everyone has their own pick-me-up when going through a dull phase... i seem to get mine my from photos :)  - taking photos, to be precise...

i like it especially when something seemingly ordinary or mundane turns out beautiful when captured on lens...


when i saw these oranges a few days back sitting on the dining table, i couldnt resist fiddling with the camera and taking pictures of them... these are california clementines, which are at the peak of season now, and seen stacked up in boxloads in all the stores here... they have a lovely orange glow on their skin, making them glossy and photogenic :)

(clicking on the pictures opens them up bigger, and i love blogger for the black background - makes them look all the more, umm... ,may i say, classier ... :) )

weekend 'mugging' !!

i recently got a promotion for a free mug from shutterfly, and being the mug'o'maniac that i am, couldnt help jumping on the chance... !

instead of choosing something from my collection of routine photos (the vast majority in my archives seem to  be flowers, trees and seashores for whatever reason) , i decided to go a little off the beaten track... since am crazy about almost all things vintage, i chose to use vintage ads of beverages from old magazines... i chose pictures of ads of bournvita, ovaltine, and a brooke bond french roast coffee... i did a little cropping and adjusting of the photos, uploaded them and ordered them to be printed on my free mug (for which shipping has to be paid, of course)...

the bournvita and ovaltine ads come from the tamil magazine 'ananda vikatan', dating somewhere between 1948-1952... and the coffee ad seems to be comparatively a bit more 'recent', dating somewhere around 1961-62, from 'kumudam'...

interesting to see that there is a hyphen between the 'bourn' and the 'vita' :)

both the bournvita and ovaltine brands survive to this day... (as do the tamil magazines vikatan and kumudam, though their substance and form today have undergone vast changes... )

i am not sure sure of the french coffee though, if brooke bond still retains the brand in any country...

the earlier post shows a little sneak peek of the mug from shutterfly (and for which i am unabashedly hoping for another promo in return :) ) , and i'll hopefully post more pics of how it has turned out once i lay my hands on it...

the pics below are of how it looks up close...

Mug

Blank Project Collage Mug

Unique party invitations and announcements by Shutterfly.

View the entire collection of cards.

i could have kicked myself for not knowing this till now - when you take a screenshot while having picasa open, it automatically saves it for you. go to picasa and just crop or do any edit you want. simple. and all this while i have been pasting them onto ms-paint, saving them as jpeg and then crop....

found it out quite by accident, when i was taking some screenshots a few days back and had left picasa open unintentionally - it popped up a message immediately saying the screenshot had been saved, and was so surprised to see it !

after a long long gap i am baking oatmeal cookies today... as i type this the house is filled with the sweet aroma of the batch that has just come out of the oven and is cooling off...

try as you may, its just impossible to take your mind off some things... or take some things off your mind. i suppose the warmth of a freshly baked oatmeal cookie is one of those. hmmm.

brewing a storm in my tea cup...

i have a fetish for coffee mugs... given a choice, i'd probably buy a dedicated china cabinet and fill it up with mugs that catch my fancy.
(btw, why is that its almost always 'coffee'mugs and 'tea'cups... ?? i have never had a drop of coffee so far in life, despite my love of mugs !)

coming to the point of this post, over the past few days, i've developed an irrational craving to get some small tea cups (dont ask me why - by already saying its irrational, i've absolved myself of the need to give any explanation) ... maybe some little floral designs, or maybe something in blue china ... the mugs that i do have now are all the typically huge 11oz ones...

since i can never bring myself to drink 11oz( which is more than 300ml) of tea (or any other beverage) at a given time, i just fill my mugs to about half, or maybe a little more sometimes.... i think i suddenly want the cute,smaller cups so that i can see them brimming to the full...

i am putting the brakes on my impulsive cravings, however, as my reluctance to accumulate stuff at this point overpowers my desire for teacups, buttercups, or anything else... having hauled suitcases back and forth so many times  across the oceans in these past few years, my primary concern when buying something is the 'packability' of it :)

the amount of bubble wrap, tape, other 'packing and stuffing' supplies i've gone through in these years would have been enough to embalm an extra-large mummy...

so am just sitting tight for now, but someday i just want to be at that point where i know i am 'home' for good... and i can feel free to give myself some retail therapy without worrying about too many things... till then, well, siggghhhhh.....

life is like a puzzle...

found this piece of pine bark, which looked like a jigsaw puzzle, on a trip a few weekends ago... the place was full of pine trees, up on a snowy (in southern california, in the middle of a desert, in april ! yes !) mountain, and so there were pieces of bark, pinecones, etc strewn all over the place...

the pieces of bark seemed to reaffirm my take on life.... life is like a jigsaw puzzle - every piece seems weird by itself, but you just keep going in the hope that you'll finally see the full picture someday...

and yeah, on a totally unrelated note, found this family of snow-people someone had made... thought it looked cute... (ok, maybe it looks creepy too, but i thought it was cute anyway :) )

spicy tales...

there have been some itsy bitsy stuff which i've been wanting to post for sometime now... and kept postponing indefinitely for no good reason other than, well, a general state of inertia...


well, sometime back i saw this in one of the grocery stores... not an indian store, but a regular american one.... so was (understandably !) quite excited on seeing this in the spices aisle...

'madras curry powder' - just the name got me all excited, and obviously i had to take a closer look at the box...  despite all the years of living in madras, i have hardly seen a kitchen in madras use a standard 'readymade' powder called madras curry powder... this one though seems to be a mixture of most spices used in indian cooking, like cumin, coriander, fenugreek, fennel, pepper, chillies, etc etc...


 obviously i didnt buy the box, since, like every other indian kitchen, i have and use almost all the individual ingredients listed there in different combinations and amounts in different dishes.... but it still felt strangely nice seeing that in a place where you least expect it...

and i also realised i am no good at taking pictures with a mobile camera :) i fumbled with it so much and my hands were all still cold from the air-curtain in the veggies section, and i ended up with very shaky pics !