putting the FINE! in solitary confinement

This is my last weekend in country (that's a little shout-out to JFH), it's currently Saturday afternoon, and for the last couple of hours I have been howyousay slowly losing it, and here's why:

a. The internet went out around 3:00, and typically when it goes out it does not spontaneously come back, and did I mention it is Saturday which means there is no way this would be dealt with before Monday?

2. When I sighed and thought to myself, well, at least I can watch the Discovery channel or something, I discovered that the TV ALSO IS NOT WORKING. It is giving me the television equivalent of the blue screen of death.

iii. It is 90+ degrees outside, and the air quality is "smoke" (see helpful graphic below), so it's not like I am going to go for a refreshing walk to clear my head.



But in some sort of belated (or perhaps very early) Christmas miracle, the internet has shown up again, at least for the moment. Which, thank god, because otherwise I'd have had about 36 hours staring me in the face where my biggest hope for entertainment would have been knitting and listening to tinny music emanating from my iBook. Who says the life of a globe-trotting linguist manager lady isn't glamorous?

And to prove my point, now I will go have toast for dinner.

just like old times

Now that I am all alone in Bombay (well, except for those 19 million other people), I've reverted to the habits I cultivated when we used to live at the hotel--knitting, eating cereal for dinner, and watching a lot of National Geographic Channel. Next up, Megastructures: Garbage Mountain. (Apparently NatGeo has been filming down the street from here.) To add to the nostalgia, I am still seeing all the same commercials they were running last summer: Hrithik Roshan is still selling chocolate chip cookies, bizarre space aliens are still selling car batteries, and everyone and his mother are still selling skin lightening cream. Alex and Casey know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, I am still working through the Yarn Mountain sent to me here last year by my ass kicking MEOW kitties, and I decided it was time to make something other than socks. So, I present to you the April May Wristwarmers. Or at least they'll be wristwarmers when I finish the second one.

It just occurred to me that it would be difficult to knit wristwarmers for Hrithik Roshan. I won't actually post a photo of his extra thumb, but you can click on that if you want to. You sicko.

hell's bells

So, for a couple few weeks now we've been dealing with someone's very obnoxious alarm going off at 1:30 a.m. every night, just loud and long enough (i.e., very loud, 30 seconds) to wake us all up. And then recently it started also going off at 3:30 a.m. Awesome good times!

Except then the other night I finally realized it was our own land line phone out in the living room, i.e., we are in fact the incredibly obnoxious neighbors whose alarm goes off twice every night. And, OK, it might seem incredible that we could go for so long without realizing there was a phone making ungodly noises in our very apartment every night literally like clockwork, but work with me here, people. The alarm sounds are not very similar to normal phone ringing sounds. Not to mention WHY WOULD IT EVEN OCCUR TO ME THAT OUR PHONE HAD AN ALARM?!? What kind of phone (that isn't a cell phone) has an alarm?? So anyway, I have noooooo idea how it got programmed to go off at those times, and, unable to find an owner's manual in the house or online, I could not figure out how to unset it. So I took out its batteries, assuming that would take care of it. Except it did not. It went off again at 1:30, as per usual like the scream of Satan himself. Seriously, this sucker is LOUD. And SHRILL. Like so many things in India, come to think of it. So I removed the phone connection line, even though I thought to myself "Why the hell would the phone line being plugged in make any difference?", but I was getting desperate, and finally the display went blank and now it no longer makes any noises.

Seriously, we thought maybe it was possessed. Like the rest of the apartment.

yes, we have no teh internets

We have not had internet service at our apartment since Saturday afternoon, except for a few blissful hours when we were able to steal our neighbor's unprotected wireless on Sunday. Punit, our office manager, was very apologetic yesterday, explaining that "with these internet guys, you have to call every hour and follow up, and they'll say it will be fixed in 6 hours, but then it isn't," and I was like, "Dude, you know I've been in India most of the time since June, right? You think you need to 'splain that to me? I knows me some Indian repair protocols."

So yeah. I am posting from work. The internet at work only goes out once every couple of months, so that is nice.

Dan and Misti recently discovered a veritable paradise just a couple of blocks past our usual shopping area near the apartment. It is a street with trash cans that people apparently actually use; no car horns blaring; and several nice, clean shops, including a small produce/grocery store and A REAL LIVE BAKERY that makes ZOMG!!1!!1!!! whole grain breads. Which you can buy. And then eat. Mmmmm. Nom nom nom. (The "whole wheat" bread at the regular supermarket is basically overprocessed white bread that has been colored brown.)

