Caffeine, my lover

Dear Caffeine,

I love you. You are my very best friend. I wish I could shrink a bite-sized espresso machine to carry around in my shallow girl-jean pockets for emergencies. My dependence upon you leaves me desperate, wandering in the snow looking for a cup of coffee unblemished by Starbucks brand bitterness, disregarding my cashless wallet and frost-bitten nose (my nose gets colder than my feet sometimes, but not when I have a hot cup of caffeinated something to my lips).

I love you most in my mother's milk tea, spiced with saffron and cardamom, paired with digestive biscuits from Devon Ave, and always hot enough to burn the roof of my mouth. At times, I dip the biscuits a little too long in the cup and the rest of biscuit resurfaces, only half intact, and the other half disintegrated at the bottom.

At home, almost twice a day, you are an excuse to sit back and relax, and chat with mom and Avva. It makes me think of tea in India (super sweet, extra hot, made with milk from bags), long to visit the coffee plantation on which my mother spent her childhood, and of my dream to buy a coffee plantation, become a farmer and live on a farm in my retired years.

Caffeine, you are the reason I didn't drop out my sophomore year of college. I couldn't have made it through all those all-nighters without you. Even though I didn't know how to work my sister's coffee machine and poured water over the grounds, you still managed to pull through for me.

Caffeine, you are also my most treacherous enemy. Why oh why did I make coffee at work for 4 days only to discover after 4 horrible nights and days of what I thought was a sinus headache was the result of caffeine deprivation??  I should have noticed the "decaf" label.

Don't ever leave me.

Love,

Me

Tea in Kerala.

Maybe DC is growing on me

I've recently had the opportunity to make a few more cards for some very dear, dear friends.

Miss Catie reminds me of summer, and when I think of summer I think of watermelons:

I miss my idol Alia who is currently in the PRC so I sent her this along with some other goodies:

 

aaaaaaaaaaaand speaking of le PRC, Miss Anne came over the river, through the woods, over mountains, continents, etc., and is now in DC! So I made her this card to remind her to always remember her roots (WI):

 

I made a card for my dad, too, but it's so bad it's embarrassing. I'll just have to fulfill his dream of having a multi millionaire daughter instead.

The holidays are coming around so I've switched from making cards to baking cookies. A much more delicious switch in hobbies, although I may buy a glue gun soon and expand my crafty sensibilities to 3D objects.

I suck at memory

While sitting in a leadership development seminar the other day (yeah, quite the exciting beginning to a blog post), I found out that one of the key components to good leadership, fundraising, community organizing and professional ladder-climbing is people memory. People love it when you remember something about them, however small/insignificant the detail. For example, if you remember that they have a voracious appetite for grapefruit gummy candy or that their kid got their head stuck in a chair, or what have you. 

Too bad I suck at memory. I forget what people have said seconds after they say it. I also forget to inform important people in my life about important things.
Example from a couple years ago (BF stands for Best Friend, read: inseparable since preschool):

BF: So, what're you doing for New Year's?
Me: Oh, well, I'll be in India so, I don't know, family time, probably won't be clubbing or anything. I'd be lucky if I got to wear a party hat.
BF (highly offended): India? Since when were you going to India? I thought you said you were going to be around???
Me: Yeah, that was back in August. I thought I told you, I'm going to India right before I study abroad in Bolivia.
BF: You're going to BOLIVIA????
Me: uhhhhhh.....

So yeah. I do that too often.

I'm also terrible with names. And faces, and dates. and everything. Speaking of names, while I was working an event for work, handing out name tags and registering guests as they entered, a man approached me and said, "Suma! How are you? Decided not to stay in Minnesota, huh?"

I had no idea how this man knew me. I was noticeably surprised and tried to buy time by pretending to be distracted by the light reflected off of the plastic covering of his name tag.

Unfortunately, it wasn't enough time for me to figure out how I knew this man.

Here's was I said:
"uhhh ooo um, bladiggity blah, oooh yess, Minnesota....ha ha what a night ha ha heresyourdrinkticket why don't i just give you two ha ha old friends and all ha ha??"

All of this was said while I stared at his name tag trying dig through the black holes in my brain to place his face and name with memory.
It was embarrassingly obvious I had totally forgotten him and how I knew him. If he didn't have a name tag, I definitely wouldn't have remembered his name.  It was only a couple of hours later when the aperture in my brain clicked into the right setting and the world came into focus and I remembered that HE WAS MY OLD BOSS from a campaign I worked on in Minnesota. AHHHHHH. Talk about terrible relationship building.

In unrelated news, my grandparents celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary on Monday. Congrats, Avva and Thatha!
Below is my Avva with the card I made them for the special day.

Isn't she lovely?