Another year is waning away

A few lines I scribbled in the past three days-

Monday:

6:30 PM it is, and I am back home from work. That is fairly quick for a Monday evening, or any evening for that matter, and it turns out to be quite relaxing to reach home early, have a couple of hours to idle, do this, that, and the other, before having to worry about anything as serious as preparing dinner.

Early morning, the commute to work was smooth. Most of the city has journeyed elsewhere, apparently, to spend the Christmas vacation, so there was virtually no traffic anywhere. And the office parking lot was empty, so I got to choose a spot, and reached my desk.

A cup of coffee and barely a dozen of emails later, two of my colleagues and I, decided to step out for lunch (basically eating out is our favourite thing to do under all conditions). We reached the nearest Au Bon Pain, bought some sandwiches and soup, and sat down at a table- mine was a bowl of cream of green pea soup and a vegetable sandwich. Expectedly that wasn’t sufficient, so we further devoured a few slices of plum cake that had a rich content of wine making me feel slightly dizzy, and some freshly baked cookies.

Wrapping up work, while driving back on the ring road, I watched the sun setting in the horizon in front of me with the last of the sparkling rays falling on my windshield. The sky slowly turned from blue to crimson to grey.  Another day waning away, of another year waning away, I thought to myself, looked outstanding!

Tuesday:

Today was unpredictably a busy day, as often happens with the days when you don’t foresee much work but a lot of it suddenly lands up. There were a lot of phone calls, a lot of emails and a lot of follow-ups to complete. Finally when I finished, it was late evening.

Back home, before I went off to sleep, I finished the second of the three chapters of Jonathan Livingston Seagull- it’s a very inspiring tale, and the book has some remarkable photographs accompanying the story. The author, Richard Bach, is one of my favourites. His other book The Bridge Across Forever is one of the most absorbing books I have ever read.

Wednesday:

I am on vacation for the rest of the week. That essentially means that I would get back to work only in the New Year; it sounds like a long time away, and though it is actually not long, I quite like the way it sounds.

In a way, I am often fascinated by how things sound to me- like Prague sounds very mystic and glorious to me, and Budapest sounds stylish and adventurous, while Bali sounds enchanting and limitless, Ulan Bator sounds outlandish and unexplored, again as Guatemala sounds historic and traditional, Viena sounds very contemporary and young. Indeed they make me want to find out for myself, and someday I possibly will, if what they sound like, is similar to how they really are.

And, another word whose sound I forever like is: wonderful. I rather use it too often, possibly to describe a holiday, a dinner, a landscape, a film, a present, a person, or almost any other thing that needs my describing it. Just like now it feels wonderful to string together many incoherent thoughts!