sunday ...

i skipped 4 days in my mission ... so i will explain it first ... first of all i had not many memorable experiences on wednesday and thursday, except for the fact that i missed the spanish omellete on wednesday and went for the team breakfast.During the one hour i spend there i felt very much part of the ASIC test team ... cracking jokes with DEs and STSMs ... hey thats memorable .. well i need to cut down my critereas ... over these two days I watched hollywood classic "The Untouchables" and Goal ( Not the bogus malayalam film , our very famous Santiago Munez film ).

Friday there was this Party in Madan's house ... again i felt great about my vegitarian day .. there were lot of non-veg food and Tequila , but i sticked on to my way .. felt lot great about it after that .. then at midnight went to Barnes and NObles to see some Harry Potter freaks , waiting in the cold night for a book ... and for those who hasn't read the novel , the moment i got that book in my hand, I looked at the last few pages , Poor Harry Potter was killed ... sniff..sniff ... he he kidding ....

Saturday was a shopping day for me ... spend around 200-300$ ... went from one part of the town to other with A list of things to buy for friends and relatives.Then in the evening me and Prat went for the Japanese food ... a restaurant by the name Koto .. the fun part is they will make u sit around a table and cook in front of you ... enjoyed every moment of it ....Came back and saw A few good men ... awesome movie .. i missed a lot of classics like this ..

Sunday ... cricket day ... got up and saw Fernando Alonso win European Grand prix and then went to play cricket , though i didn't get batting ... but in the field it was aq good day for me ... took two blinders , specially the second one ... a high skier against the sun ... and the day ended well ... and now while writing this , i am feeling like have some beer and do some IBM work ... so into work mode .. see you later

Tuesday 17th July

13 to go ... ohh yeah i still can't believe i am gonna leave this beautiful place in another 13 days ... today was an awesome day for me ... couple of interesting things happened ...

After lunch i got a request in the issues database. Normally i buy time by asking for consoles and a testcase . this time for a change i looked up the address of the person and headed to his office to solve it personally ... on the way back i was in a hurry ... then i saw DJ ( those who know her know who she is ) .. and she was near the stairs and i slowed down seeing her ... every time i see her Babs comes in my mind and her comments .. sorry Babs ... can't help ... and then DJ opened the doors and asked ... U r in a hurry go ahead .. I just heard like .. hey Hari go ahead .. i was wondering how the hell she knows my name ... then i got it ... she might have said ur in a hurry .. but should not miss a chance ... I headed saying I thought u called my name ... for the first time i talked to DJ, even though i see her almost everyday for the last five months .


I was all set to go for the football match at 6 pm .. then around 3.30 Dave Litten came storming into my office ... hey u gonna do water skiing after work ? ... mann that sounds cool ... never done that before ... shall i ditch football .. anyway i never found playing football interesting out the HSR league, and in two week i will be back in that league. so i said yes ..went home picked up the camera and went to Lake Iroquois .. it was an awesome boat .. John wittmer ( my teammate ) is into this sport .. he went around the lake to show the skiing course and then asked who gonna go first .. no one raised their hand ... only me , Dave , Patrick ( Dave's son ) and John were there ... i said i will go .. like a dumb guy . Should have waited to see how others do it ... i then put the skies and jumped into water .. it was a nice feeling floating in water ... but u need to know u will not get drowned .. it will take a minute or two for u to digest that .. then john tried to pull me with his boat .. but everytime i will not get out of water , as i launch off i will loose either the the string or the ski ... on the 4th attempt got up a bit ... but didn't go much .. so thought will give a break and do it again .. after seeing other do well , i tried again .. no luck this time also ... so after 8-10 attempts i gave up ... then as a consolation i drove JOhn's high speed boat all over the lake, did donuts in the lake using that .... But it was a kinda nice experience ..

countdown

As usual, like everyone who is coming back to India, I should also start the countdown ... but there should be a difference ... half of my mind wants to stay here while the other half wants to go back .... i can write couple of blogs siting the reasons to come back ... so i made this decision to make the remaining 2 weeks memorable .. 14 memorable days ... so today 16th monday i am going to start this series ...here we go

the day started with couple of meetings and i was thinking how in the world I can make this day memorable ... then came lunch time ... i was supposed have lunch with my friends .. but they went with their team , so i have to go with my team , so for the first time since i came here i am having lunch with my team , Dave Litten and Rick Grupp .... after lunch we went for a walk and being lazy guys me and Dave came back after half way through ... then while walking back we were discussing about something and then i told him about Nag leaving IBM for doing MS .. then he said hey can we sit somewhere down and talk .. and we did that

He was telling like nag did a good thing ... he asked whats ur plans about the future .. you should also do MS. then i told him all my reasons why i don't want to do it ... then after hearing everything he said this is one of the reasons y he didn't do his MS ... then we talked about family and all ... at the end of the talk he told me , he will talk again to my manager abt extending my stay, which is an unlikely thing ... but that talk was kinda memorable one for me ..