The Hampster and the Monkey

My kids have very different personalities. My son is usually more timid at first and has high hopes of doing lots of brave and adventurous things. He is often slow to start out, but once his confidence builds, he wants to show everyone what he can do and teach others how to do it.

My daughter, on the other hand, sees no danger and knows no fear, so she dives in to something with both feet and then when she gets hurts is totally stunned that this happened.

This last week was a perfect example of this. The place we stayed had a hampster-wheel on the playground. The boy decided he was going to play on that all day. Once we actually got to it and he saw how unstable it was, he decided he was only going to crawl on hands and knees. Over a period of several days and numerous attempts, he slowly built his confidence to the point that he was running on it by day 5, just in time for us to go home.

The girl first eyed the ‘web’ on the playground. She immediately ran to it and climbed right up to the top and even began climbing over the top bar and trying to descend down the other side. No fear in that one. After nearly losing her grip and falling a few times she learned to be a bit more cautious. All of this she was doing while still nursing two badly skinned knees and one skinned elbow from a fall at church last weekend (while excitedly running full-steam) to see a friend who had returned from abroad). Thankfully, no major falls or injuries this week for her.

Super-Flying Pool Boy and Aqua-Chick

The place we are staying this week has a great swimming pool. The kids have loved it. We spend on average 3-4 hours a day in the water.

Over the last few days it has been really great to see the kids confidence in and around the water growing. My son is now known in my mind as Super-Flying Pool Boy. He loves to jump from the edge of the pool into the water, and even jumps from 3 foot high wall at one end into the pool. He jumps really high and far out into the pool when he does these jumps. He is working on teaching himself how to swim using proper strokes too. Very fun to see him gaining confidence in this area.

My daughter is now known in my mind as Aqua-Chick. She was a bit more timid at first, which is a real switch. Normally she is the fearless one. But she is 22 months younger, and not yet 4, so she has every right to be a little timid. She also has not spent as much time around the water as the boy. However, she has gained so much confidence this week. She now walks into the deep pool, and walks out to the point where she is on tip-toes and her head is tipped back to allow her chin and mouth to be out of the water, just barely. She tip-toes around the pool like that with surprising speed. In the kids’ pool she is also quite confident and now more than happy to put her face into the water, etc.


I love seeing the kids grow in their confidence and abilities. Swimming was something that was a big part of who I was as a kid and I love that my kids might also have a love of the water.

Swinging in the rain

Today we went with my wife to a meeting she was involved in. Several of the other ladies wanted to see the kids, so we all tagged along.

While waiting for her meeting to finish my job was to keep the kids entertained and happy. Or at least prevent them from disturbing the meeting and/or hurting themselves.

We were told the campus we were on had a playground, so we set out to find it. After a few miscues from some well-intentioned, but obviously misguided efforts to help us find it, we stumbled across it ourselves.

There were two slides that were steeper than any slide I think I have seen here in India. There were two swing sets that sat lower to the ground than any I have seen before, with literally only inches of clearance between them and the ground. There were also a see-saw and a set of monkey bars.

While playing on the swings it began to sprinkle and slowly got more serious about really raining. The kids were having so much fun we decided to ignore the rain for a while. As this was going on I could not help but think of the song “Singing in the Rain”, so I changed the words a bit and began with “Swinging in the Rain . . . . . we’re singing in the rain . . “.

The kids looked at me like I was nuts, but then slightly impressed that I had just made up that tune all by myself. That is the fun part of being a dad. You don’t have to worry that they don’t know you did not make that song up.

Eventually we gave up on playing on the playground in the rain and headed for cover. I was glad to see the kids able to recount to mommy later the adventures we had and the song ‘daddy made up’. Memories being made. Good stuff!

First the fire, then the flood

I got a call around 9 am this morning that there was apparently some flooding in our office. Someone had left one of the taps open in the bathroom, and the floor drain could not keep up with the flow of water. How could someone leave a tap open you might ask? Well, when you only have water running in the taps for a couple of hours a day, it is easy to leave a tap open without knowing it. I could hardly be upset with whoever did it, because we have done it before too. In fact I mostly felt bad that we had wasted all that water.

A few minutes later another call . . . . this time to report more extensive flooding than originally thought. It was not only a small area in the main room, but the whole of another room had standing water as well. With computer equipment and other electronics all over that office, it was easy to begin imagining the worst. I headed down there.

