So, I know it's been a while since I last wrote on this blog and believe me when I say I've had some serious separation anxiety over the last few months. But I just couldn't think of a topic to write about while sounding both intelligent and funny. Needless to say, the longer I took to come up with something smart to say, the more pressure I put on myself and the less I wanted to actually write the post.
At some point, I tried to convince myself that my lack of intelligent things to say was linked to the absence of full-time and hard core formal learning taking place. At best, I spent the whole year learning to take on and excel at the responsibilities of a homemaker. No so very impressive to say the least. But then again, its not like I didn't learn anything in the past year. So here are a few valuable lessons I learnt in the past year (And all of these are only from experience):
- If you are cracking eggs to make something, leave the eggs in their little cardboard carton while you are cracking the others. They are safe there. Do NOT put them on the counter to await their demise. If you do, they will try to get away and save themselves.
- When you are washing white clothes in a white load of laundry, be sure to remove that primarily white top that has a little bit of colorful embroidery on it. Unless you want all of your whites to be light blue when they come out of the wash.
- When you crack the egg over the pan, do NOT add the eggshells to the pan. (Believe me. It seems like common sense, but if you have never cooked before, its possible your scrambled eggs will seem unusually crunchy!)
- While making chapati dough, you may be excited and feel the urge to use both hands to knead the dough and make it extra soft with the added pressure of another hand. Do NOT use both hands. you will be stuck with two hands messy and covered in very sticky goo, and zero ability to use them.
- While vacuuming the carpets, make sure to lift up the curtains before you try and vacuum under them. If you attempt to get under them without taking care to get them out of the way, there will be a lot of ripping and a lot of cutting of fabric out of the roller of the vacuum. There will also be no curtains on your window. Not such a great thing if you are worried about peeping toms.
- If you accidentally forget rule number one and do leave an egg on the counter and it starts to roll off the counter, do NOT try to stop it with your body. You will end up with crushed egg goo running down the leg of your shorts.
The list goes on and on. I realized though I am learning something new and valuable everyday, I am not actually going out of my way to learn something new. To be the life-long learner I claim to be, on pretty much all my social media profiles.
And so, I have taken it upon myself to start a conscious learning process, in which I will attempt to teach myself things that go beyond my formal education.
For example: About 3 weeks ago, I took it upon myself to learn how to knit. I have known how to and loved crochet for about 11 years now, and I decided it was time to learn how to knit. It took me a while, a lot of concentration, and several YouTube video tutorials to finally complete my first ever knit garment. A shrug. (For those of you who don't know what a shrug is, its pretty much a cropped jacket, or as one of my male friends so eloquently put it, just sleeves).
So that was my first experiment in teaching myself something new. I decided that while knitting was very much within my comfort zone, I think my next assignment should be something that I would consider more difficult or outside of my interests. So I decided to learn Calculus. Needless to say that failure was pretty epic, and I put down my pencil within two hours and the first page of my book. Math is not my subject and never has been and I will have to reserve Calculus for a different time (I think my 23 hour journey to India that is coming up should provide me with the adequate time and boredom to try and take on this task).
However, in the meantime, I found an Intro to Computer Programming, 7 week long, online course that was being offered by two professors from the University of Toronto, through the Coursera Portal. It started yesterday, so I am a day late, but I am so looking forward trying to learn Programming. As I get through the course, I will keep posting to update on progress (existent or non-so-much).
Wish me luck!
