Me in my Indian clothing

More of India and my favorite recent post.

Canned Unicorn

I will admit I have had fantasies of eating meat in the past week. Yesterday I actually had a small amount of chicken, and a pork-sausage hot-dog which was really good. Most days, though, home or restaurant, it's vegetarian with an occasional egg and little to no cheese. Yoghurt and paneer and "groundnut"(peanut) chikki are protein. The food is really tasty but it's not what I'm used to.

Then this came in the mail

Really. An advertisement for canned unicorn meat.

I read every detail and thought "oooh.... how fun to take this can to Thanksgiving, maybe..." and then I thought about it and decided I really LOVED Indian vegetarian food and will be glad to eat no meat for the next three days.

Some things are easier than others

Apparently not.

Lizard

This was up high on the wall of a patio, to get out of the rain, I guess. Someone asked whether we didn't have those in New Mexico. Lizards, yes. THIS lizard!? Nope.



Pune, India, if anyone wants to ID this.

Kites (a bird I hadn't seen before)

Toward the roof of the mall below here it's easy to see birds, in contrast to the white roof. I saw something I thought was a hawk, and went to get better glasses and my zoomy zoom camera. Hema's dad said it's probably a kite.

I think this is it, in a wikipedia cut-and-paste:

Milvus migrans govinda (Sykes, 1832): Small Indian Kite (formerly Pariah Kite)
Eastern Pakistan east through tropical India and Sri Lanka to Indochina and Malay Peninsula. Resident. A dark brown kite found throughout the subcontinent. Can be seen circling and soaring in urban areas. Easily distinguished by the shallow forked tail. The name Pariah originates from the Indian caste system and usage of this name is deprecated.[6][7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Kite

My pictures won't be good, but anyway... it was fun to see something new to me. Again. :-)

Painting Diyas

For Diwali (which is kind of a combination of Christmas, New Year's, Easter and the Fourth of July, it seems, from an American point of view), people use oil lamps of all sorts, but there are these little clay lamps for sale in stores and on the roadside:



The fancy molded ones in the lower left box are just everywhere this week. And the round ones in the upper right box are plain versions.

Today there's a gathering of homeschoolers to paint some of those. They're low-fired pottery, so that they can be recycled later. People use new ones each year I think. I'll have photos of the painting session on my India blog in a few days. Tomorrow we fly to Bangalore for Diwali, which is day after tomorrow.

"Diya" and "Diwali" are related words. Light. The sound for "y" and "w" is the same here, it seems, kind of a combination of W and v.

Here's a link to a google image search on "clay diya."

attachment parenting talk, Pune 31st october 2010

On Sunday there was a VERY well-attended discussion on attachment parenting, organized by Pushpa Ramachandran in her home in Pune, in India. Her husband, Anand, set up a projector and we had Schuyler and David Waynforth live on Skype (they were home in Norfolk, England). It was really wonderful to have them involved that way. I'll put these and some other images on my India blog, too, but in these three you can hear Schuyler, Hema (standing, in the third clip) and me a little bit.

(The other photos from the day are here: http://sandraindia2010.blogspot.com/2010/11/attachment-parenting-talk-at-pushpas.html)