As recently as a few months ago, the kids would mope around on Sunday when they saw me packing my dress shirts for a trip. Not any more.

This Saturday, when I mentioned that I'd be leaving for Boston, S1 got all excited. "Yeah!" he said with a little jig, "we get to eat Maggi noodles". They don't get to eat it when I'm at home, so my trips are his only opportunity to gorge on the stuff. The younger one is not such a fan of boxed stuff -- she much prefers the stuff I cook when we're really short on time (steamed salmon or linguine and pesto both take less than 20 minutes) -- but she too followed her brother's lead: "yeah, Maggi noodles," she said. And they both ran off to tell Mom.

But now it's Tuesday, I've been gone two days, the Maggi craving has been quenched ... "So when are you coming back?," they want to know. Good to feel wanted, but the cynic in me wonders how long that's going to last ...

Rajendran, one of my classmates from college, runs/co-founded Jambav which makes an online cartooning program; he asked me to try it out ...

This was my Sunday:

The ice storm we had on Monday brought down a bunch of trees and felled several power lines. We're ok, but friends who live in leafy neighborhoods didn't fare so well.

One of my colleagues bought a car on Saturday. His new car and old car (he was planning to use it for parts) were both parked on their driveway. A tree limb fell across the driveway, totaling the new car, but leaving the old car pretty much unaffected. Insurance is covering it, fortunately. Some other friends have spent the past two days clearing out all the fallen branches. Half the traffic lights in the central (older) part of town are still out. Our daughter's daycare lost its power and hasn't got it back yet.

The school district took this as the excuse to cancel school for three days in a row. Monday, I worked from home, but I couldn't keep doing that. I'm currently subsetting and processing several hundred gigabytes of satellite data for a rainfall nowcast validation experiment. Such work doesn't travel very well, so Tuesday and Wednesday, the kids have come to work with me. The 5-yr old pretty much occupies himself, but the 3-yr old needs attention periodically.

"It's so easy for them to cancel to school," I commented to a colleague.

"And so hard for us to cancel work," he empathized.

The three-year old developed a fascination with umbrellas this summer when we had enough rain to make 2007 the wettest year on record. So, when I saw a cute ladybug one in Chicago a couple months ago, I brought it back for her. She's been hankering to use the umbrella since then, but the weather didn't cooperate. No rain since the time I bought the umbrella.

Until today ... only the temperature is hovering around 32F (zero celsius) and so, we are getting freezing rain. The rain that fell overnight has iced up. The grass crunches as you walk on it. One of the elms in our front yard has doubled over from the weight.

But the 3-year old woke up, took one look through the window and squealed that she wanted her umbrella. I didn't have the heart to object.

It is better, according to a set of University of Pennsylvania researchers, to praise a kid for working hard than to praise him/her for being smart:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids&print=true

If you praise the kid for being smart, he/she will be more reluctant to undertake challenges; the kid is more likely to test limits if they are praised for their effort. When I was in school, the kids who got good grades without much effort were admired; the ones who worked hard were put down as "slogs". Yet, in life, the successful people are those who can pick themselves up after a disaster and keep going. Being risk-averse gets you nowhere.

The three-year old was going on and on yesterday about the cookies she'd gotten at her day care.

"It was orange and yellow and had small green things on it," she enthused.

"Did you get some for me?," I asked.

"No," she said sternly, "when Appa is two years old and I am thirty five, then you can get a cookie".

I went to the post office near my building last week. Because the post office is on campus, the worker (she looked like a temporary worker) was probably a college student. The mailing charge came out to $4.60. I gave her $10.10. "Umm ...," she said hesitantly, "I don't know how to do this." "You need to give me $5.50 back," I told her and she was happy to oblige. Shouldn't she have been able to do that?