Category: Living

  • Kai’s first Halloween

    I’ve never celebrated Halloween till now, and because of that, we went completely overboard with the decorations for our apartment – we spent most of the week cutting out construction paper from templates we obtained either online or from the venerable Martha Stewart. Most of the enthusiasm, planning and execution was supplied by Naomi, while…

  • Wear blue to go green this Saturday

    They showed that 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere is the safe limit for humanity. The bad news is we’re already past that number – we’re at 390 parts per million, which is why the Arctic is melting, why drought is spreading across the planet, why humanity is facing perhaps its greatest challenge…

  • Water displacement formula, 40th attempt

    Back when I was in full time NS, the cleaning of weapons was a mundane, time-consuming, daily chore. Between the 7 troopers in a combat section, we’d have around seven small arms (M16S1), couple of grenade launchers (M203), couple of light automatics (Ultimax100), two GPMGs, and a heavy machine gun (Browning .5 HMG). Carbon residue…

  • Take down a musical instrument

    One of my favourite poems and one which I’ve quoted here again and again is by Jalaluddin Rumi: Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we Love be what we do. There are…

  • #joy

    Things that bring us happiness these days tend to revolve around Kai. His name in Japanese means “The World”, so he’s our world after all. We’re happy all of the time because we have Kai. Happiness tends to be an enveloping state of mind. But there are little moments that happen throughout that are just…