Sydney Stories - Week 58

Hello,

A fairly quiet week, Business As Usual (BAU) as the IT professional Aussies say. Came up with some interesting graphs on Friday to assess how various teams were performing. As luck might have it one of the senior client managers was walking by and he peeked into my monitor and was surprised that someone actually looks at graphs (to analyse how things are) these days. Thankfully I was not on my gmail page then. ;-) 

Friday had a unique Thai lunch with one of my newly found friends. A Wiproite who happens to be Nandhitha's friend's dad. He is a hard core vegetarian and I was surprised when he used to claim that he loves Thai food. To prove his point he took me to a vegetarian Thai restaurant in the city. I am not sure if I would go there again, but certainly was an interesting concept. It was actually a vegan shop where all they had was tofu and veggies. I ordered one of my usual favourites - Pad See Iew. It had everything minus the chicken and more importantly the fish sauce. Chicken was substituted with some form of tofu - acceptable. However lack of fish sauce - it seemed to lack something basic. Is that what people call "soul"??? Looks like one can get realization through food too. ;-) That restaurant was trying its best to allure people to turn vegans. They had quotes from famous personalities starting from Da Vinci to Einstein and more. However, I remember reading somewhere that while Leonardo might not have eaten meat, he does kill animals for his varied experiments. 

This weekend happened to witness a "political drama" here. There was a general body meeting for electing this year's office bearers for the main committee of the Tamil school that Nandhitha goes. I had no intention of going there but did go on a request from my neighbour. Apparently my neighbour's friend was contesting for the post of "President" and hence trying to gather troops for his support. It was a hot saturday afternoon and about 80 people had turned up for this. The "meeting" started with a downpour of complaints on the outgoing president and the committee. Am sorry this is a volunteer role that someone is doing in his/her free time. Dont see how anybody can have any right to question anybody here except of course if there was any mishandling of funds. Which BTW, is a decent amount for a volunteer organization - about 20k. So far I hear there was never a competition for the post and usually selected unanimously. Anywhere there are more than 2 people, factions are formed. This time there were 4 schools joined together against our school. One team offers water to the participants and another provided sweet, karam for the voters. No points for guess who won. ;-) So much for an ego massage. 

Tried out a very decent and basic mee goreng. Uma and kids had a heavy snack outside and was not in the mood for dinner and me took this opportunity to experiment. The trick was with the sauce, kadai and small quantity of noodles. The small quantity allowed to get the noodles fried well with a bit of burn as well. The sauce mix - tomato sauce, kecap manis, sambal paste, soya sauce and oyster sauce. As for the kadai, I think I wouldn't have got this effect with a non-stick kadai had to use a iron kadai to get the burnt flavour.

Oki doki, that's all for now. Have A Great Week!!

Chetty