It's official...

Tickets have been purchased, hotels are booked and the Joneses are heading off to France to join the rest of the family for the annual love fest in the land of cheese, Jerry Lewis film festivals, and recent conservative takeovers! Nathan and I are spending a few days in Paris alone first and then we will be joining everyone in Brittany for a week. I am going to start a jar for Nathan where he can put a rupee in for every time he says "I can't wait to go to France". Then when it is full I am going out for ice cream. It's a more positive take on the swear jar, I think. By my calculations the jar should be full by Monday night. He's a wee bit excited. And I'm up for anything that gets me ice cream.

Hmmmm...

I think I may have discovered why the dentistry is less than stellar in India. The other day we realized that Chinu has been cleaning our bathroom with Listerine. While our sinks do not have plaque buildup and have that lovely minty fresh taste to them, I hope I explained well enough to her that this is not its intended purpose. Of course, with our complete lack of a shared language she might start gargling bathroom cleaner and then I am really in trouble. Also, while shopping for toothpaste the other day, one brand stated quite emphatically "Now Sugar-Free!". That's positive. How very Victorian of them. This morning while brushing my teeth something caught my eye. As you can see, we just use our family favorite, Colgate.

It's what I noticed in the corner that I find so intriguing.

So no more mutton paste? Dang it! I kept coming back for that rich, gamey flavor...

Last night we had a lovely dinner with Nathan's cousin Mike who was here on business. He works for GE in their aircraft leasing division and is based out of Singapore. He has invited us to come and then suggested that we take a hopper flight to Bali for a few days. We are thinking December time would be perfect, so all morning in anticipation I have been singing Burl Ives' yuletide favorite, "Have a Holly Bali Christmas". This is shaping up to be a pretty exciting year!

Wow.

Mother Nature has a way of reminding you of just how insignificantly small and powerless you are, and last night she put on a show. Yesterday was a sunny day, warm and dry, but at around 9:00 in the evening I noticed lightning outside. Being my father's daughter, I immediately went out to investigate and was front seat to one of the most amazing sights I have ever beheld. There wasn't just lightning - the was sheets of it. It never let up. There were no breaks between bolts. Most of it wasn't even bolts, it was just clouds lighting up all over the sky. It started off to the west of us but very quickly came directly overhead. The eerie thing was that there was no sound. It was very War of the Worlds. I kept waiting for it, but besides the occasional low grumbling there was nothing. We didn't get much rain - heck, the electricity and TV didn't even get shut off - but I would be hard pressed to come up with a more amazing storm that I have seen. The coming of the monsoon is celebrated here in India because it means a break in the heat and that the rivers will be full again. Last night as I stood out on our little lawn I could hear whistles and horns being blown. I think everyone was pretty excited. I can't wait until it comes to stay.

You can't always get what you want

Nathan and I learned something very important this week. Repairs in India last about a week so it is good to hold on to your warranties! That's right, the air conditioning went out again with a loud POP! the other day so we have moved as much as we can into the bedroom where the AC does work. Fortunately, it is not as hot so we can walk through the living room without having to shower afterwards. And speaking of showers, I got up to take mine for church yesterday and yet again we had no water. Poor Nathan was woken up by my screaming, but luckily he watched the "electrician" fix it last time so he knew how to do it. I wasn't sure how long it would take, though, so I took the last bit of water from the hot water heater in the kitchen and bathed with a bucket and bowl. Nathan got it fixed though and got in a shower and we were only five minutes late to church! We have decided that the pump must also believe that Sunday is a day of rest because that is when it keeps cutting out. Thank goodness the Bhatias are coming back tomorrow!

