Tis the season

If ever there`re 2 words that I love unconditionally, it`s gotta be "party supplies". Party supplies convey a feeling of something festive going on, obviously, with the word "party" and of abundance with "supplies". And coincidentally, parties and abundance are other words that I love. I love piles of good stuff ranging from food to decorations. Sometimes I love it when things are overdone. Makes you think that Christmas won`t be Christmas without all the excesses. So I`m gonna be making the most of this year`s Christmas, as usual. I got lots of pastry making coming up during this week. Looking forward to making gingerbread men and a yule log. Oh!

Have a great Christmas dudettes and dudes and whatever... Haha! `Tis the season for everything.

Chocolate Weekend

I am currently flipping through this wonderful chocolate cookbook called, brace yourselves for it: "Chocolate!". And I must say that it is exquisite. This book depicts chocolate in its very best aspects; sensual with the silken chocolate cheesecake, warm with some chocolate drinks and sometimes, even vulgar with the very decadent brownie pudding cake. But that`s the thing with chocolate, it reaches us at every level of our moods with its decadence or sophistication. My sister lent me this book this weekend, which she got from her boyfriend, in a somewhat unconcealed attempt to lure me into baking something for them. But really, I don`t need much pressuring for baking, especially when it comes to chocolate...

Fusion...

Call me harsh but I despise it when restaurants decide to go for several cuisines in a single menu. In Mauritius that seems to be the case for many restaurants. They would propose "Thai" food, followed by "Italian" food and then some "Mauritian" recipes and guess what? None of the recipes have any authentic taste. It`s neither Thai, nor Italian and sometimes not even Mauritian. The food is just some wild interpretation of those cuisines made by someone who, I am guessing, has not even had a proper taste of authentic Thai or Italian or any other foreign cuisine. And they call that fusion food. Ooh! I shiver thinking about fusion food.

Now you see, fusion food is not a bad concept in itself. I don`t know if you`ll agree with me, but we do that all the time at home. I sometimes add curry leaves to my spaghettis or soy sauce to an oriental recipe. Examples like that are varied and they depend from person to person. People have got their own interpretation of classic recipes and no one is judging them, except when they decide to make money out of it. Then, I`m the first one to be judging them harshly.

The thing is, if fusion food is really well done, it is comparable to a fantastic culinary voyage into novel and peculiar tastes and flavours. And if it is badly done, then, to put it plainly, it is crappy. And I don`t want to pay for crappy food. I don`t want anyone else for that matter to pay for  crappy food and to be misled into thinking that Thai or Italian or Indian food is crappy just because they tried it at the wrong place.

Criticism

You know how everyone tells you that you should accept criticisms and work on them... And you know how deep down, perhaps reluctantly, you nevertheless accept it and work on it, to improve, to be a better person. To be a person who listens to others and who is committed to self-improvement.

Well, there are certain days when I`ve totally off. When all I think about is myself. When I hear people`s advice, opinions and suggestions and just think "Screw them!". Those moments are totally blissful but I guess they are not recommended often when you are in HR...

Kindle me up

So the story goes thus: I got the Amazon Kindle some weeks back, I can`t remember exactly and ever since I got it I`ve been reading. Cause that`s what you`re supposed to be doing with a Kindle I suppose. I was so caught up with my reading that I did not give a damn about writing a blog post to tell you guys about how cool the Kindle is. So yesterday my boyfriend, a guy named Jevin told me to write something up and here it is.

Well the Kindle is cool if you`re a bookworm, if not, then you would certainly look down on it as a useless tool. I am a bookworm and ever since I got the Kindle it seems that it is accompanying me everywhere, except, of course, to the loo. Even if I was taking it to the loo I wouldn`t be telling you about it, right?

Yeah, so, well the Kindle is accompanying me everywhere. Even today as I was having lunch all alone `cause my colleague and partner in crime was out for a conference, I was reading the Kindle, a wonderful novel my Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, if you want to know. I wouldn`t tell you where I got the books though.

