I am working on my entry for the Click! event after a pretty eventful weekend at our house (no pun intended).

Angel Face had her birthday two weekends ago, and all this weekend we have been celebrating Nini's birthday which actually happens today. (Happy Birthday, Nini!)

This meant there are actually loads of foodie pics waiting to be uploaded and matched with recipes.

For the moment though, I am putting up a picture of the roof of the historic Fairmont Vancouver Hotel at sunset, from our trip there at the end of August.

See you soon with a more food-related entry :-)

First off: to all of you in areas that are affected by the Southern Californian wildfires: our hearts go out to you, and we hope that you and those dear to you are safe.

The company I work for has a huge presence in the San Diego area, right in the middle of the worst hit county there. While the company buildings are fine, the site has been closed all week to allow employees to take care of their needs: a large percentage of them have been evacuated, and several have lost their houses.

We were watching the news with the scary flames, and Angel Face was sitting with eyes getting bigger and bigger. When they showed the maps, she asked where that was, and we told her.

Now, back in March I took Nini and Angel Face to Southern California when I had a business trip to San Diego. We left the weekend before, and went to Disneyland (all of our first times), and then at the end of the weekend, they flew back home, and I went down to San Diego for a couple of days of meetings.

I had planned the whole thing as a huge surprise: I only told maa chellelu three days in advance that we are going to California - and then only because she needed to pack for Angel Face and herself. When we got to the airport, Angel Face still thought that she was only there to see me off. Now luckily she doesn't know that only passengers are allowed past security, so she checked happily through security, and they came "with me" to the departure gate. It was only when the flight was called that she realized that they are coming to California with me - she was so excited she almost cried.

I had told neither of them that Disneyland was on the itinerary, so early on Saturday morning I just told them to get ready because we're going to go out and do some fun stuff. They only realized where we were going when they started seeing the flags. And then I couldn't get the little one to stop talking; she kept running through a litany of the things and people she might see and do.

Her day was utterly exhausting; by the time it was time for us to leave, she was limp, and still she wanted to stay - you know what I mean, don't you?

And since then, every writing assignment she has at school she wants to write about Disneyland.

To get back to the original story: when we told her where the fires were, she said "That's where Disneyland is!" We had to explain nicely that it was in that area, but that it was not Disneyland itself that was burning.

Now, every time the fires come on the news, she looks very sad and scared. Last night she was asking "Is it the castle that is burning? All the towers will make a big fire." At least we can tell her that in among the many sad and scary stories, a little bit of magic has stayed intact.

The seasons were observed more on the calendar than in nature where I grew up; in summer it was green with some rain, in winter all the grass went yellow and it was chilly. Most of the trees were evergreen, so few were bare in winter, which also meant that there were few who got tender new leaves in spring. Sure, there were a a few blossoms around in spring, and there were a few bright leaves in autumn, but nothing too remarkable. And I had never seen snow where I lived.

And then I came to the US and fell in love with the seasons. For the first few years I was mostly in the midwest with the large swings; very hot and humid in the summers, foot upon foot of snow in the winter, stark bare trees that suddenly get a green fuzz at the first hint of spring to explode in a pastel dream of blossoms everywhere, and autumns where entire streets look aflame in hues of red and rust, orange and gold, yellow and blush.

We lived in the Bay area for a year, and found the weather too even, with very little to mark the passing of the seasons.

Now we are living in the Pacific Northwest, where the change of seasons is a little milder than the midwest; the heat is not as high in the summer, the cold is not as severe in winter, and we get a little snow once in a way, but we still have the brightly blossoming spring and the riotous colors of fall. In other words, the perfect combination!

And even though Washington is called the Evergreen state, there are plenty of deciduous trees
around to provide for spectacular autumns.

I have been having great fun reading responses to the Fantastic Four Meme that has been going around. Being relatively new to the food blog world, I found this a great opportunity to learn a little more of my fellow bloggers than those cryptic little "About" pages tell me.

But now the shoe is on the other foot: I was put on the spot by Rajitha from Hunger Pangs, and now I will see how it feels to bare a little bit of myself to you.

My Fantastic Four Meme

4 Places I Have Lived (in no particular order)
• Rustenburg, South Africa
• Fargo, North Dakota
• IIT Madras Campus
• Portland, Oregon area

4 Jobs I Had
• Nanny (while a student)
• Cricket Scorer on television
• Curriculum Developer and Lecturer for Computer Training Concern
• R&D Engineer

4 Favorite Places I Have Holidayed
(This is our joint list.
My list of places before marriage would be a little different)
• London
• Delhi
• Cape Town
• New York

4 Favorite Foods
(I'm cheating royally here; then again, it's my meme...)
• Andhra Thali: panasa pottu kura; gutti vankaya kura; tomato pappu; pappu pulusu; charu; pulihora; bobbattlu; avakayi; gongura pacchadi; dosa avakayi; appadam; vadiyalu; paramannam
• Kimchee Jigae
• Desserts: Basundi, Potharekulu, Chocolate Mousse, Mysore Pak (from Saravana Bhavan), hot Jalebi
• Drinks: Fresh lime soda, Madras coffee, Ginger lemon chai

