1. After finally making it to shoot another Creative Mornings event last weekend, I’ve had this burning desire to paint. Thanks to Prashant Miranda whose daily visual journal keeping inspired me to no end. I am a journal keeper too but for some reason it has become hard to write down my life lately and I’ve tried many times to start photographically journaling my days, but let’s just say when you are constantly working to organise your clients’ thousands of photographs, on a computer, the last thing you want to do is add more photographs. It’s unfortunate and I haven’t given up but it’s just not a good time right now.

Anyway, so I mentioned this to the hubs who tried to convince me to attend Prashant’s watercolour workshop yesterday, to which I answered, “I don’t even have any painting supplies!” Well, the man needs no more motivation to immediately look up the timings of his favourite art supplies store and we are off… to VT. About an hour later, we have emerged with a tiny metal box of watercolour paints, a few brushes and some beautiful paper.

My painting experiments may never be shown to another soul on the planet but God, I love how that colour spreads from the brush to the paper at different patterns and rates depending on the amount of pressure or water you apply. It’s magical.

This may be another of my whims but the good thing is the hubs is an artist with a lot of experience in painting and he tells me the paints will last us a good ten years and if by then, I have lost my interest, so help me God, our children shall paint.

2. Having satisfied the inner artists in us, we headed to Crawford market to satisfy my other the not-so-new-nor-secret passion. Food. More specifically cheese. One day, on one of my googling adventures, I came across a blog listing a place at the market where they sell really high quality cheese at wholesale prices. So of course, I had to check this out and while we didn’t find the exact same shop, we did find a wholesale cheese seller and it’s pretty much a piece of heaven. They have every cheese that I have ever heard of and it’s delicious and 30-40% cheaper than what you’d find at regular stores. It’s called Legend, shop # 118, 3rd Lane, Fruit Section, Crawford Market. You’re welcome.

3. Some weeks ago, a friend invited us to the book launch of Room 000 by Kalpish Ratna at the Maharashtra Mitra Mandal Library (aka Mcubed Library) in Bandra. We were intrigued. Both by the book and the venue. A library?! In Bandra?! How had we never heard of/seen this before?!

So of course we went and it was a fantastic event and we came back with a great book but best of all, the sweet sweet knowledge of this library. It is primarily a children’s library to which they quite recently added a ‘Grown Up’ section where you will find a fantastic selection of books, both fiction and non-fiction. I was most excited about the fiction section because I grew up a lover of fiction books and then married this man who has about 200 books in different sizes and shapes, none of which are fiction. So I started reading non-fiction and I love it but I also still love to escape into the world of fictional characters but a) we have not enough place in the world to call our own for both of us to keep buying books (yes, I’ve tried reading on a Kindle and I.just.don’t.like.it) and b) I usually don’t read a fictional book twice so a library is our perfect solution!

I can keep reading my stories while we limit book collection to non-fictions that we know we will keep going back to.

Words cannot describe how glad my heart is to have found this library.

And that is all for now.

So we were rested, and had balanced amounts of social time and alone time and started off the week strong. But on Tuesday, I was discouraged. I have a health problem that I am currently dealing with and my visit with my doctor proved that I hadn’t made any major progress. And I know I shouldn’t, but I am hard on myself for that. Why haven’t I gotten better? Why haven’t I figured this out? What am I being anxious and stressed out about? Why can’t I just take control of this thing? Is God being mean to me? And other unreasonablenesses.

And it went kind of downhill from there. And then yesterday, after dinner, Rob and I sat on the couch and I had my second melt-down of the day, not being able to make an ounce of sense of the million-and-one thoughts flying rapidly through my head at any given time.

There used to be a time that I wrote very honestly and raw-ly on my blog. It was in fact, the way my husband first got to know me, even before he had met me. I write way more lucidly than I speak sometimes. And I am able to catch hold of the thoughts that generally bounce around in my brain and put them together in actual sentences.

Then I started a business and became very conscious about my social media presence. And so I bottled up a lot more. Every time I thought of something to write I would think, but that’s been said before. Or that’s too controversial or embarrassing. Or that’s not going to get me any “likes”.

But I need to write.

Honestly. Embarrassingly so if need be.

And share my food pictures with you, no matter how clichéd and “done before” that may well be.

So here goes.

Let’s start with Chana Masala that I made for lunch today that was so surprisingly delicious. You can find the recipe here.

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