Another lazy but awesome summer friday

Spent last night playing empire earth.. slept at 7:30 PM in morn, woke about 1 PM, nice :)

However some real firsts added to today which have me satisfied with this day.

Configured Empire Earth on laptop and on my PC. So that I and Naqiyah could play as a team.  To say that she's caught on to Strategy gaming is to put it mildly. Awesome fun. We played till 6 with just a break for lunch.  So I guess network gaming in our house is going to be one of popular way of spending weekends ( My bro will join in via internet on the new PC that I bought for gaming for him.. he's been surviving on 2-3 hrs of sleep a day since last week as he's been going through the backlog of all strategy games he's missed out on in past years. You can say he's bigger fan then I am )

I was planning to take Naqiyah to Cocktail as she doesn't watch hindi movies, nor does she see much TV so really she needs help to keep brushed up on Hindi. I've decided to force her to watch hindi movies with me, however it being the first day of release and a weekend,  Cocktail tickets were all sold out for evening show, so I canxed the movie plan, and was considering how to plan the evening. Amy messaged that the couchsurfing live music get together was tonight and offered for me to join her. Basically bunch of surfers get together and play various musical instruments (mostly indians) and add nice company, drinks and conversation could be a fun and memorable evening. I've never been but its at Manish's place where Aneta was staying for a while, and Amy is a regular, so joining in would be easy for me. However Naqiyah did not really want to go and hence I was about two minds whether to go or not, when i got a brilliant idea.

 I took out the roller skates that I'd bought for Naqiyah from ages, and we decided to practice skating. She has had some practice on ice skating but she'd never tried roller skating before. It was awesome fun and within 30 mins she was skating along quite smoothly. She skated for around 45 mins and its gonna be another one of those things which she will hopefully learn this summer ( She's already covered 35% of keyboard and is well on the way to becoming a good touch typist).  It was another first for us.

I also promised to take her to the pool for a swim at night as we had never done it before (swimming at night). Water was just right, although light was a bit low with just a single tubelight. However today was another day for many firsts in the pool. Yesterday as Christy didn't know freestyle and was asking me how to do it, Naqiyah saw this. I showed her but she managed just few splashes. However today she did whole horizontal laps with crawl ( free style) including breathing technique ( means u breath out in the water and turn ur face up to breath in, and back to breathing out under water).. That was awesome first, as I was always worried when she would learn free style and if I could ever get her to do it. Next seems she'd picked today to amaze me... Yesterday to make her jump into the pool I had to cajole her and pressurize (involves me shouting a bit at her) her.. However today suddenly she said she wanted to try to dive... Although immediately after bending down to dive, she jumped. After lot of guiding, cajoling and appealing to her braver side, she finally managed an awkward dive.. But after that there was no stopping her.. She kept going back up for dive after dive.. until I had to stop her firmly. The problem was that after diving water being a little dark, I had difficulty seeing her under water.. and I was always worrying about if she had held her breath properly.. So another first for her was a diving..

More to come though... as soon as she started diving, she also got more confident under water, and started doing flips and rolls underwater... Also for the first time she swam under water and touch the floor of the pool.  If you ever try you will feel that sensation of water pressure building inside ur nostril when you try to swim straight down... seems it does not stop her at all! She was an absolute water baby under water today.

And then she usually likes to swim backwards a bit and asks me to hold her from bottom so that she can float or 'sleep' on the water to relax.. today I left her while she was sleeping and she floated on. Now she can absolutely comfortably float around in the water on her back without moving her arms or legs, something I can never do in the pool ( I always blamed lack of fat , but if she can do it.. I have no excuses)

Then we came down and finally she got her wish to make a muffin and , even as I write this I can smell freshly baked muffin right out of the oven...

A nice nice day this :)

Boobs Pasta

Tasneem / Bindi gifted me boobs pasta when they came to dubai.. I had no idea at the time how to make them.. (basically Pasta boob shaped..  :) ) ... but  2 days back, just before sitting to paint Parveen suggested making the pasta.. as she periodically does, getting the box to me and asking me to tell her how to make it...

I decided to make it myself.. happy to say it was finger licking awesome..