Saturday I made some good progress. After seminary I went shopping with Cheri. We went to the Big Bazaar, the store that we went to our first week here that scared the heck out of me. My standards have changed significantly as I now find it the greatest place to shop in Delhi! I bought a bookshelf so I can finally clean off the table I use for a desk. I bought some plastic tubs to organize our bathroom a bit more. It still doesn't look organized. I don't know what else to do with that. I also tried to buy an ironing board but they refused to sell one to me. Customer service is a bit different here. Either there is WAY too much or none at all. I was in the household electronics section and saw that they had some ironing boards stacked up there. As I have been using our coffee table for the last two months I got very excited. I tried to get one and they told me I couldn't have one as those were part of a promotion. If I bought a $40 iron I could have the ironing board for free. I refuse to spend that much on an iron in the States, let alone in India! The boards had price tags that said 150 Rupees ($3) on them but they would not let me have one. They told me to go to the bottom floor where I would find ones I could buy. Shockingly enough, there were no boards. So I continue to use my coffee table. Ah well.

One really neat thing, before we went to the store Cheri and I went to Raj Ghat.

This is the pyre that Gandhi was cremated on. It is set in a beautiful park with lovely flowers and trees and is pristine. You can walk around the wall surrounding the pyre but to come up to it you must remove your shoes. It was quite moving to see people of so many races there. It is a very reverent place with an eternal flame and a real sense of gravitas. The engraving on it are Gandhi's last words "He Ram!" which means "Oh God". All heads of state are brought here to pay their respects and regular prayer meeting are held here by the national leaders. Really beautiful...

Why does this not surprise me?

From The Times

June 22, 2007

Parents film son, 15, doing surgery
Jeremy Page in Delhi

The 15-year-old son of two Indian doctors has performed a Caesarean section in an apparent attempt to get into the Guinness World Records book. Dhileepan Raj carried out the operation on a 20-year-old woman in April under the supervision of his parents, who own and run a private maternity clinic in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. His father, K Murugesan, recorded the operation on video and showed the footage to the local chapter of the Indian Medical Association, saying that he wanted his son to win a Guinness record as the world’s youngest surgeon. Dr Murugesan told the medical association in his home town of Manaparai that he had been training his son for three years and that it was not the first time that the boy had performed an operation.

When the chapter members reacted with horror, accusing him of violating medical ethics, Dr Murugesan denied any wrongdoing and accused them of being jealous of his son’s achievements.
He argued that if a 10-year-old is allowed to drive a car and a 15-year-old can graduate as a doctor in the United States, then his son should be allowed to be a surgeon.

In the film Dr Murugesan is shown delivering a spinal anaesthetic, although it is not clear if the patient is aware that his son is going to perform the operation, according to doctors who watched the footage. The baby was born with a noticeable lump on the spinal cord, but the defect had nothing to do with the surgery, they said. Local media quoted relatives of the mother as saying that she and the baby were both in good health. “We were all shocked, but he just didn’t listen,” said Venkatesh Prasad, secretary of the Manaparai Medical Association. “He said that we were jealous and were not recognising his son’s progress. He had no consideration for the ethics of the surgery.”

Dr Prasad and his colleagues reported the incident to the state medical association in Chennai, formerly Madras, about 300 miles (500km) away. Dr Murugesan, whose wife is a gynaecologist, has since retracted his claim, saying that he performed the surgery while his son watched.
“We allowed [him] to watch the surgery only to motivate him to pursue medicine after his school,” NDTV quoted Dr Murugesan as saying. But he could still be stripped of his licence and even face criminal charges, according to local doctors and officials.

V K Subburaj, the state health secretary, said yesterday that the local government would investigate the incident, which has shocked the nation. “We’ll get the report and then we’ll see whether there are any violations . . . prima facie it looks like there is a big violation,” he said. “We will definitely take action against the medical officers concerned.”

The incident highlights the poor regulation of myriad private clinics in India, which provide healthcare to hundreds of millions of people in the absence of sufficient staff or resources for state hospitals. It also reflects the enduring fascination of Indians with setting world records, even when they put lives in danger.

Last year a four-year-old boy tried to run a 43-mile marathon in an attempt to enter the Indian version of Guinness World Records. Doctors stopped the boy when he showed signs of exhaustion after 40 miles and later found him to be malnourished, anaemic and under cardiac stress.

