Another one, which can be added to “Snapshots of US”. I almost looked for a switch at the side, which would pop out a door from the wall, that opened to a secret stairway which lead to a huge dining hall at the basement. Well, nothing is “impossible” these days! 😀
The picture is a little blurred due to the lack of time I could spend with the “object of interest”. I didn’t want to attract unwanted attention from people around me!
I had always believed that relocation was a familiar ground for me. Although I chose not to move, the 2 years I had been in Syracuse, I had managed to move houses 4 times in the three years I had been in Bangalore, and that I thought made me a “veteran” in the job! So when I moved to Philadelphia to start my work, little did I anticipate a new surprise that was waiting for me – carpentry!
Furniture, to me was always a finished product. Be it a cot or a book shelf, a dining table or even a small table, every thing had to be readymade in my view. For this same reason, when I went out to shop for my new house last Saturday, I was on the lookout for the best that fitted my budget – bulky or fancy! The shock of my life came when I went to pick them up from the basement of the IKEA showroom at downtown Philadelphia. Everything that I had chosen came in boxes which, even in my wildest of imaginations, could barely fit a fraction of what I had actually ordered for! I never knew that each one of them needed to be assembled, once it was delivered! 🙂
Within minutes of delivery, my house turned into a carpenter’s workshop with pieces of wood (or pieces of the jigsaw, as I should call them) lying all around the place. Soon started the relentless hammering and nailing. The one class of carpentry workshop back in the first year of my undergrad education finally paid off I guess. It took my roommate and me a whole week, which saw us coming back from the office by 6 and without wasting anytime working on solving the jigsaw, to finally complete the task! The beds were the hardest. It took us almost 3 hours to build one! And finally this was how my room looked at the end of the week.
I did build another 6-feet tall book shelf which found its place on the other side of my bed. Im yet to fill it up with books. The carpentry work took away so much time that most of the boxes which contain the books remained unopened! There is still a lot more space in my room and I guess that should soon make me an expert in carpentry and perhaps open new avenues for a second line of job 😉
As yet another quote from the book “Quotable Quotes of the Wise Men from the Mountains” goes, the beginning of every phase of life is extremely fluctuating, before it settles down to what is known as a routine. And so does the end of a phase. The past few days had been just that. The new chapter, as I would like to call it, which started the day after my birthday was filled with activities that should hopefully help me settle into this new work, new place, new people and hence this new phase.
And most obviously hit was my blog updates. However I do not wish to prolong hiatus any further than this weekend. So another 3 days it will be…..
Packing was never my cup of tea (or coffee, for that matter!). That’s perhaps the reason why I decided to live in the same house for two years that I had been in Syracuse – simply due to the “complications” involved in relocation!
With no other choice this time, I just had to find a way to fit everything I’d accumulated over the past two years into an “optimal” number of boxes, so as to transport them as easily as possible. Being weak in Chemistry as I was, cubic closed packing was never my favorite term either!
So this is how much I could manage over the last 4 hours of non-stop work!
As the joblessness seems never-ending (yet another week to go!), grills got replaced by movies, both in and out of the theaters. Well there was quite an overlap between the two “phases”. Such chronological errors can be overlooked as those born out of sheer monotony! Coming back to the point, the list is so amazingly long that I guess its time for me to change my glasses. It started off with Zohan and his mess, a couple of weeks back (now you know where the overlap started) and then came Get Smart, Wanted, and Hancock, in the theaters and a truck load of movies at Hulu including “Raising Arizona and Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind” (perhaps the “notables” among the “golden” oldies!)
As wise men from the mountains say, every phase in life gets routinized over a period of Time. And so did this brief vacation during the transition phase from student-hood to a working life! I sat up to see the sunrise every morning, reading on my bed and started my day by noon with a large mug of coffee. Typically a game of risk would have started off at Land Grab , by the time I got to the lab, which filled the rest of the two hours, before I got myself out in the sun for a game of football (soccer) or tennis if laziness did not overpower me by then.
But the best part, of late, has been the coffee sessions at Recess Cafe – a quaint place close to my house. With coffee being just a matter of daily doses of caffeine in America, its hard to find a place where coffee is *not* served in take away cups with a lid and a small “mouthpiece” that gives you a jump, when you take that first sip of steaming coffee. And that’s perhaps why, a few of us started taking a liking for this place – for the coffee mugs that were used. Several hours of idle conversations happen over a *mug* of coffee until the sun decides to set, well into the night. In fact we have been frequenting so much over the past one month that, the owner decided to open a tab for us, so that we don’t have to pay every other time 🙂
So here’s to the Recess Cafe at Wescott Street, Syracuse.
And as the long weekend approaches, here I am packing my bags for yet another relocation, 2 years later, for a new phase in life….
Idle thoughts 