Early Morning Thoughts

• I find it amusing that my last post was so depressing that I didn't even get one comment on it. Still no word on Jill, by the way.
• It's 7 in the morning, and I've been at work for a half hour already. Most people don't start filtering in till 8, so I don't have a lot of conversations till then. Does talking to yourself count?
• Here are the two pieces of software I stare at most of the day. Don't they look important and exciting? :-)

• Ok. Not as exciting as pictures of Priya. I saw some new ones in the digital camera last night, but forgot to upload them. So stay tuned.
• Priya is definitely developing a very willful side. She also knows when something must not be done. This comes out most often with pulling out books from bookshelves, or playing with cables in electrical sockets. Before reaching for them, she will look back and see if we are watching. When we say "No", she will hesitate, and then reach out anyway. Tish does a good job of disciplining her by flicking on her fingers and saying "No". One of the funniest things is when Priya is almost done eating, and she tries to tear her bib off. She does it once, you say no. She does it again, you say no with a flick. Then the third time, her hand starts to move towards the bib. You pre-empt it and say no - she then just lightly touches the bib and starts to stroke it - pretending she never meant to yank on it anyway. It's hilarious when you actually see it happen.
• I have been asked to make a presentation at our worldwide sales meeting in Germany in May. I guess that means I'm off to Germany again for a week. Let me know if you want to see the presentation when it's done. Haha.
  

It is Painful

I don't know how many of you are following the fate of Jill Carroll, the kidnapped freelance journalist in Iraq, who mainly worked for the Christian Science Monitor. I am personally feeling very anguished. For some reason I feel a strange connection,and I'm trying to figure out why I feel so torn. If I explore my thoughts, then I think the main reason is the fear I get when extrapolating Priya's life. I mean, as parents you try to raise your daughter with the idea that nothing is impossible for her. That whatever goal she sets her eyes on, she can achieve it. If you don't give that sense of expectation, then you may as well raise her to believe that at 17 she will be given off in marriage to raise children for the rest of her life. Not that there is anything wrong in it, but you know what I mean. So here's Jill Carroll - trying to be a world-class journalist in the middle of a conflict with no rules. A woman in a world where women are considered "properties". Doing what she wanted to - set her heart to. Surviving in a mans world. Kidnapped at gunpoint by ruthless men who shot dead her interpreter. Used as a pawn in a senseless war. That land is soaked in blood, and it's thirst is not quenched. With all my heart I hope she is able to go free with her life. This is one death I won't be able to forget too easily.

Random Friday Thoughts

• So I guess I'm talking in my sleep again - last night I was encouraging Priya to walk towards me. I go through periods where I talk a lot in my sleep. You can even ask me questions and I will answer back. Tish hates it when I talk in Hindi though - then she can never figure out what I am talking about.
• So does eHarmony really work? I've been encouraging a friend of mine recently to sign up, but I'm skeptical of my own advise. I mean sure - there are lots and lots of desperate guys out there (I should know... hehe). But, are there as many desperate women? 'Cause then the cool guys will still get the girl, while us nerds get left behind - so to speak. Maybe desperate is not the right word either... I don't know.. What's a good word for it?
• I wonder how much the child tax credit is? This will be the first time that I will be filing taxes with a dependant child, and I'm curious as to the effect on my tax liability. By the way, I have filed taxes through eSmartTax for the last couple of years. This year, if you file before 2/15/06, the federal eFile is free. What a deal. Actually, every year I look for ways to eFile for free.
• Tax time always makes me think of how much we depend on money. For almost the entire month of January I go around with Abba humming "Money, money, money.. Always sunny.. In the rich mans world".
• I also realize how God has blessed us incredibly - I am undeserving of it all.
  

Some pictures

I don't know how many of you check out the Yahoo! picture page consistently, so for your viewing pleasure, here are some pictures of Priya.

The last one is of us at my office holiday party held in January (well, it's cheaper that way). It's nice to get out once in a while!

300 caps? Wow!

