when you call my name, it's like a little prayer

Yay for work. I taped an hour-long meeting at work today for a project that I'm working on, but I didn't have a tripod, and I had to hold as still as possible--the end result was a massive cramp in my arm, and sadness over the fact that I have to do half a dozen more of these in the next week :( I'm going to have to figure out some sort of propping system, since I'm sure that the video contains easily-discernable jerks where my wrist spasmed uncontrollably.

I stayed in the office until a bit before eight p.m., then came home and ate Mexican food. It's rather sad--Ranjit is out for two weeks to visit his family, and so Anup has cooked for the past three nights, and we're all enjoying it much more than we were enjoying Ranjit's food before he left. I feel like I'm being disloyal to him somehow--but the Thai food that Anup made last night actually tasted like Thai food, and the Mexican food tonight actually tasted like Mexican food (sans sour cream and guacamole), which is a huge improvement over the almost-Thai and almost-Mexican that we were used to.

After dinner, I worked on a couple of things that I had to do for tomorrow, and then rebooked my tickets home. I'd booked them way back in April, and had just picked an October 10 departure out of thin air, and so it was time to switch this before the flights that I wanted became all booked up. So, I'm flying out of Hyderabad on the 16th, and returning to San Francisco on October 26. The intervening days will be spent lazing about in Bali, where I will hopefully get a glorious tan and write my romance novel while sipping exotic beverages on the beach. I'll be back in California just in time for Halloween, which should be fun--it will be interesting to see whether anyone in the office recognizes me, and I hope that my friends haven't forgotten who I am.

I also got my tickets for this weekend's trip to Delhi, and I'm in the process of confirming my trip to Ajanta in a couple of weeks. Some people are trying to convince me to go to Sri Lanka for the long weekend next weekend, but I think that I want to spend it shopping in Hyderabad, since I have a v. limited amount of time left in this fair city. I'm going to miss Indian VH1--tonight they played 'The Fabulous Life of Britney Spears and Kevin Federline' for like the fiftieth time, followed by the usual weird mix of videos; a Ricky Martin video was followed by 'I'm Too Sexy' by Right Said Fred, and there was some Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Linkin Park thrown in for good measure. American VH1 pales in comparison.

Now that I have accomplished so much, it's time to go to bed so that I can get up and do it all over again! But, tomorrow is our offsite, and we're going to see a Hindi movie ('Salaam Namaste'), followed by dinner. I won't understand the movie, and I will probably be annoyed by the mice in the theatre, so I may sneak out and shop in the mall beneath the IMAX. However, that's not a very team-oriented activity, so we'll see if my desire to escape the Bollywood dance numbers outweighs my natural inclination towards social acceptability.