 2014 by memoriesandsuch

Sunrise at the Angkor Wat, Cambodia

Irrespective of how much I blog in a year, I usually do one on the 31^st of December as a way to reflect on the year that went by and also try (the operative word here) to put in goals and resolutions for the new year.

Family

2014 was a mixed year with some good and bad happenings. The year actually started well with both BB and GG getting Edusave Awards. All of us were super thrilled and had hoped that this will spur them to do well in school in the current year too! Alas, as usual Hindi was the party pooper and for GG Maths also proved to be the subject she just does not get the grips of. BB did better in school than GG with being in the top in his class for his other three subjects – English, Maths and Science and will be getting his award for 2014 this Sunday.

Their school choir also won a Distinction at the Singapore Youth Festival in April and I was one of the parent volunteers there. We were in school at 5:30 am to get the children ready L and they were scheduled to perform around 10 at the School of The Arts (SOTA). All in all it was a wonderful experience for all of us – both children and parents! We came home tired and exhausted that day, but seeing the school (SOTA), GG wants to now try to apply for the school for DSA next year.

Health-wise, mostly it’s been positive for everyone. I was the only one who had a health scare this year. In July, after a particularly bad case of an abscess, I was warded in hospital to have it surgically removed and in the process discovered that I am a Diabetic! It was my Type 2 Diabetes which was responsible for the abscess in the first place and in a way I am glad it came when it did as it helped me get diagnosed. It was a shock to anyone who knows me as I am someone who does not have a sweet tooth and prefer spicy foods to sweet any time! Anyways, I’m on medication and will probably have to have it for the rest of my life. My last HBA1c test had a fasting sugar rate of 7 which is in the upper end of what normal people have. My primary care doctor is happy, but I want this number to be on the median level – somewhere around 5.5 to 6.

Other than this health scare, which made me stay at home for three weeks (but I was working all the days at home, so no real rest), and other than usual colds, coughs and flu, we are all healthy. S has been having some real bad back pain over the last few days, so hopefully today’s medical check-up will only reveal it’s bad posture and maybe approaching old age and nothing serious.

GG decided to drop her ballet, something she has been doing since she was 3.5 years old, around 8 years back! Gosh, now that I put it down, it’s been more than three quarters of her life so far. She’s been losing interest in it for a while and every few months would speak of dropping it. It was only me who kept pressuring her to continue. But then when she was unsuccessful in her last exam, I decided to let her drop it and concentrate on her studies. No point in spending money on something if she no longer has the passion for it anymore. She says she wants to try modern or contemporary dance now, we’ll see after the end of this year.

Our helper R has will complete her contract in February next year and she has indicated she wants to continue with us, which is good. She’s been wonderful so far, and if you close one eye to things about her which irk you, this arrangement is a good one for both of us. I definitely need a helper for the next year and after that it really depends on how our life takes flight. We may be able to do away with a full time helper and have a part-timer coming in when we are not at home. Or I may just decide to continue with this arrangement, if things go according to the plan I have in my mind – more on that when I write about goals.

Work:

Again a good year for me professionally. I did well at work and my bonuses proved that, but this position, although good, is not something I would like to see myself doing on a long-term basis. This position, at a large MNC is on a contract basis and the position involves some administrative work, which I would prefer not to do. Readers who may think why I took up this position when I was not very comfortable doing it may read this post I wrote same time last year which has the why’s in more detail. I don’t have anything against admin work, but it’s not something I trained in and not something I see myself in doing on a long-time basis. My boss, the guy who initially recruited me has also moved on – he has moved to another country with a promotion, so although I am real happy for him – could not have happened to a better person, I also no longer have any guilt for leaving him (I am like this – have very strong loyalty, especially to the person I report to and if he/she has recruited me, it’s multiplied many times and feel guilty when I try to leave a company). I will, in any case, spend 2015 in this same company, honing skills learnt here – and I have learnt so much in the two years I have been here! Then by the end of the year, if no other opportunity in this organization comes up, I will start to look for any opportunity to move in. Win-Win right?

In the meantime, I need to work on some social (read office politics) skills here which I hope to do this year….

Memories and Such

Memories of a very ordinary life

Category Archives: Life