I just realized that this was the first photo that I took in 2010. We were on our regular morning walk and the roads were pretty much deserted. This particular fellow we have been tracking since it was a juvenile just out of the nest. Usually raptors are very camera shy but this individual I would like to think knows us and likes to pose

This photo also made it to Flickr explore on 6th Jan 2010

Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there.

There they sit, the two children of the hills of Namdapha:




She is, obviously, spinning stories for the younger one....what gossamer thoughts of far away princes, dragons and wonders is she weaving, that the little boy sits rapt next to her, gazing into the far distance, lost in what his childish imagination shows him?

Children live in fantasy, and to them, stories are part of the fabric of life. I felt lucky to be able to watch these two in their world, even if just briefly...sitting there in the sunlit meadow, free (for a while, at least) of the cares of household chores or school, being...just children...,

All these OTHER photographs from Assam and Arunachal mean...that I have not finished uploading the pics of the birds and the mammals (OK, I admit they are quite lousy, but I *am* going to post them here as usual!)

And meanwhile, I am off to Thattekkad today, with (in alphabetical order) amoghavarsha, anushsh, and Sandeep ...so even more birds (hopefully) to add to the list... I am sure that in the next Bangalore Bird Race, (on Jan 17th) I am going to start identifying birds endemic to Assam, Arunachal, and Kerala!

When I come back from Kerala, it's a trip to B R Hills in Karnataka....I am laying up a store of wildlife memories for the long short, cold days ahead when I am back to GD-care in St.Louis, at the end of the month!

I have asked asakiyume to make up one of her (pun intended) fantastic stories about these two goats I found in the hAt (weekly market) at Miao...




But...any of you can do that...what are the issues that these two are at loggerheads about? What has...got their goat?

Let me know what YOUR story is...

Today I received a patch of history in a box.


( Actually 19 patches and some 1/4 yard cuts. )

You may recall that I posted about making this top last spring, well, I finally got around to quilting it, and it's my first finish of 2010.



( Holding true to my new determination to take my time with my quilts to let them be what they need or want or are fated to be )

Asterix & Obelix's Birthday Album

I read the latest Asterix album released to "celebrate" the 50th birthday of Asterix & Obelix.

This is a very unconventional album. There is nothing much to call as a story, and we see a very liberal use of the artist's intervention techniques (like the ones present in Iznogoud comic books) for the first time in an Asterix album. The book begins with an attempt to portray the Gaulish village 50 years after the usual time frame of 50 BC. We see all people in the village, including Asterix and Obelix, caught up with age. This was apparently the artist's experiment, and the experiment ends when Uderzo himself appears in the comic and is blasted by Obelix. The story is rewound to 50BC, and we see Asterix, Obelix and Dogmatix going for boar-hunting as usual, while the people in the village secretly plan for giving a surprise party for the upcoming birthday of their heroes. Rest of the album shows various characters from earlier Asterix albums making an appearance and describing about the birthday gifts they are planning to give.

While Asterix and the Falling Sky, the previous Asterix album, sadly indicated that ageing Uderzo has nearly exhausted all interesting story ideas, this new album looks like an open admittance of that fact, as there is no "story" here. But Uderzo tries to make this up with new narration techniques and attempts to exploit the reader's nostalgia. His artworks are as great as ever, and we get to see many weird images of the Gaulish heroes in this book.

If we are approaching the album expecting to read a typical humorous Asterix & Obelix adventure, we would be heavily disappointed. This book is mainly an object of curiosity for fans, who want to keep their collection complete.

I am back to Bangalore, after spending 3 weeks in Kerala - This was the longest vacation I had in Kerala after 1996!

We've got Charter. The good, the bad, the ugly can sum it up if used respectively to describe the speed, the value, and the reliability. And, really, if not for the reliability, then it's a reasonable value too. However... the reliability. The connection becomes unstable on some days. Not often, but when it happens, it's infuriating. I cannot stay connected to work. I cannot stay on a conference call. And when I call then to get tech support, I have to wade through 10 minutes of automated "support" spiel asking me to reboot my computer, reboot the cable modem (actually, Charter's term for this is "power cycle"), check the status lights, basically check everything there is to check on my end. Only, the problem isn't on my end. It's on theirs. Actually, to be fair, the last time we were having problems, they came out and replaced the modem just on principal since it was old. And, by the time the tech was done, the problem went away by itself. So, we may never know if the old modem was defective or not. I'm guessing not.

This morning the connection became horrendously unstable, blacking out several times, and then conking out entirely. The phone router is plugged into our cable modem. As I always do, I ensure the problem isn't on our end before calling. After "power cycling" the cable modem, I went to the phone router's admin console and hit "renew" on the DHCP lease. Nothing. I unplugged the phone router and plugged the wireless router into the cable modem directly, and "power cycled" the wireless router, checked to see if it was getting an IP address. Nope. Tried hard-coding the last known one. Nothing. Plugged my computer into the the cable modem directly. Again, nothing. No IP address. Plugged shortindiangirl's Mac into the cable modem directly... instantly, Charter's DHCP server wakes up and serves up an IP address, and we're connected. Wait... what? The hell?

