With the start of Spring, one can see a variety of wild flowers in Plano, without having to go far from home. Most of the urban areas in Texas have been built over and near prairie grasslands, which are replete with all kinds of grasses and flowers in the season. Even in our apartment community, just a patch of unused land a few feet across turned up more than ten different flowering plants.
Over the last few days, Poonam, Raghav and I, equipped with 'Texas Wildflowers: a field guide' by Campbell, Loughmiller, set out to learn something of the flowers we see around us. Just our community campus, the local trail I run on and the park 5 miles away yielded us a trove of flowers. We managed to refresh our botany knowledge a bit along the way (Apparently, the sunflower is not a single flower, but a close set collection of scores of small flowers: Look up Pseudanthium in Wikipedia).
Some of the flowers here (also see Poonam and Raghav's artistic impressions of those flowers):
..that invariably likes something 4x more expensive than normal/common and more elaborate/labor intensive/rare.
Case in point: With intense swim and karate sessions he gets cramps, especially in summer. Drinking coconut water helps. Two choices.....
Option A: Coconut water by Vita Coco $1.50 (pasteurized, so no need to store in the fridge, saving space+ longer shelf life and more convenient)
Option B:Coconut water by Simple Harvest $4 (fresh, not pasteurized so must be kept in the fridge, must be carried in a cooler to swim, and expensive to boot)
He refuses to drink coconut water usually and must be forced to drink. He samples the expensive one in Costco, goes back for another sample, and another, and another, and another and one more...until the saleswoman is looking at me like "You better buy this lady!!!!"
He likes the $35 Baumkuchen( very light and airy, the whole cake can be eaten in one serving) but not the $3.50 cake slice at Safeway.
BTW, the procedure to make a Baumkuchen..watch this
You stand in front of a hot rotating oven and bake the cake layer by layer pouring batter for the next layer as one layer bakes, for a nice even tree ring appearance.
VERY high maintenance.... (both the cake and Aditya :-) )
I had my spring program today and it went very well. The first sign that this was going to be a funny program was when at the beginning, Ronit forgot about his line! Then, when we were doing the Charleston, someone in the audience sneezed in the middle of the song. Towards the end, at my line, my hat fell off and everyone started laughing. Well, that's all for now! Bye!
These are some of the poems that I wrote in school:
This is a limerick I wrote. (For those of you that don't know poems, a limerick is a poem that has 7-8 syllables in the first, second and sixth line, the others having 5-6 syllables and the poem has a rhyming pattern of a, a, b, b, a.)
There once was a giant typhoon,
That sent a man up to the moon,
Then during the night,
He had a big fright,
To find he had woken at noon.
This is a free verse that I wrote. It has no rules, so you can do whatever you want in the poem.
Bob was very smart,
He lived in a cart.
Tim liked to swim,
but he was very dim.
Bob was smarter than him,
and Tim went out on a limb.
Tim fell on his head,
and then he was quite dead.
On the "occasion" of mother's day, a poem by Gurudev. Perhaps we children do not deserve the adulation the mother in this poem offers... But we did it get it all the same from our mothers.
The Beginning
“Where have I come from, where did you pick me up?” the baby asked
its mother.
She answered, half crying, half laughing, and clasping the
baby to her breast-
“You were hidden in my heart as its desire, my darling.
You were in the dolls of my childhood’s games; and when with
clay I made the image of my god every morning, I made the unmade
you then.
You were enshrined with our household deity, in his worship
I worshipped you.
In all my hopes and my loves, in my life, in the life of my
mother you have lived.
In the lap of the deathless Spirit who rules our home you have
been nursed for ages.
When in girlhood my heart was opening its petals, you hovered
as a fragrance about it.
Your tender softness bloomed in my youthful limbs, like a glow
in the sky before the sunrise.
Heaven’s first darling, twain-born with the morning light, you
have floated down the stream of the world’s life, and at last you
have stranded on my heart.
As I gaze on your face, mystery overwhelms me; you who belong
to all have become mine.
For fear of losing you I hold you tight to my breast. What
magic has snared the world’s treasure in these slender arms of
Mexico->Germany->Canada->US(Chicago). After 1 week of total immersion in fun and 3 weeks of total immersion in work, glad to be home for 2 weeks before having to go off again.
Okay, so the last few days have been a blur. There is so much happening and its all happening too fast.
Updates:
1) My grad walk is on May 17th and I am pretty excited. :)
2) I received the "Outstanding GTA (Graduate Teaching Assistant) Award" for the academic year 2013-2014. It is kind of a big deal here :D My name was etched on a golden plaque in the University. My name is going to be up on that wall forever. I received a certificate and a gift card worth 100$ from the DGS (Director of Graduate studies). I also featured on the main page of our campus newsletter.
Small story behind why I got the award in the first place:
One day, after spring break, some students of mine put up sticky notes everywhere in the department that said
"Lavanya is the best TA ever. - MATLAB students"
Everybody was surprised. I had to go around to every door, professor's offices, classrooms in the department and take these down. I was a mini celebrity for a week. :P Eventually, the Director who noticed this decided I win the award hands down.
Here are some pictures.
This is one of the sticky notes I kept as a souvenier.
This is me with the DGS accepting the award. I didn't get enough sleep so I look pretty tired. :| ( Please do not start with the "You've become soooo thin..." and "You look malnutritioned" stuff..!! )
This is my name on the wall.
3) The third update is that, I finally managed to complete my coding part in my thesis and get pretty decent results. My adviser is happy and so am I. I will hopefully leave Minnesota and the cold, soon.
4) Lastly, I won the game 2048. I don't know if any of you have tried the game. :)
That's all folks!! :) Stay happy and in good health everybody :)
My swim practice is going really well! On Monday, we did a relay, and after I swam, we were always in first, or tied with the person in first. I have been doing much better than I was last year. My new coach is Coach Rosy, and she is very strict but has helped me improve my swimming.
