It's been a loooooong time....

Ok sorry, it has been a whole bunch of months since I have posted. I am sure I could list a reason for every day but....

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. We did here, we had two other American families and one Indian couple here at the house for Turkey dinner. It was a great time for all, except maybe me. I came down with the flu the night before, what I was able to eat I had the opportunity to not receive any calories from the meal. You can read between the lines.

In the last couple of months I have been doing some extensive traveling. I have been to Nepal three times and to the state of Sikkim once. Sikkim is very beautiful but cold. It was 42 in the morning and my room was not much warmer, but I did get a hot steamy shower that warmed my bones.

I have to keep this short, but I will attempt to post more very soon.

Daily Routine

Each Day I look out of our living room window and I am reminded how easy our life really is. The women from the nearby village come to the creek each day to bathe, do their laundry and dishes. This view gives me a reality check each day and reminds me why we are here in India.

I was impressed on how this man was able to walk up the side of this pole barefoot. The two showing him working on the line are from the roof of the house 3 stories up. The one on the topwhere he is just sitting on the top of the pole I thought was kind of cool. Let me know if you like me posting pics. If it does not slow things down too much, I'll try.....

Yahoo

You know what this means? POWER! It was interesting watching him hook this up without first shutting off the power.

82 is cool?

Josh and I went to Nepal yesterday. It was a productive day of meetings and visiting the Bhutan refugee camps. We went to three camps that contain 10s of thousands of refugees from Bhutan. They have been in these camps for almost 17 years. It is kind of sad because they do not have status in Nepal. They are not able to work, so they have a lot of time on their hands. Although the children are well educated; many of them spoke English well. We were there because a group wants to do a concert outside the camps this fall. I think it will be well attended. We managed to make a fast one day trip there and back while the unrest was not too bad.

I guess we are finally getting adjusted to the weather. This evening as we were all sitting out on the deck we commented that it was really cool out. I looked and it was only 82. But I guess after we had one afternoon this week with a heat index of 136, this does feel good. We are now able to run the AC in two bedrooms at night. The power company has upgraded the transformer, but we still await the hookup of the new wire to the house. I guess we made a good contribution to the neighborhood as everyone’s fans will run faster now that we all have 220 volts in the evening vs. the usual 150.

I have been playing with a weather webcam and uploading the images to the Weather Underground website. They still do not have all the links working correctly, but you can go to the site here: http://www.weatherunderground.com/webcams/index.html?range=intl and click on the picture of India. You will get an enlarged view of looking out of my office/laundry room window. They don’t have the rest of the links working yet but I hope soon they will have the time lapse features working so if you check it at night you will be able to still see a daylight picture. Until then, if you want to see a picture you will have to check it out in morning or evening US time. So to those of you who have been telling me to post pictures; this will have to do for now.

Well, I was reminded yesterday that waiting for more juice is much better than having no juice. During the night we had the nastiest thunderstorm I have ever seen. Even though it was still hot outside we had to close all the windows to the house because we were getting soaked on the inside of the house. Anyway, the power was out for about 16 hours. This was long enough for our inverter batteries to die and so we spent the afternoon without fans. So next time I complain about not enough power for the AC; remind me just how good it is just to have power :)

Waitin' for da juice.....

Well here we are on the 24th still waiting on the power company. My hope is to have the upgrade done soon because it is getting really hot. The other day the heat index was a not so comfortable 117 and talking to the locals it only goes up from here. If you like thunderstorms you would really enjoy the weather here. We have one in the area on most evenings. The other night we had a couple of thunderstorms during the night that dropped over 3” of rain. There is no such thing as light rain here.

Well India as usual; I started this post several days ago but the internet died in the middle of it so I will try and pick up where I left off. Today I was going to depart for Nepal for a few days of meetings. I got all packed up and loaded the car picked up my friends and then received a call saying the road was closed at the border. The Maoist Youth (aka commie kids) were staging yet another strike. The details are a bit sketchy but 7 hours later I am here at home awaiting word for this evening or tomorrow. I think I would rather skip it. There is always the chance that we could get in and then after our meetings there could be another disturbance that could get us stuck there for a couple of extra days.

Later in the week I hope to take the family to Pelling in Sikim for a couple of days to get out of the humidity and heat. It is really a beautiful place. Here is a link http://www.east-himalaya.com/sikkim/pelling.htm It is kind a commercialized web site, but it gives you an idea. Here is another link with some pictures: http://www.shunya.net/Pictures/Himalayas/Sikkim/Pelling.htm I will let ya’ll know if we go. I was there a couple of months ago and almost froze to death (well at least it seemed like it).

Still waiting on the power company. I have a meeting with the district head on Wednesday. He is going to try to explain to me why they don’t have the materials to do the upgrade even though we have paid them big Rupees. Say a little prayer for this meeting.