Plugged in the phone router again... nothing. Wow, this is getting stranger by the minute. And worse. Meanwhile, shortindiangirl has called Charter to have them send someone out (why they always insist on doing this when the problem is actually on their end, I don't know). Just imagine, the Charter guy comes out the next day, finds one machine that is able to work perfectly well with the cable modem, and just proclaims that therefore their service is working fine and that our phone router, our wireless router, and my laptop must all be malfunctioning.

Not so fast, though. Most routers let you spoof their MAC addresses. So, I had to try it: I plugged the phone router back into the cable modem. Again, it gets completely ignored by Charter's DHCP server. But, then I change the MAC address to match that of the Mac (Yes, we're talking about two different types of "macs" here. Try to stay with me, OK?). The router reboots itself. And, upon waking back up... instant IP address.

Worth noting that since doing this, I've had the connection black out a couple more times briefly, actually causing me to have to "release and renew" on the phone router again, but, still, every time it renews successfully.

So, what the heck is going on here? What is Charter doing with certain MAC addresses? And why does it happen to coincide when a day of very unstable connectivity? Something reeks here. I can't quite tell yet what it is, but it doesn't look good.

Tomorrow a tech comes out. It could get interesting.

Here I am, quoted in the Indian Express by Saritha Rai, a journalist whom I respect.

click here



I do agree to having faced ageism in Chennai...and often facing it in life...

..but I want to make it clear that for the most part, I said the EXACT opposite to what is quoted...I said, VERY clearly, that in Bangalore, and in wildlife and birding circles, I have never come across ageism at all. Between what one says to a professional reporter (even one who is a personal friend) and what that person hears and writes...there seems to be a very wide gap!

Let me state once again, that the birding community, the young-theatre-group community, the wildlife community, the cycling community,the quizzing community, the LJ community...all these seem to have NO ageism at all, and I find myself, and even older people, accepted for who they are, and indeed, age and its attendant experience is often given great respect.

I will be writing to Saritha about this, never fear. For my age, I am quite active, and so are my tongue...and typing fingers!

Deepa.

This is for (a) my non-Indian friends, but it's for (b) my Indian friends too...jalEbis, as (b) and many of (a) know, are sweets, made of flour batter that has been fermented, fried and then dunked into hot sugar syrup. Which of us have not fallen for the jalebis at weddings, hot off the syrup kadAi....?

At DakshiNEshwar, in Kolkata, Geetanjali and I had just finished having bhAdEr chA (tea in those special mud pots...its taste is unique), singhAdA (the Bengali samOsA) and heengEr kochudi (kachOris made with asafoetida as an ingredient)...birdwatchers, these are the "endemics" of the Bengali snacks world!..... when I realized I could record the making of this delicacy.






The circular motion with which the halwAee (sweet-maker) starts looks as if he is stirring the batter...but if you notice closely, he's actually filling up a vessel which has a hole in its bottom (please, no dirty comments at this stage!)


Then, he positions the vessel over the hot kadAi (large wok-like vessel) and, extremely skilfully starts making the series of circles, in a spiral fashion, ending up in the middle of the oil. The batter is extremely slippery in the oil and when L-boards (er, you can guess one example of a person unskilled in this...yours truly) and can make terrible lumps and tangled squiggles.....it's NOT as easy as this halwaii makes it seem! Of course I *could* say that with daily practice I would also be as good....but that would be not true, I think!

At the end of the video, you can see him using the perforated ladle to turn over the earlier batch of jilebis, which is soaking in the hot sugar syrup (to his left.)

Jilebis (or jalebis, as you wish to call them) are one sweet that is no longer made at home, for the most part. In the south, we have a variant of this, called "jAngri"..the word is derived from "jahAngiri" from Mughal times! This sweet, too, is made the same way, but is substantially thicker and the batter is not fermented, and for some reason, is now generally bright orange in colour, as opposed to the golden yellow-to-orange variation for jilebi.

(many of the south Indian sweets have names derived from Mughal times..."pAdushAh" is derived from "bAdshAhi"!... interesting sideline that I am not going to follow right now...)




Oh, yes, we went back to Geetanjali's in-laws' place bearing some of the hot jilebis! And you can be sure that some of it is now smiling back at me from my waist and hip, when I look at the mirror....

I started this before the holiday but only managed to finish it now.

The basis for it were the varying shades of creams and browns which I used in a table runner for my guy's mother's xmas present. I don't use this color palette often and didn't know what to do with the left material. Then I found some brick reddish brown fabric and put it together with the blue border. It reminds me of a candy/chocolate box so I put cherries as backing.