Akrit Jaswal, a 12-year-old from India, is studying for a science degree, but in his spare time tries to find a cure for cancer – and performed his first operation five years ago. When a local girl in the Himalayan village of Nurpur burnt her fingers, fusing them together, he used a scalpel to separate her tendons – cementing his celebrity status. He now hopes to be the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize

Fyodor Uglov claims to be the world’s oldest surgeon. Even after celebrating his 100th birthday in 2004 he refused to hang up his scrubs and has performed more than 6,000 operations during his 75-year career. Serving in the medical battalion during the 1941-1944 Siege of Leningrad, now St Petersburg, he worked on wounded civilians and soldiers while under fire

Heaven, I'm in heaven...

Today was so wonderful. The weather was perfect - sunny but not too hot with a slight breeze. Perfect. Last night I got a call from Michele, a fellow American in our branch, who invited me to come to ACSA (American Community Support Association) with her family for the afternoon to go swimming. ACSA is a social club adjacent to the US Embassy that serves its staff as well as the American community at large in Delhi. It has a pool, a few restaurants that serve beef, a bowling alley, a commissary, all that kind of thing. As you can imagine I JUMPED at it. We were the only people there for most of it so we had the pool pretty much to ourselves. It was so deliciously chilly that I could have cried. I spent most of the time floating on my back enjoying the coolness of the water on my back and the warmth of the sun on my face. With the breeze and my eyes shut, I could have been in Hawaii. Perfect. We swam for awhile, ordered some lunch (Roast Beef Panini, fries, American Coke and Milky Way - oh I was going to milk it for all its worth!) and chatted for nice long time. If there is one great thing I can say about Delhi, we have met some wonderful and interesting people. We were laughing about how it must be like a combat unit - you cling to each other sometimes to survive! Fortunately, I think we are clinging to some pretty great people. Michele told me that they come to the pool all the time and that Nathan and I are invited whenever we want. I told Nathan and I think he was about to run out of his office to the embassy and jump in with his suit on! We will be using that a lot, I should think. We are also going to the July 4th party that the embassy is hosting there. I can't wait!

On the way home, Muktar was pointing out all the embassies to me. I would take pictures but they get a little antsy about people taking pictures of embassies for some reason. Hmmmmm. It was a crack up, though, as I realized that the embassies really took on much of the stereotypical cultural aspects. For example, the embassies of the Middle Eastern Arab countries all have a guard in a booth surrounded by sandbags as if they are ready to take us all on at any minute. The Japanese has long sloping roofs that resemble a pagoda. The Pakistani looks like a mosque. The British High Commission has lush green lawns. The German proudly flies the EU flag and looks like the most dull but efficient office building you will ever see. I couldn't see much of the US Embassy, but I did see the long line of people waiting to get a visa. It went around the block. I wonder if they do that on purpose or if it is just part of our national cultures that we unconsciously choose to portray. Either way, it is a very serious and bureaucratic version of "It's a Small World". I wonder if they will change it up for Christmas...

Oh, Happy Day!

The rain has come! It has been so lovely and cool that I could cry! We didn't even use the AC yesterday and it was heavenly. I must admit to some evil glee when I see that it is now warmer in Mesa than it is here. We take what we can get, right? While the temperature is an absolute blessing, the rain has caused a few issues. For example, this is how my paper arrives every day...

No plastic bags here! That's okay, though. The paper costs 3 rupees a day (about 6 cents) so it's no huge loss. The Times of India cracks me up. It is a "serious" paper, but every once in awhile there are the funniest articles in it. Take, for example, the fashion spread that they did on women attending a female empowerment conference. I had to laugh over that one. Can we say that someone slightly missed the point?

The rain has caused other issues. The drains here are less than effective so the streets flood almost immediately. While this can be hard on cars, it can also be great if your driver decides that it would be fun to drive really fast next to rickshaws so we can splash them! That was a good time.

One not so funny thing is that the wind messed up our water pump on Sunday so we woke up to go to church and had no water. We were hot, sticky, and un-Christlike but we got it sorted in the end. Since our landlords have been gone we have lost our water, AC, keys, and sanity. We really need them to come back!

