This loooong weekend was absolutely action-packed, and unexpected in all kinds of ways.
For one it was a 4-day holiday and I was really looking forward to the break. But it wasn’t really a holiday as I had a major project release coming up, and was on stand-by for testing, quality checks, and bug fixing. So, I didn’t really think it was going to be a break as such.
Surprisingly though the long weekend ended up being fairly quiet in terms of office work (needed to go in only one day), and so the other three days were devoted to all things fun,family, and festivity.
Specifically calling out festivity because we celebrated Diwali, Halloween, Karnataka Rajyotsava, and my mother-in-law’s death anniversary (not festive, but it was a pleasant day remembering her) on the long weekend.
So here come the pics, not too many because I was too busy doing stuff to take snaps, but still enough to capture our long weekend.
Diwali day
On Diwali day, we woke up bright and early, did our prayers, wore our new clothes and burst a lot of crackers – environmentally very bad, I know, but Diwali really isn’t Diwali if crackers are not burst, what say?
I clicked a couple of photos of Snubnose and Piglet, but he was dancing around so much, he was just a blur.
Here’s a rangoli for Diwali. This wasn’t something I made, my talents have never been in the least bit artistic, but it was funny to see how much respect Piglet (the elephant lover) gave the elephant rangoli, while he stampeded all the others around.
Diwali was a day of cooking the kids’ favorite foods. Unfortunately, their favorite foods don’t exactly align with the expected Diwali dishes. So an unplanned for dinner visitor had to hide his surprise very politely when presented with mac and cheese, and spicy salsa to liven it up 😀 .
Mother-in-law’s anniversary
This was initially a somber day, where we all sat around reminiscing about her, and all the ifs and buts of her ill-health and awful last days. But things lightened up after a heavy lunch, and soon we all enjoyed a long chatathon followed by another round of bursting crackers.
Halloween
The next day was Halloween, and I was totally unprepared when it came to the kids’ costumes. We made do with a sweet dress for Snubnose and some mouse make-up, which eventually morphed into a cat.
She went trick or treating with friends and had a blast, and was very satisfied with both her costume and the amount of candy she raked in.
Piglet wore the same Spiderman costume he wore last year, and Piglet who is still as timid as he was last year, clutched my hand tightly and bravely ventured out into the dark. Again no photographs, because Halloween was such a last-minute scramble for us this year.
Karnataka Rajyotsava
Karnataka Rajyotsava or State Formation Day marks the date in 1956 when all the Kannada language-speaking regions of South India were merged to form the state of Karnataka. Usually, we don’t do too much on this day, but there was an interesting jatre (festival) happening nearby and we had time on our hands, and so off we went. Unfortunately, the long-dreaded call from work came and so had to cut short all the fun and log in to work.
The long weekend was capped off with a tumbler-full of a brandy cocktail (made with Janus Brandy) because I was down with a terrible cold. This concoction was K’s recipe and it’s brilliant – easy and tasty. Recipe coming up on the blog in a while.
This brandy and a nice book (sobbed over If I Stay by Gayle Forman), rounded off the long weekend.
This book was nice, and sobby and overall cathartic, but now I am having mixed feelings about it. Anyway, review is being written and should be out sometime soon.
So that was the sum of our long weekend, people. It was a much-needed break, and though we had nothing planned for the weekend, it turned out to be a pretty great one.
How did your weekend turn out?