We are closing in on the end of the training cycle for our six new hires, and then Dan will be flying back to the US. I have half a mind to either stow away in his luggage or tie him to something heavy at the office so HE CAN'T LEAVE PLEASE DON'T LEAVE ME DAN NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

apparently it's not just us

If you read this blog with any regularity, you'll understand why we suspect that our apartment is cursed. But today Shana, who is living in the other corporate apartment in the adjacent tower, told a story that involved phrases such as "a screaming noise just outside my bedroom every couple of minutes," "I had NO idea what it was," "sounds of dripping," "burst pipe in my closet," and "woke up this morning and there was water all over the floor."

Martharani Stewart

It's Sunday morning and the last day off Alex and I will have at the apartment before we come back in early October, so I'm going all domestic diva on this place's ass and doing laundry, ironing linens, etc. When we come back we will be bringing Ms. Robin with us, so I am making sure the third room is all ready for her. I've also already made pancakes and washed dishes this morning, even though strictly speaking we can leave our dishes for Mangal to do. I'm a little prissy, though, and frankly speaking I get the dishes cleaner than she does.

I'm really looking forward to having another chick at the Linguist Pad. We'll be able to give each other pedicures and gossip about boys and...wait, did I say "give each other pedicures and gossip about boys?" I meant "drink lots of vodka and make lewd jokes." I'll be adding Robin to the contributor roster soon, so that you'll be able to hear about her India exploits first hand, if she feels like tellin' ya.

Last night was a going away party for Priya at the Bandra apartment, which is called Sea World, by the way--have I mentioned this? Like, literally, the building says SEA WORLD on the outside. (The Linguist Pad building is called Avalon, and the building next door is Verona. Whatever.) Anyway, we hung out with some coworkers and drank Indian beer and ate Indian snacks, many of which were some form of dough wrapped around some form of potato.



Yesterday was Ganesh Chaturthi, so the city is being all festive and welcoming Lord Ganesh into town and stuff. It will continue for something like 10 days. This was in the lobby at Sea World:



For the knitters out there: I have busted the shackles of the heel flap style of sock construction I usually use and teach, and I'm trying short row heels and toes. I have not yet figured out how to not get tiny little holes at the turning points, so that's irritating, but I do love the zigzag toe bind off I learned yesterday:



Ok, people...that's all I gots.

lazy weekend

Those of you who know me as the loquacious extrovert I am can probably imagine that our whirlwind recruiting trip to another city in a developing country to interview nine people whose native language is not English did a bit of a number on my social energy stores. Even a bubble bath and a very relaxing-looking chaise longue at the hotel in Delhi had done little to help.



I didn't realize how drained I was till this weekend, when the thought of leaving the apartment for anything beyond an hour's run seemed about as attractive as dirt.

Both Saturday and Sunday when the cleaning woman showed up, Casey and I were sitting in the exact same places on the same two couches in the living room--him with his computer and me with mine, and both times with me also knitting and listening to music on my headphones. I am pretty sure Mangal thinks we didn't move for 24 hours. I did get up once in a while to cook some comfort food--vegan pancakes for everybody both mornings, and today also some sheera, which is an Indian semolina pudding with nuts and raisins and banana. Needless to say, Casey did not eat any of that one. BANANA!

There was so much nonstop knitting action these past two days that I finished another pair of socks. Normally I don't worry about my yarn being vegan (technically wool and silk are not vegan, but those of you who have been to my apartment know that purging it of wool yarn would take six burly movers a full day, and at least one of them would suffer a hernia in the process). But the stuff I used for these socks (Tofutsies) is SO not vegan that I actually feel a bit weird about it--it's made with chitin, which comes from shellfish. It's supposedly naturally antibacterial or something like that. The bulk of the fiber is wool and soy silk (hence the name--which, hello, how misleading is that? what could sound more vegan than tofu yarn??).



And the yarn is actually so awesome (and you know how we feel about awesome) that I ordered enough for 3 more pairs of socks. I'm such a bad vegan. But damn I have cute socks.

UPDATED TO ADD: Casey just jumped off the couch, lunged and pointed at me, and shouted "Who's a dork?!" Then after a two-second pause he said "Remember that time, just now, when I said that?"

