Monthly Archives: November 2006

White Stuff falling from the sky

Today, we had the first snowfall of the season. Sadly, it started right after sunset, so I couldn’t get any photos of the landscape around our house covered in white. So, here’s the best I could get – a photo of the strip mall next to our house.

snow covered strip mall parking lot

Snow falling as I walked out the garage to get a photo of the neighbors kids playing in the snow…

snow in our garage  

Hopefully, the snow sticks around till the morning so that I can get some photos on the way to work. I don’t think I have too much to worry about, though – given that it’s only the end of November and we’ve had snow already, I think we’re in for a white winter 🙂

 PS: Jas writes in from Vancouver, BC about it snowing there: http://jasvir.com/2006/11/some-white-stuff-fell-from-sky.html

Vancouver again

I took three days off this week and joined Vikram and his brother on a trip to Vancouver and Whistler in BC, Canada. Ullas was here too and joined us on the trip. I’d blog in detail about the trip, but Ullas has written up the salient points in his blog. Some trivia about the trip:

  1. This was my third trip to Vancouver. I’ve now visited Vancouver once a year for the past three years.
  2. The weather sucked. It was cold, windy and rainy for most of the three days we were there. It wasn’t as bad as in Seattle, which had a couple of thunderstorms while we were out, but pretty bad nevertheless.
  3. All my trips there have had some connection to the (rather pathetic) movie ‘Fantastic Four’. The first time we were there, in Nov ’04, they were filming the movie a block from our Hotel. The second time we were there, the movie had just been released and we saw this huge flying ad for the movie while we were at Stanley Park. This time, I had the DVD of the movie with me when we were there. I know… lame…
  4. Vancouver downtown – especially the area between Gastown and Chinatown – is full of druggies and drunks. Even at 10am! The last time we were there, we walked from Gastown to the Chinese Garden at 6pm and thought it was just because it was after dark that there were so many of them there. This time, we saw drunks on the street at 10 in the morning!
  5. Some river near Vancouver was flooded recently leaving the entire city’s drinking water supply polluted. So, restaurants and hotels weren’t serving water anymore. We were glad we carried water, Coke and Capri-Sun with us from the US.

The trip itself was a lot of fun – Whistler was waay above my expectations and I will from now on look down upon every other ski resort, including Snoqualmie, with contempt for not living up to the bar that Whistler has set. We didn’t do as much skiing as would have liked – we started at 1 and were done by around 4.

A few pics in my flickr set.

An Empty Inbox

Woohoo – something to be proud of… an Inbox with zero unread messages in it… for the first time in nearly three years!

Well, I kind of cheated, by moving all my mail from my Inbox to an archive folder the day after we shipped! The best part about starting with a clean Inbox is that I can now strive to be at zero email bounce at the end of each day or atleast each week.