Eerie... As I am writing this the sky goes dark and the wind starts picking up. I LOVE IT!!! People always asked if the rain bothered me in London. It never did. I always loved it. Ooh, it just started raining again...

So funny story. Nathan was going out to one of the campuses the other day to work with the enrollment team, only they had a different idea. Instead they hosted a debate on his behalf. He was the guest of honor and was presented with a bouquet of flowers and had a red dot put on his forehead. I don't know what that means for men, but for women it means you are married. I'll have to ask about that.

An artist's rendering

So they have him sit in a special chair as he is to judge this competition. The MC gets up and introduces the topic and then calls Nathan up to say a few words. Now Nathan told me he wasn't quite sure what to say, but anyone who knows Nathan knows that is a lie. That boy has never had trouble figuring out what to say. So he sits down and the debate goes on. It was pretty good, apparently, and when it ends they have Nathan get up and speak AGAIN. I'm sure he was thrilled! I was bummed, though, that he wiped his red dot off. I wanted to see him all Indian-ized!

The best news of the day is that in 25 minutes I will be completely done with my statistics class. Oh, happy day!

Dealing with the issues...

I think that when it comes to the hard pressed issues of the day, no one holds a mirror to our faces like Flight of the Conchords.

I am so bummed we are going to miss their new show. Fingers crossed that iTunes will have it.

What are your overheads?

I am of worth, of infinite worth...

The news lately has been hard to watch, hard to read. Yesterday, CNN did a story on the rise of honor killings in the west. I was so angry by the end of it that I wanted to hit someone. This poor young woman was killed by her family because she ran away from an abusive arranged marriage and found love with another man. It didn't matter that he made her happy or that they shared their faith - he was from the wrong village. Clearly a good reason to have your daughter raped, strangled, and then crammed into a suitcase and buried in some backyard. It makes you wonder who was a better follower of their faith.

Unfortunately, The Times of India has stories like this everyday. India has had female Prime Ministers and is about to have its first female President, but on the same front page that announces this there is a story of an underground abortion clinic that was discovered yesterday with the charred bones of female foetuses crowding a septic tank. There is a huge population disparity between males and females, even amongst the upper classes. Ads for abortion clinics say things like "Save 100,000 Rupees in 20 years, spend 2,000 now". There is legislation against gender-determining ultrasounds, but the underground market for this is huge and unborn girls continue to suffer for it. Even fertility clinics which boast 30% success rates have women aborting if it is found that they have conceived a girl. All that work, and the child is not enough. As you can imagine, this breaks my heart.

It is not just the babies that are in danger. Married women are killed or commit suicide years after their marriage because their new family is dissatisfied with their dowries. There was a story in the paper today about a woman who hung herself. It is exhausting to read.

I will never understand why being female is such a crime. Are we not all God's creation? Are we not all sufficient and worthy of acknowledgement? I wonder what it be like when the time eventually comes, whether it be in this life or the next, when those who have perpetrated such awful crimes against the helpless and innocent and those who did nothing to stop them will finally understand who those helpless were. Last night I finished reading Legends of Our Time by Elie Wiesel. It is a series of stories chronicling his search for understanding in the twenty years after the Holocaust. In his closing paragraphs he says something that just cut me. He is talking about the ridiculous notion of those who try to psychologically understand the plight of the Jews at that time. Basically, he says there are no answers and to try and find them is to blame the Jews for not rising up. He makes this statement "Let me reveal a secret, one among a thousand, about why Jews did not resist: to punish us, to prepare a vengeance for us later. We are not worth their sacrifice." It will come. It will come. It will come. God will not forget His daughters even if we do.

Who came up with Murphy's law, and can I legally kill him?

