Home Cyn Home: January 2013

Optimizing the wet room

With DH away on a business trip I’m still going to stick to easy blog posts as day after day my level of energy is going down being on double shift duty. Weekends are probably even more demanding than week days since I am stripped of my 2 hours of quiet peaceful time. Anyway, I have plenty of pictures on my computer, a black book full of ideas, and if all fail some noodles to review. Today however, there will be no noodles to blog about, I have enough material to blog on something else.

A while back I was writting about your typical Indian bathroom. Which is pretty much just a room that gets wet all over and is a pain to use and keep clean. The one we had in our old rooftop apartment in Bangalore was the type were you could not even separate with a shower curtain. The ones we had in Navi Mumbai and in the 2011 Bangalore flat were at least having a slight, albeit ridiculous dividing line in the way of a difference of 5mm in height between the shower area and the rest of the bathroom. In Bangalore, we had 3 bathrooms and one was pretty much a storage room/guest toilet. To hide the mess, we did buy a shower curtain. The mess stayed hidden in the shower area and the bathroom remained usable for guests. If we stayed longer we would have upgraded all 3 bathrooms with curtains. But, if you remember well, we had money issues back then too.
The previous flat here in Mumbai had the coolest western style bathrooms with a wet and dry area properly segregated with glass doors and a sink sitting on a counter so we could keep our toilettrie where they belonged instead of cramming them in always too tiny wardrobes.
No such luck in this new flat however. We are back to old fashioned Indian style wet rooms and all three look like this:

This is the one that is attached to the study and is now DH’s bathroom, when I took this pic we were just moved in and still waiting on the plumber and electricians to fix the “common bath” that is now my bathroom. The third wet room is in Ishita’s room. DH and I preferred the layout of the bathroom less room for our own use. Because Ishita is not going to use the shower on her own for years to come, that master bath has become the official storage room where the old shower curtain we had all along went back to hiding some of our mess.
As you can see, it’s a room where there is no distinction between wet and dry, other than the same old 5mm difference in floor levels. you shower in there without a curtain and it is guaranteed that you’ll have water absolutely everywhere.

The first thing we asked the carpenter to do was to put shower curtain rods everywhere (they are basically regular curtain rods because the spring extendable ones you find in the west are very hard to find in India). We also bought wire racks to mount on the walls to store our stuff as the typical Indian bathroom will not let you have a wooden cabinet unit under the sink and usually lacks storage nooks too. These have window sills you can use to put your shampoo bottles on in the shower corner but that is about it. So here is what we ended up doing:

We first bought wall mountable wire racks to store our bathroom essentials as there is nowhere else to put things. If you look closely, you'll notice that even the soap dispenser is not standing too well on the edge of the bassin.

Once the water heater and plumbing in my shower got fixed, I needed a shower curtain. Because, if a single grown up use an Indian bathroom to take a shower you splash a little water all over. Throw a toddler into the equation and you have Tsunami Grade flood on your hand every single time your little sweetie uses it. Making it dangerous to both the parent and the kiddo as it gets slippery. So here is how my shower now looks:

As you can see I made full use of the window area to hold all the shower essentials, and we were fortunate that in this flat the owner thought to put some towel rods. We won't have to try to find a way for them not to get wet on the ground while we shower. And if you think I am making this up, we had to find ways for them not to get wet in all the previous wet rooms and the tiny hooks on the door can’t hold a towel long enough half of the time which result in said towel to inevitably fall on the ground and soak up the wet puddles left by your shower use. And to those Indians reading this now wondering why I shower and not use a bucket…personal preferences cannot be discussed. But I will say that bucket and mug use do not result in less splashing, in fact in all the instances of me, DH or relatives bathing desi style we actually ended up with wetter and more slippery bathrooms than with the shower head.
Anyway notice my pretty pink curtain? I opened it just for the picture. It looks like this the rest of the time:

Since my bathroom is also the common bathroom, I don’t need my guests to have a full view of my wet quarters and choice of shampoos and soaps or a look at my loofah. Ideally they should not have a view of my deodorant and face cream either because in Switzerland it is considered bad taste to let your guest see your personal care items. And I’d like to honour that as much as I can in my home. DH’s bathroom is still curtain less, it’s the next one to get an update but DH isn’t particularly caring about his bathroom getting splashed all over, he pretty much uses it only to shower, and it can remain wet without him caring or having to bother stepping into wet puddles when he go use the toilet and then leave dark footprints all over the house as a result, because he actually like MY bathroom for his other bathroom businesses, and thanks to my little improvement mine stays dry almost all the time. The only exception is when the maid washes it and still doesn’t get that she can use the mop broom to do so, and instead does what every maid will do, pour a bucket or two of water and then use a plastic broom to push the 8+ litres of water down the shower drain, never mind it doesn’t clean well and that all it does is wasting water, that’s what she does despite my having told her a million time not to do it. She was even doing it in my old bathroom with wet and dry areas. So I made my peace with that, refuse to go into endless battles about it, and just drag the mop broom in there after she left to mop it clean and dry.
This little post is just to show that even if you are used to practical bathrooms and inherit a crappy one in India you can still work with it. The curtain rod installed by the carpenter will not cost you more than 1 or 200 rupees, and the shower curtain I have in there did cost me 599 rupees with the hooks. It’s washable, and can prevent a nasty fall due to slippery wet surface.So by all mean a fortune would it be just to prevent me or my daughter from sustaining potentially life threatening injuries.

4Comments

, by Cynthia Haller

In Home,

My new kitchen

I’m a bit under the weather these days with the weirdest case of cold or rather non-cold I have ever had. I sore throat, a mild fever on occasion and body aches, but nothing that degenerated into a full blown nasty old, just a persistent numbness that just makes me want to do nothing at all and rest. To top it DH is away to Bangalore for 2 weeks which means whatever rest I can get I will take it and blogging hasn’t been really on my mind, other than in the fact I have tons of great ideas but zero energy to materialise them into posts.

So since I’m lazy mode but still think updating my blog is important I’ll go on describing my new Kitchen a little. I promised a photo tour of my new place, and I guess it is better to do it one room at a time.
Now I know I did a post on kitchens in India a while ago, where I described all my kitchens over the year and you can go read it here.

As mentioned in that post the previous kitchen was my favourite, mostly because it had loads of natural light, over the months I spent in it I wasn’t a huge fan of the glossy off white marble tiles in there because when you cook in a kitchen it gets messy, and that kitchen with all the magazine perfect look and gloss was actually making you feel like you committed a crime actually using it to cook food, and there wasn’t much storage space considering the size.

Now here is one pic of my new Kitchen:

It’s a bit dark I’ll give you that, and that board on the window in the back is now gone but I haven’t taken a new picture. But the floor is a old fashioned grey marble with not one single tile matching the other that is also matte, the spills don’t show, and that kitchen is slightly narrower than the one in the previous flat and a tad longer, and backs quite a few more cabinets. First there are all the loft cabinets designed only for one thing: storing the never used junk away, you find these a lot in old fashioned Indian kitchen, they kind of replace the basement cell in Swiss apartments. Then there is the fact that on the stove side of the kitchen there are little cabinets under the counters as they would be too deep and unpractical, I have one that was to put the gas cylinder that we use to store the dog food, the cylinder goes under the stove slab, and one deep cabinet in which I dumped things I use but not often. The counter on the other side is a narrow one, namely used to put the cooked dish or stuff you need while preparing the food, and the cabinets below the counter are less deep and therefore far more user friendly to put pots and pans. Above the narrow counter are one class door display for the plates and glasses, two wooden cabinets to put food stuff (they aren’t full yet) and two secret triangular shaped cabinets to fill the tiny space on bot side of the unit/ The stove side has 2 big cabinets for food stuff, and a drainage cabinet above the sink, which I do not use to drain plates and glasses because my Aquaguard unit is underneath and it would not even really drain properly, so I use this one for all my cutting boards, steel plates and bowls.

The fridge doesn’t fit in the kitchen because we bought a wider than average fridge when we replaced ours last year, so the space for the fridge now looks like this:

The cheap metallic shelf we bought in 2010 when we were living in Navi Mumbai to store DH’s old never used books in the storage room and later moved into the kitchen in Bangalore to move back as a bookshelf in the hallway in the previous place is now back in the Kitchen, a bit more rickety after so many moves but still standing and by far the most versatile 3500 rupees we spent. Now I’ll give you that all that is now on the shelf could have fit anywhere else in the kitchen if I decided to seriously cram the cabinets, but I’m all for practicality in a kitchen and I don’t see the point in crowding a cabinet unit or a counter if I can avoid it and since that fridge space would remain unused for it’s intent purpose why not use it for something else?
This kitchen has also two sinks, for me that’s easy to figure out how to use them: Put the heavy pans in one, the breakables in the other when there are dishes. Use one to store dirty dishes and the other to wash vegetables…In Switzerland with sink drain plugs that would have meant fill one with warm soapy water to wash the dishes, and fill the second one with cold water to rinse the dishes before placing them on the draining platform. But these sinks here have no drain plugs. In fact that is the first time I have seen the oh so familiar to me two sink setting. My maid is totally clueless about them, she hasn’t even figured out she can transfer all the dirty dishes to one, soap them all up and place them in the second sink before rinsing…oh well!

