Dinner Party and New Arrival

Those who know me well know that I love to cook. I don't know why it has taken me eight weeks to invite people over for a party. I invited Chandan, Avinash and his wife Sowmya, and belatedly, Suresh, to dinner on Saturday. I had great plans to travel all over town getting what I wanted to cook, but decided to try to make a meal from what I have in my cupboard and what I could buy from the FabMall in the apartment complex.

I had such a surprise when I started to cook. The new houseboy I have here on the 4th floor saw me smashing garlic as I started to cook. I was making a chicken dish and had already brined the chicken. Adrian taught me that chicken always tastes better if you start by brining (soaking in salted water.) Since I wasn't sure of the quality of the chicken, this sounded like a great idea.

Anyway, Santhos, the houseboy, asked if he could help me peel the garlic. OK. Then he looked at me and said, "Onions?" Of course. So as I browned the chicken, Santhos cut onions for the chicken, then peeled and cut cucumbers, washed tomatoes in bottled water then sliced those, peeled and cut carrots into thin slices. That was salad, beautifully arranged on a plate. Then he cut cantaloupe and seeded it. He did put that in the freezer, so we had beautiful blocks of flavor. He seeded a pomegranate and put the seeds over the frozen cantaloupe.

I added dried fruit and chicken bouillon (from Per) and green olives and vermouth to the chicken and let it simmer for a long time. I sauteed shrimp, or rather Santhos did, and then I added pesto from Per and that was the appetizer. The rest of the meal was basmati rice that I cooked and two veg dishes that I got in packets at the store for the vegetarian Sowmya.

Yes, too much food and it was wonderful. The food was good, but the feeling of preparing it and working in such harmony with Santhos was wonderful. He came back when we were done eating and cleaned up. Then he prepared the dessert, mangos with vanilla ice cream. Chandan manned the bar. I didn't have to move much and as the evening went on, I couldn't. Avinash brought an excellent red wine from India. So there was plenty of reason to be immobile.

I did help Santos put things away, but he never let me clean. That is his job. Sauteeing chicken is such a messy business without a splatter screen. When I started to clean up when I was done with that, he told me that was his job. OK.

The next day we picked up Laura from Chicago from the airport. She had taken a long flight from Chicago to New Delhi, stayed 12 hours in Delhi (we had convinced her to go to a hotel, too long in that little airport) and then flew a domestic airline to Bangalore. For someone who hates to fly, that was an exhausting trip.

We got her at 9:30 and then went to the Leela Palace for brunch, as we like to do for new comers. I've become so tired of Citrus, even its excellent brunch, we went to brunch at Zen. They bring sate' to your table - lamb, chicken and shrimp on skewers. They brought dim sum and tempura shrimp and vegetables. The buffet was filled with sushi and marinated vegetables. It was fabulous. I think that will be the last of the Leela. But it was a great last hurrah. After brunch, Laura and Nancy went back to the apartment and I stayed to have a massage. Teena joined me for a facial. It was great. We all got to meet Teena's husband. I liked him in their wedding picture. He is better in person. Maybe we will get to meet and talk for longer than 2 minutes sometime.

Busy weekend. Fortunately, we took Monday off for Memorial Day. The ladies came over for tea and cookies (Nancy brought them to the party from a shop at The Forum. Really good.) It was a quiet day. A good day for memories.

Sorry, I'm Going to be Late Today

We are experiencing pre-monsoon weather or peri-monsoonal weather as we older women would call it. We left the apartment yesterday in thick air. In the car, I told Ramesh in an ominous tone that it would be raining somewhere in Bangalore today. He smiled and said, "no, it is raining somewhere in Bangalore right now." We laughed because he had done this Jedi thing before. Then, lo and grow old, it started to pour just a few minutes later. Pfoummm, all the water in the sky dropped. And a cow came ambling down the road. She was sort of aiming our way, oblivious to the rain. Had it been me, she would have been steak the next day. But Ramesh is a much better driver than me.

So on the way in, I kept imaging the phone call to work. "So sorry, I won't be in today. Ran into a cow when a monsoon hit." Only in India.

Then I asked Ramesh if he would drive us through the gates at IBM and into the compound, rather than have us trudge through mud and cascading rain. He agreed kind of quietly. I thought he didn't want to wait in the long line to get in through the gate. But he knew. Somewhere in Bangalore it was not raining. Like at IBM. Only in India.

Another Sad Goodbye

Nahum is leaving tonight. He has been such a productive member of our team, I will hate to see him leave. When he arrived, the group was just starting to take mock calls. He saw that they weren't using their tools correctly, so he spent a lot of time working with them and drilling them on how to use their Tribune tools. This has helped considerably. Group 2 has it very tough. They have two very demanding groups, Chicago and Orlando, and two less demanding groups, Sun Sentinel and Daily Press. There is a lot to know and remember. KJ always stressed using their reference material for Orlando and Nahum has done the same for Chicago. Please have patience, folks in those cities, they will get there, given a lot of calls and time. It will be easier for them because Nahum cared so much and worked so hard to get them started on the right path.

Sophie and Nahum will always be the eaters in my experience in India. The fact that they were picky eaters is beside the point. They didn't seem to like to eat at the apartment. That's where I'd rather be, but we tend to stick together. Now that Sophie has gone, we've eaten out less, but still more than my body needs. I did take Nahum and Nancy to the Blue Ginger on Tuesday. This was one of Harriet's favorite places and the place where KJ learned to eat with chopsticks. It serves Vietnamese food and looks like a cabana. It has a high roof and open sides. I ate my obligatory scallops and a mango salad. Nahum had lamb chops and shrimp fried rice. Nancy had a delicious chicken and noodles soup and a chicken dish. The food was great, but the fun was the monsoon. It started to rain, then lightning and thunder, then the skies opened and dumped water. You can't call it rain. It's like the shower I've been dreaming of. Hummm. Next time, I'm taking the shampoo outside and finally getting my hair really clean.