On January 18th, Kristine Lilly became the first person (that means male or female) to play in 300 international games in soccer (representing the US). She did it in style - she had a goal and an assist. This number is ridiculously insane. To put in perspective, the record for men's appearances is 173. Kristine started playing when she was 16, and now at 35 is still going strong.

Yay for women's sports.

An expensive toy?

I have to admit it - I am a gadget freak. I'm not as bad as I used to be. I think it's because our discretionary income has gone down with Tish not working, so I restrain myself more. Otherwise, I'd be the poster child of someone having anything that requires batteries to run.

So what happened was that we went to Michigan over the weekend and I got a couple of belated Christmas gifts - cash. It was enough that I was tempted towards the one thing I'd been eyeing, but not considering. Until now. Yep. Within two hours of my having cash in my pocket, I was at Best Buy getting the 5th generation iPod - the 30GB video one. I already have a 1GB MP3 player, so the only reason I was wanting this thing was for the videos.

So I've had it now for a few days, and I have to say it's got some great points, and some not so great points. Memory is virtually limitless - I downloaded a couple of DVDs to it, and they were about 600MB each. The biggest problem is battery life. When playing MP3s, it's no issue - 10 hours or so. But playing video... So far I'm seeing that it's no better than 45-50 minutes before it needs a charge.

As a toy, it's pretty cool. I just don't know if I should keep it. Any votes?

Falling for "chain" blogs

Were you the kind of person that believed if you passed on an email to a million other people within 2 seconds of getting it, your true love would kiss you? Or that someone was dying of horrible skin disease and Microsoft had pledged to pay for their cure if they could get a zillion emails going around the world so that they could track them? You know what I mean. If you were, you probably stopped copying me a long time ago, because most "chain" things died with me.

So now Michelle 'tags' me in her blog, and I have to write five random things about me. On top of that, I believe the idea is to send this to other people so that they also do the same. OK. I've given you a fair warning - this was something Michelle didn't do. If you don't want to find your name at the bottom of this list, click away and come back next week when there's another entry. Don't tell me later that I didn't warn you. Hehe.

OK. Five random things about me. By the way, 10 points each if you knew this about me. The person with the most points gets a surprise gift!

1. My middle name is "Harold" after my dearly departed grandfather.
2. I am a rocket scientist - though I've never even been close to a rocket.
3. In high school, I came third in every event I would took part in: 200m, 400m, long jump, high jump.
4. I have the genes (which not every one has) to both metabolize white asparagus, and to smell the after-effects of it. Not very pleasant, I can assure you. Lucky you if you don't have the smelling gene.
5. I was a week away from joining the merchant marines as a deck cadet, and spending the rest of my life on a ship. God had other plans. He wanted to make me a rocketless rocket scientist.

Ok. Now it's my turn. I hereby tag Lisa, Josh, Rebecca, and Alicia.

Time passes unequally

One thing that I think of often is how 2000 was a defining year for the apparent motion of time. I mean, it took forever for 2000 to get there. I remember thinking in the mid-90s how exciting it would be to use dates like '00 or '02 and so on. Then starting in 1998 the whole Y2K scare started. The following two years seemed soooo long with all the predictions of world chaos. Then we breathlessly waited at 11:59p on 12/31/1999. Two minutes later, the apparent motion of time accelerated. We are six years past 2000! I find it unbelievable. I mean, so much has happened in between. But still - to me it seems like these six years sped by way more quickly this side of the millenium.

What I don't have any idea on is whether this is only apparent to me (having also crossed my 30th birthday in these last six years). Or do some others also share this strange phenomena of physics?

