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)

Raghu's Mario Costume

Halloween party preparations

This is not quite so much about India, except for the cool "packaging" and exotic pumpkins.

These guys are two and a half stories up, and a guy carried BAGS of pumpkins up those stairs, and then another flight up to the roof (some of those we carried one by one, because of a misunderstanding, but when he saw we were doing that, he carried the three remaining bags up).

On the door, the scary house taped to the door is Halloween. The Ganesha and the flower garland is everyday stuff.

The picture of the guy with the glasses (between ghosts) is a guy who's always on the wall, but the glasses came from Albuquerque.

"You have problems."

"You have problems."

That was the response I got to this:

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 11:01 PM, Sandra Dodd wrote:

You wrote to me a few years ago. I do not WANT your writing on my site. Television is ruining your life because you're obsessed with television as the devil.

Why don't you live a happy, peaceful life without television instead of dedicating your time and energy to something you hate? It's not healthy. Your writings are disturbing. You bring a very unsettled vision into my otherwise very peaceful life.

Sandra Dodd

The person whose writing I am rejecting once again (after engaging in a longer discussion and a more polite rejection last time around) has allowed television to ruin his life without even watching it, I guess.

And just now when I went to bring a link to what he was talking about, I see that I have it on my "arguments against TV" page already. http://sandradodd.com/t/anti (I don't want to name him and give him more exposure, but it's under the garbage can art, and my review there is "Badly written, but short.")

I did make a page of links to anti-TV writings. I don't think a single one of those other pages has any links to the ever-growing collection of benefits of TV.

It's nearly a compliment, though, that someone as seemingly deranged as this guy thinks I have problems. I hope he will recover from being mesmerized by the evils of television, though, and go on to live a healthy life.