Winter is fast approaching. We are now in the Thanksgiving week, kids home and all that fun stuff.

Lots has been going on. This summer and fall have been unlike any I have ever had, thanks to Smule! Here’s the background story!

I reconnected with my old friends from my teen years back in June. These are all the kids of my dad’s colleagues, and we have always held a very important bond. My dad was a scientist with the Indian Government and they used to go on these months-long field trips looking for minerals. During this process, they ended up making very close friendships. So they all were super tight, and there were a lot of such families. As kids we spent our time with their kids and we all grew up together. Then as fortune would have it, the institute that they worked in decided to make housing apartments for their employees. So now we all ended up in the same location and we had a blast. All of us would hang out, celebrate festivals, have parties, go for walks, discuss crushes, maybe have crushes on each other (!) and we would also make productions. The department would celebrate an annual day or the Indian Independence day and we would create skits or practice a song to sing for them. Once, famously, we girls produced a fashion show. That was the best we ever did. The parents joined in on the fun. I remember all the moms dressed up as men and doing a song production. The dads had their own productions. It was all a great time and a welcome break from our punishing school life.

Anyhoo, fast forward to now, thanks to COVID lockdowns and Whatsapp, we came together and reminisced about the good ol’ days. One of the girls who was a great singer back then started sharing her recent singing projects on Smule. I learnt that Smule is a cool karaoke app where one can record their voices on their favorite songs. How fun! Since I have been a closeted music buff my entire life, I got the app and have been enjoying singing all kinds of songs. A kind of interesting feature of Smule is that you can produce duets by singing only parts of a song and then posting it. If anyone else anywhere else in the world decides to sing the same song, they may find your song and can record their voice on the other half. As you can imagine, that can be a blast with all kinds of creative possibilities. So that’s been a ray of bright sunshine lately in my life.

Unfortunately work front has not been so great. I decided not to teach because of COVID and the idea of hanging in a room full of college students. Its amazing how much I miss it sometimes. My teaching had gotten better over the years and I miss all that interaction. Since it seems that I will be stuck not teaching next semester as well, I am thinking of some new ways to engage myself. I am now working on an Engineering website, but so far I haven’t put in enough time to create a smooth layout. That is a project to look forward to.

I also found this amazing book called Breath by James Nestor. I am in the process of reading it. A lot of the information is not new there. Since I come from the land of Pranayama (deep breathing), importance of correct breathing is something that I always knew. That’s funny, because I breathe so badly. Anyway, I just started reading this book and the first chapter already blew my mind. It talks about evolution, and how as we evolved, our brains grew. This gave us an advantage as a species but in the process has deformed our nose and jaws to the point that most of us have impacted breathing. This is also funny because we humans are the only species with impacted breathing and that is due to our better, bigger brains as well as our ability to control our voices. So all that gave us a competitive advantage over other species has also impacted our health. I guess our ancestors didn’t think about that! Anyway, after all the reading from Weston Price, this is getting all the information together really well for me. Hopefully I can use this to improve my and, more importantly, Tanya’s breathing.

Kids are doing great. They spent the last year home due to the lockdown. Leena was homeschooled. That went ok, except for the fact that she was very rebellious! Every day was a battle to begin. She ended up making a lot of progress but I am not sure if I can homeschool again! The other downside was that she really missed being with other kids of her age and got incredibly lonely. She is back in her old school and is quite happy. Tanya studied online last year. I really enjoyed being a part of her Mathematics education. She is in tenth grade now and back at school. I hope this continues but she is a joy to watch right now. She has gotten very good at Mathematics and I am over the moon about it! She has also developed an interest in coding and is taking a class in computer graphics or coding. She took a course in computer animation last year when she was home and I spent quite a bit of time trying to help her with coding. This year she hasn’t asked (Thank God!!) and seems to be having a blast in that class. She also seems to love Biology, so I think she is in general on a good path. She also seems to be making friends, really doing all the things that makes this mom happy!

Johan is always busy with his projects. One of the apartments is getting fixed up and he has been somewhat involved. He also fixed up our old school bus. Very sadly our school bus (Elfie) crashed last year. He was driving close to Dubois and lost control and the bus flipped over. Luckily he was unscathed and although Rosie dog had a serious injury in her back leg, we were able to nurse her back to a reasonable gait. However, at that moment the bus looked totaled and was twisted. With amazing perseverance, hard work and dedication, Johan got the bus back to running. He actually improved the layout to add a bathroom and has a 4×4 transmission on the bus now. We tried to improve the interior by painting it. Finally after months of sitting around, we took Elfie on a road trip to the Outer Banks a few weeks ago during the Halloween weekend. We had an amazing time. Pics below.

Before logging off a word on the dogs. Rosie, our older German Shepherd, has reached the ripe old age of 12. That is usually considered old for German Shepherd dogs, but she is doing ok. One issue that Johan mentioned what that her back side was buckling. This is due to nerve demyelination, which is very common with old German Shepherds. Being the great dog parent that he is, he decided to take care of the issue using his Engineering angle. While I have been supplementing her diet with ginger, garlic, turmeric and Vitamin B, he has been giving her laser treatments to initiate remyelination. Rosie turns out to be the dog we have learnt everything on, from taking care of all her many wounds with Epsom salt, to homeopathy, to leech treatments and now to laser therapy. Hopefully things go well. Kylo Ren, our young German Shepherd boy, is now one and a half. He is what a dog his age should be and more. He is naughty, of course. But more importantly, he is capable of giving a lot of love, and has a large heart. Unfortunately he is also over protective and an alpha, so training him has been a major challenge. We are getting him under control, but it is a daily job. I guess in his mind he is the Supreme leader, just as the original Kylo Ren from Star Wars!