My first REAL eye makeup

We had an early Christmas this year, because we are flying to India on Christmas eve. The only sad part about not having Christmas on time is the lack of energy and enthusiasm to put up lights and trees. Oh well !

So, this year I requested Sephora's ultimate eye makeup kit and Santa granted my wish :). This is Sephora's Limited Edition Ultimate Blockbuster eye makeup kit.

On my cosmetics expert friend, P's advise I went online and watched some "How to do eye makeup videos". The good part is that there are a lot of videos with all sorts of techniques and color matchings, the bad part is that they make it look so easy. Let me tell you, eye makeup is NOT EASY and is definitely an art. Being a tom boy all my childhood and only getting into makeup stuff in the past few years is rough. Like my friend P says, we don't have 15 years of practice :(.

Anyways, so after a few tries I finally got something that looked decent and I got so excited about it and I decided to post my results (the pic below). The right eye (as you see it) is my take on evening wear, hence the glitter. It has glittery brown on the eyelid, a dark almost black on the crease between the eyelid and the brow and right below the brow is a glittery white. And I finished it with a dark brown eye liner. The left eye is more for daily wear; light pink on the eye lid and white under the brow and a darker pink coming from the outer side of the eye inwards, almost 1/3rd of the way in (not sure if you can see it here.. see I told you its an art... :-) ), finished with a black eyeliner.

Please let me know what you think :D.

Holidays and Festivals

Today is Karvachauth and I realized this yesterday.. thanks to an email from a friend asking when is Karvachauth this year. Dusshera came and went by. Diwali is only 10 days away...

In US, Indian festivals just seem come and go past. Unless you are really involved with an Indian community which is hard for me, as I rarely go to temple and my husband is American. I really miss the festivals and all the exciting days leading up to the festival. The food, the decorations, the shopping, all was so much fun. And the lack of it makes me sad.

Yes there is Thanksgiving, yes there is Christmas but nothing compares to Holi and Diwali now, right ?

Vent it out !!

Why do some people do not vent ? Whether it is about personal issues or work issues or school issues, some people forget that how much venting helps.

I have met so many people in my life who either don't vent or unfortunately do not have good sources to vent.

At work my boss encourages that we vent to him (ofcourse except for when we have to vent about him :P). But it is such a good therapy, specially because he is aware of what we are venting about and sometimes has very useful insight. Sometimes during venting u realize how ridiculous you are being in a certain thinking - its like brainstorming :). I vent about my boss to my husband, I vent about my husband to my girlfriends and so on and so forth.

Though one has to be careful about who to vent to and how much. You do not want to be the person who when enters the room, people go : "Oh here's the whiner!!" .

But some people just do not understand the importance of venting. They keep all this negative energy inside them and suddenly one day they snap !! And when the snap they do so much damage to themselves its unbelievable.

If you do not have a person to vent it out to... write a blog (har har !!) and vent it out !!

Is it worth it ?

In two days my MBA classes start again. I noticed that in the past few weeks, as the day of the first class is getting closer and closer I am getting more & more anxious and more & more crankier.

For starters I am doing it part time. I started in Jan 2008, I still have about 2 years to go. I have a full time (thankfully not very stressful) job, and I have a husband and a dog to take care of. Husband helps a lot with taking care of the dog and some chores, which is nice. But I use the extra time I get obsessing about my classes.

Due to my Indian genes and the way I was brought up... I take my studies way too seriously. I obsess over getting A's and when I do get one, the happiness lasts only for two weeks - until the next semester starts. Yes I am learning a lot and it is a very good degree to have yada yada yada... But is it worth all this hassle.

I am no more as ambitious as I used to be in undergraduate. I had big dreams, I wanted to make it big in life, to leave marks. But after my Masters the zeal, the motivation slowly started fading away. Today I think that if I have a good enough job, I will be more than happy. It doesn't have to be the highest paid or the most important job. As long as I have money to travel around the world and live a decent quality of life, and ofcourse my dear husband, I am happy .

