It’s The Book Of My Days, It’s The Book Of My Life

I’m back after a short break. Finally reinstalled Windows. It was long overdue. Thanks Tahill, for all the help. Also bought another 250GB hard disc. Thanks, Mario

Reinstalling Windows is something I like have to do every 6–8 months, otherwise the computer gets pretty sluggish. That, coupled with a not-too-fast dial-up Internet connection, makes any kind of cyber-activity rather agonizing. To add to the confusion, I forgot to backup my Firefox bookmarks before formatting the system. Still kicking myself for that! Now I’m in the process of installing all the other software that I need… one day at a time…

• Both love the beach
• Both have loud voices
• Both lose their balance while pulling up their pants

OK. All done. That was easier than I’d expected. Not as easy as transferring all my Blogger posts, but it wasn’t too bad considering it was a manual transfer.

This week I was busy uploading all my pictures to my Flickr account. Henceforth, I won’t be uploading them to my Yahoo! 360° site. In any case, I was using Yahoo! 360° just to share pictures. I did use its blogging feature to blog about our last trip to Rajasthan, Agra and Mussourie, and then switched over to Wordpress. Well actually, Blogger first, then Wordpress.

Now I find Flickr is great for photo-sharing so I moved ll my photos there. The good thing is you can log in with your Yahoo! ID, so you don’t have to go through that igmarole of creating a new username and password.

So, the next bunch of posts will be all about the trip we took in Oct-Nov 2006.

What is it about grandparents that kids find so appealing? Thaïs has been with my mum for two days now and I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to get her to come back home. She does the same thing with Mario’s parents. Once she goes there, getting her to come back is a nightmare. Are they more lenient? Well, okay… maybe so, but whatever happened to that mother-daughter bond??? One more myth shattered.

I’m going to have to bribe her with some ice-cream or chocolate or, the most recent, ‘yestauwant’. Yes, I’ll have to wine and dine my own daughter in order to get her to agree to come home with me.

Now that’s a courtship to remember!

I’ve finally made the shift from Blogger to Wordpress and let me tell you, Wordpress is GREAT! It’s been only a couple of days, and I love it already. Everything is so much easier, starting with the migration process. It was all automated and took about 30 seconds to import about as many posts. Now if only there was an automated way to import my Yahoo! blog. If you know of one, please enlighten me. The way I see it, I’ll have to copy each post manually…. Maybe one day when I have the time… when the little one’s away… Not that there are many posts – I’ve been blogging for only about 6 months now, just the thought of having to do it manually…

So far, just one negative point for Wordpress – the themes. I think I preferred my chosen theme on Blogger. Wordpress does have one fully customizable theme that I know of, but that would mean messing around with CSS and whatever else, which I’ll get into later, and then maybe I’ll come up with a theme I like. For now I’m quite content checking out the available widgets and other options.

I’ve also found that the Technorati-Wordpress relationship is much better than the Technorati-Blogger one. Ever since I made the switch, all blog details, update info, tags, etc. show up on Technorati the way I expect them to. Unfortunately, that’s not something I could say when I was using Blogger. Back then, getting that tag cloud to work was not very easy. I did manage eventually, though. And then I migrated to Wordpress!

All in all, Blogger’s great for the absolute novice, as it was for me, but when you want a little more flexibility, Wordpress is the next best (free;-)) choice.

My little angel has finally recovered from her stomach infection after 5 days of misery. She and I stayed with my mum for the duration of the illness. There would have been no way I’d have been able to manage without help.

Anyway, she’s back to normal now and that means that the noise pollution levels have also gone up. The last 5 days were so peaceful. But now that her strength’s back, she has started talking non-stop, as is her wont. Why this… and why that…. She’s only 2 years and 2 months – I thought I had at least another 8-10 months before the questions began…?

Nevertheless, it’s good to have her back.

Watched ‘Koffee With Karan’ yesterday. I watch the show regularly, and I must say last week’s guest, Rekha Sawant, a relative new-comer to the show-biz world, from what I understand, was more entertaining than any of the other so-called celebrities he usually interviews.

Anyway, on a different note, my little darling has gone off on a two-day trip to some beach south of Goa. No doubt she’ll have a great time there with her cousins. And how she loves the water! In the shower, she doesn’t like the water getting into her face, but she has no problems getting doused by the waves. Talk about a beach bum!

It’s been a month since I last posted. At first I was busy… then, I just got lazy. But now I’m back (with a vengeance!) and hoping to post more regularly.

Thaïs has been busy spending time with her grandparents, shamelessly refusing to come back home. Looks like we’re going to have to bribe the little rascal with the latest ‘Bean’ movie. More on that later.

Actually, more on everything later. I’m posting after about a month, so I don’t want to overdo it!

Till then!!

Sorry for the long break. Like I said earlier, I’ve been busy with the inauguration of our new Italian club. Mario and I had done a basic course in Italian a few years ago, and this year the students along with some of the past students took the initiative of forming this club called ‘Circolo Italiano, Goa’ with the objective of keeping in touch with the language and promoting Italian culture, art, cuisine, etc… We plan on meeting maybe once a month, if not more frequently, just to get together to practise the language, maybe watch a movie (in Italian, of course), even organize an authentic Italian lunch/dinner now and then — we’ll be doing the cooking under the guidance of our teacher who’s Italian.

We had the formal inauguration on Friday, March 16. I’ve uploaded an album on my Yahoo! Groups site, so go check it out!

Ciao!