Anyway, anyway, all those blabbering to let you know that the Kindle is awesome, that I took a day off the day I got it to be able to read all day long, that its cheap and that the battery life is a miracle. 

If you happen to have one, you`re a lucky bastard. If you want one, go for it. 

Oh and by the way I got the orange cover. Cool, ain`t it?

2 damned hours!

It`s amazing how leaving work 2 hours earlier than usual can be revitalizing. I mean I don`t ever accomplish anything groundbreaking during the last 2 hours of my day so I might as well call it a day and leave early. Usually the last 2 hours of the day are spent chatting with colleagues, pondering on upcoming HR policies which we all know won`t ever be applied and most importantly, having tea. 

Granted today was a special circumstance. Something pressing. One of those events when people insist that you go home 2 hours earlier. But that kind of circumstance won`t be repeated in the near future. But I`m just saying, I`m more productive when I leave home 2 hours earlier...

So where was I?

Yeah, so where was I? Minutes, days and months elapse so quickly. Yeah they do, especially when a thousand thing is occurring about you. There's work and there were the exams, which ended today, at last!

Work is cool! It's the typical Dilbert thing (with Catbert, the evil HR), except that I'm the Catbert in this case. At first I was tender at heart. It's hard to call people for interviews and not giving them the job, it's hard to hear the hope in their voice when they believe there's a possibility, it's hard to see them signing a contract which unfortunately does not match their expectations. But well, it took some time for me to toughen up and adopt a holistic way of thinking instead of considering cases by cases.

But well, the good thing is that we`re adopting new HR policies that would soon make everyone`s life better, including mine. So that would soon be a win-win. 

Here we go again - Bloggers' Meeting V3

Dudettes and dudes, the time has come once again where we've got to leave aside our desks or laps or palms or all of them (OK you got it) to get together in our usual informal way for a Bloggers' and Tweeps' Meeting.

Tentatively, the venue of the next meeting has been set at Phoenix Les Halles on Saturday the 3rd of April at noon. 

It's not official yet because it depends on you guys' responses and availability. So we expect your feedbacks regarding the date and venue.


There'll be 3 free places for anyone wishing to ride with Jev and I from the North to Phoenix and back. 




You can read more about the previous event on Yashvin's blog.


So, are you people in for the event?

Are you an equal opportunity friend?

I haven't really been up to blogging lately. There've been lots of stuff going on. I went through the HRDC training sessions and came out of it full of knowledge and backaches. All in all, it was an interesting experience. The long weekend helped me recover totally from it.

Talking about the long weekend, on Friday 12th we celebrated our country's Independence day. I spent mine with Jev at Choisy with Mauritian foods and drinks. And on that day I got to know something great about him, that he is a patriot. You see, I am a patriot too but I guess that those are the things that we don't really say out loud. It's kind of hard to start a conversation with "Hey honey I'm a patriot! Did you know that? What about you?". And so we ended up not saying this to each other. But it was on Friday when he was buying flags and quadri-coloured ribbons that I actually got to know this aspect of him. And so it was while we were hanging out in the car watching people making the most of their day at the beach that we talked about what the independence day means to us. This brought me to comment on Eski's Independence Day ad campaign.

Our "national lemonade" brand has plastered billboards all over the country showing hands of people from explicitly different races and religions doing friendly gestures. All this is fine and I'm sure many of us are already befriending people irrespective of religion or other differences that society has created, except that it feels wrong and quite hypocrite when you actually show people doing it in advertisements. 

Taking my own example, my friends are varied, in a lot of aspects but I'm not about to pronounce myself as an equal opportunity friend. Friendship just happens, it does not happen because of the colour of someone or his/her religion. It just happens because something clicks. It did not occur to me that "Hey Deborah we are so different, let's be friends because I have to befriend someone from your religion." It just happened that Deborah is a foodie and so am I. 

And so I thought why not show real friendship? Friendship as it really is? Sometimes it would be with people from the same religion or caste as you are and sometimes it would be people from completely different religions. Because friendship happens with the people and not with the religions or races. The sooner we overcome the religion, caste and race barrier, the closer we would be to the actual state of equal opportunity...

It's all about certificates.

I hate it, I absolutely despise it, when the only motivation that people have for following a course or training session is the certificate. There's no harm in wanting a certificate. It is an additional garnish to your CV. But that is certainly not all. What about the experience? The knowledge acquired? Your own personal development? The certificate won't prove that you just became more efficient, it's how you apply the knowledge that will do that.

Remember when Gmauritius was going to be held? I'm sure some of you must have heard people asking about certificates. 'Cause it seems that they would not be able to learn much from Google, so they might just have a certificate to prove they were there!

Just last week when some buddies were talking about a training that the HRDC would be offering, some people dared ask about whether we're gonna have a certificate. I'm sure they did not register for the training because we don't know as of yet whether there will really be certificates.

Forget about the certificates dudettes and dudes, make the most of the experiences...

Hope...

Hope is great! It sometimes makes some stuff happen. But not every time, and certainly not for people who sit around wishing for hope to set every situation right. I'm just telling you that sometimes when everyone calls something a loss, hope can bust in and suddenly everything is doing great all over again.

I've never always been a partisan of hope but I've often been a positive person. I'm saying "often" here because sometimes some situations make it difficult to adopt a positive approach. 

Anyway, I like to think that good things come to those who deserve it. Despite being called a cynic by people around me, deep down I can be a hope freak. Just last Sunday when Jevin told me matter-of-factly that our printer would never work again, I told him it would. I told him there's hope and he silently acquiesced, perhaps because he did not want to hurt me. To cut the story short, the printer worked...

Maybe it was bound to work but I feel great to have kept my hopes high and not losing faith in the printer. 

There are several more instances when I did not lose hope and good consequences prevailed; for my academic results, when my dogs got very sick and the list is long...

I might be called a fool for believing in hope but well... I like the little mystical element that hope brings in one's life...

So dudettes and dudes, do you usually keep your hopes high or are you more likely to lose hope in tricky situations?

Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is crap. The sooner people learn this, the better it would be for all of us. And maybe, and I say maybe, in a decade or a few years, if we're lucky enough, everyone will forget about valentines and we'll see the end of that torturing "special" day. And that's coming from someone who's been in a serious relationship for a long time...

There are so many stuff that annoy me to no limit about this day but I'll go with the most annoying ones.

1. The plush toys. 
First, those things are freaky. What kind of psycho would want to sleep with a plump thing that keeps its eyes open and constantly wears a stupid smile? And second, they give me allergies.

2. The fake flowers. 
Fake flowers should be banned. They cause allergies with all the dust and crap that they attract and are horrible to the touch and smell. I wonder why in all those years of technological advancement no one has ever thought of making a fake but realistic flower for Valentine's Day. It's because no one cares. This day is not important. Period.

3. The mushy couples. 
Yeah it's awesome to proudly hang out on Valentine's Day with your fake flower and plush toy, looking like a total idiot who's just got some kind of trophy. Except that in a few weeks the gifts won't mean big deal. You might even forget the name of the person who gave it to you.

But if you really wanna celebrate the day, for an absolutely crazy reason, do it originally and as inconspicuously as possible. For instance, I'll be making him a dessert tomorrow. Crap, it's not inconspicuous anymore! Oh well! I know you don't care. 

Happy "special" day anyway dudettes and dudes...

Babies are over-rated.

I'll never understand some people's obsession with babies. I know babies are so cute that they make your heart melt and bring you so much happiness, but that's only when the baby's not yours or when they're on pictures. It's great to take care of a baby for 5 minutes or 15 minutes maximum when the mom's busy. But it's so much greater when the 15 minutes are over and you can actually sigh and thank god the baby's not yours.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those who would not want to have a baby one of these days. Come to think of it, babies are definitely in my future plans, just like education and a job were. Babies are a necessity, you know, to have a family and to have someone to whom I could narrate my life, just like my mum does with me. I've even thought of their names; I intend to have one called Jade and one called Jake, if ever there's 2 of them. That's to show how much I could want to have kids.

But my point is, people should not be obsessed with babies. They should instead think of the baby stage as the phase where they will be having sleepless nights, mood swings, a bare minimum sexual life and all other complex situations that follow. The only positive point about the baby phase is the pictures of that devilishly cute creature you will be sending to your relatives. People will say that they envy your life as a new mom but you'll know that's utter crap. But since your memory's quite short term and since you love your kid, after 4 or 5 years you will be forgetting all about the baby's tantrum and will concentrate more on telling your kid how cute and undemanding he/she was as a baby. 

Anyway, for me, the best years of child rearing are when the kid's grown enough to use words to communicate with you, that's around 18. Ok, I'm kidding. Let's say that as from 6 they would start to express themselves clearly and would start going to school so they could make you proud of all the efforts you've put in to make them become who they are. 

On the hard side, I know I'll be a good mom. That's cause I'll be applying HR principles to the rearing of my children. You know, motivation theories, leadership styles, commitment to the organisation (family in this case), remuneration and rewards, everyone of those would play a crucial role. You gotta use your education one of these days.

On the soft side, I'll be the caring and sometimes overprotective mom who'll be baking pies and cookies and spending some awesome time with the kids.

And so, dudettes and dudes, I can wait to have kids of my own in some years but I'm not naive enough to happily look forward to the pre-school phase.

And money ruins it all...

Hey dudettes and dudes! So it's the festive period of Maha Shivaratree yet again and on Sunday I went to Grand Bassin. Don't you feel like this festival comes a bit too often? I do! And so, I wore a churidar just to blend into the crowd at Grand Bassin but I found that it was not enough. It seems that some women are fond of wearing make-up while praying in the rain. But I'm not judging. Who am I to judge, anyway? I'm just that chick who likes to boast about not having to wear make-up to look good (yup I said it).

So anyway, while my father was praying and donating money to anyone who was asking for it, Jev and I were laughing at people while at the same time looking for his parents. It was one hell of a trip to Grand Bassin, quite unusual but I'd for once say that it was worth it. 

So if you're planning to take a trip to Grand Bassin you should be considering:

• Bringing along any protection from the rain that you own, umbrellas, raincoats, nothing would be too much.
• Laying your hand on bael leaves or you'll have to pay for it. (Yeah religion is a business, especially during this time of the year).
• Having a decent amount of cash in hand, especially if you're of the soft-hearted type since you'll be having at least 25 donation requests from the moment that you leave your vehicle to the time that you get back to it. 

But all in all, and even though I tend to sound sceptical, I like the spirit of this festival. The pilgrimage, the long hours of prayer, the fasting and the colours. I just wished that people would not spoil it by trying to make money out of it. Is that too much to ask for?

That hand in the sky

Freaky, huh?

In February I will be...

February has got to be the month baby! I know I tend to be optimistic for almost every month of every damned year but this time dudettes and dudes, I mean it. I plan to have some awful fun in February even with the various non-fun stuff (in the form of tests and assignments to submit) that will occur this month. 

So in February I plan to:

1. Throw a beach party with my buddies, we've got some stuff to celebrate together.

2. Have a bad-ass valentine's day with Jev and that won't include romantic craps. But I hope that it includes some chocolates.

3. Celebrate my birthday. Yeah I'll be filling you guys to the brim with this. It's gotta be the first time in years that I'm so excited about a birthday. 


4. Change my template totally as in going for a completely new one after sticking with this new one for 3 years.

And in the evening... motherfucker.

