She's alive!

This happens with blogs. The long hiatus, often followed by a lengthy (or mercifully brief) explanatory confession to the blog gods, complete with reasons for absence and oaths/promises/best laid plans to never, never, never let things go for so long again.

Basically, we got back from India and ended up hospitalized for food poisoning. Thanks very much, Continental Airlines. Five months in India without so much as a single funky day in the bathroom, and then some suspect overcooked eggs at 35,000 feet and eight hours later, after the drama of trying to find our prearranged car at the airport and a totally illegal and terrifying ride on the Jersey Turnpike with db on my lap, we got home and had about an hour before the uncontrollable barfing began. And then uncontrollable diarrhea. It was kind of like labor after the castor oil kicked in. But maybe worse because in this case there was an actual baby requiring care and after a few hours of this insanity, we were both unable to stand upright.

We called Todd's parents, who had actually come over to see us but left because I was so sick. I got sick about two hours before Todd, so I didn't know that they had left because I was retching in the bathroom. I don't really understand why their thought process was more along the lines of "daughter in law is desperately ill after 18 hour nonstop flight with one and a half year old. Must leave" rather than "daughter in law is desperately ill after 18 hour nonstop flight with one and a half year old and therefore likely could use some help." Actually, I do understand. It has a lot to do with the Chiropractic Lifestyle (tm) worldview, or as I like to call it, the church of the holy spine. Illness is in your head. Ignore it. It will go away. And if it doesn't and you die, you won't be around to call attention to the fundamental insanity and lack of humanity inherent in such a worldview.

So we called them for help, twice, and they basically said stop whining, have some tea and get a better attitude about the dry heaving. In fact, you are not really dry heaving. So we called my mom, who while crazy in her own way, definitely understands that both parents being unable to stand up is a Situation, and she immediately got in the car and drove down to the city to take care of db.

While waiting for the upstate cavalry to arrive, we were lucky enough to get some help from Laura, our pre-India babysitter. It was Laura who took me to the ER and later, after Todd passed out on the way to the bathroom, it was Laura who called the ambulance that brought him to the ER. Why hadn't Todd sought help sooner? Well, it would seem that while you can check out of the Church of the Holy Spine, you can never leave. Practically speaking, this means that you will keep saying you are fine (in between dry heaves or crawls to the bathroom) until you wake up strapped to a stretcher.

Todd and I got to share the same room in the ER, side by side on his and hers drips. It was lovely. Depending on the kind of person you are, the ER room in an NYC hospital will either destroy or restore your faith in humanity.

Anyway, we were eventually discharged and we spent the next two weeks trying to get over jetlag (so much harder with jetlagged toddler), unpack, and get ready for what turned out to be the worst semester I've ever had not counting my first year of teaching, which is in a class by itself, or perhaps a class shared only by acute food poisoning after an 18-hour flight with a toddler.

Basically, 120 students is too many. Prior to this semester, I never had more than 60. So a smart professor would have maybe done away with some of the writing assignments. But that would not be me. As a result, I have been hopelesly behind since January, and until the spring semester ends this Wednesday, I do not anticipate catching up.

Plus - post for another time - the new owner of our building has been systematically not renewing leases in order to convert livable nice two bedroom apartments into illegal four bedroom apartment shares (8 x 10 bedrooms, anyone?), so in March we got our not unexpected letter saying get out at the end of May. I negotiated a slightly later move out date, but the stress of teaching plus page proofs plus having to move AGAIN caused hives and insomnia and general shittiness beyond my ability to convey in a single humble blog post.

On the bright side, db is now night weaned and sleeping in her own room.

So there hasn't been much spare time here, and much of my non-work time has been spent watching 30 Rock, The Wire, The Amazing Race, and (oh, the shame) Outsourced. Joss Whedon, save me! I did actually knit a Tiny Tea Leaves for db out of some brown Blue Sky Alpaca that I bought a long time ago and perhaps I will post pictures another day, now that I am apparently blogging again.

And yes, about the blog. It occurred to me recently that because I am busy, I have no record of my days other than iphone videos and photos and that most of the reason I haven't posted in so long was that this was supposed to be a knitting blog. Well, f*ck that. I could, I suppose, set up a "personal" blog and use it as a venue for long, photoless, humorless posts about My Life, but why have two blogs when one is more than I can handle?

Plus, there are about six friends' babies due this summer, so chances are pretty good there will be some knitting.

Staying warm

Am I sorry to see 2010 go? I'm not sure. It's been a kick watching db become a little person, and my book, the product of so many years of work, is all over but the page proofs. Then again, these two very wonderful things also took a very serious piece out of my backside, and being in Delhi has been laughably, absurdly hard.

Knitting is happening again, amazingly. I saw Camilla on a blog and fell in sweater love for the first time in a long while, and as it happens I brought the silk/alpaca that was originally purchased for db's baby blanket with me. Held double, it makes gauge for the pattern, and about 1/3 of the way through the torso, I'm feeling very pleased with it. It's a fast knit, and with any luck, I'll be able to wear it home on the airplane.