Fatherhood emotions

It is a commonly known psychological fact that one of the hardest persons to know is oneself. Why do you think self-help and self-discovery books are so popular. If we can all find the buddha in ourselves, we'd be much better off... Etc, etc, etc. Where I was going with this was an observation I have made about myself. I am realizing that with the birth of Priya, I am getting more and more 'emotional'. That, in the sense, that I hit emotional highs and lows more quickly, and feelings are more sharply defined. Women, are probably more used to feeling this way, but to me it is a strange new way of being. Now I don't know if I was always like this, but never realized it, or if this is something new. Aha... now the opening of this paragraph makes sense. :-)

My latest weepy moment was while watching King Kong. For crying out loud... As I was going to complete that sentence, I was struck by the irony of it. Anyway. For crying out loud, falling apes from tall buildings should not normally cause emotional swellings in me. Maybe it was the background score, maybe it was felt loneliness of both the characters (wait.. can an ape be a "character"?), or whatever... But throughout the movie I was feeling tuggings on my heartstrings.

So last day of 2005. I feel obliged to summarize it. Does "a lot happened" do an adequate job? The biggest event of all, of course, was the birth of Priya. Most others are corollaries of that. There, that should do it.

Oh. I had to show this picture. Here's Priya surrounded by Christmas gifts. Most of those are actually hers. Can we say doting grandparents? :-)

I want world peace

Ok. That would be nice, but I had nothing else that came up as a title. This is one of those posts where there are no pressing thoughts on my mind. I had taken three weeks of vacation time when Priya was born, so I ran out of time at the end of the year. I had to come into work today, and I am one of five people in the entire building. I can feel illness coming on me, so I will take tomorrow as a sick day, and Thursday and Friday are company holidays. So I just have to get through today.

It was a great first Christmas with Priya. She got lots of clothes and lots of toys. I suspect as she grows older, her preference may skew towards lots of clothes, but there should be an intermediate step of lots of dolls, and other assorted mini-human figurines.

My two favorite gifts were a nice leather jacket from my in-laws, and a DC-to-AC inverter from Tish. This little gadget plugs into a car power outlet, and you can plug any AC device on the other end (upto 95W). I wanted one because I often run out of battery power on long airplane rides, and American has 12V power outlets under their seats. Very nifty little thing.


Oh, and we bought a Dyson vacuum cleaner a few days ago from Amazon. The one we had that we got as a wedding shower gift was getting to be so loud that we were violating village noise ordinances. For those who are interested, I can post later on how the Dyson shapes up given all its hype.

UPDATE ON DYSON

WOW! That's the only word that can describe this machine. You would imagine we never vacuumed our house in all these years. The first test run of the Dyson was in Priya's room. The carpet is less than a year old and we try to keep it pretty clean - no shoes, etc. It's also vacuumed regularly. But when the Dyson had a go at it, the stuff that got collected was just amazing - and pretty disgusting. I can't believe Priya was crawling around in all that filth. So, big thumbs up! By the way, we're not that hoity-toity. This $460 vacuum was purchased refurbished from Amazon for about half that price. If this thing lasts for a few years and keeps performing like it did, it will be well worth that price.

It's tough, and some won't make it

Yesterday we saw March of the Penguins. OK. The story goes like this: The penguins start a 70 mile journey to their breeding grounds - some don't survive the journey. They reach the grounds, and find partners. The females lay an egg. These eggs are then transferred to the males. During this process, some eggs don't make it. Then the males hang out for a few months, while the females head back to the ocean to feed. While the females are feeding, some females will be eaten by predators and won't make it back. Meanwhile, the males are in the middle of a brutal winter. As it turns out, some won't survive winter. The eggs hatch, and the chicks appear. Some chicks are caught out in the cold, and yup - don't survive. Of the ones that make it, some will get picked off by gulls.

Can you detect a familar pattern? I'm not kidding. After the third "some won't make it moment" we were predicting the parts in the script when the next one would come. It's an interesting movie in the sense it inspires awe in God's creations, and thankfulness that he decided to give us a little more purpose for our lives.

From a movies perspective, this wasn't a very good weekend. There wasn't much in the store that we hadn't seen. The other movie we saw was "40-Year-Old Virgin". What a complete waste of time. The reason this guy hadn't seen any action wasn't because of any personal choices - but because he was a complete idiot. I mean the classic village idiot kind.

Anyone seen any good movies lately?