You might have noticed in the first picture that one door is opened on an area covered with glass windows. This was originally an utility balcony that has been converted by the owner into a utility veranda, in an effort to protect the washing machine from the elements:

In India the utility space is almost present in every apartment or house, this is the laundry corner, in most place that’s a balcony, in Chennai it’s often a huge area, in Mumbai it’s tiny and in our old flat it was wedged in the hallway in a special enclosure. If your utility room is a balcony or a veranda like above it’s also becomes what would be known as the broom closet back home where you dump all the cleaning supplies and tools. In this one DH and I plan to get some small wall mounted racks to put things like mops and sponges and detergents to keep them organized as we don’t want it to be an eye sore that is seen at the end of the kitchen corridor. Right now I have to keep reminding my maid that NO I don’t want the brooms and mops dumped in one of the 3 bathrooms as we use these for different things and I refuse to shower facing a plastic broom or a dirty bucket or a mop, but hopefully she will get it one day (funny because she was good about that in the other flat and this one has even more utility space).

That kitchen is not looking as fashionable as the old one, but what it lacks in IT quotient it makes up in practicality, my guess is that the owner made quite a few upgrade, she even put lights under the above counter cabinet to make sure we can properly see what we are doing on the working plan. It’s also a kitchen that doesn’t make you feel guilty about cooking, it will look messy after baking or making a full meal, all kitchen do, but won’t make you feel like you ruined it the way you would uglify a super model sending her in stilettos perfect hair do, impeccable make up and a satin gown to run a marathon…if I can make an analogy. It’s probably a kitchen that would make a designer cringe, but it’s a kitchen in which I actually feel very comfortable working.

1Comments

, by Cynthia Haller

In Recipe,

Pizza at home

The other day I decided to make a pizza myself from scratch at home, including the base, mostly because I am getting sick of having to exclusively depend on some big name franchises to get one, especially since I find them oily, and not so tasty to begin with. And before I continue any further, I don’t care about the “You should have used whole wheat instead of white flour” and other health tips, so pretty much keep them for yourself. It’s not like we are eating Pizza everyday, and where I come from they are still pretty healthy despite using a white base. Granted whole wheat is healthier and I agree to that, there are dishes that just taste better without, the pizza of my childhood included.

Now if you live in Switzerland you actually don’t have to prepare it from scratch, because supermarket chains have come up with the pre-cooked pizzas, the base is pre-cooked, the toping on top raw and sold in the fridge section rather than the freezer one, meaning these are fresh and won’t keep more than a day or two in your fridge at home, you still need to bake them for about 15 minutes to enjoy them, the base is thicker than what you get at a traditional Italian restaurant, softer too but still far thinner than what Pizza Hut or Domino’s offer (both franchises have very limited success in my country anyway).
Now that I am done giving you the rundown on Swiss pizzas, back to mine, if you please. I have in the past tried the store bought pizza bases you find in supermarkets in India…simply put, they are DISGUSTING…there said it, half of the time I ended with a base that had a sweet after taste, and in any case they turn rock hard solid in the oven after just a few minutes, long before the toping you put on top is cooked enough, and it usually disintegrate on the plate with the topping sliding right off the base.
Making my own pizza dough was something I wanted to do again (I already did a few times in the past) for a long time, but never really got the energy or time to do it, to be frank Pizza became synonym of “Easy way out” on a hell day and making you base and topic and baking it and making a side of garlic bread again from scratch is anything but so.

We had a cold spell hitting Mumbai last week and this is the kind of weather that makes me crave taste from home even more, in a few words, perfect time for a home made pizza, ours turned out to be huge as the recipe I have for pizza dough could easily make two medium ones, but to do that would have meant me freezing half of the dough before letting the yeast do all of it’s yeast-y magic and I didn’t think of planning. I had a pack of frozen chicken bacon in the freezer left, grated pizza cheese in the fridge, all I had to do was make a tomato sauce from scratch, slice up some mushrooms and voila!
Because my daughter actually loves the garlic bread that comes with a pizza more than the pizza itself I googled it and found an easy recipe to follow and we had our meal. DH is usually not that much of a pizza fan, but he ate a whole slice this time around, Ishita did the same, if that is any indicator of taste. The garlic bread is something DH insisted having in his tiffin the next day and what looked like a ridiculously huge amount when I baked it was actually so good it barely lasted 24 hours.