Now I am trying to decide what to call it...

Next I am determined to teach myself how to do One Block Wonders.

Happy 2010 everybody! I am glad we have this community!

X-posted to
diy_stuff quilting 

http://hobby.pavanashree.org/2010/01/04/design-wall-monday-04-jan-10

Here’s what is on my design wall today:

Link to Judy’s post.

The Plain Tiger (Danaus chrysippus) or outside Asia, African Monarch, is a common butterfly which is widespread in Asia and Africa. It belongs to the Danainae (“Milkweed butterflies”) subfamily of the brush-footed butterfly family, Nymphalidae.

It is believed to be one of the first butterflies to be used in art. A 3500 year old Egyptian fresco in Luxor features the oldest illustration of this species.

The Plain Tiger can be considered the archetypical danaine of India. Accordingly, this species has been studied with in greater detail than other members of its subfamily occurring in India.

See an earlier post on Striped Tiger (Danaus genutia)

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danaus_chrysippus

Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there.

In January of 2009, I set out on a journey to improve my quilting skills in the hope that I would one day be able to make "the quilts I saw in my head".

At that point, having only two "real" quilts under my belt, and being entirely self taught, I wasn't sure where I was going or what I was doing, but I knew I wanted to get there.

( My year in quilts )

It snowed all night and by the time I got off work at 6am Sunday there was already 3" of snow and it was a balmy 9 degrees. The good news is that the new snow covered the old snow which was all grey and dirty. The bad news is that we now have over 12" of snow in many places and ice everywhere. I don't think our house ever got warm today, but I guess that is what happens when the high is something near 10 degrees. Fortunately I was asleep for most of it :)

My job has this Passport to Health program where if you complete three wellness activities you get a discount on your health insurance. That is why I do those goofy wellness activities, the Route 66 pedometer challenge, the 12 days of wellness, the wellness fair. This year I am going to be on a Biggest Loser team with four of my fellow co-workers. I don't know how long the challenge is but since I need to lose 10 pounds (15 would be nice but very unrealistic) and they needed a fifth I decided to join. Our team name is "I Pity the Food." Funny stuff.

Otherwise work is work. We have been short staffed between people taking vacation or being sick. There were finally enough of us tonight for me to take down the Christmas decorations. Tomorrow I will put up Valentine's Day decorations. It's a dark and depressing room, so a little decoration cheers things up :)

J went to the reptile show today to pick up some fuzzy mice. When he got home I was awake, which he wasn't expecting. Turns out he bought a snake while he was there; it was an unexpected purchase, but it was really pretty and one of his favorite kinds...and only $30...His plan was to set it up and not mention it until I noticed it. Which I would have noticed. This is probably the fourth snake he has 'snuck' home, since we have lived together. The only reason he isn't in the dog house is because one of our kenyan sand boas (who had been a poor eater for the last year) died while we were out of town for Christmas. As retaliation I might get another aquarium :)

http://hobby.pavanashree.org/2010/01/03/stash-report-week-1

Judy hosts a weekly stash report and I decided to join in this year. The first week has been a huge eye opener for me. I think it is a very good idea to track what comes in and goes out of the stash.

When I got an email from Connecting Threads announcing their huge 50% off sale, I had to go over and look. I love their fabric and at $2.78 a yard, it was such a steal, I couldn’t resist buying some. Some? I counted the yardage. 33; Aiyeee! Not the best way to start the year eh? But in my defense, I intend to make a bunch of quilts this year – let’s just give me the benefit of the doubt! :)

I also went by Joanns for their end of year sale. All I wanted was the Ottlite floor lamp but some fabric also decided to come home with me. Their Legacy Studio collection is good quality fabric. Grin.

Fortunately, I did work on a mystery quilt so there’s some usage to report:

Used this Week: 11.00 yards
Used year to Date: 11.00 yards
Added this Week: 48.50 yards
Added Year to Date: 48.50 yards
Net Used for 2010: -37.50 yards

I’ve earmarked fabric for another mystery quilt from Planet Patchwork (7.5 yards!), so I hope to continue making a dent!

I have to mention this – when I called the Connecting Threads people when I had not seen my package yet, the lady said that they had 10,000 orders a day and they were behind in processing them. Wow!

I was mightily tickled by this one:




Talk about ancient! I hope those biscuits were not made back in 1883...

In Dibru/Shaikowa, we stayed on the banks of a water body called Magori Beel (beel is lake) which connected to the Magori river. As we went around looking at waterbirds, I saw this horse all the time:





Our guide Binanda told us that for some reason, this horse just does not like working and the owner pampers the animal, too! It was lovely watching the animal under that simple shelter...






Here he is, his coat shining in the misty sunlight:






We think being human is the greatest thing in life...but I'd like to be that horse in his house of hay....!

I thought only males possessed a pair, but apparently sarees have them, too....