I found this digital photo printed on a A4 size paper, when I was clearing up my steel filing cabinet ( Yes, I still have one ) in my room. From memory, I remember this photograph was taken by my colleague Bryan, some time back when we both had travelled on a business trip to Durban, South Africa.
So it’s Valentine’s Day today! To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of Valentine’s Celebrations going to Valentine’s dances and stuff like that and as a matter of fact, I’ve never been to Valentine’s dance ever! However, this year it was a bit different.
Earlier this week, Monica had forwarded an email to me that she has received from a friend in the church prayer group asking us to join a few other friends with their spouses to go for a " Valentine’s Ball” a dance organised by a group called ‘Marriage Encounter’ in St Mary’s Church in Dubai. Oh well, when Monica asked me whether we were going; at first I had my apprehensions. Any way, even though she did not say it, I knew in my mind that she wanted to go particularly because all of her close buddies were going with their spouses.So, I did not want to disappoint her and decided that we go for the Ball. It was held on last Thursday night at Sheraton Deira hotel in Dubai. Although it wasn’t extravergant, the organisers had done a brilliant job putting it together. There were about 100 people or so and we had 8 young couples in our group from the prayer group. In addition to music & dancing, there were spot prizes and wedding march. The dinner buffet featured was Indian cuisine and I had some Indian naan, butter chicken & goan style pork. There was a cash bar almost hidden in a corner of the banquet hall, which offered beer, wine & a few sprints. Chrys and I grabbed a couple of beers and we were the only ones to drink from our lot. The dance floor was rather small and quite a few people moved their feet out of the dance floor on the floor carpet. We too! There were many among our bunch who took photos and a few of them are posted below.
Here I'm posting this using drafts app and Swype keyboard on my iPhone. I've not really been using drafts on iPhone since I had installed Drafts 4 a couple of months back when I got Iphone 6. What I like most about the drafts is, it's nice and clean white writing space. It's cutter free and distraction free of perhaps any other writing apps I've used in the past on iOS.
I was just listening to @matigo’s Doubtfully Daily Podcast where he mentioned about how he miss friends & laughter, since he moved to Japan some 7 years ago. I have been in a similar situation up until recently, like, I missed good friends & laughter since I moved here. But now I’m glad and very fortunate to have been able to find a true friend, who cares, listens, provide me with good advice when need be, interested in things that I’m interested in and even sometimes challenges me in my opinions. Lester & I have been knowing each other for a decade or so as colleagues, who worked within the same department in the organisation. However, he then moved over to another department in the company; but since 2008, we again met up when we all moved our work places to one central Headquarter building in the city. We used to meet up in the open terrace when we step out for ‘fresh-air’ breaks. Among many other similar folks like us those who enjoy ‘fresh-air breaks’ we met Keshav, another colleague who has been in the company for many years like Lester & myself. Gradually, we became friends who enjoyed our chatter & laughter. Having said that, in late 2011, Keshav decided to move back to India. Years passed by, friendship between Lester & myself continued. But, except for our very brief drop-bys at each others homes during the weekends for a couple of times, we haven’t had a chance to really meet outside the work. Meanwhile, in May last year, Keshav moved back to the UAE; but to Abu Dhabi - one & half drive from where we live.
With Keshav’s moving back to the country, finally gave us a fabulous opportunity to get-together and bond each other, when Lester, Tony (another colleague & friend) and myself made a sleep-over trip to Keshav’s bachelor accommodation in the Capital over this weekend. We left Dubai on Lester’s new Ford Explorer on Thursday afternoon after work, arriving at Keshav’s place in Abu Dhabi around 5.30pm. We chatted, listened to music, danced & laughed enjoying each others company till mid-night until our eyes were literally closing after a busy working week. Next day, after having breakfast in a local South Indian Restaurant, Keshav drove us to show a little bit of his surroundings, including AUH Airport in his new beast - Volkswagen Touareg. After returning to Keshav’s accommodation, we continued with our chatter & dancing, before Lester, Tony & myself drove back to Dubai in the afternoon. Until next time, perhaps a bonding session in Goa!
Villa No 1
I’m with Keshav & Lester
Sorting out the Dinner. Tony looks on
Moving our feet to the rhythm of Goa music
South Indian Restaurant
Chatter over Breakfast
Yesterday I saw our friend on ADN @phoneboy posted that he mostly uses his iPhone to post blog posts to 10C blog via ADN by sending a PM. Up until I saw that post, I had completely forgotten that cool feature 10C offers that allows a short & quick post to my personal blog. Whilst I’m still waiting for 10CV3 update and to see what cool things Jason has wrap under the sleeves, I should make use of 10CV2 platform more often to up keep and maintain my online presence consistently and Keeping it alive!
Am here posting after a couple of months. Towards every year end, I take last week of the year, leave off work to put my feet up and reflect on the year passing by. These are those moments to reflect on 2014!
To be honest, I feel like I hadn’t achieved much,in both personal and professional lives over the year. So what should I do..? Should I be worrying and regretting of the stuff I failed to do or quite the opposite - marvel about at least a couple of things I did manage to achieve and did well.
There are two major career highlights that I achieved during the past year and both are related to increasing awareness of the behind the scenes in our business,amongst flight attendants community. One was that, I worked tirelessly to get a video produced to show flight attendants of consequences of some their wrong doings in-flight ( wastage, cost impact etc) & how could they support us to minimise wastage, costs etc by doing this right and the other was, me organising & personally facilitating flight kitchen tours for the flight attendants twice every week starting from November 2nd, 2014. By the end of last year, I had facilitated about 14 such tours for about 200 flight attendants. Looking at the numbers, of course, this was just about a fraction of 1% of the flight attendants in the airline and there are many many more tours to do to cover entire flight attendants community.
