The miracle of life

The past few days, I have been walking past this little grass patch on my way to work. It's not nice - being shielded from the sun, it's almost always muddy and wet. But what really struck me was these tiny little mushrooms that have sprouted out in the middle of it.

I don't really know why, or since when I've started to really appreciate the beauty of nature, but they called out to me - to admire their beauty and their strength in being able to survive amidst such tough conditions.

Many a times, I wanted to slow down my pace, stop and just take a picture of these beauties. But the timing was always not right - either there were people hanging around in the vicinity who were going to look at me weirdly if I stopped to take a picture of the muddy grass patch, or I was rushing for work.

Today was one of the days when I thought to myself, "Finally, I have time, and hopefully there won't be anyone around this time." Imagine my disappointment when I walked past the familiar grass patch, looked all around and found, to my utmost dismay, that my beauties have wilted.

There they were, huddled in a bunch as usual. But they were not as I remembered them - it could be the extremely unpredictable weather of the past few days (sometimes unbearably sunny, sometimes storming like there's no tomorrow), but they were, dare I say it?, almost... dead. Some of them have already collapsed to the ground, the others hanging on for dear life, but seemingly not for long.

I didn't want to take a picture like this, because this was not the way I wanted to remember them. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that probably tomorrow, or even the day after, when I walk past them again, they would have found the strength to live on.

Technology, we've come a long way!

Ok, I'm not sure how many people in this current day and age still relies on VCRs to tape their favourite programs to watch at their own leisurely time and pace, but I'm one of them.

It was therefore with great dismay when I settled comfortably into the couch one evening, fully prepared to watch "Project Runway", when the sound came out but nothing else. The TV screen was totally blank, argh! I tried other tapes, but no, no images came on. Pi tried the tape cleaner, but it was stuck in the VCR after months of disuse.

So, we finally came to the conclusion that our trusted Sony VCR has breathed its last. Being kind of a TV fanatic and a couch potato, I bugged Pi to no end to get a replacement - and fast - so that I would not miss out of any more of my usual doses of TV entertainment. Since VCRs have become kind of an antique (has anyone tried buying VHS tapes in the stores? They actually don't sell them anymore!), we settled on a HDD recorder when we chanced upon a great offer at Courts.

It took us almost the whole night to get it up and running, but omg! the clarity of the images surprised us! The amazing additional functions, like pausing live TV if you need to run to the loo urgently in the midst of a must-watch program, are something that we'd never thought possible in this day and age. I guess age has caught up with us, for our new friend could offer us so much more! It can play movies from USB, so we've promoted ourselves from watching movies on the 19" computer screen to our 32" LCD TV - with subtitles no less!

Now that we've "moved on", we wondered what kept us back there for so long. And I'm sure as I type, more amazing new features are already coming out in new models in stores.

Technology, it has indeed caught up with us, but the question is, can we truly catch up with it?