Stuck in a hotel room in beautiful NY

I am on a one day trip to NY to meet a customer. I flew in from SF, leaving home at 4:30AM and reaching my hotel at 5:30PM. After responding to emails and eating a very late lunch, it's already 8PM and its cold and rainy outside. Being the Bay arean I am, I forgot to bring a hooded jacket, so I am just staying in the hotel room in Chinatown, which at $300 a night is worse than many $75 hotels I stayed at.... Tomorrow, after meeting the customer, I fly back to SF, reaching home at midnight.....grrrrrr Well, one thing I did see, in passing, is Flushing Meadows, the US open venue as well as the filming location for the ending of the movie Men In Black, with the two towers and the globe.

My maiden monochrome mural

I painted this one in mummy papa's room. Appreciate mummy's guts for allowing me to experiment on their nicely painted walls :)

http://psimagine.blogspot.com/2011/11/monochrome-mural.html

Need some fun in life.......

The wintry and rainy weather put an end to our weekend hikes and life has become a bit boring.... Any topics for a hot and steamy discussion??????

My Black Friday Battle Plans

The Day of/After Thanksgiving ( Typically the last week of Nov) kicks off the Christmas Holiday shopping frenzy. These 5 weeks make or break most retailers, so everyone is competing for the consumer dollars. The Friday after Thanksgiving is when most retailer's accounting books turn "black" ( as in profit, instead of "red" for loss, typically the rest of the year), so this day is called "Black Friday".

If you really need some things, this is the time to buy them, as most stores deeply discount certain popular products, some times below cost ( they are called "loss leaders") to bring you into their store.

I use this opportunity to buy certain household necessities and of course,  some unnecessities :-) One good thing is the return policy of most retailers, so if I get buyer's remorse the day after, I just return the products unopened for a full refund.

So, here is my planned list this year.
1) A pair of shoes,a pair of sandals and sleeping socks for Aditya
2) A heavy and a light jacket and  gloves for Aditya
3) A trench coat or pea coat and gloves for me
4) A set of luggage ( Our luggage was bought when airline allowance was 70lb instead of the 50lb now, so I need to buy a lighter set)
5) A cookwear set ( I generally buy inexpensive cookwear every two years to account for Nabeela's rough handling.....)
6) A rotating waffle maker
7) A router
8) A cable modem

On the unnecessities list is a Table Tennis / Pool table........

To give examples of price differences, a luggage set that sells for around $120 most of the year will sell for about $45 and the cookwear set that might normally run around $50 is sold for about $25.

Most stores open at crazy hours like midnight, 1AM, 4AM etc...and have these low cost items in very limited quantity, so I need to perfect my plan of attack and recruit some allies to divide and conquer.Unfortunately, Sudha is going to be in St.Louis, and Srinivas refuses to get in the game, so I am already starting the battle handicapped :-(

Odd Thomas

A book by Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas, was a gripping read after a long time. Odd Thomas is about a young man who can see ghosts and uses the ability to solve crimes and prevent disasters. This is the second book that I read in the last month, and both were in the domain of dark fantasy. The other book was American Gods by Neil Gaiman, which was also good, but too dark for my taste. Both authors have a strong command on the language, use similar styles of juxtaposing anecdotes with the  main plot line to build the main characters in the book and are good at similes & metaphors. It seems that good writers have decided to make a living out of surrealist and dark fantasy type of books, which is a pity. It is difficult to read such books after a time, as they get to be depressing.

Odd Thomas was good enough to for me try Dean Koontz once more...but it is hard to find good fiction nowadays.