A weird week

I love the coffee culture. More than coffee itself. I treat these coffee shops as 'homes away from home' - taking books and newspaper to read, the laptop on the rare occasions that I am working from home or at those times when I have to work late and doing that from a warm, buzzing, promising-to-be-serving-up-mugs-of-coffee kinda place makes it so much more tolerable, almost cool. I also treat these places as a meeting point, with brokers and the likes. Glorious is life when there is a coffee place nearby!

In a stroke of bad luck, my back played up again. Must be because of all the carrying and lugging that packing and unpacking entails. Also my landlady generously put a pair of plump mattresses on the bed that she also so kindly provided (yea, I have an actual bed to sleep on now!) but that played havoc with my back. Unlike the Princess in the Pea story, who could not sleep all night due to the presence of a pea beneath some millions of layers of mattresses, give me a hard plank of wood and I will sleep like a babe. Not princess-material, me.

So this week there has been no traveling and lots of staying at home and frankly, I am bored. Traveling is now so much a part of my lifestyle that a week of not, makes me feel as if - hmm..mm..hmmm..as if my nose has suddenly disappeared off my face, you know, an improvement for sure in the general scheme of things, but weird.

Also paid a visit to the dermatologist after the recent escapade at the salon, while I was at the hospital for my back. I have never been to one, and I was a bit apprehensive. I had not even checked before paying the exorbitant consultation charges whether dermatologists do look at scalps. However, he did not miss a beat when I told him that some hairstylist had advised me to get my scalp checked. He checked, and told me lazily - Hats off to her that she managed to scare you like this. They are evil, these beauty parlors. While I kept insisting that he check again - well, I had to get my money's worth - he seemed to get more and more amused.

If you ask me, he seemed like a bit of a sham himself, slightly bored, kinda like he was reserving all his energies for the truly meaty clients like hmm..Hrithik Roshan, whom he had a framed photograph with, in his office. Or ladies who have enough moolah and time to go nip-tuck-lift-botoxx!

Anyhow, what with all my visits to Lilavati hospital, I am now a card-holding member of that landmark institution. And by landmark, I mean, actually so. I always use it to give directions to my home.

The television is also part of the paraphernalia that the flat has come with. And I must say, I wasn't missing much. Although when you are a bit lonely and all that, it does help having a television blaring familiarly from the corner.

As part of the grand initiation ceremony into the new place, I tried to whip up some bread pohe. I love the bread pohe. The only thing that has prevented me from making a staple diet out of it is the fact that I don't eat bread. Such is life. But now that there is whole wheat bread, and multi-grain bread, and three-grain bread and an assortment of healthy options to plain old bread, I decided to get back at it. So in went bread, and some onions, and carrots, topped with some thai sauce and Olive Oil (yea, I bought Olive Oil to cook, I am that pretentious!) and I discovered that I didn't have any matchsticks or a lighter. So I put the thing into the microwave, and skeptically put it on 'Auto-cook' wondering how on earth would it cook the carrots, which are about the hardest things to soften.

I was wrong, oh so wrong. After about ten minutes, when I went in again, I was greeted by a delicious aroma and the sight of molten plastic. Yes, the microwave had reduced my plastic bowl to an abstract-artsy-looking thing. The pohe turned out well though.

All's well that ends well though. Will use the half melted bowl for potpourri. Nice and bohemian. Yes, I am that pretentious. I have potpourri.