I am lucky to have so many patient people around me, because I would have wanted to shoot me last night. We were leaving the house to go shopping when I realized that I had forgotten to grab the keys just as Nathan was closing the door. Picture Darth Vadar at the end of "Revenge of the Sith" screaming "NOOOOOOOOOO!" and you get the idea. Yes, we have one of those handy dandy security locks that bolts the door whenever it is shut. This would not normally be an issue, but our landlord is in England (Slough, in fact) for two weeks and we could not get into his place to get our spare set of keys. So, while I am about to burst into tears, Nathan called his office and they had a locksmith out in about half an hour. I swear, I owe them all my firstborn. Now, I figured that he would drill into the lock to bust it out but this was not the case. He pulled out his hammer and chisel and proceeded to WHACK away at the lock. This gave me an enormous sense of safety as we realized that if it takes a locksmith half an hour knocking the ever living daylights out of this lock with enough noise to wake the dead to get into our flat, we will never be robbed. And if we are, we will be on the other side of the door waiting for him!

I poked it. I think it's dead.

As the locksmith was working on it, Nathan's co-worker pointed to the hammer and chisel and said with a grin, "Indian technology, huh?".

So this is what my door looks like now.

As you can see, the bolt has been hollowed out and the locksmith will come and replace it later. In the meantime, we are using the other lock below the handle. It has a very complicated key that no one should be able to replicate.

Eat your heart out, Fort Knox.

I'M MELTING! I'M MELTING!

Cheri sent this to me the other day so I could get even more irritable. You see, on this day our air conditioner died in the living room. Unfortunately, this is the room where I have to do my school and work so I spend almost all day there. Nathan came home early, fortunately, and found me in a pretty bad state. He immediately called his office to have them send someone to look at it. When the repair team came in we were told that this would probably happen as... are you ready for this?... air conditioners don't work well IN THE HEAT. Wow, I guess it's good we only use them when it's 72 degrees outside... So Nathan dragged this moron (sorry, I don't deal well with idiocy in the heat) into the other room where the AC was working perfectly well and demanded to know if there was some other weather system in the bedroom that was making it possible for it to function there. I have never found him more attractive. So the team fixed it. It's still not working perfectly, but at least I won't get sick.

So the branch took no time giving us callings once it came out that we are here for a year. I am second counselor in the Relief Society (Enrichment -they obviously don't know me), Nathan is more than likely going to be in the Elders Quorum presidency (because the Elder's Quorum president told him that today) and we are teaching institute at 7:30 on Saturday mornings. They like to keep us busy around these parts! We are excited though, there are some great people in this branch.

Oh, by the way, here is the temperature right now...

Well, at least it only feels like 131 degrees.

VICTORY IS MINE!!!

I am so proud of myself - I managed to figure out how to beat the annoying shopping shadows! As I mentioned in a previous post, whenever you go shopping here you can expect to have someone two feet away from you following you everywhere and staring holes into you. So the other night Nathan and I were at the grocery store and I decided to have a little fun with it. He was off on the other side of the store when I noticed that I was being trailed... closely. So I thought it would be fun to play with this guy a little bit. The aisles in the store are about 10 feet long and the shelves are about 5 feet high so you can see across the entire store. I walked up a few aisles to make sure he was really behind me and when it became unmistakable I just started circling one set of shelves. I started off slow but then got quicker and quicker as he was still hanging on! He was persistant, I'll give him that, but I was going to win this one and eventually he figured it out and dropped off. I was so proud of myself and my incredibly childish behavior! I know it won't change anything in the shopping culture, but I figure that if I can show them that I can be just as crazy if not more than everything around me I'll come out on top!

We're having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave...

I just checked two websites to find out the temperature. One says 108 and the other says 115. One thing they agree on is that the 10 day forecast is not going to change much. Good thing we got out of Arizona for the summer! I don't care which temperature it is, it is flipping hot. Our poor little air conditioners work as hard as they can, but the fact of the matter is that they just are not strong enough. Last night the one in our bedroom shut off and I woke up from my perspiration. Lovely. Poor Nathan jumped out of bed and was checking fuses and switches all over the house. Fortunately, it came back on a little later and we could get back to sleep. I think it just needed a break. I figure that I will be moist for the next two to three months and hopefully drop some lbs in the process. Nathan and I are hoping to get away for a weekend to one of the hill stations. These are villages around the base of the Himalayas that everyone goes to during the summer to get away from the heat. Shimla is the most popular one. Funnily enough it is where the British Viceroy had his summer home. Now if the British built a town there you know it has to be good, right?

