My 'blog has been kinda quiet lately because I've been pretty busy last few weeks with work stuff. Things are progressing quite well and a lot of the stuff I made over the years is finally coming together. Still a few more months before it's all done though.

So my backyard that was in very bad state last year when I bought my house, is finally starting to look decent. Last month I bought 20 cubic yards of fill dirt to cover the big holes and level the yard. Then I had the wild weeds cleared and just tonight, I tilled the entire backyard and half of the front yard. I added some calcium/lime mineral and some good weed & feed everywhere. Soon I'll add the grass seeds and hopefully I'll have a nice green lawn in a couple of months. Once the lawn is better, I can get on with my projects. I haven't given up on any of my plans, just got terribly delayed due to... ummm... the space-koalas eating my literature homework.

I haven't been doing much lately other than work and house chores. Last weekend it rained pretty heavily, albeit sporadically, and I didn't go out in the water. I'm hoping this weekend is better so I can have some fun exploring the wild again. I don't have any travel plans in near future so other than my weekly kayak trips, I don't really have much to keep me entertained. Especially since the motherboard on my PC-TV got fried. By PC-TV, I mean the computer in my living room that is wired to the TV and wirelessly connects to my 2TB Raid array in the PC Room that contains 300+ movies in DVD quality. I love to just sit back on the sofa and watch a good movie or two on weekends so now I'm kinda bummed that I have to wait for a few weeks till I find a decent replacement motherboard.

Well, there's always YouTube.

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Ever since I came to US, I've always wondered why the Americans call the main sofa room the "living room." In India, we just refer to it as the "hall." Additionally, I encountered the "family room" and the "great room" during my four years in NJ. While the American living room doesn't have a television or an entertainment system if the house has a family room or better yet, a great room, the purpose and setting of these rooms is pretty much the same as the Indian "hall."

Nevertheless, the term family room made logical sense to me since the family would often gather around in this room after meals to watch TV or play boardgames. In case the room was huge, it was apt to call it the "great" room. Yet why call something the living room? It's not like there's another room called the dead room that people need to differentiate against.

Actually there is, rather, was. It was called the "parlour" and "in the late nineteenth century, the body of a member of the household who had recently deceased would be laid out in the parlour while funeral preparations were made." In modern homes, the parlour has been replaced by the living room "as a result of a twentieth-century effort by architects and builders to strip the parlour of its burial and mourning associations." Now one wonders, what made the architects scratch off the centuries old tradition of parlour from their blueprints?

I have a simple method to determine the cause of seemingly unexplainable societal movements - look for the industry that would benefit from the drastic change. In this case, Penn & Teller helped me out with their Death. Inc. episode. That industry is funeral homes. Funeral homes were not so common two centuries ago because every house had a parlour and only the ones without parlours would avail of their funeral services. So obviously, over the course of a few decades, the funeral home owners persuaded the builders to wipe out the parlour and replace it with something else. It was only a matter of time till some marketing genuis came up with the term "living room" to replace the parlour.

Enough history lessons. I'm gonna go watch TV in my living room now :)

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