Sunday 12 April 2020

11 April 2020

A couple of days back when I was going for a walk, a neighbour asked me if I was flattening the curves. And I beamed back. While the weighing scale is ruthless and doesn’t budge, it is good to know that my ample curves are flattening enough for her to notice! We are all adding to our vocabulary, thanks to COVID-19.
Last evening it rained and as with summer storms, there was a lot of wind and thunder. Must have been a great psychedelic show as well, but somewhere else. I was just about to water my garden and instead could sit down and appreciate the coolth. I then remembered that I had lost my lovely pink polka dotted umbrella last year - I had to wait till the rain stopped to go on my walk. Gave me more time to sit still and be…

Surprisingly, I don’t find time nowadays to just sit - there is always something else to be done. My kitchen disasters continue. I think my cookbook will be called “Cooking for the dummiest of dummies”. For breakfast, I decided to fry an egg. How difficult can that be, right? Now that I have survived, more or less, for three weeks on my own cooking, I was beginning to see myself as a full-fledged chef. So rather than break the egg into a bowl, fish out the little bits of egg shells from it and the pour it onto the pan, I decided to break the egg directly like I had seen in all those Youtube videos on cooking. I had music playing and I was doing a little jig and I broke the egg on the edge alright - only on the edge of the stove rather than on the edge of the pan. I managed to get the yoke into the pan, but the white of the egg was all over the stove. Chef out, rookie back in place with a new mess to clean up. Ah well, some mothers do have them!

This evening I drove off to a friend’s place to pick up dosai batter. Indu makes the batter at home and the dosais come out superbly. Yes, my dosais are decent - one of the few things I can make properly. She packed some chutney and sambhar to go with it, fed me some idlis doused in sambhar and ghee and sent me away. When I got back home and tried to put everything into the ‘fridge, I found that it was full up! An absolute novelty for me! I am usually staring into my ‘fridge hoping that something would miraculously turn up; and here in these times of difficulty, I had a wide choice! I guess I have gone into overdrive on stocking up - ‘hoarding’ is the right word. When would I eat all of this? I have never been faced with this problem before. I should probably make a list of the things in the ‘fridge, when I had put them in and follow a first in first out principle. It would be absolutely criminal if any of it got wasted. Agenda for a Sunday morning!

The other thing that I realised this evening is that I am not spending much money - I mean, there is really nothing to spend on! I stocked up on groceries on Thursday and paid by credit card. I looked around for something ready made to eat - sweets, samosas - nothing anywhere. So I came home with all my cash intact. In my panic I had withdrawn the grand sum of Rs.10,000 on 19th March, and I still have some left! Normally, that would have been long over by now. I would have had a few good meals outside, bought some stuff I didn’t need and been back at the ATM. Now, there is no chance of any of that! I can shop online, but somehow I never really got into that, luckily! There is an online store that is giving a whopping discount if you pay now and have the delivery done whenever possible - I am very tempted; I will probably give in the next time I have to bribe myself to do something boring - like sweep the house. Oh goodie! Maybe tomorrow!


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