What I’m also very pleased about is that I’ve been receiving many complimentary comments from some of those who attended the flight kitchen tours both verbally and in writing. Below is one such lovely note that I received on email on the new years eve and I have to say, which made my NYE a bliss! It also inspires me to continue to facilitate these tours even better this year and perhaps even starting to write a blog about our industry & airline food!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Recent Catering Tour 2014
Dear Sumudu Gunaratne,
After recently having the pleasure of being taken on a guided catering tour by yourself, I felt it of the utmost importance to write to you and thank you.
The catering tour I attended far surpassed my expectations. It was wonderfully co-ordinated and informative, and whilst highly professional- in that it showcased the 'behind-the-scenes' ongoings at the Catering location- it was personal and moving for me, resulting in a different outlook on my part on all my future flights.
From the onset, I felt it a deep privilege to have been allowed to view what takes place 24/7, 7 days a week, between the busy, and successful flight operations the airline is renowned for. From the moment we were picked up and escorted to the Catering division, signed in, donned our white jackets and hair nets, I was amazed.
I would like to take this moment to salute and commend you and your colleagues as a Team at Catering and Service Delivery. You can be proud of the work you are doing. Without the hard work that is done by the staff behind the scenes, whether it be packaging of menus, packaging of blankets, emptying of clearance carts, re-stocking of bars, cutting and boiling of vegetables or packaging of knives and forks, you are a highly valued and a crucial part of the hardworking team that works around the clock, ultimately resulting in making the Airline the prestigious success that it is.
Thank you for allowing me to see the important roles that you play. We value you.
Happy New Year in advance to you and your family. May 2015 be an even bigger year for the airline!
Kind regards,
xxxxxxxxxxxx
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After some time, when I started writing a blog post on Evernote this morning, even before I started the text, my Evernote Notebook for @10Centuries posts went onto auto sync and published a blog post "Untitled" on my 10Centuries website. A leasson learnt - I created a new Notebook for "Blog Drafts" on my Evernote. I'm using this new Notebook to start writing blog posts and keep them there until they are finish & ready to publish on to the website. This might help me to blog more often, I don't know. Perhaps, blogging more regularly might even help me to improve my non work related writing skills. One of the things, I have always been wanting to do is a bit of journalism; but never been able to got around it. Last year I even asked my good friend and a well respected writer, journalist and a political commentator Malinda Senevirtane { Malinda Words } whether I could write tech reviews for his newspaper and he was very kind to say 'yes'. Oh well.. one day, some day!
I'm now doing this post on my iPad connected to my newly purchased Logitech Bluetooth Keyboard K810. Using an external Keyboard makes wrting more simple and practical specially when the iDevice is kept on a flat surface like my work desk at home. I can see that I will be using the external keyboard with iPad more regularly. That said, I hope, I would be able to use the keyboard even when I am using the iPad on the couch rather than on my work desk all the times. In the recent past I tend to use my iDevices while seated on the couch in the living hall at home rather than in my room, eventhough the wireless signal is rediclousley bad.
I know this post may not have focussed on any particular subject, but rather me trying to motivate my self for writing and also to see what tools might help me in keeping up with writing more conistently. In that I just discovered, I am unable to insert URL on Evernote iOS application. So, I will have to do the finishing of this post on my Mac. However, all in all doing this post on iPad connected to Bluetooth Keyboard certainly is a pleasent experience.
A couple of years ago, when our daughter Stephanie was about 13 years old, she was fascinated with making bracelets using beads as a hobby. She started selling them with a tiny price tag to her friends in the neighbourhood. She even went on to branding them with a name called “Boonbutts” I have no idea how and why she came up with that name. But she thought that was a cool name for a brand. She even created a website using, I think webs dot com. Even though, she did not ask, I registered boonbutts.com for an year and also created a twitter account in July 2011.
As Stephanie grew and became more loaded with her school work, particularly getting prep for ICGSE exams, her fascination of making bracelets began to disappear and she did not keep her website updated. With that I too did not renew the domain name. But last month when I was looking for any domains to register and in particular looking for a personal domain to set up with FastMail trial account,I remembered of Stephanie’s Boonbutts name and that was still available for registration. I quickly grabbed it. I have no idea at this stage what I’m going to do with the domain; but I set up email addresses for Stephanie & my self. Stephanie still thinks Boonbutts is a cool name for a brand and perhaps we do small start up enterprise!
Among my college mates, most of us reached our 50 ( or new 25 ) in the year 2014. It was after long 32 years since we left our high school in Sri Lanka, Royal College in 1982. To mark the occasion our friends in Sri Lanka from Royal College Group ’82 organised a Dinner Dance on August 2nd , 2014 at Cinnamon Lakeside Hotel in Sri Lanka.
More than 300 college mates from the group from all over the world gathered at Cinnamon Lakeside Hotel in the evening of August 2nd.. The event started with a cocktail at the pool side, before the main event of Dinner Dance held in the banquet hall. The Dinner Dance started around 2200 hours with the College Song sung by all of us. Thereafter, a pre-recorded audio was played as of our teachers marking the attendance register by mentioning each students’ name. It was indeed a fantabulous occasion in which we met our college friends after almost 30 years, that brought back lovely memories from our childhood.
Here a couple of photos from the event
I'm writing this post during my flight from Dubai to New York. Am on my way to Chicago on this trip via New York for a business assignment. I have another one of my work mates traveling with me and we will be in Chicago only for about 20 hours, including our overnight stay on the day we arrive. This is my second visit to Chicago in less than six months and I was there last, in March this year, when I travelled from Boston after Emirates start up. Even during my last trip to Chicago, it was a very short trip that I stayed less than a day for work and flew out to Canada for a brief holiday to my sister's place.
Breakfast after take off from Dubai