From what we have heard, strangely enough, the winters can get quite cold here. I am wondering if it is like Argentina in that all the floors are marble so there is nothing to absorb the cold. We are going to gave to get some space heaters and some rugs or I will freeze. Then apparently there is an hour and a half somewhere between October 26th and November 3rd where the weather is absolutely perfect and everyone runs out in the street and erupts into a parade. We'll find out, I guess. Should be interesting. People here do what people in Arizona do in the summer if they can - they get out. This is the big time for expats to go home. Some of them come back in the fall, but this is when most of their contracts end. I look at it this way, we are going to get over the nasty first and then get on to the cold but much easier to manage temperatures. I would much rather do it that way. With everyone leaving too, I am thinking I might pop over to the thrift shop at the American Embassy that the American Women's Association runs. I am hoping to score a microwave oven as they are incredibly expensive here. People just don't use them so they cost a pretty penny. If I could find one though... bliss.

Alright, one funny story. The other day my friend Merinda called me and asked me if I would like to go to the salon with her to get our hair done. I jumped at it! I was so ready to have someone pamper me a bit and they did not disappoint. It's this great shop just down the road from us where they have imported a Frenchman to be the master stylist (having spent some time in France I always wonder why everyone thinks they have all the style - doesn't matter, I'll take it!). So I have my little kimono on and I am getting my hair washed. There is lovely music playing. Then I get my head massage. Nice acoustic rock songs. Then I get a shoulder and arm massage. Then it happens. The theme song to "Popeye, the Sailor Man" starts playing. What? It's true. I start chuckling. No one makes a sound. I look out the corner of my eye to see if anyone finds the fact that we are listening to "I'm strong to the finish, cause I eat me spinach" as amusing as I do. Nothing. Everyone just continues on with what they are doing as if nothing odd is going on. When the song was over it went right back to the lovely acoustic music that was playing before. I half expected Rod Serling to step out from a corner somewhere and start a monologue about how I was about to get my hair trimmed in the Twilight Zone. No such luck, but my hair turned out great and I got a funny story out of it.

One other funny story. The other night Nathan was helping me with my statistics homework. He truly has the patience of Job with me and I completely understand why Simon liked having him as a tutor. Finally, after working for a ridiculous amount of time I turned to him with tears forming in my eyes. I said," Thank you so much for helping me. I don't know what I would do without you. You are the best. I am sorry that I ever made fun of you for checking out statistics books from the library. I will never do that again." My husband looked at me and gently placed a hand on my shoulder. "You really do need me," he said in all seriousness, "because those were algebra books." Oh dear.

Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes

Well folks, WIU says it looks like we are here for a year. They think. Don't quote them. That's the plan. Nathan spoke to his supervisor last night and she said that they are pretty confident that we are going to be here for awhile. So still nothing in concrete, but I feel pretty good about it. That's the weird thing too - I do feel pretty good about it. I was relieved when Nathan told me because I really want to give this place a fighting chance and, let's face it, nowhere gets a fighting chance when it is 110 degrees. So I can chill out about packing in all the sightseeing in the next few months and wait until it cools down to an acceptable temperature. This also means that I am going to start spending some cash on making our place a bit more comfortable to live in. AND that if anyone wants to come and visit, they too can choose and non-flesh searing time of the year to do it...

So I have managed to touch off a firestorm in the neighborhood this week without even trying! I paid Chinu 1000 rupees the other day for the work she did over the last month. This comes to about $25. I thought this was an acceptable amount for the woman who washes my dishes, mops my floors, and cleans my bathrooms everyday. I was mistaken. Our landlord told us that this was unacceptable as this is more than she gets from the other people in the neighborhood and now she will want more from them all. Also, if she works an hour and a half to only pay her for an hour. So far, I have been told that she will rob me, lie to me, and steal my money while holding it over everyone else's head. My experience with her has been that she brings me every rupee that she finds, asks me if she can move anything, and she came back the next day trying to explain that I had paid her too much. I wanted to say to our landlord that first of all this is between Chinu and me, and second of all she is not a child and I don't feel like trying to squeeze as much work out of her for as little money as possible. It feels a bit dishonest to me. But then, I don't understand how business works here, so I have promised to only pay her 400 next month. I'm totally Kathy Lee Gifford with those Kmart sweatshops...