I’m knitting it on 7 circulars that I managed to track down here in Delhi. I can't find the photo that I took of the receipt, but I wouldn't lie about something as serious as knitting needle prices. Everything else in Delhi may be ridiculously, infuriatingly overpriced, but I paid a whopping 58 rupees (TOTAL) for 5 pairs of circular needles. At 44 rupees to the US dollar, I think we can forgive them for not feeling quite as good as Addis.

It's freezing here in Delhi - not technically freezing, but close enough. In order to beat the cold, people burn coal in these little stoves that are generally made out of clay-lined metal buckets. A recent and all too rare foray into the world of field work resulted in one ball-busting grandma potter teaching me exactly how these small ovens are made. Here's a photo of us with our work.

I love that someone in Delhi will eventually purchase my little stove. Also, I would like to note that (1) the clay mixture we were using was 1/3 cow dung and (2) that the ball-busting grandma is so nicknamed because she spent much of the afternoon explaining to me that while it takes me a year of classroom instruction to teach my students anything, in less than 30 minutes she successfully taught me how to make a heating stove out of a bucket, some wires, and a big pile of clay.

The city is filled with simply amazing knitwear, much of which seems to have been extruded from the bowels of some large, hairy acrylic monster. On the bright side, a fair amount of baby knits are still done by hand, often with spectacular results. People here can be a little touchy about having their kids photographed (and maybe that’s true in America, too – I wouldn’t really know), but a few proud Indian knitters let me document their work. Some particularly sparkly store bought stuff is also included.

Also awesome: the handknit vest.

This is a typical specimen. Indian men are obviously very comfortable in their masculinity.

Noooooooooo

This morning our lovely cook/nanny called us with some exciting news: her daughter-in-law, who lives with her, had a baby boy last night. We knew that a baby was coming, so this was not unexpected, although it was on early side. The surprise is that the baby had to be delivered by cesarean section, and that means that unless the maternal grandmother wants to stay with the in-laws and help out, we have lost childcare and cooking help for the next few weeks.

Hence the Noooooooooo.

The internet came back today after a week of server problems (apparently when the guy who deals with broadband goes on vacation, no one else at MTNL is capable of solving server problems), and I was wondering what the next crisis would be. Now I know. The most devastating part of this is the timing - I am supposed to finish proofing my copy edited manuscript by 1 December. Which basically means I am screwed.

Let's try to cheer ourselves up with some recent photos of everyday Indian absurdity, shall we?


















But before '88 he was a really nice guy.
























I guess we wouldn't want any vehicles running over those manhole covers.


And a recent photo of db - playing in our sort of probably clean enough local park, which is closed from 8 am to 6 pm. That's right. 8 am to 6 pm. Don't try to understand. Unless you want to go totally mad.

















The Aviatrix hat is snug, but still wearable, and great for fending off intrepid end-of-season mosquitoes.

Hmmmm.

Spotted in the Catholic bookstore in Connaught Place:


















But if God is eternal, wouldn't all his knitting projects also be eternal, and wouldn't he therefore have to cast off forever?

ubersuckage

Oh, the grumpiness.

On October 3rd, my birthday, we had some friends over for pizza and scotch (it was supposed to be pizza and beer, but whoops, liquor store is closed on Sunday despite the fact that Sunday is not the primary day of worship for about 99% of the Indian population) and made fun of the Opening Ceremony for the Commonwealth Games. Earlier that day, my big special birthday breakfast at the imperial hotel was ruined by a call from the nanny saying that she had just locked herself out of the house. Leaving db in the house. Alone. So one minute Todd was lovingly piling his plate full of cold cuts and I was ordering my omelet and the next minute we were running through the well-appointed, jasmine-scented hall, crying (me), yelling for a taxi (Todd). In the cab, the driver said to me "Madam, if god is good, then baby is okay." Which he probably thought was reassuring but which actually just made me cry harder.

As it turned out, our nanny Sunita, who had come specially on her day off because it was my birthday, got locked out because although there are SIX locks on our front door (post for another time: paranoia in Delhi), not one of them allows you to simply close the door without also locking it. Sunita went out the door to call down to the building super to send someone to buy onions (we were out of onions, again not her fault but mine because I was still figuring out the delivery system for what seems to be the only organic vegetable dealer in all of Delhi), and the door closed behind her. We only have one set of keys because that is all our snakey, distinctly unlovable landlord gave us, so we don’t have a spare for ourselves, let alone the Sunita.

So this would have been a huge disaster had Sunita not put db in her crib/playpen – just as she should have – right before going to request onions. Consequently, db was alone in the house, but she was safe in her playpen, incapable of pulling the TV on herself, eating the mothballs that one has to stick in the shower drains in India to discourage bugs, poking her eyes out with stray pencils, etc. But I did not know this until we got home.

