June barabar Jhoom ........

Yes folks !!! July has arrived on-time at normandy apartments.
Wat was special about June, well...it was the first month with 4 letters, first month to start with J and marks the beginning of the second half of the year...Naaaaah..June spelled SUMMER all over it....
We had a wonderful weekend after a long long time...

Siva bought a new black MerC this week, after months of monetary analysis and quest for good deals. Deciding that pittsburgh is the best place to drive his first car, he drove from his hometown (although his still calls pittsburgh his hometown) to pittsburgh yesterday... I just cant resist some rambling about this amazing machine so here it goes....

MerC is an amazing vehicle... An amazing icon of engineering...Spacious and Stylish...Classy is one word to describe it...The vehicle is really really reallllllllllly smooth and you can feel it...Siva's merc was fitted with a six-speaker bose sound system...We had the out-of-the-world experience of listening to some 'Thiruda Thiruda' songs on our way to the temple...

Car Puja at the temple was a nice experience...Perumal kitta car first kaatinathula siva-vukku alaathi santhosam...There was a lot of the crowd at the temple..Being grad students we couldn't even vaguely recollect the date forget the occasion...After some sincere saami darisanam (for the first time...minds were not filled with dreams of puliyogare thanks to sivas afternoon treat at orchid), we packed some food for dinner and left to see the jain temple....

It was our first experience at the jain temple...It was really serene and well-maintained too...There was not much crowd in the temple and the priest did a special puja when we arrived (no..it was not for us..it was for some old north indian couple who entered exactly at the same time...)...A comment at the temple from an ABCD girl, "Indian parties are nothing but drink, dance and gossip" ...Seriously wat else do u expect in a party ???? (Now why are we journalling this in our blog....none of us know).


Siva is an executive member of 'Bhakti Brothers' , so he took us directly to the sai-baba temple from there...We reached just before the temple closing time and had a good dharsan...We even got some apples as prasadham (buddhi pokutha paaru...aiyee....)....It was quite interesting to see the same people from the jain temple here....(I guess there is only one route to bhakti....)

Just in case you were wondering, YES ALL THESE TEMPLES ARE THERE IN PITTSBURGH..

After all that fun, we decided to take the car for a ride...And wat better way than to open up the moon-roof (sun-roof..watever...), open all windows and play some blasting music..Yes we did that...The fun part is that no one else understood any of the songs besides us and we attracted a LOTTT of puzzled looks...Arjun was so flattered that he decided that his new car should atleast have bose speakers...else its not worth buying one..

The best way to enjoy a new car is to have a nite-out ...So we decided to drive to schenley park and spend the night at the golf course...It was a really cold summer night and we had a pretty good chat....We thought we were the only loones to be sitting that late in the night at the park, we were startled when we saw a men (hopefully....) walked past us when we were busy discussing chennai corporate life (or probably it was wen we were talking about the indian economy...). We came to a consensus that we were not the craziest people on earth and decided to get back home...

Sunday dawned (or dusked...watever) a bit early on siva and he left early in the morning to his hometown....We had a wonderful time as usual....

It all started with some swimming fun...We totally rocked the pool (in case u have any doubts..plz imagine prashanth diving into the pool...). After having a really great time...Arjun has decided that swimming is going to definitely be a part of his every day schedule (We have decided to go swimming early morning tomorrow..lets see how that goes....)...After hours of swimming the lifeguard blew the whistle and it was time to go...

Swimming makes you really really hungry....We were starving (not for the first time though....) and decided to go to kohlis to get some samosas...There was an amazing vintage car rally happening at craig street...As usual our patelism kicked-in and we took some photos with the classic cars...

Being the jobless juntas that we are..We decided to play SCRABBLE at the CS department lounge...After some serious gaming and few cups of hot chocolate, we decided to get back to our normal life...Just when we thought the weekend was over...Someone had the amazing idea of playing tennis ( Maybe it was arjun...) and we decided to conquer the court...

After some superb cycling and jogging, we were at the UC equipment desk...As if we had not had enough action for one day, arjun had forgot his ID card..He cycled back home and rushed back to campus, only to find that the courts were not empty...After some waiting and under-arm cricket with tennis racquets, we finally got a court and played some really physical tennis (Prashanth adicha ball-aa innum kaanala...)..A great way to end an awesome weekend...

This long blog completes our perfect weekend... (Now lets hope that my sensor network stress test is still standing up to the challenge....Yaarange..Nodes ellam vela seyuthanu check pannunga...)