Memories light the corners of my mind...

I apologize upfront that really only one person in the world will understand the enormity of this post, but it is vital that I post it here as I almost fell out of my chair laughing last night over it. So Nathan got home safely yesterday and we went to dinner at a great Italian place nearby. It works out well because Indians eat dinner much later than we do so we can always get a great table right away. Effectively, we are the old Canadian snowbirds that clog Mesa with their massive RVs every October driving 30 miles an hour in the fast lane with their left turn signal on. Now if only I could find 50 drug stores within a three mile radius... At this particular restaurant they play Kenny G until about 8:00 when the crowd starts piling in and then a DJ starts kicking the music up a notch. Have I mentioned yet that Indians love American rock? Oh, yeah. Last night we got a little Sweet Child of Mine to start things off and then it progressed from there. So I'm telling Nathan something when all of the sudden I hear something over the speakers that I have not heard in years... "Lydia, oh Lydia, I wish I didn't get rid of ya, Lydia I miss your rose tattoo". Suddenly I am 19 years old again dragging Main in Boise in Thayer's Saturn heading to the 7/11! Oh my gosh, I started singing and chair dancing, excitedly telling Nathan how Megan and I taped this band performing at the Apollo (do you remember that performance - whoa.) Then, as if this is not enough, it starts mixing into "Fantastic Voyage" by Coolio! That's right girl, the DJ was just playing MTV Party-to-Go Vol. 6!

My wonderful husband, realizing that this album signalled a pivotal time in my life, went and talked to the DJ who is going to sell us his copy of it tonight. Then I am going to need him to go away on business for a few more days so I can convert the apartment into my own private dance studio. Because as Elizabeth Berkely so emphatically put it "I'M A DANCER!"

Is someone being a grouch bear?

Yes, someone apparently is and it's me! I just reread my last two posts and I sound HORRIBLE. I think I am going to chalk that one up to heat exposure. Whenever Nathan gets moany about things I make him say three nice things about whatever he is moaning about. As I must hold myself to the same standard, here goes...

1. I love that Delhi has built around its monuments. In the center of many of the roundabouts are temples and tombs that are hundreds of years old. They have held up in amazing condition and still show some of the delicate tile work that decorated the outside of many of them. I especially love the blue tiles. They are bright and cheerful, especially in contrast with the brownish color that most of the buildings have here.

2. I love that McDonalds delivers here. We cook for ourselves probably five days a week, go out once, and order in once. As this is the extent of our kitchen appliances (I am not complaining - I am explaining)...

...we have had to be a bit creative with our cooking. I do quasi-Indian once a week, we have pasta, omelettes, and rice dishes, and we have rediscovered our love of french toast. Every once in awhile, though, it is nice to sit down with a chicken burger, fries, and chocolate shake. As Nathan says, our attitude towards McDonalds is much different in India than in the US.

3. I love that this has been the coolest May on record for over a decade. There was an article in the newspaper that said that India has received much more rain and, as a result, much cooler temperatures than normal. We have been wondering as it has been warm but not unbearable since we have been here. This week has kicked it up a notch, but from the experts at Weather.com, June is supposed to be a bit cooler and then the Monsoon comes. I am so excited for that. I realize that I will have a few really bad hair months, but I just keep picturing articles from National Geographic that I used to look at with people wading in water up to their necks. It doesn't get that bad here, fortunately, but apparently in the south it gets pretty close sometimes. I will make sure to document that really well.

Well, I just got off the phone with Nathan and he is on his way home from Punjab.

Not this one...This one.

So he "may be far away, or may be real nearby". Great, now I am going to be singing the Annie soundtrack all day...