Our preferred modes
of transportation

In my last two Weblog entries, I have given you folks some ideas about our culinary preferences. Today, I shall introduce you all to our preferred modes of transportation.

Before you start calling us weirdos, please be informed that we are direct descendants of the famous Sena (or Sen) Dynasty of Bengal, India. Lakshman Sen was my great, great, great, great .... grand father. Royalty still runs in our blood!

We try to avoid mechanized vehicles whenever possible (though we have a few cars in our garage). We prefer to travel in Royal style. But horses are sooo "common men's" transportation. So we have not kept any horses in our stable. Instead we have one camel and three elephants (and one mahout for each elephant).

Whenever we travel alone, we use the camel. When my wife and I travel together, we use an elephant. We have kept the extra elephants for guests(money is not an issue here -- by God's grace we have enough of that in our family). Relatives from India do come to visit us quite often. Except for special reasons, we use our animals to move around in town, for roaming in the park, or even to move across the country!

I know you are being skeptic, because Royalty is not in your blood. How about some photographic evidence? Seeing is believing, right?

Yours truly ... off to work.
(Yes, I do work - just for fun).

My wife ... going for shopping.

Our animal mounting platform.
We are going to a movie.
Notice the bus route right next to our house.
But taking a bus is beneath us!

We are taking a shortcut.
Too much traffic on the city roads.

Here are our three elephants.

My wife is treating her mother with an
elephant ride in the city park.

Family traveling to New York in Royal style.

Now beat our style!

My lunch menu today

I was in the mood for some seafood today. So I had my favorite baked shark sandwich on a submarine roll with lots of fixin's and an ice-cold beer. Oh, it was so satisfying! What did you have? The usual, I guess.

What's for dinner?

Of course!

My More Advanced Animations

Yesterday I posted here two of my first animations. I still dearly love them, and call them my classics. But since then I have moved way up. I can now produce professional quality animated gif's. Below are some samples. You can see some more here.

The last three animations are clickable. What do you think? I am a professional or what?

 My First Animations

I learnt to use computers at a very matured age. And the more I learnt, my fascinations about the different things a computer can do increased. I wanted to learn newer things. Pretty soon I learnt how to make Web sites using only Windows Notepad. I soon built a Web site for children using a lot of animated gif's borrowed from other sites (after obtaining due permission, of course). And then my ambition grew to even higher heights. I wanted to make my very own animated gif's. I studied, and studied, and studied some more. Eventually, I understood the secrets of making animated gif's. It was a BIG DAY for me when I produced my first and second animated gif's. I cannot express in words how happy I felt on that day. It was a project I thought I would never be able to complete. After many failures, eventually I SUCEEDED. The first few animated gif's I created were crude, but nevertheless, by definition, they were animated gif's. All I had to do later was to polish my skills to make more eye-catching animated gif's. That also I did, and I shall post a few of those here another time.

Below are my first two animated gif's. I am so proud that I created them all by myself. Nobody taught me anything. Nobody helped me!

Water dropping in a bowl.

Free hand exercise

You can see a few more of my first animations here.

Grandkids started kindergarten today

It is a big day for us and for the two of our older grandkids today. After finishing pre-school, they have started going to kindergarten effective today! They feel like grown-ups now. And they are proud because they are going to the same school as their mother where she eventually became the Class Valedictorian at the time of graduation. We wonder if they will also go to Harvard and Yale in the future as their parents did.

The occasion brought back memory. My wife and I were reminded of the first day when we said good-bye to our two and a half year old daughter at the gate of Shishu Bhavan, a Montessori school in Calcutta. Tears came to our eyes, but she did not cry. Instead she said, "You go home now." Then she turned around and entered the school building completely unconcerned about us. We still remember that day. She completely baffled us. We actually expected her to cry!

Years have gone by. But it seems like it happened just the other day. My daughter is a grown up woman now -- a young professional and mother of three kids.

Time will fly, we know. One day, these kids will enter college and then graduate from the college also. Then they will get married and have their own kids. The question is how many of these important events will we witness?

I better go and eat my vegetables. I want to live for at least another 25 years!

Sorry, I cannot "Blog"

I have to admit, I am not good at "blogging". If "blog" is what I read in most of the entries in Xanga, I simply don't have the ability, interest, or time to blog. I can "write" a little bit, I sure know how to build different kinds of Web sites (from simple computer tutorials for seniors to informative, original,  interesting, eye-catching and stunning sites) from scratch -- meaning not using any HTML editing software at all. But blogging? That is indeed my weak point.

You might ask, then why have I become a life member of Xanga? Well, I thought the price was right to reserve a place in the Web to record what is going through my mind at a given time (if and when that happens). It is really my online diary not "blog", if you know what I mean.

Recently, I have received both direct and indirect invitations from well-wishing people to join particular blog rings ( I am not really sure what a blog "ring" is or what it does to its members). Somebody even wrote, "I hope you are benefitting from the ring". I don't really know what benefit to expect. Yes, I arbitrarily joined some rings. But I am not really expecting any "benefits" from any one of them.

I am not blaming anybody for anything. I just don't have enough free time to read other people's blog everyday, leave alone "blogging" everyday. I am an occasional visitor here.

I just wanted to set the record straight so that nobody misunderstands me.

Enjoy "blogging" everybody. I shall stop by here occasionally as I always do. Having to manage 10 different Web sites (not counting this one -- I don't consider blogs as Web sites) that is the best I can and want to do.

By the way, ring member or not, if you need help or suggestions for building your own Web site, you can contact me. I am really good at it.

PS: What is "tag"? What is "pulse"? I don't really understand the terms used here!

My oldest grandchild

Meet my beautiful granddaughter.
She is my darling.

My older grandson

Too bad you can't hear him playing.

My youngest grandchild

I would rather play with him all day.