When I bring this up some people ask why did I start to do an MBA in the first place. There were three reasons. Firstly, for some absurd reason I was not happy with just a Masters in Computer Science, having realized that I am not PhD material. Secondly, my life has always been sort of laid out for me by my Dad, and for those who know my dad he can be very persuasive. So he convinced me I had to do an MBA (this could be the absurd reason in my first point.. hmmm..). The last but the most important reason was that while my husband finishes his PhD I had to find a job in Rochester itself. With Xerox and Kodak not doing so well my options were limited, and so when University of Rochester offered me a job I took it - one of its biggest benefits was free MBA.

So, my delimma is that I am losing a few years to get this MBA and I am not going to make full use of my qualifications as I see it now. Is it worth putting myself through it? I know a lot of people think that now that I have done almost 2 years I should just finish it. But I see it as 2 more years lost.

Looking for cars ?

The next big task on our hand is looking for a good car. With my husband finishing up his PhD and going for a real job (yes finally !!! :P) we will need two cars. We already had been feeling the need of two cars and were just putting it off for later. Now the time has come for some real research.

There are a few basic things that we need... big Big BIg BIG TRUNK... big enough to fit Clover's crate with Clover in it for long distance driving. And then for suitcases etc.. to go along with it. Secondly, it should be safe to drive in snow. I have already been hit by a dumpster, err.. I mean I have already hit a dumpster and hubby dear has run it into a stop sign, so a car that drives well in snow is a MUST. Thirdly, I should be able to drive the car :D.

So we are looking into Station Wagon, SUVs etc. There are some really good sites to help you. First one I found in my marketing textbook: www.edmunds.com (yeah what a weird name for a car site...). This site allows you to check specs, reviews and search with a whole bunch of criteria. Very user friendly site I love it. Second site is www.carsmart.com. This is the site where you get the blue book prices etc. I haven't looked into it yet.. as I haven't reached that stage yet.

So anyways, wish me luck.. hopefully in a few months we will have a new car ! :D

Cruising to Alaska

Its been over a week now that we are back from our cruising trip to Alaska and I still don't find myself quite adjusted to "back to work". May be I need to get the beautiful Alaska and the cruise out of my system by writing this post.

Our vacation began with a 7-8 hour journey to Seattle, this where we were going to embark our ship. We met up with a friend who moved there last year and it was great seeing him and great seeing some people don't change :). He is my hubby's batchmate and they still make awkward conversations as they used to unless they are talking about work or watching South Park !! I am much more informal with this friend, or should I say he is much more informal with me... I think its because we both are Indians ??? I don't have a better reason so do not judge me :P.

So that day in Seattle he took us to a very nice seafood restaurant for lunch. We sat on the port looking out towards the cold waters of the Pacific. It was very calming. We had a whole bowl of mussels.. yumm. The rest of the day until dinner was spent in his ridiculously hot apartment. Apparently it was one of the hottest days in Seattle and he didn't have air conditioning. Even after taking a couple of showers the heat got to me and I ended up being sick. Guys being guys dragged me for dinner to this awesome Lebanese restaurant and I came back and threw up all the yummy food :(. I went to bed and dreamt about two guys laughing loudly while watching South Park...

The next day we boarded the ship. We went on the Royal Caribbean Cruise line and the ship was called "Rhapsody of the Seas". We got their around noon had lunch at the buffet in the ship. Now cruises have food inclusive in the package. So guess what... I ate and ate and ate.. and right now I am on what they call a "post cruise diet". Anyways, so the ship had 11 decks, 3 bars, 2 pools (one indoor, one outdoor), capacity to hold 2500 people including crew. The crew was made up of some 700 people from 53 different countries. The vacationers consisted of people from 27 different countries.. yeah !! I was surprised by how many ship staff people were Indians.. I had not expected that. The majority was Philippines but the next was Indians... not just captains and crew members, but waiters, housekeeping, room service etc. etc. The activities included two formal nights so I got to wear some of my nice dresses... one of the high points of this vacation for me.. haha.

We were sailing for 3 days and were on ports doing excursions for 3 days. While sailing we were busy with the innumerable activities provided on board. There were raffles, games, dance classes and the list goes on. The 3 ports that we visited were Juneau & Skagway in Alaska and Victoria, British Columbia in Canada. The ship was also supposed to go right next to the Tracy Arm Fjords, but unfortunately weather did not allow :(. So we went to just about where it starts and then the captain got a huge chunk of glacier fished and brought on board for us to touch D:.