By the time I arrived two of the programmers had begun sopping up the water with some towels kept in one of the cupboards and were using a squeegee to push water out a doorway as much as possible. I joined them and began soaking up water into a bath towel, then wringing the towel out and repeating the procedure. Within about 15 minutes we had most of it cleaned up.

The good thing about it being 1000 degrees here this time of year (ok, slight exaggeration, but it did hit 107 in the shade here this afternoon and more than 130 in the direct sunlight) is that any remaining water was quickly evaporated.

It does not appear that any of the equipment suffered in this potential calamity. Whew!

So, two days of fire (or things getting burned anyways) and now one day of flooding. What will tomorrow bring? Freezing? Wind storms? Infestation of vermin or insects? Oh the possibilities. Can’t wait. Each day here is a new adventure.

Dad burn it!! - Day 2

I am a dad. It burned. ‘It’ was a voltage stabilizer.

I returned home late this morning to a smell that scares me every time I smell it. Burning electrical something or another. No smoke. No active noises or signs of ongoing burnage, just the lingering funk from a very recent electrical burn. It was one of those sting your eyes, can’t possibly be good to be breathing this stuff sort of smells.

And so I began my hunt for the recently deceased electrical device, which those of you who have seen our office at home know could take me days to find. Since the power was off (in the whole neighborhood, not as a result of the burnage), which happens all the time here, this could be interesting. All the while, the question keeps running through my head – is there something still burning?

About two months ago we had an inverter installed in our house which stores power in two truck batteries and then supplies power to almost the whole house when the main power goes off. A very cool thing indeed, which has made our lives a lot better. So, due to the inverter, most things in the office were still powered on.

I began by searching for devices that should be on (powered by the inverter) but were not. I found two. My wife’s lcd monitor for her computer, and the fax machine. The fax machine is old and would be no great loss. The monitor would hurt a bit more. Then I realized that both devices were plugged into one single point, the above mentioned voltage stabilizer.

We bought that stabilizer almost 10 years ago now, when we first moved here. Power fluctuations were extreme then, and one dared not plug much of anything in unless it was through a voltage stabilizer. It has served us well. However, it will not be serving us any longer.

As soon as I picked up the stabilizer I knew this was the source of the smell. It was too hot to hold in my hand, and reeked of the same smell as the whole room, only much, much stronger. I removed the cover and confirmed its status. Totally hopeless. The main coil inside had literally melted and several key wires had burned significantly.

We are actually lucky it did not do more than fizzle out within itself. It was sitting behind my wife’s desk, among a whole pile of other cords, wires and cables. A bad thing indeed had it ignited back there.

In happier news, an update on my fingers from yesterday – they have experienced remarkable healing in the last 24 hours. One of them still hurts, but not too bad.

My hope now is that there is not a need for a “Dad burn it!! – Day 3” to add to this series. We can not afford to burn anything else.

Dad burn it!!

I am a dad. I burned it. ‘It’ being my fingers.

Tonight while cooking dinner for my beloved children (we are eating healthy this week while mommy is away – mostly things that require frying in hot oil), I apparently overheated the cooking oil.

I realized this fact only while placing frozen popcorn chicken (little balls of minced chicken covered with some kind of breading – likely meant to increase nutritional value I am sure) into the hot oil, it began violently spitting and popping. This caused reasonable amounts of oil to leave the confines of the vessel it was sitting in, and jumping onto the plastic bag containing said popcorn chicken.

As the super-heated oil landed on said plastic bag, meltage did occur. Said meltage then resulted in a serious case of “Oh Crud!!” being exclaimed.

The result – burns on several fingers. Not sure if the burns are from melting plastic or from splashing hot oil. One of the fingers had blistered before I even turned my hand over to look at it.

But not all was a total loss. The chicken was not harmed in this process (it had been harmed long before it arrived in our house), and I proceeded to cook it, albeit at a lower temperature, along with some French fries. We all enjoyed. I winced a little.

Now . . .I am going to go find more ice to soothe my pains. As they say here in India . . . “My fingers are paining me.”

Camping . . . .sort of

This weekend we had a family camping experience . . . sort of. It involved some of the normal camping elements, like grilled Hilshire Farms Beef Polska Kielbasa, hoagie rolls, potato chips, ice cold diet cokes, and lots of other goodies. It also included a tent, paper plates and utensils on a picnic table and two very excited children.

