Spirit of the rising sun lift me up...

I'm home. It's 2am and I can't sleep. I've been a little conflicted about my job lately. I've been overwhelmed for a while. It's not the travel at all. People have been dropping likes flies and the company has done very little to help prevent the rest of us from leaving. I'm overwhelmed with my projects and lately I'm barely keeping my head above water. I have to remind myself that things could always be worse. But of course, things could always be better.

Brazil was great. It's a wonderful country with friendly people. Unfortunately on my flight back I was surrounded by high school exchange students who had no concept of volume control. I read this great article in Vanity Fair about scars. The most interesting physical scar that I have is the one on my left palm. My mom worked double shifts for many years of my childhood. My older sister would "watch" me from the time we got home from school until my dad came home. Now by "watch" I mean she would watch TV and I would try not to get in her way. One day when I was about 10 years old I was cutting a bagel to pop into the toaster. My parent's house had a TV in the kitchen and I was watching that episode of Happy Days where Fonzi rides his motorcycle over barrels in the parking lot of Al's diner. In hindsight the episode was pretty lame, but for a 10 year old this was a pretty episode. Anyway, my eyes were on the TV when they should have been watching the big cleaver in my hand. (No immigrant Indian family is complete unless there are a couple of machete-type knives that can cut through a chicken leg or coconut shell in one chop). I felt a burn and when I looked down my sesame bagel was drenched in bright red. I sliced into flesh and was mere millimeters away from a tendon. I'm so lucky I didn't lose the use of my hand.

Wow..I digress. OK. I'm sleepy now. I leave you with pictures of our Onam celebration. Onam is a harvest festival. D commented that it's sorta like American Thanksgiving Day without the connotation of genocide. My cousins came back from India today so we celebrated with a big dinner at their house and my aunt and uncle brought outfits for all the girls.


Here's the Girl getting dressed.


Here she is with her cousins.


Here she is looking innocent.


All the kids


Here's the cake that says Happy Onam. My aunt sent my uncle to get a cake with sprinkles and he brought home a Madagascar cake.


It was chocolate and it had a ton of frosting so I don't think the kids would have cared if it had math problems on it.

Finally my favorite picture of the week. We take pictures of the kids every month on our steps.

Here are the kids on the Boy's first day of First grade.

Good night!