Ho hum

The darned extended holiday season is over. Gotta return to work tomorrow and wait until the Christmas week, before I can get such official breaks.

This Deepavali has been one of the best that I can remember. I got to burst a lot of crackers. I didn't spend too much on them - in other words, I spent a lot of money and got lot of crackers (unlike the previous year). I had a lot of sweets and savories. There was no untoward incidents during the festival - burns etc. Saw quite a bit of TV.

Then on Friday, I went to the branch of my office closer home, along with couple of others from my car pool. I did this 'coz my teams at my regular branch were all on leave since they got my permission to compensate last Friday by working the next Saturday. Many teams in my office were doing it and I found it quite a sensible thing to do. I only hope that the organisation also implements it. I say this because, when I went to the office, I found very few people there. Though the car park did look full, I couldn't see enough people around the campus. And one needs to factor in the fact that many people would have come to this branch like me!

That day, I even left the office around 12.45-1.00 and was home by 1.30. Went out that evening as our dear friend Nilu was giving his birthday treat at The Piano in Hotel Savera. Nice dinner buffet and it really helped that I was
wearing my bigger sized trousers. ;-)

Didn't do much on Saturday, other than going to the Sholinganallur house and having it cleaned by a couple of guys whom we took along. The cleaning was mainly for the exterior of the house - too many shrubs and lots of grass had grown. We've arranged for some helping hands to clean up the interior as well. In the evening, I went out and bought my next TV.

Today, I got to meet my college buddy Karthik after nearly 7 years. I last met him in Los Angeles when he and a couple of his friends had come there during the Christmas holiday weekend. Shankar also came along and we had a good time catching up with things at the Fruit Shop.

This evening, I went to Spencers (where else) with Raghu (who else). We were quite shocked by the crowd there. Rather, the shock was due to the lack of crowd. All shops were open, yet there hardly few people around the place. The eating joints were REALLY empty. The Arun Ice Cream outlet guy said that they were barely doing 50% of their regular business. The place was so damn empty, that we left it within an hour's time.

So anyways, the holiday weekend is coming to an end now. I gotta resume my duties at work from tomorrow. Since 24th Dec falls on a Monday, there wont be too much activity that day, what with most people trying to make it a long weekend. The same holds good for Dec 31st as well. So if I can take a day off some 2 weeks from now, I can pace myself through to the end of 2007!