We got there before a drop of rain fell. This gave us time to admire their gardens and start our lunch. Then the heavens opened. Holy cow! You can see them lowering the plastic curtains to keep out the rain. Anyway, the plastic kept the rain out and the whole thing stopped just as we were leaving. This is some resaturant. They even provide a floor show.

Goodbye Hello

It isn't that interesting things aren't happening every day. They are. When KJ was here, we would check each other's blogs every morning. I had to get my thoughts up quick or my Karens (Jennings and Campbell) would be asking what happened. Then Nahum and Sophie came and KJ left. These two aren't bloggers. They are eaters. We were constantly out in the afternoon looking for food that they would eat. Nahum isn't as picky, but Sophie is pickiness champ. That took a lot of our time and energy and isn't very interesting to blog about.

On the work side of life:

The LA team is constantly improving and feeling more confident. Harriet came up with the brilliant idea to ask for phone number instead of name. Most times the phone number in our ticketing system is right. If you put a %last 4 number (%2591) you will get just a few listings and you can find the person very quickly. Brava, Harriet. This saves so much time in getting to the right person. We are making sure that all teams do this. We have had such complaints about this part of the call taking forever. But we have been able to cut down our average time per call from 11 minutes to 5 minutes. This will make for much happier callers. Well, that's a little optimistic, but that should be happier.

They should also be happier because I don't ever remember seeing a more collaborative group. They know they don't know as much as old-timers do, so they pore/pour (they both seem right to me) through every reference document they can find. Poor Ratish has been scouring the Right Answers knowledge base through TechLynx. He found that users could have a lot of profiles in Outlook. He came over to me and asked why someone would do that. How the helk would I know? People do weird things. But he was just interested and really wanted to know. Poor Ratish, he went away with just that type of answer.

We had one call from Duke Helfand, an education writer, asking about an Outlook issue. There were 5 people researching every aspect of the problem. It's sometimes difficult to get to the whole answer because you don't know the chain of events that lead up to the problem. But they were looking at every resource and trying all solutions to come up with a good answer for Duke. The folks in LA have experiences that they can rely on to give them quick answers. The folks in Bangalore will get that experience over time, but they have a great team to rely on.

On the traveler side of life:

Sophie left last Saturday early in the morning. Just before she left, Nancy Carey joined us from Newsday. The Newsday team was very happy to see her. Other than a delightful but brief visit from Rob, they haven't seen any of the people they support. So Nancy has been a welcome addition. Nahum and I took her down to the local food store and pool area at the apartments. There are a lot of families here. They have a children's playground, a basketball court and swimming pool by the store. The pool looks so inviting. I don't wear bathing suits for good reason, but I am so tempted to slip in one night in my tank top and shorts. Very late when no one is around. The big lock on the gate was pointed out to me. Nahum said I could climb the wall. Funny guy. I'm just now getting better at stairs!

We have cut back on our searching for food and have just gone out to restaurants a couple of times. We went to Citrus at the Sophie, er, Leela Palace for their Sunday brunch. I have to say that going there so often has completely taken the shine off that place for me. We enjoyed it, but I may try something a little different for Laura's first weekend. Nahum, Nancy and I had found a good Indian place in the Forum Mall around the corner. That was really fun. We got into a three wheeler and went around the block. Nancy is very game for this type of adventure. It was just her first day here. What a trooper! Nahum had wanted to go to a movie, but the show was sold out. Spiderman III. Someone up there was answering my prayers. So we went to this Indian place instead.

It was modeled after a train's dining car in the old Raj days. Totally beautiful. And very inexpensive. We all enjoyed our food. It was prepared and presented beautifully. And my camera was at home. Sorry, Lynda. We tried to negotiate our normal price for going home and the drivers all said no, there was no place to turn around. Who knew that Bangalore was such a hopping place on Saturday night? Not me, even after 7 weeks. We met 3 of the guys from the Chicago team and they negotiated a 30 rupee drive. Then we kept going on forever because, you guessed it, there was no place to turn around. I gave him 50, which is what the first driver said. Considering how much money I've spent here, you'd think I wouldn't fight over 50 cents. Shame on me.

I did have my camera for our trip to Sunny's. Nahum is counting down the days until he leaves. We are visiting some of his and Sophie's old haunts. This was a real favorite. He got his lamb chops, Nancy got a delicious looking pizza and I got tempura vegetables and shrimp. A little eclectic, non? Nancy took the pizza to work. It was huge.

Nancy is having problems with the wifi in her room. None of us remember KJ having this issue. However, it just came to me that she connected directly to her laptop from the modem a lot of the time. I hope that solves the problem. It is hard to be without connectivity when you are so far from home. And she is having problems with the phone and no clock. Talk about being adrift! Actually, it sounds like my first week. Except I have a Blackberry that has a clock and instant email access. Rob and I were in touch throughout the early part of his visit, thanks to our Blackberrys. I don't know how one can survive on a business trip without one.

I'm having problems downloading pictures after that first one. Maybe another day you can see the great picture I took of Nancy and Nahum. I should ask the LAT team why this is happening. There would be 10 bodies all over this laptop.