Drunk on life!

Home alone pouring myself a chilled Pepsi along with awesome leftover Mandi (Chicken and Rice an arabic dish) mixed with boiled lamb (boiled with hint of garlic ~ginger). Thought crossed my mind to pour myself a shot of brandy. It was soon dismissed though. Lots of highs today.. no need for one more

For a start crossed my barrier of 50laps and managed 55 laps in the pool. Not being a guy with any particular affinity to water this change has of course been brought about by as always ... you guessed it right - Naqiyah!.. She takes to water completely and twice this week she's even swum in morn in the pool at her summer camp and than again swam with me in the evening in our pool. And i'm always the one who has to insist we finally leave the pool. Infact the one promise i'd made to her when i was moving into a separate apartment is that it would have a pool. Am so glad I managed to keep it. Anyway with all the time I spend in the pool with her, I've also at times gotten around to taking few laps whenever I get a chance ( not very often since with her in the pool, i simply have to stick by her). Also on and off, I prod myself to swim, when she's off to Umaima's place. All of it has added up to my technique getting more streamlined and I actually myself swimming faster, and effortlessly. I can simply swim more than i ever could earlier. A downside that I've noticed is, that it doesn't seem to have much affect on my weight which has been on steady increase and the outlook still is positive!

Another awesome first today was - my guitar Sang!! thats the only way I can describe the melody.. Guitar is obviously a lovely piece of instrument, and i am sort of enthralled by mine (Its a beautiful Yamaha, will post a pic soon).. even visually it looks sleek and elegant, full of possibilities. However unfortunately I was trying to study playing guitar via internet tutorials and the one I am following (http://www.justinguitar.com/) starts off with chords and than move on to playing chord based songs after much practice. Again due to the fact that I'd gone and got Piano for Naqiyah (again a Yamaha) I finally found a music class in Qusais near my place and on enrolling her ~ at the same time enrolled myself for Guitar. So we have a joint class where she's supposed to learn piano and me guitar. However our first class to-gather was more of the instructor instructing me ,to show her how to play piano and me helping her practice the notes (CDEFG). This was lovely fun and it seems i'll by default be learning to play piano if only to teach Naqiyah. Meanwhile good part of the institute turned out to be that they train students for appearing in Trinity college London exams. So the course book I got needs me to follow sheet music based studies wherein I have to read and play music rather than just learn chords and try to memorise songs. Luckily this also meant that the book starts of with notes rather than directly with chords ( I often used to wonder why all the sweet sounding notes were never supposed to be used while playing guitar because seemed to me only focus was on chords). Anyways today played a song while following the music sheet and the sound was awesome.. I kept getting distracted by how lovely the music was sounding (if I may say so myself) :).. It was truly enlightening to experience first hand how the musicians must feel ! Needless to say I'm hooked. I only made myself stop after about an hour as I don't want to create impossible expectations and targets for myself for my music practice... 30mins to 60 min is max I hope to practice about 2~3 times a week. More than that will be bonus but certainly not a commitment that I make.

Also happened to be Naqiyah's Nana's birthday. So since Umaima was coming to pick Naqiyah up from my place, I brainstormed with Naqiyah what she'd like to give her Nana as a gift. Initially after explaining to her that she can't buy clothes etc for her Nana as she's a kid, she decided writing some songs was a good idea. So she came up with impromptu songs while playing the piano which I took a video of. Unfortunately for some dumb reason windows movie maker doesn't work with the file that my Cam creates and hence I couldn't upload it yet. But have promised her, that I shall do so, so that she can show it to her Nana. Also I tried to print lyrics of two more songs which she sang onto back of her picture which I printed out so that she could gift it to her nana, unfortunately my photo printer didn't quite print on the back side of photopaper well and it was smudged. In any case seeing her makeup and play songs made my day!

Also yesterday was a special nite. Being a weekend evening, first time ever I and Naqiyah watched a whole movie togather. The movie I wanted to see with her was Alice in wonderland. Unfortunately its print was bad and hence while browsing through dvds, started up a film Donkey Xote. Turned out to be dubbing of Spanish cartoon in english and was quite a strange movie. But Naqiyah insisted on seeing it, and we enjoyed the show with her constant questions as to what was going on.

In morn we invented a new game. Having by some chance woken up at same time (Usually she wakes up earlier) we just lazed around and started talking. She asked me if (knight) in the last nights movie was night.. I explained to her it was knight with a k . As we were discussing spellings ofcourse night and knight both came up. Knight being mighty - might came up. Slowly words evolved into more and more words that rhyme, like light, fight, height, right(again confusion of right as in direction and right as in correct) etc.. With each additional word added we'd try to make a sentence using all the previous words, and the sentence would follow an earlier one forming a story.. I feel I have stumbled upon a great tool to get her interested in spellings of the words and meanings and a way to add to her vocabulary. As usual incentive is story telling.. She just loves stories, and I love to put all sorts of info into stories that I think she can deal with. For instance she now knows what Sirens are, the mythical ones are.. she infact knows most mythical creatures like elves, sirens, witches, goblins, gomes,unicorns and others, some sorts of ramdom information she collects while listening to stories are things like boats and their masts, deck,captain, sails and bow etc whirlpools and tornadoes (similarities and differences also experimentation in the pool to create a whirlpool)..basic geography like China(some provinces), Africa/egypt , european countries etc etc... basically anything and everything I think would get her become a more open, curious and well informed person, i make a story out so that she gets it naturally. Ofcourse she's still quite too young but I figure if in any case she's going to be listening to stories from me, why not add some value.

Anyway also got around to organising some of thousands of pictures i've clicked since I got my dslr.. and even finally used my photo printer to print them out!..

Work.. yes.. I did some work too.. but as usual seems like I anyway don't do enough, so yes.. a lot of it is pending :)

Best part is, my friend Bindi is gonna become a blogger. Gives me incentive to get back to blogging too.. so here I AM.