4 Favorite Places I Would Rather Be
• In an armchair next to a fireplace reading a book and watching a storm on the ocean
• Graduating, instead of still working towards the Masters
• In Nalli's with a blank check in my bag
• Always with the one I love

4 Bloggers I like to tag (I tried to check that these are bloggers who have not yet participated. Do let me know if you have already done the meme, or if you would prefer not to, and I will tag someone else.)
• Zlamushka from Zlamushka's Spicy Kitchen
• Suganya from Tasty Palettes
• Sandeepa from Bong Mom's Cookbook
• Sailaja from Sailu's Kitchen

First, a happy deepavali to you and your families from all of us. Instead of posting a traditional light, I thought I would give you light of a different kind: the light from the face of a child.

Sandeepa stumbled across a page with very old pictures of Angel Face, which has started the requests to see her. I suppose she features frequently in my posts, and we love her very dearly, so the curiosity is understandable.

She just turned seven about a month ago, and she is growing so fast we can hardly keep up with clothes for her. Angel Face is my niece, Nini's daughter, but as we are an extended family living in one house, she is like the daughter I don't have. Sometimes she slips up and calls me amma instead of doddamma and, even though I laugh, it makes my heart feel warm inside.

She loves reading (which she must have gotten from me) and clothes (which she got entirely from her mother); all her dolls seem to have two names: Emily Elizabeth and Lila Laxmi and Natalie Jean; her favorite stuffed animals are unicorns (Paisley and Wysteria).

She loves homemade foods: macaroni and cheese, and broccoli cheese soup and rice; boy, does she ever like rice. If we give her a whole plate full of just plain rice, she would finish it and ask for more.

When we eat out, she astounds the servers by begging for broccoli or spinach; if we are having a Thai curry for instance, she would keep asking us to pick out all the broccoli from the curry for her. The servers are so used to children making a fuss because they do not want the broccoli that they actually call others over to come and see this unusual event.

With all the talk about Angel Face recently, I thought I would just share a quick little story with you.

When kids are little, they hear things and if they don't immediately make sense, they try to make it fit in their world, and translate the words to something meaningful to them. (Actually, I don't think that is limited to kids only).

A couple of years ago, when she was around four or five, I got home one day and she ran to the door to hug me. As I was taking off my shoes, putting down my bags and taking off my ID tag, I asked "Where is peddananna?"

AF: "In the family room, watching April-May."

I was a little perplexed, wondering what this new show was, until I reached the family room; on the tv was 30 Minute Meals with - you guessed it - Rachael Ray!

::

You might ask why I suddenly thought of that story? Well, today I was sitting in one of those meetings full of corporate-speak, when somebody spoke of something to happen in the "April-May time frame."

Everybody wondered why I suddenly had such a big smile!

We have been seeing typical Pacific Northwest winter weather here for the past week or so; mostly overcast skies with rain, drizzle, showers and spitting most of the time. Lucky for me, I love the rain, although the gloomy skies can sometimes be a bit depressing.

But the grey skies are also responsible for the fact that we appreciate the sun breaks so much; the contrast makes you want to dance for joy when the rays gild the edges of everything outside.

Yesterday afternoon around four o' clock, one of my colleagues suddenly shouted my name from two aisles away. Startled, I got up to find him running towards me. "Look outside!" he called, and I stood on tiptoe to see over the cube walls to the wall of windows running the length of the building. The first thing that struck me was the unusually golden color of the bright sunlight (and that too after there had been only dull grey gloom a moment earlier). Then, almost obscured by a pillar, I saw the rainbow. Well, a little portion of it anyway. I couldn't believe my eyes because it was so bright, so big, so close.

I ran (well, shambled) outside to the car to get my camera. All the while of course the brightness was busy fading as the sun started moving out of the gap in the clouds that allowed this wonder. By the time I got into position, the rainbows (the second, inverted rainbow was also visible although more like a pale shadow) had lost some of its impact, but even then it was the brightest and biggest rainbow I had ever seen.

Enjoy!

There had been a power outage in the night, so the heat went off and the alarms did not. Not that I am complaining, since there are many people in this region who had lost power for several days as a result of storms but still, we do feel those little inconveniences.

Of a more serious nature is the spotty performance of the server on which this blog is hosted. We are a little perplexed, and have been trying to troubleshoot the issue which is basically that roughly once a day the computer either shuts down entirely or hangs.

We are trying to figure out conclusively whether there is a problem with the computer hardware, the operating system, or the software running on the system, but we have been baffled. Our short term plan is to switch the system to a different (older, slower) computer and make sure that that will stay up - thereby pointing to hardware issues on the actual server. Then the next step would be to decide whether to attempt to fix the server or whether to get a new one.

Tough decisions.