< Viveks Rant />

Last weekend I climbed 10,000 ft to Mt. Rainier basecamp. It was freaking gorgeous and spiritual. We were under a cloud until 8000 ft or so and when we broke out of it, views of mt. adams in front was simply breadthtaking.

No doubt this was hardest physical task i have undertaken and I am so proud that we actually reached the base camp. This is the beginning and I shall continue. One day I will do the summit.

We did another hike of this season. Annette lake hike turned out to be a great one. Snow melted water was coming down with a great force. Sorrounding colors resonated with rainforest ambience. We even hit snow towards the end. We couldnt go all the way to summit. We were so not ready for the snow but in all it was a fun trip. Next is memorial day long weekend and I am planning a camping trip with my frens to Olympics National Park including shi shi beach. It should be lot of fun !!!

[Update] Nishant is talking about the hike on his exploremore blog . Note differences in picture quality. Flickr does far better job than msn spaces. Compare pictures he posted on spaces with my pictures on flickr. I think his are compressed more or may be he uploaded lower resolution pictures to save space. Also I couldnt get a link to his particular album in msn spaces as I could do using a tag in flickr. MSN spaces should allow tagging !!!

This saturday bunch of us decided to finally get out of couch. We decided to do rattle snake lake and hike but when we reached it was raining. no surprises there :)

So we stayed back and did our lunch and waited it out. Then we decided to try out twin falls which is 3 miles east to rattle snake. It turned out to be a beautful hike as you can see in pics.

Seattle is the best place to be in summer. i am sooo waiting for it.

I wonder why all customer service phone calls end up in frustration. I would have a frustration index inbuilt into customer rep s/w which keeps track of the frustration level. This means everytime a customer hangs up, the phone rep will change the level depending on what went wrong. and next time when customer calls back , rep will be ready to treat and greet so as to enhance over all customer satisfaction. would it work ?

solutions aside. I had one such experience just now. All I wanted to know which of the 3 same looking wellsfargo CC links to my HELOC account. I have mortgage with them and so I have a regular visa, and two other credit cards on HELOC account, all differ only in color and account number. These numbers dont link to original account. I understand this is for my security so I called them. After entering my HELOC account number, loan number and SSN multiple times and some wait time I got through a customer rep. He said he cannot help me with my question and would transfer me to the CC dept. He does that and guess what? That dept. working hours are 4am to 7 pm PST and they dint pick up the phone.I dont have their phone number. Yeah.. the CC dept phone number. I will have to repeat this entire process on a weekday during normal hours. I would kill for a direct line. Next time when i call them - can they auto detect my frustration level and treat me better ?

more and more i live and more i think about it.. more i talk about it with my friends and more i observe... i can zero in "hope and fear". These are the most powerful emotions that drives me and my actions. I would not care about making a general statement here because it doesnt matter to me. I will simply assume this is true for most of us. There must be exceptions and I will keep looking for them. Like pundits who claim they are free soul - free from fear and hope. Well !! It doesnt matter. I am talking about me and my "Id".

There is this spot light. All i have to do is to decide whether i should step into it or not. Once in it I need to perform. I have performed before alot of times but noone was watching. This time I am watching. And I am not sure if the performance is going to succeed or not.

I hope that I take that step and I fear myself that I will.

I was going through my pics to find a desktop wall paper, when i found this one. All snorkelling memories keep coming back. hawaii keeps coming back ... i need another vacation to hawaii. i wish msft opens an office there (mebbe buy one of those smaller islands) and entire redmond shifts there.

Happy marriage anniversary to us. I cannot believe its already one year. Richa thinks it's all too weird and she doesnt understand how and why we got married. She is talking about it here.

It seems yesterday and so close that we decided to get married and everything happened one after another. But one thing is sure. After staying one year with her I know i was right. I was right every time when i reasoned myself into the relationship and to get married. Its an amazing decision to take and to stick with it. It feels like the single most important decision of my life and it was very rightly so.

This is our first anniversary and we dont have a clue what we do at our anniversary. So we are trying to go back in time and date each other. This week we already had two good dates, and one where i completely fumbled and Richa agreed that she wouldnt have picked me if she knew I was so hopeless. I hope I improve on tonite's date.

Here is the original call for marriage. We went through the invitaion and all our marriage pictures. You will enjoy them too. I hope blogger stays around and keep our marriage invitation alive for years to come... !!!