The Life aheadPersonal Blog of Ratish Naroor

I am pretty excited about my new project Home School Coach helping one of my good friend Mary Ann Johnson to setup and drive traffic to her Home schooling blog Home School Coach .The blog is basically explaining the concept of TJED (The Thomas Jefferson Education methodology) and its various techniques of Home schooling . I was also not much aware of the concept of Home schooling till now but now I am learning a lot on this topic and I hope I will gain a good understanding of Home schooling . In simple words , Home schooling is

Homeschooling or homeschool (also called home education or home learning) is the education of children at home, typically by parents but sometimes by tutors, rather than in other formal settings of public or private school. Although prior to the introduction of compulsory school attendance laws, most childhood education occurred within the family or community, homeschooling in the modern sense is an alternative in developed countries to formal education.
Homeschooling is a legal option in many places for parents to provide their children with a learning environment as an alternative to publicly-provided schools. Parents cite numerous reasons as motivations to homeschool, including better academic test results, poor public school environment, improved character/morality development, and objections to what is taught locally in public school. It may be a factor in the choice of parenting style. It is also an alternative for families living in isolated rural locations or living temporarily abroad.

Here’s my personal blog back again on the internet with a new design and layout, bringing it under my personal domain http://RatishNaroor.com . It was hard for me to find extra time to re-design all my three blogs under wordpress platform .I would say WordPress was fun to work with . It took me very less time to master the tricks in designing a blog from the scratch . I would be adding an article on “how to create a blog in wordpress “ in my SEO blog at http://SEO.RatishNaroor.com .Do check for updates soon . So what am I going to scribble in my personal blog? It will be mostly my travelogues, various personal experiences and my life in words & pictures. Lot of things are happening in my life recently and I felt I should share all those small experiments in my life . Also I would try to cover some of my recent trips that I did which were part of my Photo expeditions.

I got some good response for my re-designed photo blog at http://photography.RatishNaroor.com . WordPress has lot of options to tweak and present my best shots in a neat  and better way .Also the wordpress’s SEO plugins helped me a lot in  placing me on top of the search results for most of the searches related with my name .

The spring is here and its time for me to start traveling again .Winter was ofcourse an experience for me as this was my first winter in USA after I left India . Snow was fun and 5 months of winter was something really exciting for me.Anyways I was glad that I survived the winter with no health issues .
This weekend we decided to do some shopping at park city malls but the sad part was the power was shut down from noon and we had come change our plans .We decided for some fun drive to Heber and the historic city in heber, in Anoop’s Ford Mustang.The drive was superb after the winter and I think I should be scheduling more drives in our wonderful and beautiful Utah .We took a break at Deer state park in Heber and decided to watch the sunset near the lake.It was a calm and peaceful evening after the hectic week at work . Check out some fun pictures we took at this place .

Complete set of pictures

Got hear a great song sung by Job (the Amrita TV super singer runner-up)from his new album ‘Thaalam’.Its an amazing song and with a great meaning for the lyrics . I decided to make a video with some of the pictures of my parents which I took two years ago at Ponmudi in Kerala State.This is something I would like to dedicate to my parents who helped me reach to this level . Thank you Dad and Mom .

Its was a great speech given by the new 44th president of United states of america .Watch the the inauguration speech- address video here.

A R Rehman proved it again .Its the first time an Indian is winning a Golden Globe award.

I love when A R Rehman comes up with great singles.And here it is again after “Pray for my brother”.This album is called “Connections” and has the title song “Jiya se Jiya”.I really loved the beats of Sivamani and the video is well made .The song has some great folk song beats that gives the song a punjabi touch.Also at times A R Rehman has used the typical Scotland pipes that you can here in Scotland music.I think that also made me love this song so fast.Anyways enjoy the video and the song .

After doing the research on the new album ” Connections ” , I came to know that its a first of the kind release where Nokia and A R Rahman is releasing the 7 songs of that album in all the new Nokia Express edition mobile phones.The phones are scheduled to be released In January 2009 with the songs preloaded with it .

Jiya Se Jiya A R Rehman (Connections) Youtube Link

I don’t know why I procrastinated writing many of the interesting items that happened around me and new adventures happening in my life in the past two months.May be bad mood or I was in my own world. Anyways now over-coming all those factors I am scribbling about something I was dong in the past two month .The Bryce canyon and the Zion National park trip was the one of those that I missed .
I was fed up with no trips for sometime and thinking of going somewhere before the winter starts in Utah.So the only place near to me was the Bryce canyon national Park and Zion national park. And I had only my then room mate Madan , with me to team up for the trip .So we started off renting a car to the famous national parks in Utah state .Bryce Canyon was great place to be, where you can see some nature designs formed of tough soil , sculptured in certain patterns.

The funniest part of the trip was the place we stayed the night .Madan Veerapalli booked a queen’s bed for us through Orbitz.com and we were trying to find the hotel amidst the national park boundaries.Managed to find the place but we were astonished to find that they only had ‘TIPIS’ , which are tents used by the ancient red Indians (of USA) long time back.But it was real fun staying the night in the witch-hat shaped tent .The next day morning was really cold as it rained in the night.Also some leakages brought me out of my sleep wondering whats happening .

In the morning I got a chance to shoot some good fast shots of the humming bird which flies very fast .I was lucky there to practice some fast shutter shots in the new digital SLR.

One of the great things happened in the trip was meeting some wildlife on the roads .It was totally unexpected on a weekend when the crowd and noise are high .I had to put a sudden break when driving and reverse the car to park on the sideways.I grabbed the camera and started running towards the family of deers.They were not much frightened by my approach and I got some cool closeup pictures of the group.As a whole we had a nice time and some new experiences .

The whole set of pictures can be viewed here .
Bryce Canyon National Park
Zion National Park