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: