Been as Busy as a Bee

Since the last post, I have been

1. Regularly doing a lot of laundry, folding the washed clothes properly and also ironing and all of these take up atleast 3 to 3.5 hours of my weekend time.

2. Talking very very very regularly (almost every other day) to my mom, dad, brother, sister. Wishing them for Diwali and digesting all the latest family gossip. hehehehe.

3. Travelling between San Diego and Dallas in lousy flights and spending 2 (sometimes as much as 3) hours between connecting flights in Denver, doing nothing but ogle at pretty women and observe playful kids at the aircraft boarding gates. (Almost forgot to mention 5 of shots of Cognac on the rocks to get a little tipsy high)

4. Going around in Dallas from one lab in the west to another in the east for the purpose of testing the new Motorola phones to see if they work properly with other equipment manufacturers. The result - astounding as it seems is true - Motorola phones do work. :-))))

5. Driving on the accident prone and notoriously infamous highway I-635 and trying to drive safe amongst the whacky drivers with no driving sense and no lane discipline and at the same time trying to avoid debris strewn in the middle of the highway from a recently happened accident.

6. Trying to avoid tail-gating drivers and in the process missing the Freeway exit which resulted in me having to take a 35 mile detour and drive at a lousy 20 mile per hour speed through downtown Dallas on the crazy I-35 E going North when I was already running late for the lab appointment.

7. Doing a lot of perfume shopping for my friends and also for myself. Its unbelivable the price you pay for authentic (or atleast seemingly authentic) perfumes in the Mexican market at Harry Hines Blvd. More astonishing than that is to find an Indian owning the perfume shop and employing Mexicans in his shop to sell perfumes in a Mexican market. WOW!! BTW...FYI...I got a Carolina Herrera and it smells fantastic.

8. Finishing off my work in Dallas one day earlier and taking a one day break, meeting up with friends, but the folks at work thinking that I'm working. Wow! that was fun.

9. Waking up at 01:00 pm in the noon on a working day and meeting friends, doing shopping for friend's wife on her birthday, celebrating the birthday at night and eating lumps of chocolate cake.

10. Meeting up with loooooooooooong lost friends. Friends with whom I haven't been in touch with nearly 6-8 years, whom I last saw on the last day of engineering, who were dating each other during those years and who've now married and settled here in the US.

11. Sleeping flat on the two adjacent seats on the flight from Denver to Colorado when all the other seats in the plane were occupied. The only two that were not occupied were the ones next to me. Gosh! Even I can be lucky at times. :-)))

12. Cooking the most awesome, mind-blowing fantastic Dal, made completely in ghee, with just the perfect amount of spices, the closest I've gotten to Mom's out of this world Dal experience.

13. Keeping track of all deals available, in the lead upto and during thanksgiving and literally browsing sites like deals2buy.com, dealnews.com, techbargains.com and gottadeal.com once every 2 hours to check out the available offers. Wow, this is Internet Window Shopping. :-)))))

14. Talking to my dear friends in Charlotte and Baltimore and making an impromptu plan to go and see them for the Thanksgiving weekend. The one whom you know as TK, is in Baltimore and he's gonna do some shopping before his marriage in April. Who knows maybe he might throw us friends a bachelor's party. :-))

AND FINALLY....

15. Very very very very lazy in updating this blog. This post contrived over a very very long span of nearly 14 days and each point written on a different day. (Hey I should try it this out once.) Naah...I'm just kidding, I wrote this post in two days albeit the gap between the two days was more close to 10.

Rants About Roomies

A couple of weeks back, I shifted apartments. I had to. Because the lease in my earlier apartment was getting over. I had 3 other roomies in that apartment. Lets call them Lazy-Good-For-Nothing-Gult (LGFNG), Confused-Secretive-Faithless-Mind (CSFM) and Style-Guy-Chicken-Cook (SGCK).

It all started back in April when I shifted from Hot-and-Humid Florida to Sunny-and-Pleasant California. I hunted and found a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment and which was also within 15 minute walking distance from my workplace. I knew CSFM and SGCK from much before - they had come to Florida at different times during my year and a half stay there. Of course CSFM was not so confused, not so secretive and not so faithless at that time. He seemed a decent enough guy. SGCK used to work in my project and I came to know him during his stay in Florida and we became good friends. The 3rd guy LGFNG, I had never known before.

So when our assignment here started, I knew that CSFM and SGCK would be staying with me and SGCK suggested that LGFNG stay with us. I agreed to it since the apartment would be rather expensive for just 3 people. As soon as I got the "possession" of the apartment, I bought all the necessary stuff. The basic necessities in the kitchen namely - toaster, microwave, blender, plates, glasses, bowls, spoons, a kitchen utensil set. Lights for each room, iron-board and iron, hangers to hang clothes, waste bin for kitchen and both washrooms, internet connection, rental washer and dryer. Just about everything was setup even before the other guys moved in. (On a completely different note - now I got a first hand experience of how to setup a new home and its gonna prove extremely helpful in setting up my new house in Mumbai).

During the first week it was just SGCK and I and between the two of us, we did cooking, cleaning, preparing lunch boxes, etc very smoothly. Soon CSFM and LGFNG joined us. And it turned out that I was the only vegetarian in the house. Fortunately or unfortunately, I've always got non-vegetarians as my roomies and I've had no problems in adjusting with them. But I always make one thing clear, I wouldn't be cleaning any dishes in which any non-veg stuff was cooked. And I think its a reasonable expectation from my side since I'm a complete veggie.

I love cooking and so does SGCK and we used to literally do everything between us, chopping, cooking and cleaning. We used to never expect that anyone would help us. So when we started to stay together, I had made it clear that SGCK and I would be doing the cooking and LGFNG himself said that he would voluntarily do the dishes, but he never ever lived up to his word. Sometimes CSFM would help in cutting and cleaning without us having to tell him, but LGFNG would NEVER EVER come to help us in our cooking or cleaning on his own. Each time we come home from work late, the dishes would lie in the kitchen sink and although LGFNG would have come home much earlier than us, he wouldn't have cleaned the dishes at all. Many-a-times SGCK would just clean the dishes and still do the cooking but I CANNOT STAND irresponsible people. So I always used to make it a point to MAKE LGFNG DO the dishes.

I had also mentioned very clearly - right at the beginning - that the cost of ALL food stuff would be divided equally between all the roomies and everyone agreed to it at that time. Nobody objected to my suggestion. Now, a month or so had passed from that day and I sat down to do the monthly expenses. Apart from the rent, water, electricity, gas and trash bills, I also included the cost for setting up the house in my calculations and thus initially, the per head liability came out to be slightly high. Suddenly, LGFNG had problem with the high liability. He started saying that we should now be careful in spending and should not buy any non-essential stuff because its a huge waste of money...etc.

I freaking HATE this attitude. As if whatever I did to setup the house was a WASTE. As if I would go on buying a new microwave each month until the lease of our apartment expires. Bloody ignorant asshole!! People like LGFNG DONOT APPRECIATE the value of things because they get everything in front of them served readymade on a Silver platter and then they go mud-slinging other people who've taken efforts to set-up everything properly. Anyways, I clarified that such expenses are just one-time expenses and the next month's liability would not be so much. I thought the differences would end at that, but I was SO VERY wrong.

Soon the complaints spread on to the grocery being brought for the house. LGFNG and CSFM started to argue that they do not eat a lot of stuff that we get for groceries and hence wanted to opt out of some of the grocery items. When in Florida I'd been living in an environment where the cost of ALL the house grocery items was shared between the roomies, irrespective of who ate what and who liked what.

So coming from that kind of an environment, this was nothing short of SHOCKING. The two niggardly roomies started to complain about food stuff being brought but not eaten by them. In fact one asshole (read - LGFNG) even went to the extent of saying that although he ate chips and cornflakes, the quantity consumed by him was far less than the quantity consumed by two of us (SGCK and I). This had me fuming. I completely lost it. The prick does not help even one bit when it comes to cleaning and cooking and washing the dishes and freaking complains about quantity of food being eaten by us. Dickhead!

Regular readers of this blog might know that I had been to Kansas City some months back. So, just before I left for Kansas City, I did some shopping for the house and since during that time, the pressure at work was quite high, I hadnt done the calculation. Now, 2 and a half months later when I came back, I did the calculation and when I asked the roomies to share, there was a HUGE uproar from LGFNG and CSFM. As if I've fabricated the bills and I'm out to steal their money. Freaking cheapos smellier than cow shit had no bloody faith in their roomie who pays off the rent, electricity, water and trash bills without even flinching an eyebrow and doesnt even ask them to pay until the end of the month.

Sometime last year I had bought an external DVD writer and since I had never even tested it, I opened it one day and burnt a DVD just to check if everything was alright. CSFM saw this and asked me whether he can use it for a day to copy some stuff. I willingly gave it to him and he returned it to me once his work was done. Then when I was in Kansas City, CSFM, without informing me took the DVD writer and was using it all the time. Even when I came back from Kansas City, CSFM didnt ever inform me that he was using the DVD writer. 3-4 weeks back a friend of mine was supposed to go back to Mumbai and I decided to give the DVD writer to her so that my brother (who has been pestering me for it for quite a while) can use the DVD writer.

I searched for it at the usual place where it was supposed to have been there, but it wasnt there. I was completely flummoxed. I asked SGCK and he didnt know where it was. Then suddenly I saw this writer in CSFM's room and instantly realized that it was mine. I called up CSFM and asked him about it and he grinned sheepishly and said that he was using it all the time. I cannot understand how people can do such childish crazy things. Where is the Maturity???

I have never ever used other people's stuff, be it their laptops, portable hard drives, DVD writers, books, pens, or any trivial or non-trivial thing. I might have used it just once or so and still I make it a point to ask their permission and I also make it a point to use it for the shortest possible time and return it in the exact same condition it was, when I'd borrowed it. If I ever think that I would be needing something more often than not, I'd immediately go and buy it instead of borrowing it. I cant understand why other people cannot behave in the same manner. Am I asking too much??? I honestly dont think so. Finally, I was able to send the DVD writer along with my friend to Mumbai and thank god nothing went wrong when it was being used by CSFM.

Of all the time that I have stayed with roomies, this time was the toughest. Honestly, I've never seen a more CHURLISH attitude from anyone. Both LGFNG and CSFM were very cheap and rude and had absolutely no regard for other two of us. Thank god a zillion times that the ordeal is now over and I have resolved now to NEVER EVER stay together with LGFNG and CSFM even if it means that I've to stay alone and spend a fortune. Atleast I'll have my peace of mind and wouldnt be tearing my hair off in trying to resolve silly petty issues and giving explanations for each of my actions.