Pages from My Diary

Knowledge is power, and Twitter helps you gain that with only 140 characters. Effective? Yes. But gleaning useful information from the useless ones that appear on your Twitter feed can be really troublesome sometimes, especially if you're following 1,000 people at once.

I am not a published or self-published author; but I am well aware of the hassles associated with creating a good book cover. I opened my account on Wattpad around 4 years ago, but started uploading stories this year. I had no idea that I was supposed to upload a cover to go with my story. At first, I did not want to go through all the trouble, but then soon I realized that creating a good book cover can actually gain you some readers. I started looking for free photos on the web for my first short story, and found one on a website. I did the same with the second cover as well. The process was definitely not easy. I had to look up for hours and had to determine whether the photos I had found would actually be consistent with the theme of my story. Then checking license and rights and the likes would take another hour or so. I could actually write a whole short story in that time.

I am not sure if any such challenge exists. I guess I just made it up. Hey all, sorry for not updating my blog for such a long time. Well, I have been busy doing nothing. You know how I am! So, the other day I thought of pushing myself to see if I can reach a certain word-count limit. My writing has been the epitome of sloth in the past few weeks, and I could barely squeeze out more than 2,000 words per day (that too, if I sat in front of the computer for at least about 7-8 hours at a stretch). I have also been meaning to write a short story lately because I had kind of started to miss writing the words 'The End'. Writing a #shortstory . Target: 10k words. Deadline, TONIGHT. 12:27PM here. I will live-tweet progress. This should be fun. #amwriting — Mehnaz Tabassum (@mztabassum) July 20, 2015

I have wasted around 1000 precious hours of my small life looking at the blue-white pages of Facebook. But the sad truth is that  there is essentially nothing to watch. 

Homemade pasta is a delight, and when it comes to creamy pasta, I can never resist the urge. After spending plenty of money at restaurants, I finally decided to give this one a try at home. Although most of my cooking experiments fail first, this one turned to be quite successful; so, sharing my experience with you all here. Here is what it looks like.

"So, what do you want to do in life?" this was the common question people used to asked me when I was about to take my HSC exams. My answers used to be definite. I was younger, immature, but I had a set plan for my life. I knew what I was doing, what I was aiming for. Today I am that same girl, albeit a bit older; but when someone asks me the same question, my answer is: Error 404: Answer Not Found. Image Credit: Danilo Rizzuti at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

[A post on good and bad memories of 2014 and resolutions for 2015.] Another year is gone from my life. Time truly flies. This time it was literally gone with the blink of an eye. It still feels like January 2014, except I am twelve months late. Wishing you all a very happy new year, and hope that you will live your life to the fullest, achieve whatever you dream of (or at least get one step closer to achieving it) and stay healthy all through 2015. Image Credit: Freedigitalphotos.net

Pardon me if the I misspelled Shwarma . I have seen plenty of restaurants adopting the name Shawarma instead of Shwarma . I am not sure which one is correct, but the way we pronounce it, Shwarma should be the right spelling. Anyway. Let's move onto the review. This was my first visit to Shwarma House , and the occasion was Friendship Day celebration with my friends. Having heard a lot of good things about this restaurant, I had my hopes pretty high, only to be shattered by their poor service. Here are shots of the food that we ate:

I was supposed to do this a long time ago, but got held. So, without further excuses, let me present to you my next creation: an elephant. Those of you who have been reading this blog know that I did not have much clay to begin with, and so I had to go for blue for the elephant. I did not even have black or white for the eyes (well, I have the white. But wouldn't it look creepy without a black iris?) Here is a shot of my finished elephant:

eat@ (by BRAC Chicken) launched a few days ago ( click here to visit their Facebook page ). I would probably have no clue about this restaurant whatsoever if I had not visited Aarong the other day. While checking out after shopping, they handed me a flyer that said '20% off on meals', and I thought, well, why not? Hence the visit. Although this is a comparatively new restaurant and I believed that I should not keep my hopes high, the fact that they are serving chicken made me change my mind. KFC, BFC and CP have pretty much made our expectation really high with their supreme quality of food and service, and I expected the same from this one. Here's a sneak peek of my lunch there:

