Egg sandwiches and college days

Yesterday began as any other day since Magali was sleeping late and being a Sunday I too did not have to go out in the morning. At around noon time I received a call on my cell phone from a number I did not recognize and a female person asked me to guess as to who she was. I thought of a different friend from college who is settled in Mangalore but the voice did not match.

Sitting on the steps with my friends in
Lonavala. Can you spot the 17-year-old me?

She reminded me of our degree college days when we used to play Table Tennis and bunk college to go for movies. Now I somewhat guessed that she was one of the five friends from my group because she mentioned 'egg sandwiches'. Those were the days when we were allowed to carry whatever we pleased into a cinema hall and our group always planned as to what each one of us would bring for all to eat during the intermission. The menu for the four of them used to change but I invariably had to make egg sandwiches for all of us because all of them loved the sandwiches and so did I. I had finished college and gone to Bombay Hospital to do my Registered Nursing while the others did what they planned to take up as a career. Two of the friends got married and are homemakers and two are single and career women. While two are in Karnataka state (one in Udupi and one in Mangalore) three of us are in Mumbai itself.

Us again! (left to right): Sujata, Neeti, Eleanor & Me!

The best thing that happened was I got hold of all their telephone numbers and spoke to all of them. So yesterday I got in touch with four friends whom I had not met or spoken to in years. We are planning a get together either here in Mumbai or in Mangalore.

A holiday together would be great fun. We had gone on a holiday together in December 1980 to Khandala and I happened to have 2 photos which Magali has managed to capture with her camera as we are too lazy to use the scanner.

With love,
Sheila

Hello everybody

My husband Ezy in his uniform
feeling very bored.

Hello. My name is Sheila Araujo Vaz. I am born and brought up in Mumbai and I do not think I will be happy in any other place. I am a homemaker though I trained to be a nurse before I got married in the year 1990. My husband Ezy is a Captain in the Merchant Navy and I have spent many years sailing with him and though I had terrible bouts of sea sickness in the beginning I later became 'a sailor's wife' according to Ezy because after 2 months the sea sickness flew out of the porthole (that's sailor lingo for window).

My daughter Magali pretending to
steer the ship.

My daughter Magali is going to be eighteen very soon. How the days have gone by. I remember holding her as a baby the day after she was born and her father was speaking to me on the phone from the port of Gibraltar and feeling very sad that he could not be with us at once. He came 10 days later. Now she is a childlike mature girl who still wants to play silly games with me and I sometimes wonder how the years have flown by. She herself has been a blogger since a long time & introduced me forced me to blog.

Ezy & Me on the ship.

Though I had not started blogging I have been reading a lot of blogs and I really do not know how often I will blog because I am not much of a writer. That is Magali's forté. I will write as and when I am in a mood, and I should warn you all that I am a pretty moody person as I am a Cancerian.
My free time is spent as a Volunteer at The Home for the Aged close to home. I have been going there for nearly seven years.
This is all I can think of for my first post. Will post sometime soon.

Take care,
Sheila

*all three pictures in this post were taken during our trip sailing with Ezy in the year 2008.