Story of the lost keys ...

... it all started happening when I went to the university on Saturday morning and discovered that my office keys were not in my handbag, where they normally are. Quickly, I started scanning my mind of memories of the past twenty four hours to try and remember where I might have left them; only a very few places came to my mind as I had not visited any shops or did not stop anywhere on my way back home on Friday.

I immediately called home and asked them to search for my keys and did the same with my aunt. After about fifteen minutes, both replies came back negative. Finally, I decided to work in the computer lab and after working came back home thinking I had dropped them somewhere.

Then Monday came and after reaching the university in the morning, I went straight to the administration building to get a duplicate. As I was walking towards the building, I realized that I had also had a meeting with the Vice Rector on Friday. She is out of the country but I requested her PA to search her room for my keys. He did and told me that there are no keys there. That was the last resort. I went down stairs to contact the administration.

What I have not mentioned so far is that the key chain not only had my office keys but also they keys to the staff rest room. While requesting for a duplicate I remembered my room number but not of the rest room. For that, I immediately decided to call our dean's secretary named Madiha and asked her about the number. She told me and then said "By the way, you left your office keys with me on Friday" :)

This was yesterday morning. The afternoon and evening were equally chaotic, mixed with good and irritating and hectic moments. The day ended with an overdose of handmade pistachio ice cream with my brother and sister-in-law.

Today, I woke up early, wanted to go back to sleep a bit more but could not, wanted to skip my morning class, but decided against it and then finally decided to get blip out of the way and start a yet another hectic day ... The countdown has begun; 10 days to go before the semester ends, then I will be left with exams and grading and compiling the result. I am hoping to be done with that by the 10th of June.

I hope everyone here is doing great ...

Update (7:00 PM): This day will be remembered as the day on which the administration was kind enough to get bracket fans installed on the walls of our offices; a backup for when the chillers for the central air conditioning system fail to work. It will also be remembered as the day when the fire alarm falsely started to ring and the concerned staff forgot to turn it off, which in turn caused intense noise pollution. My afternoon class got canceled due to unforeseen problems. I left early and decided to visit Readings. My last visit to Readings was when we had to take gifts for children at TAC in December. Book shops are always a source of immense pleasure for me and I can easily spend hours in one. The primary objective of visiting Readings was to buy Stephen Covey's "The 7 effective habits of highly effective people". There is a copy at home, but I wanted my personal copy so that I could write notes on it. I know I will be needing and using this book in the near future. I did not find it at Readings, but did end up purchasing some other things.

After Readings, I headed to a nearby bookshop, where I found the book I was looking for. In all, I bought the following:

1. Stephen Covey's "The 7 effective habits of highly effective people"
2. Azhar Abidi's novel "The house of Bilqis"
3. Berlitz Rush hour German listening course. I learnt German in 2001 - 2002 with the intent of pursuing my higher education in Germany. That plan never materialized and with that I also forgot the language. It's time for a refresher course.
4. I guess I have never mentioned before on blip that one of my hobbies since childhood and which I am still pursuing is collecting post cards. I have lots of them and a few got added in my collection today. Photographs of Bath, images by Neill Menneer. The photographs were so beautiful, I could not resist buying it.
5. The latest copy of Reader's Digest.
6. Some stationary.

Came back home, had lunch and then made some phone calls to make arrangements for a class trip for tomorrow, took a nap, did some embroidery and am now updating my blip. Rest of the evening will be spent working on a web application in netbeans and mysql, reading, dinner and maybe a movie.

Out of the eight sections of Daniyal Mueenuddin's "In other rooms, other wonders", I have read two. The reviews of the book are overrated for me, but the way he explains the life of a common Pakistani is to be applauded. An excerpt from the book:

"Beginning the rounds on his itinerant mornings, summoned to a broken pump, Nawab and his bicycle bumped along, decorative plastic flowers swaying on wires sprouting from the frame. His tools, notably a three-pound ball-peen hammer, clanked in a greasy leather bag suspended from the handlebars. The farmhands and the manager waited in the cool of the banyans, planted years earlier to shade each of the tube wells. "No tea, no tea," Nawab insisted, waving away the steaming cup."

This is probably one of my longest write ups and I need to stop now :)