Here is how I make my pizza dough:

2.5 cups of white flour (maida)
1 pinch of salt
2 tbsp olive oil
7g dry yeast (with the yeast sold in India you might need to double that)
2 tsp sugar

1) In a mixing bowl mix the flour and salt and make a well in the middle. Dilute the yeast in a little warm water along with the sugar and pour into the well, cover the yeasty water with some flour and let it foam. Your yeast and flour will be ready to receive more water and be knead into a dough when the yeast water foams and oozes out of the flour covered well.

2) Add water gradually and knead to form a smooth elastic dough, once you achieve that consistency knead and fold the dough for 5-7 minutes then cover with a cotton cloth and let it rise for about an hour. if you plan to freeze half of it for later do it BEFORE you let the dough rise.

3) Pre-heat your oven at 220 degrees Celsius WITH the tray on which you plan to put the pizza on once the dough has risen, knock back your dough and roll out to a 5mm thick circle.
Once the oven is hot, take the pizza tray out with oven mits and place your dough on the hot tray. Immediately cover with your choice of topping starting with the tomato sauce (store bought pasta sauce will work great if you don’t want to make your own), then the vegetables or other topping you want on it, then sprinkle some grated cheese on top. I don’t use that much. On the pizza you are seeing in the picture which is a large one we used half a pack of grated pizza cheese from “Go Cheese), Add some toping on top of the cheese, in our case this was only the bacon and olives that went on top.

4) Bake your pizza for 15-20 minutes until the crust is turning golden brown and the cheese bubbling. Now the reason I must not stress enough that the tray on which you place your raw dough must be HOT is that the fresh toping on top of the pizza will prevent the dough from really cooking in the center of the pizza if you don’t make sure the base is getting some heat from the plate it has been placed on. If you place your pizza dough on a cold tray and put everything in the oven the topping and exposed crust will be overcooked and taste horrible by the time the center stops being gummy. The reason why in traditional Italian clay or brick ovens the pizza is placed directly on the stone bottom I must add.

The garlic bread recipe I used can be found here

Enjoy

11Comments

, by Cynthia Haller

In Home,

Flats with a soul

In French anything that has a little something about them (and I mean THINGS not people) is described as having a “cachet” (pronounced cashay) which translates as “a stamp mark” describing said things their uniqueness or personality trait. Flats in old buildings or neighbourhood steeped with history are said to have a cachet. My studio apartment in Geneva was one of these, it was located in one of these century old row townhouse that have generally tiny apartments located atop a shop arcade on a main road or in a commercial district. Mine was on the top floor of one of these houses (the ground floor was a beauty parlour) and what made it special was that it was in the attic of that house, complete with it’s slanting ceiling to give a charm and all the problem that goes with it: water seepage due to a roof in need of restoration, cold winters due to poor insulation, stifling hot summers due to the fact clay tiles retain heat…but it was pretty and cosy. The flat could be described in English as having a soul. Not because that place had a particular history, there are hundreds of these houses still left in Geneva, but because the house at a time were human dimensions still mattered, where having a life somehow still mattered and people didn’t want to feel boxed despite living in an apartment.

