Every end is just a beginning of something else, apparently (until finally one gets to *the* end and hands in their dinner pail, as someone else quaintly put it). It started with, "Study hard and just get into IIT and then no more worries!" only to be followed by, "Did you stand first in class in the exam?" (I've grown up and come to grad school, but my mother unfailingly still asks me this after every exam, I guess it has something to with my being the only child of a schoolteacher :P).

Anyway this is not supposed to be a rant because I passed my first qualifier yesterday! After a semi-sleepless night muttering 'DFT' and 'coupled-cluster' in my sleep and dreaming about my slides, I pulled off a fairly good presentation, knew the value of room temperature in wavenumbers and timed an 'Oranges and lemons' animation just right to pass my first oral exam. Now I can sit back and enjoy the anticipation of going home in roughly a month's time. Went and watched a performance of 'Into the Woods', a musical which combines elements of a whole bunch of fairy tales. Loved the singing and all the performances. All the audience cheering for the people on stage brought back memories of all the drams I've seen/been a part of in good 'ol LT.

Haven't been exercising in a while, but I've made plans to go  running on Sunday. It's going to be cold out, about 6 degrees (Celsius). I guess now is as good a time as any to start running again, especially since I cannot afford to show up looking overweight at home. Thinning hair, fat and 23 years old! (Emphasis on the old!)  Disastrous! I can't help the age or the hair, so  I guess I should stick with controlling what I can :)

I willed my love to dream of me last night, that we might lie
at peace, if not beneath a single sheet, under one sky.
I dreamed of her but she could not alas humour my will;
it struck me suddenly that where she was was daylight still.

--Vikram Seth

<I think Facebook is slightly driving me up the wall with it's million and one applications.>

I just had dinner with friends where I rolled my own sushi. I was a disaster pretty much because I put in too much rice so the roll was rather plump. But the bamboo mat that is used to roll the sushi is an extremely neat looking device. That's on my new wishlist (I seem to have a new one everyday), a sushi making setup. No raw fish though, we played safe with smoked salmon, avocado, peppers, sweet potato and cucumber. No wasabi either this time. But I get the feeling that sushi night is going to be a regular feature from now on. As will be Thursday night 'Office' parties. And Sunday homework nights. <Sigh>

Also watched 4 episodes of a 7-episode BBC production of Sense and Sensibility. That's one of the Jane Austen works that I haven't read but the plot and ideas were (as is only to be expected) predictable. Though if Colin Firth had been part of the cast, I probably wouldn't have been complaining as much:) I'm looking forward to finishing watching the whole thing. I quite enjoyed making catty remarks about everything.

Just had a superbly non-work related high-productivity week. Accomplished stuff that had to be done weeks and weeks ago. Helped to make an apple pie. Mailed stuff to a friend. Spoke to a friend from school after 6 odd years. And...er...Maybe it wasn't that productive a week after all. Partied on the weekend. Kathy and I are getting quite good at beer pong. Might start winning games soon. Then, I can quit while I'm ahead. Watched some Twenty-20 highlights on youtube.  The bowl-out is one of the most ridiculous things I have come across. To me it seems like a soccer penalty-shootout without a goalie - pointless.Plucked up the courage to go to a Theatre Collective meeting. I hope I can make the time to get involved in that a little more. I think life is getting a little more exciting.

What I really wish for though is a Marauder's Map type device that would track my advisor as he comes trooping down from his office to lab. Or maybe I should just wear a biking helmet with a rear-view mirror. Another professor has the rather convenient habit of shuffling his feet on the lab carpet so that people can tell when he's coming. Or maybe I should just stop being a slacker and work all the time. Wishful thinking , that. Another week has chugged along. I'm getting closer to going home!

The song 'Bicycle Race' by Queen has been going through my head on and off for some time now. Though I think I overdid the sentiment and underdid the preparation for my bike tour in New York City yesterday. 55 miles, 7 hours, 4 bridges and countless traffic lights -  it was pretty gruelling. I can't decide if running over those flyovers at the Mumbai marathon was tougher or the biking over the bridges. I wish I could remember all the places we rode through, but it is sort of a blur. It was fun biking through Times Square, thrilling to cross the Brooklyn bridge and good to see the Verrazano bridge (and even better to admire it respectfully from a distance without having to bike over it). I also think I rode over almost every pothole in the city. All on roughly 4 hours of sleep. The timeline sort of went like this:

3:30 am - Stagger out of bed and get ready to take the train.
4:40 am - Take train in to New York.
7.00 am - Start biking.