The first time I had visited Boomers, I had hated the place and their food, probably because I was having my lunch for the second time in two hours. This time, however, I loved every bit of the food (except for a tiny part of it), and have really nice things to say about it. Read on. Here is a snapshot of Boomers' famous three-item platter:

Pizza Hut Spicy Beef Price: BDT.1100 (Pan)  [I will post detailed pricing soon, watch this space or visit their website/FB page for official menu with price list] This is one of the pizzas listed under Pizza Hut's 'spicy' list, however, I did not find the pizza that much spicy. Indeed, I found a good amount of chopped red and green  jalapeños , but that's it. If you are used to mouth-scalding spices, then you will be a little disappointed with this one.

To say I am disappointed with my life in this country would be the understatement of the century. I believe most of you had read my post about my phone  getting stolen with utmost pity (written in February, 2013). Well, get ready to summon all of those condolence once again, because the same incident has happened to me once again! I am not short of a celeb, because this time the thief took her time to come to my house and steal it from right under my nose!

Before I tell you where this 'RFC' is located exactly, please let me say a quick prayer because I am not exactly sure if this restaurant was actually called RFC or not. There are so many '-FCs' popping up in the streets of Dhaka nowadays that it has become harder to commit most of them into my brain, even after I have visited one for lunch! Here is a glimpse of what I was blessed with:

I went to visit my grandma today, and found my 3-years-and-something-months old cousin playing GTA: San Andreas on his father's computer. "What's the big deal? He was probably just running a car around the streets." "One of his sisters must have turned it on for him.  Wasn't she just playing a game like Candy Crush Saga?" No! He did all of that himself!

Well, I am not really sure if I should call it madness, because I am certain that many readers out there do the same. If you are the type of reader who has more books on his/her to-read shelf than he/she can finish in this lifetime then I believe you already understand the immense pain that we have to go through right after finishing a book. The single question that jolts us awake in the middle of the night is: What to read next? Okay I might have made it a little too melodramatic. But I wouldn't deny that I don't spend an awful lot of time worrying about the next book I want to read. I had read a blog post a few days back (sorry I couldn't find it for you) where it said that you could make these small chits with the names of books you want to read next, and when you finish one, you simply pick up another and whatever the chit says, you read that book. This makes it a lot easier and cuts the agony we have to face every time. There was this Facebook post that sugge...

Hello all! This is a very special post, because it happens to relate to my first ever commercial shoot. Before you start guessing things, just let me tell you something real quick: I am not a model and this was not an actual TVC. We created it for our Marketing (Advertising and Promotion) course. Take a look at this video and read along :)

Finally the sixth day came! I hadn't expected it to be so late, but I kinda got tangled into the mess of finals and term paper work, hence the delay. This time, my target was to create some berries or a white cat. But since the pizza, my white clay has never been the same before. There are splotches of green and red mixed with the stick and I am afraid that I might not be able to use it for something that does not allow red and green shades to be in it. I also found out that I had used a dirty hand to create the pizza dough, because the white clay had tinges of grayish/brownish residue mixed all over which I identified as dirt. Anyway, so this time I decided to do bear, which, I am mortified to announce, did not come out as I had expected. Seems like my sculpting days full of success are wonders are over! Okay, so here are the steps that I followed for making the bear. I was so submerged into the process that I forgot to take snapshot for every detail I put on the head. But ...

Finally the pizza! The pizza! Unfortunately the pizza did not come along as I had expected. I had only white clay, not the brownish one like a baked pizza. Here are the photos:

Today it was turn for some strawberries. Here are the steps recollected in the form of photos: First, I took the entire stick of clay and divided it into four portions. I kneaded them and created four balls.