Now with all the moves we made across India, DH and I have visited a lot of flats, and whenever we can we actually prefer the less glossy-glitzy-posh ones over ones that may not look designer perfect but gave us a feeling of being at home rather than parked there at the end of a busy day working. Inevitably the ones we like have enough windows to let natural light in, and good ventilation, rooms that suggest we are still human beings who enjoy their leg space rather than bunnies in a hatch or chicken in a cage. Who wouldn’t?
The problem nowadays in cities and especially in Mumbai is that space has become a luxury, and not only that, it has also become a license for developers to build ultimately crappy apartment towers which they sell at an over inflated rate, and to justify their outrageous prices they quote the name of this and that architect apparently famous, blind you with ground floor lobbies all done up in imported shiny marbles, mirror works and chandeliers, state of the art elevators that let you admire your rear through the 3 sides mirror, rigid garden landscaping, most of the time with a club house boasting the latest fitness equipment and swimming pool to make you forget that your personal living quarter will only account for about 1000sq ft of the 1700 you paid for and are finished in cheap cement, basic electrical fittings and vitrified white marble, to really woo you they will if they are kind enough throw in a semi modular kitchen (cabinets below the counter but not above) and a “Kholer” wash basin and tap in your bathroom (Look for the 2 crores you pay we got you a 3-4k imported tap in your bathroom…FREE!!!!).
We rented flats in these type of buildings, twice, the first time was in Navi Mumbai, and you all know it left is rather unimpressed as as designer the tiles were in the bathrooms and Kitchen, and how modern the tap fixture looked, the pipes inside the wall were substandard and could not hold the water pressure, resulting in me calling the plumber every week to fix a leak, and which in the long run turns into water seepage in the walls and growth of black mold (which is a health hazard). The second time was in the flat we just left last December, it was fortunately better built and the bathrooms were nicely planned, but the layout of that flat was the same as the layout of the flat in Navi Mumbai, and the same we saw in many of the flats we saw before settling for the one we are now living in: The main door opens directly on a big empty space that will be your living room (meaning anybody coming to do a delivery has a nice view of your living area) right after the living room you get a tiny kitchen, then a long narrow hallway usually take you to the rooms with the master bedroom inevitably being at the end of the hallway. Hallway that is in every case a ridiculous loss of square feet that you can’t furnish with anything bar a few pictures on the wall which you’ll never get to appreciate as it is also badly lit.
We’ve seen that layout over and over again, and in rental properties it means the landlord also left the default fixtures, so you get industrial white walls, tube lights, and this dreadful cold glossy uniform oh so trendy nowadays marble floor that will not even forbid you to step out of the shower with damp feet, a floor that looks good only freshly mopped and is ridiculously high maintenance.

They are one size fits all, and typical of a urban culture in which you are to fit the cookie cutter mould, the advantage is that when you move from one flat in one part of the city to another flat in another part of the city you don’t really have to wonder too long about which furniture goes where, you can replicate the layout.
These flats might be a symbol of the New India, the emerging economic powerhouse, but boy are they BORING, and high maintenance too.
Our old flat was great, with bay windows, and tons of natural light, but because it was basically that soulless industrial place the only thing it tolerated was soulless minimalism and pristine order to feel great. The floor looked crap after we brought back our dog from a walk, Ishita’s toys scattered around made the place look suffocating, the bedroom while bigger than the one we have now looked stuffy if we put anything more than the bed and the wardrobes in it (right now we have the bookshelves in a small room and it still look bigger than the old one did). And too many pots and pans out in the kitchen made the place look tacky (arrrgh these people actually use the kitchen to cook!!!!!!!!).

Our new place in many ways make us feel like we are in a bigger version of our good old Bangalore flat. It was built 10 years ago, in an area that was back then barely developed, people still valued life outside the office and it therefore has far more human proportions. It has 3 bedrooms each with big but old fashioned windows. the main door opens on a narrow hallway in which a shoe rack still fits, meaning that the random stranger delivering parcel will not be able to get a glimpse of your life and put a price tag on it. It also means that there is a space where you can drop your shoes and bags before entering the rest of the home. Each bedroom is big enough to accommodate a king size bed and let you walk around it (newer fancier building don’t all let you have that luxury trust me). The living room is smaller than what it is in the latest designer complex, but still fits my dinning table and sofa without looking crammed, and a big balcony extend from the living room living us a nice pleasant out door sitting area through some French doors. Space we plan to furnish with bean bags and lots of plants and is the closest to a terrace we’ll ever come to in Mumbai. We left the master bedroom to Ishita preferring the other one for ourselves, It is smaller than even our big bedroom in the flat we just left, but the bookshelves do not dwarf it the way it would have done in the old place.
The kitchen is narrower but longer and definitely darker than in the old place, but for some reason looks more functional (even though I could not put my big fridge in it), and I even told DH that if the flat were ours instead of being rented by us it would still be easy to upgrade the kitchen and make it cheerful than it would be in a newer building.
This older flat from a simpler time that was not too long ago has that “cachet” or soul I was talking about. It has that homey feeling, it is forgiving to a little mess, it doesn’t make you feel like you committed the ultimate crime of cooking in your kitchen instead of ordering take out and let you live a life outside our workplace. It also has a much nicer view than my old one, it opens on a small, a bit wild, not too manicured garden, but I’ll let you judge in picture.