(Don't remember too many details. The bridges , yes. Three rest-stops with some very strange tasting energy drinks. Coney Island...and some other places:P )

2:00 pm - Finish the tour.
5:00 pm - Back home, bone-weary and rather smelly, sweaty and gritty with my free T-shirt, water bottle and some random goodies stuffed into my bike helmet.

We did reward ourselves by getting some really delicious seafood at a restaurant in a nearby town. Some of the best clam chowder I've ever had. And wonderful stuffed rainbow trout. I was pretty much falling asleep in my plate though. I do wish I had three stomachs :-)

Note to self and a word of advice in general: A pair of sunglasses is a good thing to have on a bike ride. The number of bugs I had to fish out of my eyes was not amusing.

I also recently read 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' by Mohsin Hamid. Very riveting. Evocative in places. And a stunning ending. I'm still coming to terms with it. It's been shortlisted for the Booker. I looked up the entire shortlist and discovered that the public library here has some of the other shortlisted books also. (Yes, the amount of time I spend digging up non-academic pieces of information on the web has shot up alarmingly over the summer:P) Now my next target is to read all of those, maybe before the award is announced.

So much to do...

Note to self : Never make plans to leave lab early on a weekday. Some calamity will inevitably take place 15 minutes before I have to leave resulting in said plans getting messed up.

With that out of the way, it has been a crazy weekend. And it feels like I've been sitting on a bike for ever and ever (I think that mostly had to with the fact that I had not been riding my bike for a while now, there are reasons for that also but this sentence is getting too long now so never mind). Since I signed up for a 55 mile bike tour for next weekend, I decided to finally haul myself outdoors and ended up on a 30 mile round trip on Sunday. And whatever muscle groups had been spared by the bike ride were promptly made sore by a 5 k road race in honor of Labor Day yesterday. And all this on the heels (literally) of a symposium on friday where I was running around most of the day in semi-formal garb topped off by a BBQ which had its share of keg stands (my time was 17 seconds), beer pong and what-have-you. I also got to operate the neatest corkscrew and other accessories ever during the course of my wine-pouring duties. This symposium was also the day when we officially turned into second-years. I guess it also brought the summer to a close. Compared to what is about to follow it seems like it was idyllic indeed. I have to teach a class, take a class (in the Physics Dept.), do some work in lab so that I don't look like a fool in my oral exams. A picnic indeed. With my customary knack for making my life more difficult than it already is, I also signed up for a glassblowing class. That's not the difficult part though. It starts at 9 am on Mondays. That's the tough part. An improvement on 8:30 am but then I'm also older and lazier (but not wiser, it would seem).

Time to run home...the craziness starts tomorrow :(

I did it! Survived a year here without a computer of my own. And as soon as the year ran out, succumbed and bought myself a macbook. I love it! Not that I am sufficiently computer-savvy (yet) to appreciate all it can do. But while checking out all the options in the Photo Booth, I realised that the Squeeze feature makes me look disconcertingly like one of my classmates from college.

The summer has gone by. And I spent 6 weekends in a row in New York City. Well, not exactly. More like took a ride on the Metro-North train 6 weekends in a row. Of which, the train broke down twice. Met some interesting people. Paddled a canoe through a pond in someone's backyard in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Saw this quote in an antique shop there...

Life is NOT a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely. But rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming...
"WOW, What a Ride!

'What a ride!' would be a good way to describe the bike tour I did in May, every last mile of it. I loved it. ( I think I can afford to be generous now some 4 months later though being stuck on Staten Island for about 3 hrs didn't seem like a picnic then). I also fell off my bike. And felt ashamed of my biking skills when I later saw a guy whizz past downhill on a bike, airily peeling a banana and chomping on it with gusto.  As if that isn't enough, I've started trying to learn how to swim again. It doesn't help that the end of the pool labelled '4.5 feet' is actually at least 5 feet deep. I even managed to move backwards this time, a feat that I had never performed in the past. My target is a triathlon next July, let's see if I end up doing it as a relay with the swimming delegated to someone else, or as a duathlon or if I manage to swim the requisite 1 mile. It doesn't hurt to hope...

I think I shall crawl into bed now and suffer the effects of indulging in a latte at about 8 pm. Fortunately I brought back some new books from the library so hopefully I won't just be staring at the ceiling mulling over all the things I need to do but never get around to doing.