The kind of dreams we dream these days!

Deep sleep.
Images panning quickly with a swipe, one after the other.
Faces zoom in with a thumb and fore finger.
More images.
More zooming.
Until I can no longer swipe to the left.
Have I reached the end of my iDream already?

This and that..

I'm back! I agree it was an unreasonably long hiatus and even the customary new year post was missing. I blame it alllll on motivation - err the lack of :-) What a relief! ;-)

There has been no one-great-change that has affected the attention on Doodles. It was just a culmination of zero motivation, lack of enthusiasm and my good old laziness which got the better of me. The handful of visitors have also dwindled. People (let me be specific - Dad) who used to come atleast to feed my pet panda,Po, some bamboo shoots also don't come now. No wonder my dah-ling Po looks so malnurished :-(

Did I tell you about the surprise gift I got recently? Surprise gifts and I rarely go together - be it the gifting part or receiving part. Explaining the goof ups in the former will require a blogpost on its own so I'd rather stick to explaining the latter, which are relatively lesser in number. You realize how pathetic you are when you kept a surprise secret for almost 2 days but broke it when there was just an hour more to go. No more comments!

Yeah, now about the receiving part. There are two types of surprise-gift category here. Receiving a gift from somebody you didn't expect one is a surprise gift. Receiving an unexpected gift from somebody you expected one is The Surprise Gift that I like! The probability of the first category happening is HUGE. On the other hand, the second category is extremely rare. This is because I either end up guessing what the gift can be or they tell me what they are getting for me or mostly, I demand that they give me this exact thing that I want. Let me admit, I remember JUST ONE INSTANCE of being Surprise-Gifted in the true manner of the second category and that was 12-13 years ago when Dad gifted me a cycle pump (yeah folks, I agree no frills. But you would realize the worth of having one at home when you had to push your cycle almost everyday all the way to the guy who did this).

So I, naturally, almost fainted when the second one came last month. We were celebrating our 4th anniversary of Marital Bliss (oh yeah, laugh!). Being the 4th and as the limit tends to infinity we had apprehensions about having those cliched cake cuttings, wine and PDA's. So this time around we decided to stay at home and spend less! Spend Less - Ok, I got the point immediately. Probably I would be gifted a mug with You-are-the-best-Wife type lies written on it or may be I will "earn a Bournville" as I have never earned one until now or something from the Archies shop that they call cute, cuddly and sweet which is priced equally cute. I believed I can probably demand a dress too, he might relent.

When the D-day came I had still not decided what I would gift him. It was not because I was confused with the options. I simply thought it was much easier to take him somewhere and allow him to pick what he wanted. And since Spending Less was his part of the agenda, he would keep my purse stable. May be another mug if he isn't able to :-p

I now wonder why it didn't sound awkward to me when he kept conveying the same message throughout the day on all possible communication channel - chats, mails, calls, SMS, face to face - multiple times.

The message was "Talk to me if you have plans to get me something expensive. Talk. Talk. Talk." I
didn't pay heed to it as it was just not applicable! I wasn't getting him anything more than 500 bucks anyways!

After work, I got busy searching for a good place to dine and that was when he dragged me to the next room to "show me something interesting". There, in a Croma packet was a box with Canon written on it!!!

I guess I won't get another Surprise Gift from him from now on - the shreik almost brought the neighbours in! And my question almost made him shreik.. "Nee Canon aano mediche??" (Did you buy Canon??) for he replied "What??? Did you also buy a Canon for me???" For the innocent man that he was he thought his worst fears were coming true - we were going to have 2 Canon EOS 1000D at home :-p

Fortunately, I was far less romantic than he thought. It was embarassing that I had not got anything
for him then, but adding salt to the wound was my next statement "No..But I wanted a Nikon!!". There, the damage was done! After a little bit of cajoling and statements like Yeah, Canon is good too, things got back to normal.

So that was my Surprise Gift that I almost lost. Since that day I have been mostly found with the gift around my neck zooming on random things at home - garlic flakes, boxes, vegetables, pens - you name it, I have captured it. I think he now regrets getting me this.

You have comments on your photographs!!

If somebody collects all the comments people received on their photographs posted on different social networking sites, there is a very high possibility that they would all fall into any one of the below mentioned categories.

1. The made-for-each-other-comment : OK, Now this one will make 50% of all the comments. Any picture which has a guy and girl and nobody else in it will definitely fetch any of these comments with 100% chances : "Wow! You make a great couple", "Man, you both look great together!", "Cool.. both of you look fab in this one", "Awesome pair". Forget the fact that they might be a bro-sis pair, just-friends pair or yeah, as the viewer would have liked them to be - engaged. But who knows! Or rather, who cares!
2. The how-sweet-babies-comment : Alright, I agree, all babies are cute. I know it, you know it and the new mama knows it too. No matter what, the SNS rule states that no baby's pic should stay fetching for comments for longer than 10 seconds post the time of its upload! And a second rule states that every baby picture will receive a constant comment "Howwwwww s(ch)weeeet"; the only variable part allowed can be the number of 'w's and 'e's. Please note "Howww s(ch)weeeet" is the universal constant. Regional constants like "Chakkkkkkkara" are also substitutable.
3. The wow-comment : This comment is just that! You click next, and you actually tell it out before typing it down as a comment. This is usually found beneath pictures of great places, wall-paper candidates, somebody's new haircut/new look/ new clothes, new car, new bike, new wife... ok, just kidding, leave that last one out ;-) Short comment, nevertheless makes the the photo uploader glow like a young bride.
4. The LOL or ROFL- comment : This forms a minority because you rarely find people who would like to make a fool of themselves on social networking sites especially when single and ready to mingle :-P Hence, of the very few occurrences, the most common is beneath pictures of babies doing funny things, a bunch of guys all gone unusually crazy or next to a picture of your pet.
5. The Awesome-comment : All other comments that we have remaining will fall under this category. In case you are wondering what to comment on a particular snap and you badly want to do it too, then rely on these for they are multi-purpose comments - one size fits all! "Awesome", "Awesome!!", "Awwwwwwwwesome", "Truly Awesome!", "Simply Awwwwsome!", "Gosh! Awesome!", "Man! Its Awesome!!", "This-Awesome!!", "That-Awesome!!"... I think this word is the only other word whose popularity in usage has soared high post the success of SNS; the other word being, yes, you guessed it right, "fraaanship" :-)

The above ones are the safest that yours truly relies on and they satisfy most of the situations ;-) If you have other interesting categories, don't forget to pen them down in the comments section!