Smile, it's raining !

It's raining today. Sometimes in nice sunny days, the buses that run in the streets of our town here have a sign on : "Smile, it's sunny". It's interesting, the excitement people feel in a sunny day here, we would get from a rainy day back home.

I remember the radio used to play songs and read poetry's about rain when it began to shower in Tehran. In my old dry polluted city, rain meant a lot. A short moment of relief for the poor carbon covered Plane trees, some water for the dried out grass in parks and gardens, and above all fresher air to breathe for people, even if for a short while. As for me, i so much liked looking at the city when wet. It was like "color" was back to the streets from beneath the gray layer of dust.

Eidetoon Mobarak

How wise our forefathers were to set our New year's day on the start of the Spring. There is something about Spring. You see how right in front of your eyes the nature renovates itself with such joy that's hard to put into words. A colorful celebration of a new era.

This New Year's day, I'm in Washington city. The Magnolia trees are in flower. The gorgeous white and pink flower buds ready for a magnificent bloom. Amazed by their beauty, I make a wish. That the new year, does to me and to you, what it does to the nature in the bloom of a new Spring.

Happy New Year.

Packing

Packing. It is one of the things I very much dislike. I like to travel. I like airports and plane rides. I like the roads and to drive, I like staying in hotels, ... I even don't mind the delays or hassles often involved with travelling, the only part of it I hate is packing my suitcases. It's such a classic problem, limited resources (i.e. luggage space) and insatiable wants (what you want to take with you).
Or hold on, perhaps it's this: having to make several choices between the stuff you want to carry with you in a short span of time. And decision-making is an energy-consuming process.

Creepy!

Following on my Sabzeh post earlier, this year I had made more wheat spouts than I needed for sabzeh. So I put half of it in a container in the fridge to eat later. Today I took it out to put some on my salad, and guess what? The spouts had kept growing in the fridge, they had developed those green stems. Creepy, it was like eating something alive

The movie 300

There are two sides to any story. Often there are two very different narrations depending on which side the storyteller is standing by. This is more pronounced when you look back at the events in the history, as there are fewer unaffiliated narrators. Ancient civilizations, Persians, Greeks, Romans,... had lots of conflicts. Depending on who's telling the story the villains change to heroes and heroes to villains. It's very difficult to remain neutral in here.

Now, I as a Persian, with an obvious biased opinion, find the movies 300 a story told extremely biased. A group of Persian bloggers have started an attempt to provide an insight from another point of view to the ancient Persia. I support their effort. 300 the movie

My goofy story of the day!

This afternoon, when I got to my office I found my PC was dead:-( It actually would come up and show the login window and then froze in there, no ctrl-alt-del, no mouse movement, no nothing. So I restarted the thing a couple of times, and it didn't help. I called the office, they said that I had to fill up a computer maintenance request form ONLINE! Isn't that funny?

Add to this situation, a busy busy office hour, cause my kids have their midterm on Friday. Anyways, I started filling up the form on my officemates' machine, but he just then showed up to print out something, and when he left, i was logged out of the system, pooh! Who needs a secure system for maintenance request anyway? So long story short, I sent the request. There they said it might take 1-2 days if it is not a case of emergency. I was debating with my conscience to declare it an emergency (which wasn't) or not, and at last like an angel decided not to slip to the dark side of the force, yet!

An hour later, I had 4 students over, and I was going over a proof on the small white broad we have in office. I should mention that our office is a tini-tiny room, with 3 desks in it. So having 5 people in the room is actually a full house, the 6th person has to stand in the hall! Then the computer guy came in. He could barely fit in the room anyway, but add to the fact that he was a pretty big guy too. He actually offered to come back in a less crowded time, but I was so excited that he was there that soon that I said i wouldn't mind him fixing it right then. Perhaps the students would mind, but hey, TAs rule!

So, could you guess the ending by now?
...
The problem was both keyboard and mouse plugs were loose!

Norouz is coming

Yesterday I went to the whole food store and got some wheat to grow for my haft-seen. In the picture you see my last year's lentis Sabzeh. This year I'm growing wheat for a change:-)
The New Year spirit is in the air.

P.S. How to grow Sabzeh
-Soak the wheat in water for 24 hours
-Wrap it in a wet cloth for 2-3 days. Make sure that the wheat and the cloth is damp at all time, but there is no excess water in the bowl.
-tranfer the young sprouts to the plate you want your sabze in, and give them sunshine and water and sing to them!!!

Ellen

I'd say, Ellen DeGeneres did a nice job hosting the Oscars.
See the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfeZibn3vmU&NR

She cries in the studio after seeing the comments those celebrities made about her before the show. It is one of the most superb feeling anyone could ever feel. That you see people truly believe in you, no matter what.