This was the view from my old place:

And here is what i see from the living room in my new place:

Granted I have bars on my balcony and they are repainting the outer walls at the moment, but you see what I mean about the place being a bit more human now. The view from my bedroom has lots of trees too but do not give on the same side, and above all it is PEACEFUL, I don’t hear any traffic or construction work up there…bliss!

I’ll give you a photographic tour of my new place in one of the coming entries.

2Comments

, by Cynthia Haller

In Relocating,

Finding back my groove

First of all sorry for the lack of new posts, as you can imagine I have been busy, packing, moving, celebrating Christmas, recovering from the effort of packing and moving, and celebrating New Year (quietly at home with take out chicken and a few movies).
It actually all boils down to figuring out a new routine, the constant in every move, and the one you really can’t fully adjust to until you unpacked all your boxes, and slept the stress away.
This time around since we relocated around the holidays, Ishita’s school had their last day on the 21st of December, then I had the good idea to enrol her for their Winter holidays activity class, so that she still get to spend 2 hours with her friends and do some fun activities when I would not really be fun myself.

With each moves there are some things you need to get used to, for me it’s the morning routine that takes time to get back into. In our old building the morning was punctuated by a concerto of doorbell rings that frankly was driving totally insane. It is common in India to have all kind of services and they all come in the morning, so here was my “ding dong” parade going:

6am: Maid showing up to cook chapatti and clean the flat, sometimes she would be in a rush and leave a few tasks undone then.

7-7.30am: the milkman would come, the system was that you bought a stack of coupons in advance and would hand out as many coupons you wanted in exchange of packs of milk.

8am: about once a week but never on the same day the car wash guy would come to ask for the key to clean the inside of the car.

9am: twice a week the clothes ironing guy came to pick up the clothes, then ring the doorbell again the next day around the same time to drop the pressed clothes back

9.30am: the maid would come back again, or to finish what she didn’t do earlier or ask if there was any dishes that piled up between 6am and then.

10-10.30 am: The garbage collector would ring to see if we had garbage to dispose of.

Some days we had people coming to collect their monthly fees as well. between 6am and 11am by the time Ishi was in school I would be interrupted all the time, DH could only squeeze his daily walk before office, Ishita being your usual 3 years old makes million requests and it never failed, Murphy’s law would have it that the instant I would just go to the bathroom to relieve my bladder the damn door bell would ring again, never mind taking a shower, I learnt to move it to the evening instead of the morning simply because I hate being disturbed when I do so. The only ones I could have somehow cut were the milk man and the garbage, the milk man by putting a bag on the door handle with the coupons inside (there was no way to hook said back to the door though…damn designer posh doors!) and by dumping the garbage behind the door, which I tried to do, realising that it didn’t stop the lady from ringing it, apparently not connecting the dots between a big garbage bag by my door and the fact I had already left the garbage for her to pick up.

In the new flat we found out that the milk comes before 6am and our doorbell making such a cutesy bird chirp noise barely audible from our bedroom when we are still sleeping meant we would not collect the milk in person, so I took a canvas bag, and pleased to have good old-fashioned doors could hang it to it, now the milk man pick up the coupons in the bag and drop the milk in said bag, we just have to remember to put said bag out on the handle the night before. The maid comes at 6.30-7 and that’s the only doorbell ring I get in the morning, the garbage collectors pick up the bags around 11am in the the stair case where people put the bags for them, the ironing guy only comes when you call him via intercom or by telling the security booth downstairs. And frankly I LOVE this system much better, that gives me back a grip on how things go. As much as I like having these small services in India, I hate their imposing their presence on me turning me into a wind up toy the whole morning long. As I mentioned several time: I am NOT a morning person, I need things to go to MY pace, and a million ding dongs in the morning is more likely to enrage me than help me.

In a way my morning routine became more fluid and simple with this shift, but still have me trying to find my groove. And right now I try not to fall too much into it because the Winter activity class is at a different time than her regular school timings, it’s also half an hour shorter.
In the old building going to school was just taking the lift downstairs going to the next building in the complex and drop her there. Now I have to take a 10 minutes brisk walk to get there (15 with Ishita since she has shorter legs), my new building is on the top of the hill in my enclave so going down is fast, coming back up give me a cardio work out (I deliberately do a 10 minutes power walk back up the hill after dropping Ishi). All in all There is about 40-50 minutes of walking to and back from school in my day, not bad in anyway, but definitely a new routine to get adjusted to.

Therefore here is the reason why I have been quiet, but I’m getting there, and am ready to be my good old blogging self very soon.