In Juneau we did white water rafting starting from the foot of a glacier to almost where it gets in the ocean. The water was ice cold - 34 degrees (Fahrenheit) and we were in the front row, so we got completely drenched even though we had a rain jacket and boots on. But it was a lot of fun. After which we went to this bar which used to be a saloon in the old days, called "Red Dog Saloon". We had locally brewed beer which was not bad.


Second was Skagway, where we went for the scenic high-pass railway tour. We were boarded in these old styled railway coaches and were taken about 3000 ft above. The view while going up was breathtaking and made our day. And third was Victoria, where we visited the famous "Buchart Gardens" and then went to a pub to taste some local food and bear. We also saw the famous Empress Hotel and just walked around the city which was a lot of fun.


Apart from having all this fun we met some great people. We had dinner with the same set of people everyday, as that's usually how it is in cruises. So we were seated with two other couples. The first couple was an Italian couple, our parent's age and they were very warm and we immediately connected with them. The second couple was more our age and we happened to be on the same tours and played games and watched shows together... ah what fun !! Oh and before I forget we saw whales, dolphins, sea lions, salmons and all sorts of water life :).


Oh there is so much more that I want to write here but I don't want to make this too long. So I will wrap it up here by saying that being on a ship with nothing but water around you, is the best escape from the real world !!

If anyone is interested in pictures let me know and I can email the link to you :). If you have never been on a cruise before, you are missing out on something and it is a great way to spend vacation with family and friends :)

Desi white couples

This post (rather rant) is about another blog post. Apart from this particular post being interesting, what is more interesting are the comments on this entry. Do check it out: http://stuffdesislike.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/desi-white-couples/

I agree with some comments that desi male/white female pairs are seen with a lot more respect than desi female/white male. We Indians make a lot of assumptions and judgments without ever meeting the person or not know what is going on. I will not be surprised if half my extended family assumed at that time that I was pregnant and hence my parents accepted that I am marrying a white dude. Though, what I find most irritating is that once you get married the person that they doubt or despise suddenly becomes the center of their attention because now they can use that person to boast the status of their family. "Oh my so and so relative's daughter married an American..." they say with a lot of pride... sigh!

Porch Remodeling

After I was tired of yard work (which I didn't complete fully). I decided to take on my porch. We have this great three season room but unfortunately it started being used as the extra room where we dump stuff that we don't know where to keep and don't wanna keep in the basement. Like our cooler or the old fan, car seats.. yes car seats... !!

Below are a few pictures of how are porch used to look.


Trust me this is no exaggeration.. its not like its cluttered because Paul is working there. It used to be that bad. I had cleaned it up several times and it looked ok, but never good enough.


As you can see there is a whole array of furniture there... wicker (some of which I bought at Craig list and other brand new at Home Depot); Chairs from our inherited dining chair set; some other random chairs. To top it, I got these really cute hot pink cushion covers from India for my in-laws; which got rejected.. so I exchanged the ones that i got for myself the year before (brown in color.. i guess more suited for them). They work great in this porch I think because they give a nice contrast to the greenery. And then I had got cushions for my wicker which are country style.. so really was a hodge-podge :).

So the first thing to do was get rid of those ugly blue blinds and put some nice drapes. I knew I wanted sheers but the challenge was the color. The problem was that with all the various hot-pink, green, brown, yellow, I had to get something that will compliment everything. And there is this chance of me inheriting black wicker furniture so I had to think ahead. First I got green-white drapes, gawd they looked hideous and nothing like what the JCPenny catalog showed; and green not sure what i was thinking.. i forgot about all the natural green around the porch :-s. So then after some thinking I decided to go with gold sheers and volla they worked. My windows are 64 inches long, so i got the sheers that are 63 inches long and figured it will work. I forgot about the 6 inches that go above the window as they need to be hanged on a wire/rod. But it didn't look that bad until I came accorss these cute crushed sheers at Christmas Tree shops at 2/3rd the price. And these new gold sheers were not plain sheers but had a little pattern so that waas nice. So I went from $150 green sheers to finally $50 gold sheers from Christmas Tree Shop :D. Below is the newly redecorated porch. It looks prettier at night in the yellow light.