More commentary on death

I always go through internal queasiness whenever there is a high-profile death penalty case. I guess not having very solid opinions on the death penalty generates that uneasiness. If I were the victim of a heinous crime, I would probably think differently, but looking at it from the outside, it's hard for me to imagine how justice works from a supernatural perspective. I guess I understand in my head the idea of there being consequences to action, etc. But do those consequences lead to the final act of taking life? If we were all sinners deserving the full wrath of God, but he relented from not pouring out his wrath so that we could actually discover grace, and so be saved, should not that same principle apply for human justice? After all, our deserving the wrath of God is based on divine justice. I don't know. It's like the old movie line: God will judge what you have done; my job is just to make sure you meet him soon. This concept of non-grace leads to very a-theistic thinking. If God, and the people who follow him, can't give grace, then I want to have nothing to do with him or his people... Stuff like that. Remember the poem that Timothy McVeigh left as his last words? I was deeply affected by the sheer arrogance in it - man raising his fist to heaven and saying I don't need you. Here... I'll quote it:

Invictus
(William Ernest Henley. 1849-–1903)

OUT of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

See what I mean? When you think there is only you, then it's a pretty depressing life. I'm not actually sure where I am going with this. I guess I'm just trying to figure out in my own mind how justice works, and how it relates to mercy and grace.

Commute from Hell

OK. So this is my commute every day. It's a little over 60 miles each way. I know. Crazy, right? But most days it's not bad. I go in most days in a vanpool, so the driving is shared, and it's not as stressful. Along with the fact that I travel quite a bit (and so am not in the office), I have managed to survive the commutes.

Then came along, December 8, 2005. The first big snow storm of the season. 40 of the 60 mile expressway is under construction. I left office at 3:30p. Want to guess how long it took me to get home? Go on. Don't read further, but think of a number. 5 hours? Nope. 7 hours? Nope. 8 hours? Nope. 9 hours? Yeap. Can you believe it? Nine hours! I would be hopping mad if I didn't think this was a story out of some parallel universe. It beats the one time a friend of mine and I took six hours driving around the Peripherique in Paris trying to find our hotel. Boy, that's almost a story worth telling. But back to this commute. Here I was just trying to get home. There are really no good explanations why it took so long. No accidents, no spin-outs... Just people driving 5 miles/hour. If it wasn't so cold, it might have made a nice walk home. The things we do to put food on the table...

The Sens in all their glory

Our first official family pic








OK check this out. Any family resemblances? :-)

Parting here and gone

We had such a good time with my family. Parting was very difficult, but that's how it goes. Here are some pictures from the week.

Priya Getting Dedicated


Four Generations



Priya with mom, dad, brother, and aunt


Priya with grandma

Sad parting coming up

My parents and my brother have been visiting with us this last week. This is the first time that they got to see Priya. Grandma and Priya are now getting along famously. I think it will be a very difficult parting.

I have enjoyed catching up with my brother. It's been a lot of fun talking about the old days and all the shared memories.

This past Sunday we also dedicated Priya. She did pretty good being up on stage - after all, she's a Sen! We were very touched by the number of people that joined us. It was a great testimony to both Tish's family and mine. We didn't get any pictures, but I'll try to get some captures off the video.

Babies are not meant to be eaten

Tish was at Babies 'R Us this afternoon returning a car seat. As she was talking to the lady behind the counter, she heard Priya scream. Looking down quickly, she saw a two year old with Priya's hand in her mouth biting down on Priya's fingers. There were four teeth marks on her middle finger, and the kid had broken skin. Blood was coming out. Poor Priya was screaming in pain and, probably more so, in shock. The mom of the girl seemed to be a teenage mom who acted like she could care less. Just thinking about it makes my blood start to boil.

In other news, I heard back from the doctor's office today regarding my heart scan. They give you a "score" based on how bad the blockage is. The score ranges from 0 (no blockage) to 400 (don't bother coming in - we are arranging for your funeral). Soooooo... four years of high cholesterol numbers.. and my score turns out to be... 0. This was the miracle I was hoping for! That makes me feel so blessed - now I just gotta get my numbers down. But at least I don't have to worry that I'm gonna drop dead any day. God is good.

