Home Depot

Note: Home Depot isn't paying me to write this stuff.



I am not big on chain stores but I like Home Depot. The smell of freshly cut wood while casually walking down their various aisles makes me feel that all life is good. I have often stopped at the painting section and gone through a paint selector book for 15 minutes while trying not to catch the eye of a salesperson. I don't want to talk. I just want to take it all in. And all those bolts and screws of various sizes and shapes in their own boxes neatly stacked in those huge shelves...Ah! I simply relish the tools section even though I don't know one end of a spanner from the other. Oh, they take care of the afore-mentioned bolts, do they? I have nary a plant in my house. I have been meaning to get some for a few years now but continue slacking off. Maybe I will make a procurement from Home Depot's garden section next time. Maybe for once, I won't simply stare at those little stands of dainty books that read How to Build a Deck or 16 easy Projects You Can Do Yourself For Less Than $100. Maybe I will...go through them. By the way, all those rows and rows of cement bags. I tell ya. Heaven!

Any visit to Home Depot naturally has to culminate in the lighting aisles, by far my favorite area there. When my folks did a major renovation of their house many years ago, my only suggestions included a chandelier for the dining room and twin light fixtures for the front door. I couldn't be bothered with making suggestions for the rest of the house. The chandelier came from a specialist lighting company in Dorchester, where my Mom and I picked it out. But the front door fixtures, looking very Victorian, came from Home Depot...and I picked them up all on my own!

I never really buy anything at Home Depot. Still I like to stop in occasionally and waddle around.

Three Easy Recipes

Fish and Vegetables

Here is an exceptionally healthy meal that I make 4 to 6 times a week. It is rather filling.

Total Preparation and Cook time: 10 minutes

Ingredients

A slice of Wild Salmon -- about 1/2 lb
Coconut Oil -- 1/2 teaspoon
Lime Juice
Salt and freshly ground Pepper -- To taste

1. In a non-stick pan, heat the oil over medium heat.
2. While the pan is being readied, slather the Salmon with lime juice and freshly ground pepper. Add desired amount of salt.
3. Place the Salmon (skin down) on the pan over medium heat for 2 minutes. Then turn it over onto its other side for 2 more minutes.
4. Cook covered for 6 more minutes in medium-low heat (3 minutes each side).
5. Remove from pan and let the Salmon sit for a minute or two.

For vegetables, I prefer chick peas, baby carrots and either broccoli or spinach. I throw the mix into a small pan filled with water, a bit of turmeric powder and 1/2 teaspoon of coconut oil. Then the whole thing is put over medium heat until the water starts boiling.

If you don't like oily fish or if the Salmon is too expensive, you can use Tilapia (likely farm-raised). In addition to lime juice, slather 1/2 tablespoon of garlic paste on the Tilapia for a great taste. Cook each side of the Tilapia for 3 minutes (turning over once in total). Use medium heat throughout.

Beef with Broccoli

Ingredients

1 Chinese guy
1 Chinese gal from the old country

So they get married and on their first night in bed, he cooes in her ear,

"So, my love, how sweet you want make love to you?"

She looks at him coyly,

"You soun like you have lottah experience."

"I have maduh lottah "delivery", yes."

"I wan 69."

He stares at her.

"You wan beef with broccoli?!"

Mutton (Goat) Biryani

When I grew up in India, mutton was a staple meat in our diet.

This recipe is easy. I just get it from the Indian Delight restaurant in Weymouth, a few minutes away from my office.

Ha! Ha! Ha!

Now the restaurant has Lamb Biryani on its menu. I like lamb but only when prepared in the context of a Greek or Scandinavian dinner. In other cases, I find it too strongly flavored for my taste. Anyway, Indian Delight sometimes stocks mutton but you have to make a special request for it. Keep in mind though that mutton is red meat.

Hey! A gold medal...

So...an Indian has won a gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. And the event?

10m AIR RIFLE?!

What the flying f**k does that mean? A trained bumble bee delivers the bullet to the target or somethin'?

Pardon the cynicism. Guess I would have liked it better if the medal had come out of a track & field event or weight lifting -- that is, if Indians ever get out of the habit of doping in the latter sport.

But...I guess a gold medal is a gold medal.

I was so engrossed with India's sorry performance against the Sri Lankans in Cricket last week -- and researching the carrom ball -- that it didn't even occur to me to check to see if India won anything in the Olympics until a colleague mentioned the gold medal this morning.

Here is a picture of the fella:

That is a lot of hair...

Anyway, congrats to the chap for getting out there and conquering pressure!!

Cricket in the Olympics?

While I am entranced by sprinting on a track, diving in a pool and olympic weight lifting, I somehow can't take the Olympics that seriously. I don't know. I just can't do it. So when I hear about all these top Cricketers recently pushing for Cricket to have a spot in the Olympics, I get mixed feelings. Their argument is that Cricket in the Olympics will enable it to spread to bigger nations like the US and China and allow Cricketers to win gold medals.