Good god, I love my coworkers.

food beautiful food

Tonight we finally got our crap together and had enough of the new dishes/pans/etc. washed and enough food in the cupboards to actually cook a real dinner. One with pasta and olive oil and bell peppers and zucchini and basil and garlic and chili flakes. It was delicious. I would have taken a photo of a whole plate, but it got eaten up too fast.

And we have chocolate ice cream for dessert!!

Ahhhhhhhh.

more pics from the new pad

View from my bedroom window on the 22nd floor. Clockwise from bottom left: Lovely landscaped jogging path; luxury apartments; slum; building under construction + slum combo.

Some interior shots with my j@ckass roomates:





My sparsely appointed bedroom (but at least I bought pretty bed linens):



And yes, I sleep with a stuffed pig named Beatrice. You wanna make something of it? Because Beatrice will kick your ass.

swinging. linguist. pad

So, we got the lease on the apartment signed Thursday, and the keys were turned over, and everything was ready for us to move in Friday night. We ended up leaving work kind of late (for a great reason--terrific job candidate we are in LOVE with), and we were in the middle of the worst monsoon electrical storm/torrential downpour EVER, and the streets were starting to flood and it was already dark, so we decided screw it, we would make do without towels and blankets for one night, because no way were we going to wade through ankle deep god-knows-how-dirty water to get in to the store...then we get to the apartment and there are several pairs of shoes outside the door, and I open the door to find three guys working on the wooden valence thing for the living room curtains, tools and sawdust all over, guys on a stepstool hanging curtains in my room, the promised bed linens were nowhere to be seen, no one speaks English and lord knows our Hindi isn't good enough for the sort of conversation we were needing to have, etc. It was CLASSIC. I will admit to you right now that when I opened the door to this scene I let out a rather loud "What the F*CK?" Quite the picture of ladylike Indian modesty, that's me.

Oh, and of course the duplicate keys we had made don't work (awesome Indian craftsmanship), so we still have only one key among the three of us. Speaking of craftsmen, you should have seen these guys sawing away in the middle of our living room, serrated blades a couple inches from their own bare feet, which they were using to hold the wood steady, and millimeters from the marble floor, and so on. It was quite a sight.

Anyhowwwwww, after quite the comedy of errors and various promises made via phone and in person in broken English about how soon they'd be finished, they finally did get all their stuff together and got the hell out, and the linens arrived from the laundry, and we ordered pizza (!), and discovered that someone nearby has a pretty damn good open wireless connection, so all is right with the world. Well, except that we have no towels or blankets yet. But if there is ever a time to not need a blanket, it is in July in Bombay. Conversely, that does make it a fairly lousy time to be without towels, since they are necessary after a shower and all.

But we HAVE AN APARTMENT! And the rain seems to have stopped, so we should be able to venture out tomorrow; the driver is supposed to come at noon and take us to a large department store called HyperCity or some such. I am getting hyper just thinking about it.

EDITED TO ADD: It's Sunday morning now. Turns out that open wireless connection is only available when the owner is using it--we just lucked out that it was running when we first looked for a connection. We did go to HyperCity and we want to live there now. Yes, we want to move in to the store and LIVE there. We got really cool stuff to outfit the kitchen and bedrooms.

Later we were washing some of the new linens and the drainage hose from the washer came out and we ended up with water all over the kitchen floor. We called the front desk and they sent a local guy up within a few minutes. He fixed the pipe (it wasn't a difficult thing to fix, but still--it's not like WE had the tools to do it) and cleaned up the standing water, and charged us Rs 250 (about $6). Sometimes I love this country.

On the other hand, the hot water in my shower doesn't seem to work.

OK, I had better post this before our wireless neighbor decides to go out and have a life.

Swingin' Linguist Pad, Take II

Thank you sweet jesus, I think we may have found an apartment today. It's in the same general neighborhood as the last one, but in an area that is more developed. It has pavement, for example. We like pavement. Have I mentioned it is monsoon season? There are a couple of markets and quite a few restaurants within walking distance, and a coffee bar and all kinds of civilized crap like that. Here I am doing my best game show hostess imitation outside the building:



Casey is already looking forward to furnishing the place with bean bags. But purchased from WHICH warring bean bag gang? Stay tuned to find out whether he buys from the Bandra Sharks or the Powai Jets.