So in the end, everything was okay, though we couldn’t go back to The Imperial because there was a special event at one of my field sites that I had to attend, and at that point there wasn’t really time to do anything other than head off to work.

Other highlights of the past month included me being laid flat on my back for about a week with a terrible cold followed by a frenzied house-hunting stint because about two weeks after we moved into this apartment they began renovations in several of the other apartments in our complex. This would be a nightmare anywhere, but in India, where all construction work is done by pickaxe-wielding, barefoot, malnourished villagers from Bihar, even a relatively simple construction project will become extremely loud and more or less eternal. Then we learned that an elevator would be installed and they started cutting marble for flooring behind the building and I flipped and spent a long, hot, miserable, pointless week riding around Delhi on the backs of various barely competent realtors’ motorcycles (sans helmet, of course) looking at a lot of unsuitable places, after which we got the hell out of Delhi for the Commonwealth Games and went to Mauritius via Dubai for ten days of blue skies and ocean.

There was a large stuffed tiger in our hotel room. We don't know why.

And now we are back. After a bit of soul-searching, we decided that sticking it out made the most sense, and so I bought a HEPA air filter to protect db from any construction dust that might make its way into the apartment, and here we are. The uberpisser is that my book’s copyedits came back and now I have to spend the next month going through them, making final decisions on how my book will appear to the world, which is daunting and exhilarating at the same time – and how I will manage to concentrate through all the construction noise is completely beyond me.

And to conclude this inarticulate whine, I can only marvel at how I have no motivation to do anything other than watch movies we download via bittorrent. I have two knitting projects with me, including one for a new baby boy who will outgrow said project within three months if I don’t get going, but I just can’t seem to care. Ditto for writing. I haven’t done yoga in two months, either: I have become a big, boring, constantly tired and unhappy blob. Here’s to hoping I rally sometime before January.

Delhi ate my brain and then pooped it into an open sewer

Ah, Delhi. Who knew that you would be ravaged, wrecked and otherwise generally destroyed by the upcoming Commonwealth Games? It didn't have to be this way - with the right management, you are capable of producing wonders like the Delhi Metro: built on budget and on schedule, clean, fast, beautiful, air conditioned. But the Indian government has had seven - SEVEN, count 'em - years to get ready for the games and it's come to this: the entire central part of the city is a torn-up dengue-mosquito breeding construction site from hell and the games are a week away. Today in a rickshaw I passed one of the games venues and noticed that the games countdown clock had stopped working: it's possible the clock just broke, but it's equally possible that someone disabled it since at this point all it's doing is reminding everyone exactly how hopelessly behind schedule everything is.

I wish I could conjure up the energy to say more, but setting up a household in Delhi has basically rendered me catatonic, and all writing energy has been directed towards field notes. I considered setting up a blog for posting my field notes, but for now anyway I think that's a little more pressure than I need, given everything else.

No knitting has happened except the hour it took to put the finishing touches on this sweater, modeled by a walkin', talkin' ever-changing, ever-charming db. This was my first knitting kit: it was a gift from a friend and while I normally don't use variegated yarn, I am happy with the result. The yarn was, I think, misti alpaca sportweight 50 pima cotton/50 silk: nice to knit with amazing drape; it's also incredibly soft, and what I like most about it is usually a yarn this soft has pilling issues (Debbie Bliss Cashmerino, anyone?) but this one is wearing like iron. The pattern was Spring Garden Tee by Alana Dakos (aka Never Knot Knitting).























I hope I get my blogging grove back soon - I do genuinely love writing, but so much happens in a day here that I generally don't know where to start. That and after a while I find that speaking Hindi puts a real damper on English. Not that my Hindi is setting the world on fire, either. So basically I don't speak anything well at the moment.

Sleepless in Delhi

Also photoless in Delhi because the little drive I use to connect my photo card to my mac is in New York and right now finding an apartment that won't kill my daughter is a slightly higher priority than finding a way to upload photos. The past two months have been mad: getting an Indian research visa ended up being the living, breathing, monstrous embodiment of the soul of Kafka, just beating out getting IRB approval for my research project for that title. Finding a subletter who would not pee on our sofa or sell Todd's DVD collection to support a crack habit was also time consuming, and then there was the small task of packing for a five-month trip to India with a one-year-old in mind. So much could be written, and will be written, but at the moment I've been up since 2:30 am local time (and it's now 8 local time) and I think I need to have some protein and drink a lot of tea in order to have any hope of making it through the day. Db and Todd are still asleep, as they were for pretty much the entire night. I guess I should just be glad that someone will be functional today.

And knitting has, remarkably, been happening, though not on the 14-hour flight from Newark to Delhi. I actually put some knitting in my carry on and didn't even think about it - much less touch it - for the entire flight. I am not sure why I thought I would be doing anything other than keeping db from climbing me and the seat and all the other passengers as though they were here own personal Mount Everest.