After the drapes were decided on, the next challenge was what to hang them on as all the porch is made of metal and putting rods would be very tough and not exactly what I had in mind. So I decided to go with curtain wire. Paul helped me put the wire (in the picture above) and I put the curtains up. Bought some accessories, a nice bamboo rug - that compliments the drapes and finally was able to my marble plates I got from Agra.



A few trips to the mall and 2 weeks later the porch is ready for entertaining !! :)

10 dollar haricut anyone ?

Pics on demand :) :

Side View:



Yesterday, I got an awesome haircut. One which generally here costs me about $40 and in New York City about twice the price. But I got it for 10 bucks.. yes 10 bucks...

Do any of you have salons that train students who pursuing a career in hair styling ? Usually these students require models. What this means is that if you volunteer to be a model for the student you can get your haircut as cheap as free. We have a few salons like that here, good ones, and I thought I will take the risk.

They let you choose a haircut, sometimes they have restrictions like there should be at least 2 inches of hair to cut or something minor like that. The best part about this is that the student is supervised by the best stylist in the salon (usually the owner). So the parts that are difficult to cut like the bangs, the professional stylist will do it and show it to the student, so you are practically getting a haircut from them. Supervision also includes some tips for the student by the stylist which you can use for future haircuts. Like this stylist guy was telling the student how she should look for the right length to cut the bangs.. and at what length the face looks wider , so to avoid that. Next time when I get a haircut I know the perfect length for my bangs D:

It was a big risk considering this Friday I have a wedding to attend. I know P, M, or M would never ever do anything like this before an event to attend... but do try this sometime :). I got some few good tips and a great haircut :).

Amnesia

Has this ever happened to you ?

A friend of your casually comes to your office and asks you to close your eyes and says.. "Tell me what dress are you wearing today?" and you go "Oh.. ummm... errr... shooot... what the f am I wearing today ?"

Or this kind of conversation:
Friend: "How was your weekend?"
Me: "Oh it was awesome !!"
Friend: "What did you do ?"
Me: "Oh we had a lot of fun. we... ummm.. errr.. crapppp... what did I do ?"

Both of these happened to me today !!!
I am having the weirdest day of my life :-s

Alpha Bitch

I had mentioned earlier in one of my posts that I should probably write a blog about my "alpha-bitch" role in our household. We are a small family of 3 - me, my husband and our dog Clover.

"Alpha Bitch" is sometimes what my husband calls me... and not for the reasons you might be thinking. Hmmm.. how can a person be not shameful about admitting to be a bitch ?

Let me give some background. Our dog is no angel but he is the apple of our eyes !! He is just 1.5 years old and because he was our first dog ever, we ended up spoiling him. After some really bad behavior (growling and snapping !!) he is now undergoing professional training. So he is in his transition period where me and my husband are reasserting our position in the hierarchy. This might sound strange to some folks but dog owners will know exactly what I am talking about.

So there are various drills that we have to do when Clover acts out of his place. And for whatever reason I am quite good at asserting my alpha role :D. This is where "Alpha" in my nick name comes from.

The term "Alpha bitch" though was coined by me, accidentally, one day after a drill. I was feeling good because Clover gave up as soon as I started the drill.. and I was so excited.. that I was going "Who is the alpha ? Me." and my hubby goes.. "Who is the bitch?" and ofcourse without paying attention i said "Me.. I am the alpha bitch." And then I paused.. and found my husband laughing so hard that he got a stomach ache... :).

Bollywood coming to Hollywood ?

Recently I watched this new movie that is quite talked about "500 Days of Summer". The movie was good.. though I hated the lead female character and hardly felt sorry for the lead male character. Not sure if that is what was intended. Anyways I am not gonna give away anything here as its worth watching it.

Now you are wondering what has this to do with Bollywood ? For the first time a Hollywood movie that is not a musical had a song in this movie total bollywood style. The hero falls in love and then there is a song with him dancing and then a bunch of folks dancing with him... its awesome !! If I say more I am going to ruin it for you.

And then there is this new series that I want to watch "Bollywood Hero", but here is the twist.. its an American series starring actresses like Neha Dhupia and hollywood actors well more like comedians - Chris Kattan...

Bollywood is indeed coming to Hollywood !! :)

Life of Pi

I had promised myself that this summer I will atleast read two books a month. Well I managed to read one book in two months... technically I didn't start reading it until a week or so ago.

Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. What a book !! Its a book about a boy, who happens to be Indian, who survives about 7 months on a lifeboat in the Pacific with a bengal tiger on board!! The book doesn't start with his astonishing adventure, infact that starts only about midway in the book. The first half of the book is very funny and very well written. I learnt a lot about animals and zoos; it was great. I was so excited that when the topic of books came up with my manager I told him he should ask his 7 year old to go read it. A mistake that I had to correct the next day when I started to read about the boys real adventure... :-s.

Interestingly the book gave a lot of insight on how to tame tigers and its actually not very different from training dogs and I used some of the tricks on Clover and it worked!!! Clover is my dog, a mix of golden retriever and border collie. Though unfortunately he has a lot of collie in his personality and hence the dominance issues. I am slowly succeeding towards being the alpha bitch in the house (may be I should have a separate post about that :p).

It does talk about religion but in a nice way not in an obnoxious preaching kind of way, well you will have to read for yourself and see what I mean. It can be slow at times, specially for a person like me who doesn't reach much and is only used to reading murder mysteries and Harry Potter :).

In any case the book makes for a very interesting read. A fascinating tale with an ending that will leave you wondering...

Dichroic Glass Pendant

Today I went to the Corn Hill Festival held here at Rochester every year. Its an arts festival and folks from various places accross the country (mostly east) come to show case and sell their stuff. This means a lot of interesting types of jewelry to be sold.

So I bought myself a dichroic glass pendant. Here is a picture.. I think its beautiful. Just wanted to show it off.. :). Have a good day!

Yard Work - part 2

Last time I left off with my mini-garden (the roses of which are now blooooooming !!).

By the time I started thinking about doing other stuff around the house it was late spring. With the advent of summer slowly folks in Rochester started doing yard work.. and I started taking down notes and pointers. One thing I really liked at some houses were window boxes and that gave me the motivation to get window boxes for the front windows of our place.

I am really bad at maintaining potted plants, I dunno how many plants I have killed by over watering or not watering at all. So my first thought was that there is no way I am going have real flowers for my window boxes. Also its too much work to maintain them and then you have to replant every year and with my busy schedule thats never gonna happen. Therefore, I decided to go with fake flowers. I saw this really cool video on youtube on how to make window boxes. So this was my recipe for the window boxes.

Now to get the raw materials, I went to Michaels and bought a whole ton of stuff.. and after I bought everything they give me this flyer-cum-coupon of everything going on bumper sale a week later. Oh and whenever you buy anything from Michaels you get 40% off single item coupon. So a week later I went and did the SAME shopping and got the stuff like 30-40 bucks cheaper. Now thats a lot of savings. Also I had to go back and return the stuff that I had bought the first time. All of this took a lot of patience on my husband's part and atleast 5-trips to Michaels. :)

Making the window box was as easy as shown in that you tube video I was following. So once my window boxes were ready... the next step was to install them. We didn't have a automatic driller, so I took this opportunity to buy one - which was also an experience in-itself. I bought De-walt stuff from Lowes. Firstly, I got the 10% off coupon from the postoffice (from the moving coupon package). Moreover the De-walt drilling pins pack and screws pack each had a $10 off $50 coupon inside them. So I did something that my husband didn't expect. I bought the drill pins first, asked for a scissors from the cashier - she pointed out there is a scissors just outside the doors. So I used the scissors to cut the package and get the $10 off coupon. Went back in and bought the drill and the screws packet, went outside, used the scissors to cut the package and took the $10 off coupon and bought a bunch of mulch packets (to be used later in the front yard). 45 mins later we were out of Lowes with about $25 of savings, including the 10% off coupon. May be I should have a blog on how to save money !! :P

So after we had all the window boxes ready and brackets bought, I installed them with my husband's help. I took some pictures and sent it to my good friend M. She pointed out that I had installed them incorrectly, see the pictures below (incorrect then correct). The box should actually be installed such that the rim of the box should be below the window. Sigh!! it had taken some real frustation and time to drill the holes in the first place and now I had to do that all over again. I was thanking and cursing M at the same time :P.
In the end after fixing the house looked even prettier, thanks M :) really!! For the real close-up observants, yes there is an asymmetry in the placement, and that is because the double window where I installed the single box (see the photos at the end of the blog), the big bush grows up and out, so it would totally cover the window box in a few weeks. Comparison pics shown below.