Boys like notes too

I am currently reading "She Calls Me Daddy" which I would recommend to any father with a daughter. I just finished a part where Wolgemuth talks about how it's so great to write out little notes for your girl (from either mom or dad), and leave 'em in places for her to find, or pack 'em away in lunch boxes, for example. He then goes on to say that you should never send notes for little boys. He doesn't explain why, but says, trust me on this - don't send notes for boys. Hmmm... does anyone know why he is saying that? The only obvious thing that jumps out to me is that boys will get teased. Maybe I'm missing something.

Anyway, why did I think of this? As I was putting away my lunch box at work this morning, I opened it up to get my packet of oatmeal out. There in the corner was a little note with my name on it. It was Tish's writing. Inside was a cute little lovey, dovey note she had written. Well, I certainly enjoyed getting that note!!

In other news, Priya is now seven months old. As anyone with kids will tell you, man time flies. My parents are coming in a couple of weeks, and we have her dedication planned for Nov. 27th. I guess I have only a few more weeks of exclusive claim on her. After that, I'll have to share her with the Lord. :-)

Some clues

Consider the following symptoms: Fatigue, slight weight gain (usually less than 10 pounds and mostly fluid), intolerance to cold, slight memory loss, high LDL level. Sounds pretty generic huh? Well, as it happens, these are the symptoms of hypothyroidism - an underfunctioning thyroid. That is what the doctor's office told me I had from the blood work that came back. So I did some research...

Next to diet, hypothyroidism is the second most common reason for high cholesterol. Basically, the thyroid gland regulates body metabolism. With the thyroid level low, the body's ability to use cholesterol goes down, and hence the accumulation of excessive cholesterol.

My thyroid level was 30 times off than what it needs to be. Being a person who likes to think in terms of cause and effect, this is good news (yea... if news like this can be considered good). Now I know that it wasn't anything I was doing to make my cholesterol levels that high. My glandular system just decided that the wage and benefit structure wasn't good enough, and have called in a strike. We are currently in negotiations.

Thoughts on mortality

Nothing like a nice friendly visit to the family doctor to cheer you up. For years I have been aware of a silent bomb ticking inside me. A few years ago I got the rather surprising news that I was more American than I had realized - I was carrying elevated levels of cholesterol. At that time I wrote it off to years of life as a poor student - too much pizza and fast food. Through diet, my numbers came down. Then a few months ago, I visited the health fair at work, and lo and behold - high numbers back again. Dizzyingly high in fact. The walking dead kind. The nurse who did my test didn't even know what to say to me kind.

So now some perspective. As far as I know, I don't have any family history of heart disease. Cancer, yeah. Heart disease - no. Well.. maybe everyone died of cancer sooner than they would have of heart disease. Who knows. And it's not like I am eating KFC every day (I haven't had any in years). Same goes for most kinds of fast food. So it's gotta be genetic in nature. Great. Tiny little buggers I can't even see are wreaking havoc on me.

Anyway, so I came away with a prescription to keep the Pfizer company solvent for a few more years. I also had a heart scan, the results of which are due in a few days. Good afternoon, Mr. Sen - you'll be happy to know that we have scheduled you early for your 100,000 mile tuneup.

Ok. My writing is merely covering up the fact that I am very scared. Nothing like a growing family to realize how precious life is, and how much you can miss out on. I was sorely tempted to not write this post until after I got my scan results. But I learned a long time ago that it's right to give thanks to the Lord today rather than tomorrow, after grace has been made apparent (or not so apparent).

I feel funny inside. There are moments where I feel peace, and a reassurance from the Lord that my life is in his hands. Then the pendulum swings, and thoughts of doom, and death, and despair peek through. The latter thoughts last less than a second, but it's enough to know that somewhere in the garden of flowers is a dead rat.

So stay tuned. I am going to go look for that rat.