Today is one of the rare Saturdays where I'll be totally free. No damn classes to attend thanks to the public holiday. Along with my sister, Jev and I took Missy, the new puppy, to the vet. She is now two and a half months old and her next visit is due in one month. We then took Missy to Super U, Grand Bay where she enjoyed being the centre of attention of passer-bys who, unsurprisingly, found her totally cute.

I then lunched (at 4 p.m!) and the meal consisted of the traditional Cavadee food. That was deliciously spicy! 

Tonight Jev and I are going to see Florence Foresti's one-women show, which goes by the name of Motherfucker (yup!) at Pailles. I love that woman and I'm totally looking forward to the great laugh. The show is supposed to consist of short plays which humorously depict the situation of mothers. I just can't wait to see that. 

It's almost 6 pm and I gotta rush and get ready... Wooh! 

Picture source: www.florenceforesti.com

It's hard to be a couch potato

Oh crap! This had to happen just on my day off! I had decided to indulge into some couch-potato-ing today and just when I turned the TV on, the screen was all black except for a little red cube. It seems that MC Vision is having a generalised technical issue since 11 pm last night, as per what the customer care person told me. The problem will be solved by mid-day but I know the chances of that happening are very loose.

So I'm gonna dump my couch-potato plans and focus on revising instead, which was plan B. That's an evil plan concocted by the universe to prevent me from being a lazy ass, I'm damn sure!

Anyway I'm off to dig out my notes dudettes and dudes. I'll leave you guys with this song, What It Is by Mark Knopfler. This song has got to be my crush of this month.

It's all about cakes

And so days go by... I'm caught up with several non-fun hassles that come my way. But there is one gleaming, shining event I'm looking forward to and that is my birthday. It's not the prospect of growing older that's exhilarating me, it's rather the idea of being able to (at last!) eat a birthday cake.

Call me a control freak, but I like to plan my birthday party myself. I don't really rely on surprises for that event. And I like to assign a theme to my birthdays. In 2007 it was pink and green, in 2008 it was orange, in 2009 it was Maha Shivaratree (yup!) and this year it's gonna be a white birthday!

I'm having a crush on white parties because they're usually very simple and very very elegant.

For the birthday cake I'm thinking of making something like these:

So elegant, aren't they? I'd even say sexy! Ooh! I just can't wait to bake that cake!


Image sources: Country Living

Tagged

You gotta be kidding me! I just spent about 15 minutes deleting emails from people who've got nothing better to do on a Saturday save for tagging photos on Facebook and commenting on them.

I really don't mind being tagged in a picture in which I am really present (read: a picture of me attending an event or something like that) but it really ruins the whole concept of tagging pictures when some people decide to associate your name with random cartoons or flowers or anything else that sounds like fun to them.

What bothers me more is when the thing or cartoon character to which my name is associated, represents everything that I am not. Today I got tagged as Waylon Smithers in a Simpsons' cartoon character picture. I don't know whether I'm missing something obvious about myself, but as much as I tried I really could not identify myself to Smithers (one of Marge's sisters would have been great!).

As a retaliation, I did the mildly rebellious act of "untagging" myself from the photos. At the very least I won't be receiving those new comments notification emails.

In case you're wondering, I'm not turning off the feature about allowing people to tag me in pictures because I happen to be tagged regularly for real events. It would be quite rude to turn that off.

2010 and plans...

Hey dudettes and dudes! How are things doing? Stuff are going on great around me. Of course, I've had too much food in the past 2 weeks of celebration but I'm not gonna complain, I've enjoyed each and every meal!

Today is my mum's birthday, on the 2nd of Jan it was my dad's. After today's celebration, I've decided to press the pause button on the mirth and merriment. Gotta reserve some for the rest of the year.

Ah the rest of the year! It sure announces itself as being hectic and stressful but I'm not flinching. No resolutions taken this year, I've only got plans... Plans function better than resolutions if you ask me. They are more realistic and so I'm off to plan my... plans!

Take care dudettes and dudes and have a wonderful 2010!