Oh! and I had to trim down the tree branches so that this pretty work can be seen from the road :). I did that not with a chainsaw but by swinging on the branches and using all my strength and weight until they came down - yeah i fell a few times.. but it was fun D:

RIP MJ

Oh my god ! Oh my god ! Michael Jackson really died... nooooo.... I am still not able to come with terms to this.

Sometimes you don't realize how a person touches your life until after they are gone. I am really surprised by how sad I am by his death. I mean I didn't even think once about buying tickets for his concert, so why am I so sad now ?

But if I think hard about it, it makes sense. He was the first pop-star or rock-star that made an impression on me as a kid. I used to dance on his songs and in fact I think his songs were the only English songs that I ever knew as a kid. I even remember that for one of my cousins birthday party (I must be around 12-13 years old) they had a quiz game.. and it was about music and movies from the US. Out of some 25 questions I knew the answer to just one question... who sang "I am bad". I remember staying up late at night when Michael Jackson married that Lisa female and they were interviewed... I was not interested in the marriage.. I was just mesmerized by him.

Then when he came to India for his tour in the 90's I followed him over the news and magazines and just admired him from far. When I came to US and had access to internet at home... I remember searching for his music videos ( as till then I had mostly just heard his music and seen him on TV), and this is when I was 21 years old and I still loved most of his songs.

So in many ways he had been a part of my life for more than a decade.. so if I am sad it makes sense. I will miss him in a way.

Rest in peace Michael Jackson.

Man push cart

I am a movie lover.. which means I am not afraid to experiment, even when sometimes I feel like hitting my head against a wall.. at that time i resolve not to ever watch a random movie again but like new year resolutions I break this resolution every time.

It's partly Paul's (my husband's) fault. I let him get these movies that he thinks are good as at some film festival they were raved about. One such movie we watched today is called "Man Push Cart". Does anyone remember those really slow boring artsy movies that used to have actors like Shabana Azmi and Nassurudin Shah ? Yeah this one beats those.

This is a movie about a Pakistani guy who used to be this rockstar in Pakistan and left all his dreams for the love of his life.. came to US and started out as a bagel stand in NYC... They never explain this drastic transition... I mean he could have either got the love of his life to live with him in Pakistan or he could have used his talent in US.. or atleast tried.. Now the story starts with how his wife is now dead and he is still selling bagels trying to save money so that his kid can live with him... It never brings tears to my eyes... it was downright boring... even when the kitten died.

Had some good acting... but not worth it for 2 hours of pulling my hair out. Time to watch some good old "Friends" to make my mood better.

Yard Work - Part 1

We bought our first house, also the one we are living in right now, about 2 years ago. In fact we marked our 2 year anniversary a couple of weeks ago. Ever since we got the house we have been doing something or the other starting with painting the rooms first year, then fixing the kitchen, renovating the bathroom, staining the deck and now finally this year doing some landscaping.

For once I can take almost all the credit for the work I have done so far. Dear husband helped on occasions where real manpower was needed. I started out with the tiny garden on the side of the house. Every year in spring it blooms tulips, daffodils and then we have roses and strawberries. The garden also housed a LOT of weeds. One would be tempted to use a weed killer solution like Round-up but beware, it can easily kill your daffodils and tulips. So I had to do some hard work - pull out all the weeds one by one by hand. An hour and a few rose thorn scrapes, the garden was almost weed free. Now to keep it weed free.. I decided to mulch. You can do a lot more than just mulching, like covering the area with some kind of special perforated sheet that doesn't allow weed growth.. but that was too much effort for me. So I decided to settle with just mulching.

These days they have rubber mulch - made out of recycled rubber. Looks just like regular mulch but apparently lasts 10 times longer and doesn't lose color. So I got this dark brown colored mulch, which I think goes well with the house, and mulched the tiny garden. It looked beautiful, but just a week or two later I noticed that the mulch is getting dirty and so doesn't look dark brown anymore and the weeds are starting to come back. I went online and realized my mistake. When you mulch make sure you have atleast an inch thick layer of mulch. Just a thin spread is not enough - duh! So I did that and vola - it looks great and has not shown rigorous weed growth since.
Pic 1, 2: In spring right after finishing mulching
Pic 3: In June