Pasta... Boil in water with some oil and salt.. rinse with hot water

Sauce... 1 part stock (Chicken or Vegetable, Parveen had some Chicken stock which I used) , 2 part creame ( I used nestle) , heat and reduce... mix butter , after some time mix cheese ( i used cheddar at the time .. ), add herbs ( oregano and mixed herbs , spring onions, mint leaves and parsely  is what i used) , salt and pepper..... mix all and heat...


Result was one godawesome pasta dish... yummmmmm!

Thnx B - T .. although honestly me being me, i'm sure it is one of you who gave this to me, and i'm sure i dont remember which one of u did :)

Advanced Open Water

Started my advanced open water dive today... Saved due to Naqiyah... Have not dived more then a year and a half. Had essentially forgotten most of the stuff.  When my dive center suggested direct deep dive 30 meters as the first dive I'd rejected as I was scared that I did not have enough experiance.

However when I reached Dive center today with Naqiyah, Christy and Parveen in tow they insisted I do deep dive first and then come back and we all go for shallower dive while these girls do snorkling... Their idea was that since wreck dive is also a deep dive and deep dive needs to be first dive of the day, there was no other option if I was to do multiple dives in one day. Fujera being quite far I would also liked to finish multiple dives.. But after considering that Naqiyah was quite quite excited about snorkling, I canxed deep dive and told Rosy ( the cute phillipino dive center gal, who manages to sell me expensive equipment and courses at supposedly discounted pricing) that I'd prefer to do shallow peak performance boyancy dive first, so that Naqiyah could snorkle at the same time. First time I also took anti nausea medicines ( helped... non of us felt even a hint of nausea, this was good.. both Pam and Lee Peng had fallen extermely sick on the boat ride to the island)...

Anyway I dived as expected ( Huge butterflies in stomach before doing back role with cylinder off the boat into the sea.. hight daunting and weight even more so) ... went down to 10 meters.. got huge pain in ears.. kept trying to equalise using rapid swallowing actions and trying to pop the ears.. but wasnt working.. so tried to carry on without equalisation.. Equalisation is process of making pressure in ears equal to pressure outside the ear otherwise ears hurt.. remember the fast elavator rides or plane takeoffs, and landings.. however since water has huge pressure difference every meter, equalisation is more urgently required every few meters and extremely neccesary...


Anyway i continued with the pain, and after about 20 mins realised / remembered that i was to hold my nostrils shut and breath into them to equalise... Which I promptly did and was fine...

But remember this was 10 meter dive.. if I'd done a deep dive 30 meters.. this same would have ended extremely differently.. My friend hashim on his first open water dive in jumera beach had equalisation problem in 10 meters, and tore his ear drum.. no diving for him henceforth... ! 10 meters is different from 30 meters.. I don't know what could have gone wrong if Naqiyah was not there.. just glad she was.. :)

Unfortunately my mask new one with custom made lens for my power of spectacle has a leak... Kept flooding .. however being able to see the fishes clearly was an absolutte treate... have to solve mask problem though.. removing water from flooded mask is not a pleasent task.. flooded mask itself makes u feel as if u r drowning even if u r breathing through the mouth...


Nyway seems i'm back to diving after a long interval.. hoping to finish advanced open water and Nitrox dives quickly ( I decided to go enriched oxygen route even though considrably more expensive, for deep dives.. pressure sickness and narcosis is not something i'm willing to even give a go at .. call me pansy if you wish)... then to my real interest.. in August wanna do free diving.. go deeper then deep without anything.. no oxygen no tanks no bcd no nothing.. just me , my body and the deeps... thats more like my kind of thing i've decided.. there's a girl called sara lise who's supposed to do this course in dubai in August.. only one around who does it.. me so so looking forward to it :)

Parveen's Cock

My late night conversation with Parveen -

Pehli Nazar ne aisa jaadu kar diya going on in tv...

Suddenly she pipes up.. you know my cock used to love this song... ( my incredulous expression later she carries on) ... suto hoi to uthi jai... ena expressions to jova jeva.... ( I look on, still trying to digest this unsolicited info about her cock... then she says... becharane mummy ye kapavi karo... !! ( I'm speechless )

But more to come... khabar che bav naughty hato.. desh ma lai gayeli to badha ne kat to to... finally itlo famous thai gayo ke hamara gam ma koi bacchu naughty thai to ena mummy kai, ke bombay wala cock ne bulavis !!! :)