Let me tell you something: I don't want the US and China playing Cricket. If they get to do it, I will probably absorb it and then continue to immerse myself in the game...like any good sport would. But I am not that excited about them getting involved in our game. One reason is the ever-cramped Future Tours Programme (FTP) of Cricket's governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC). More countries will mean a more crowded FTP schedule. Plus the likes of countries such as the US -- isn't that Allen Stanford dude from Texas? -- and China have big egos and that means possible influences on the rules of the game from their Cricket boards.

Excuse me, Mr.President, but...playing Cricket requires a touch of diplomacy! "Slogging it" doesn't work here.

With India's Cricket board, the BCCI, now exerting a powerful influence over the general direction of the game in stark contrast to the floundering leadership of the ICC, I can't help but wonder if these international Cricketers might want the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to somehow take over the game simply because they don't want some third-world Asian country on top of things. No, wait! That is a ludicrous thought!

Anatomy of a scene

Elation! That's what I felt. I clutched the novels, one from Alistair MacLean and another from Louis L'amour, as I left the library and started riding home on a rickety bicycle. The final exams were over. I could now look forward to six weeks of summer holidays before my junior year in high school commenced. I didn't have much to do but read, enjoy my solo rides out into the hot country and hang out with friends. I wasn't as given to spending a lot of time doing the latter. So I was spending a lot of time doing the other stuff.

That particular morning, I had found two of my favorite authors on the same day in the dusty chaos that was the little library in Narimedu! But before I reached home to devour my finds for the day, I had to make a stop at a friend's house in LIC Colony. After half an hour there, I was getting hungry for both food and literary content and so decided to leave. But rather than make my way back through Sellur, I decided to take a detour through Krishnapuram and then Reserve Lines (so called because that neighborhood housed quarters for the city's reserve police force).


Click for a larger view.

At the border, where I had to cross into Krishnapuram, there was a flat barren area littered with shrunken mesquite and what I think may have been giant milkweed. Some claimed that the milky sap of the latter was toxic. Anyway, it was an untouched piece of land in an otherwise intensely built neighborhood. Some of the plants were standing in black muddy spots with dragonflies buzzing about. It seemed I could make my way through the mesquite to get to the main road that ran along most of Krishnapuram. So rather than use a potholed, characterless street, I decided to go through the flatter terrain of the mesquite. Halfway in, my bicycle chain came undone. So I put the bicycle on its stand and set about putting the greasy chain back on its front sprocket. A fairly easy task. As I stood up and wiped my hands on a jutting branch of mesquite, I took in the scene around me.

There was an elderly man with a crudely made walking stick ambling along on the potholed street I had just avoided. A housewife, standing at the entrance to her house on the other side of that street, was haggling with a rural looking woman selling vegetables door-to-door. I could hear the ceaseless traffic noise of two-wheelers coming from the direction of Krishnapuram. Birds were chirping in a variety of trees -- banana and palm primarily -- surrounding the houses in the vicinity. An imperceptible aroma of Tulasi briefly permeated the air. And in the miserly shade provided by the mesquite and milkweed, a couple of stray dogs were resting and taking a nice respite from the slowly rising heat and humidity of the day. A white butterfly was wandering around aimlessly in the contrasty light. A scraggly looking donkey, with likely the same idea as the dogs, was slowly making its way into the mesquite. It saw me and stopped. I could see that it didn't want to go back into the streets filled with the infestation of humans and automobile dust. But it was also wary of me. Very wary. There was a battle-worn look about it from living off the streets and possibly putting up with local kids who no doubt pelted it with stones when they were of a mind to.

The sun beat down on me and sweat started trickling its way into the small of my back. I thought back to the recently concluded school year. It had been a difficult decision to make. To switch schools, I mean. I had had a great time at the school. All eight years of it. My friends attended that school and the campus itself was only a stone's throw away from my house. But I simply couldn't bear going through those Tamil grammar lessons anymore and if what I had heard was true, the experience would be even more painful during the last two years of school. And they offered French as an alternative in the new school. Well, maybe the decision was an easy one after all.

A distant rumble disturbed my thoughts. The dogs were on the alert with their ears pricked. The donkey was still there gazing at the ground, resigned to destiny. I pitied its situation and considered taking it home. Then I thought of the look on my mother's face and decided against it. What a life the poor animal must be having compared to my own carefree one. Now the skies were darkening. Where I lived, tropical thunderstorms came out of nowhere. As the air turned heavier and the dragonflies settled down, the mesquite and trees around me started to dance hesitantly to sharp gusts of wind. Dust was being kicked up in spurts. I mounted my bicycle and started furiously pedalling home still a good 2 KM away. As I reached the main road, I briefly glanced back. The donkey was meandering its way into the mesquite. A whole lot of good that was going to do in torrential rainfall. Then as I cycled past a workshop, the scene vanished from view.


