Bananas Peppers and More

  Finally . The Disney days are here.  Praan was jumping for joy and excitement. I had mixed feelings though. To give a background , a few years ago I would be the first to jump in on rides or any adventures. But somewhere sometime, heights started making me dizzy . So I was not sure if I would enjoy the Disney experience. This was our first time at Disney . And most people I knew used to comment on the lines and queues at most rides. I have a huge problem with that. So off we went to the Disney Hollywood Studios with excitement , fear and joy .  We took the boat from our resort . Because of Covid-19 restrictions , the fast-pass system was not active. There was a Star Wars show that had to be pre-booked and we had our booking for 12 Noon. This was turning out to be a problem because the rides we wanted to go had a wait time and we did not know when our booking slots would be called to board. So we spent the time going on smaller / no wait time rides until the star wars show started . W

  To my dearest Jimba , A long long time ago , I used to jot down things that you did to make me smile. I am going to start doing that again. You are now a tween. I know that kids are always babies to a lot of mommies. But I cannot express my thanks and gratitude to The God Almighty for making me your mommy. The way you said today that you will always be my baby , that you will always play with me , that you will always be my jimba .... it makes me want to cry. Knock on wood for making you so loving .  Today you told me that I am a cuckoo head and you love me for that. You said that I am the only mother who must enjoy playing with her son so much. I do not think so. I think a lot of mommies enjoy that but I do not know why I love it so much . Is it coz I never played much when I was your age? The thing that gives me most happiness is to play outdoors with you. I sometimes cry when I think of you leaving for college but I think I will travel then . Or find something that interests me. 

  The next morning we woke up very late to refresh ourselves from the long drive. The rest of the day was spent exploring Disney. We walked around the resort , then we hopped on the boat and went to Disney Hollywood. We had the tickets but got the cards and scheduled the park visits. We went around the skyliners. It was nice to have a day with no agenda in mind.  The next morning Praan and I were all set to go to Kennedy Space Center.  Nanch could not join us , he was not on vacation and was working from the hotel. We had booked a tour and the bus picked us up at Disney Swan Resort.  (https://www.grayline.com/tours/orlando/kennedy-space-center-central-florida-everglades-airboat-tour-5873_30_12130_1271/) The first stop was an airboat ride on the St. Johns river. It was nice , but contrary to my expectations the weather was cold.  Made a mental note to carry a jacket with me in Florida. We did see a lot of flamingo's , the American bald eagle, cows grazing in knee deep water with all

  This was our first long trip in our Tesla Model 3 . We have had her for more than two years now but we never went on a road trip for a while now. Or maybe it was the fear of superchargers .  We had originally booked flight tickets but Covid 19 made us rethink . We knew that going to a touristy place , let alone Florida was risky . But we decided to take the plunge anyway because our hotels were booked and we really wanted to get away .  We planned to start our drive on December 18th ,  Friday. In our earlier road trips , we never booked hotels on the way. We would reach some place and decide to call it a night . But with Covid and all the uncertainties this year , we booked the first stop at Rocky Mount, NC.  It was a 7 hour drive and we planned to start from home at around noon . But Praan had a class test which he had to take and the teacher assigned it late. We finally started around 4 pm .  We did a few mistakes in the first leg of our journey but we learnt from them . For one, w

  Our family is divided over bananas . The son and I hate it but the husband has to have at least one banana a day . He goes to the point of throwing a tantrum if we do not have bananas at home.  My mother is also the same .  Growing up , we had bananas growing in the backyard. In our culture , we put every part of the banana tree (or is it a plant?) to use.  We eat the fruit, the stem , the flower and the root. The leaves are steamed to make it soft and non-tearable and then used to pack food. Think about an ethnic or old world ziplock / aluminium foil. The smell of food wrapped in softened/steamed banana leaves is so aromatic it makes my mouth water. We bake spiced fish in banana leaves ... that tastes out of the world.  We also make a fried sweet dumpling out of rice flour and overripe bananas called the unniappams. We almost never bake banana breads because overripe bananas are always reserved for unniappams and because we do not appreciate the flavor of cinnamon in sweets as much

Being the disorganized person that I am , I have had multiple blogs and more than one email addresses over the past 10 - 15 years.  So why do I need another blog ? We went on a two and a half weeks long road trip in these times (to the future me : CoronaVirus Times) and I had an itch to document our trip. But I could not figure out my old email passwords / blog passwords etc . But I read through my one of my old blogs which had only around 10 posts and realized that I almost forgot that phase of my life. I forgot the good and ugly days and incidents that I never thought I would stop laughing about or stop crying about . I had a few posts documenting my Popsy's growing up dramas. Those posts overwhelmed me and I realized that I may have forgotten and lost such simple but warm and wonderful memories that happened in the last few years .  Yet another reason is because it was Nnds birthday a few days ago . We were just back from our road trip and were on quarantine. He did not want me