Snow Show!!!

Its been rainning here since past 2-3 weeks. Seattle is a place where rains are nothing new, Snow is!! All most throughtout the year there are mild showers now and then. Yest was one such cloudy wet day. All of a sudden around 12:30 in the noon it got pretty dark. I was checking emails when suddenly i noticed something white bouncing on the ground. It looked like rain but it was more solid and bouncing off when it hit the ground. When i went out and checked it looked like white thermocol balls are falling from the sky. I realised it was ice, it was snow. :) But it looked pretty hard and round. I took a few in my hands. They didnt feel that hard and would soon melt. I was confused as to whether it was hail or snow. I was so excited. This was the first time i was seeing snawfall. or was it hail shower?? I called my husband immediately. Turns out he was trying to call me too at the same moment. ;)

Anyways he said it was snow. aaah :) My wish came true. Soon the ground was covered in a thin layer of white. The plants had little shimmers of ice on their branches. It looked so beautiful. After just a couple of showers of snow sun showed up. :( The snow melted away in less than an hour. My snow season came and went in a flash. But anyways am glad for that hour or two when I saw my first snowfall.

Back to School...

After almost 4 months in US, unemployed and nothing much to do at home, I was seeking for activities to keep me busy. One of the first such moves was joining the salsa class. Three months into it, I am really enjoying it and eager to join level 3 now. However I needed something more than a 2 hours activity once a week to keep myself occupied. I was all set to experience the classroom atmosphere again and was eager to join some academic course. So this month I have joined C# and Spanish classes. C# because I had to learn one of the contenders in the recent technologies' race to actively get into the job seeker's market space. I admit, learning technology and languages should have by now been part of a self study exercise after a 4 years stint in the IT. My mind though resists self motivation. Spanish was more of a wish list thing. Learning a foreign language. And in the US of A, Spanish is an obvious choice that would come in handy.

I was as excited and nervous on the first day of these classes as I was on my first day in engineering college. I was more excited about experiencing one of the more advanced methods of teaching. Back in India too, most of the post graduation institutes have similar methods of teaching. As in open book assignments, computer at every desk in classrooms, not to mention free Internet and access to Gmail ;-). You can be in a class and if the lecture gets boring reach out to friends online. The teachers are more liberal and practical than they were in schools or grad level colleges. The classes are much more interactive and have more of lab time. Since these are more of professional vocational type of courses most of the students attending are working professionals or people seeking jobs. One thing which I love about all these courses be it fun classes like Salsa or academic courses there is a mixed bag of students. I don't mean this by race or colour of skin but by age and experience. People from age group of 25-30 to 60-70 attend these classes. Some of the most skilled dancers in Salsa in my class are people in their late 50's. They are fit and dance so smoothly and effortlessly, it looks like they are just gliding and the floor is shifting for them. Even in the C# and Spanish class, most people are above 40 or 50. This shows the enthusiasm and willingness to shed inhibitions if any by the general public when it comes to doing the things they want to.

I had been thinking of joining some classes from such a long time. Even in India when I had so much of free time during bench period or on weekends, I never actually took the step and put off things to future. We always hear age no bar for learning, learning till the end of time. But in reality not many of us actually believe it. Deep down we think that time has run out on learning. Or we start giving some or the other excuses like time constraint or cost and budget(this was my favourite excuse at all times). If that is not the case then our passiveness wins over the urge to learn. Now the situation has finally forced me to get out of my inertia. If I don't do this I will waste away sulking in idleness and lethargy ultimately leading to feelings of worthlessness and despair. I hope I can keep up this new mindset, enjoy the new student phase and spend my time constructively for all the days to come. I always had a to do list for the things I wanted to learn. Now its the question of prioritizing and actually implementing. Fingers crossed. :)