However, our camping ‘trip’ also included some non-traditional elements. Namely, we never left our house, so we had all the comforts of home on this trip, without packing any of it.

We had a ‘picnic’ on our balcony using the kids’ plastic picnic table and dined on some delicacies we bought earlier in the day at one of our favorite stores that occasionally has imported goods – hence the Hilshire Farms.

We also had acquired earlier in the day an electric grill that my wife has been eyeing for months. As luck would have it, we got the very last one they had. So the kielbasa was grilled along with the hot dogs for the kids. She also made fresh hoagie rolls to eat the sausages on.

Once the main course was over, we were ready for dessert. Smores. Mmmmmm, yummy! The marshmallows were cooked over an open flame (albeit on our gas stove, but still, an open flame) and placed onto the nearest thing to a graham cracker we could find – plain digestive biscuits. Cadbury chocolate bars were broken up and placed inside along with the hot marshmallows.

After dinner was over we went inside and watched the live action version of Charlottes Web on dvd, and then decided it was soon time for bed. We headed to our ‘campsite’, a space made in our bedroom to set up our tent (brought back recently from America). We moved in all the blankets and pillows and allotted space for all four of us. We also turned on the air conditioner in the bedroom to cut down on the heat. Another nice part of camping at home.

After a few minutes the kids were settling down, and mom and dad were getting restless. The ground, in this case a marble floor, can be really hard at our age. The kids slept blissfully, while we tossed and turned most of the night.

The kids were so happy to have gone camping. We were so happy to have had some of the comforts of home on our ‘trip’, but more important, we were happy to make a memory together. It was an adventure that only took a little creativity and a good measure of child-like willingness to enjoy the simple pleasures.

It always takes longer

One thing we learned early on in our life in India is that things almost always take longer than we are told they will. This is true across a broad range of things, some simple like getting a ticket for a train, or running to the store, etc. It is also true for larger things like registering a new car, building a new building, etc. While this simple fact of life here may not seem like a big deal, it can at times be terribly annoying, especially when you forget it or are not ready for it to rear its ugly head.

As I ponder this issue of the timing of things, it raises any number of questions. Perhaps my sample questions will reveal more of my own line of thinking as I write here. This just may be therapeutic. Let’s see.

Line of Questioning #1 – Is the fact that things take longer than estimated a result of poor planning or foresight? Can people simply just not actually calculate or estimate with any reasonable accuracy how long something will take? Do they not learn from the past and therefore adjust future estimations based on that? Poor record keeping or a very short-term memory would play into this.

Line of Questioning #2 – Is this process the result of a different set of values at play, i.e. they know it will take longer, but in an effort to be ‘nice’ of ‘helpful’ or not to tick you off, they say it will take less time? ‘Truth’ (i.e. an accurate and realistic estimate of time) is outweighed by the desire for friendship or helpfulness. Another possibility along this line is that they simply don’t have a clue, but that is not a ‘helpful’ answer, so they give some random guess at a timeline in an effort to be helpful.

Line of Questioning #3 – Are people here just so unbelievably optimistic that they simply can not imagine one (or more) or any number of possible situations delaying the desired outcome? If you can’t or are not willing to see possible obstacles, you won’t be able to account for them in your estimate.

Line of Questioning #4 – Are things here just so totally random that there is no real way to accurately estimate how long something will take? If the process changes every single time you do something, that would make it hard to estimate accurately. But that would beg the question as to why the process changes each time? And if it does change every time, how does anything at all get done here with any regularity?

While I can admittedly see each one of these played out as very real possibilities in situations I have been in even in the last 6 months, I am hesitant to say one is more common or more at fault than another.

Of course there are some who don’t seem to have much trouble with this issue. But that then begs a whole new line of questions (at least in my own mind) as to whether I get special treatment in the ‘things always take longer’ dept in an effort to teach me something. Is God is trying to help me learn something (patience being near the top of that list)? Am I giving off some kind of vibe that induces people to try to irritate me in this way (being too demanding, pushy, or arrogant would do it here)? Is the color of my skin getting me treated this way? Or maybe everyone has to deal with this, but some deal with it better than I do.

Hmmmm, so that was only slightly therapeutic, and leaves me with many more things to examine about myself, my role in all of this, and my expectations and responses to the situations thrown at me.