"You abandoned me, Gopi! Et tu...you brute!"

My stomach was rumbling by the time I arrived at my house. With heavy clouds hovering over the city, the day had turned almost dark. Men and women, with the latter's saris billowing to a wind that was now blowing steadily, were hurrying along on the street. The guy who owned a tea shop at the corner of our street was quickly bringing in his benches. I put the bicycle in our verandah and breathed a collective sigh of relief and exertion as I reached for the books secured in the bike's rear rack. A few seconds later, the heavens opened.

A Sweaty Saturday - Beaches and Pole Dancing

Its official, folks! I no longer use sunblock for sun protection when I sunbathe at the beach. Instead I have switched to unrefined coconut oil. And I have to say my skin felt a lot cooler when I was at Revere beach this past Saturday morning! Also, while there, I noticed an Indian guy sunbathing and canoodling with this really fat, white girl...a mistake that I, of course, will never make no matter how wishful I might be for female company. But it was a refreshing change to see an Indian fella in proper beach wear at a non-India beach. What else? A bunch of kids kept kicking up sand playing football (aka soccer) nearby. That was really annoying! Then this big Indian (Sri Lankan?) family showed up fully dressed, parked themselves plumb in the middle of some beauties and started laying out all this food. Two of the beauties, seemingly annoyed, promptly picked themselves up and moved away. The family, of course, looked like they didn't give a sh*t. I am not as cynical of these things as I used to be but its hard to ignore something like that.

Anyway, these days I observe and, for the most part, forget. Besides I was having a good time texting this girl I had met online a month ago. We flirted steadily for a while. She was at a pool near her house with a friend and sent me a picture of her bikinied bottom, which melted my very sensitive little Indian heart like right away. Then my water ran out and I decided to leave. The beach was loud and was starting to get really packed (Indians or not). But I am not really sure if I want to go to Revere beach again. Like the beaches in Hull and Wollaston, the beach had a lot of noise from nearby passing traffic and the occasional siren and I couldn't concentrate on a book I had brought along. Were it not for the fact that I had had to attend Allen's bachelor party that evening, I would have gone some extra miles and hung out at singing beach or the Cape instead, where one mostly hears nothing but the squawk of gulls, the crashing surf and maybe the occasional tittering of some insect in dune grass or perhaps the distant boom of a foghorn.

I had actually gotten ready for Allen's bachelor party the previous Saturday evening. I guess I was being an eager beaver! No harm done. Now I stop at The Living Room across from the waterfront a couple of times a month for dinner on my way home. So we met up there, dined outside under the sun and drank "a bit". I stuck to martinis while the rest of the guys went with beer. Allen mixed it up though. David wanted to go across to Tia's but, throughout dinner, we had all been observing a steady stream of swell looking women making their way into the Living Room's lounge. So we decided to go hang out inside in the lounge. I was especially glad since I am not exactly fond of Tia's.

One of my neighbors had suggested Centerfolds. While the rest of the gang remained at The Living Room, David, Allen and I ended up at the strip club. At Centerfolds, David got upset. He was upset because he had just paid a girl $40 to do a lap dance for me and I wasn't interested. She had a trim body but I didn't find her attractive. Trust me. I have a big appetite but I couldn't see myself paying a girl to strip for me. So I sat at a table at the back of the bar and contented myself by watching girl after girl pole dance while David and Allen went upstairs. No idea what was upstairs and I didn't see those two again that night. I had enough visuals to keep me occupied.

While everyone else was drinking and letting go, I was analyzing. Gluteal folds, for instance. At my gluteal junction, the point where my caboose meets my hamstrings, my hammies integrate smoothly into my glutes courtesy of my choice of training. But a lot of these girls, despite their acrobatics and athletic look, had gluteal folds of varying depth. Some of the girls looked real young. Probably college students. Their dance movements were clinical and obligatory. The only exciting movements happened when the panties came off for a full frontal. When that happened, I could have sworn I was able to smell...money. At the end of the day, it was a job and the girls went through the motions no different than they would have had they been employed at some "it pays the bills" desk job. I also noticed a lot of black and asian guys sitting at the bar right in front of the stage. One black dude was giving away bill after bill to every girl who danced.

Yaaawwn! It was 1.30 in the morning and some of the girls had been asking me all along if I wanted a dance. Even though I had had only 5 drinks or so all evening, I didn't feel like drinking or hanging out anymore. Plus I had a vague notion that it was only a matter of time before some bouncer figured I wasn't being very profitable to the club. And I like leaving places with my dignity intact. So I stumbled out and caught a cab home.

An era ends

Content removed anticipating undue pressure