Bumps, Eunuchs, Monkeys, and Posh Spice: The Latest Birthdays

Bumps: Dad's 33rd Birthday

At my office birthdays are a big deal. I don't know what other offices around here do but at ours, the order of things is:

1. Cut the cake. While cutting the cake everybody claps and sings "Happy Birthday".
2. Your nearest friends each grab a piece of the cake with their hands and feed you a bite.
3. Then they dot some of the cake on your forehead (like what you would see in a Hindu temple).
4. Then they smear the cake all over your face.
5. While you excuse yourself to wash the oily cake off your face, everybody has a piece.
6. For the brave guys, when you get back you get your bumps. (I think this may come from the British) One guy grabs your arms and another your legs and they bump you up and down.
   

Thankfully for them, they took off my glasses so I couldn't tell who to give a bad performance reviews.

This is me after the ritual:

Posh Spice: Merinda's 30th Birthday

A bunch of Merinda's friends led by Marcia put together a suprise 30th birthday party. She was completely surprised. Squeals of delight and total embarrassment.

It was fun getting together Merinda's "European/Australian" buddies, and her Mormon friends:
Here's Marcia, Lesley & Kerali. Marcia tried to mix it up so there was something for both groups--alcohol and party games.

This one was a game where you had to try and get people to guess what was written on their foreheads.
Unfortunately, Merinda is a bit behind on her popular culture. Even getting her to "British pop singer married to David Beckham" didn't get her the real answer....

Monkeys: Graham's 2nd Birthday

The first thing we did was went with Sister Glaris to the Delhi Zoo.

Since it was hotter than the blazes we blew up our little pool and let the kids run around. Our local monkey-wallah seems to have a sixth sense about when there is a birthday because it didn't take long before he came down the road on his bicycle with his monkeys beating the drum. So we let him in for a monkey show, which Graham completely enjoyed (here he's feeding the monkey a green bean).Here's Graham with the whole gang: Russell, Dad, Graham, Merinda, Isaac, Pooja, Lakshmi, Margaret, and Shiva. Was meant to be a family party, but "family" is a very fluid concept in India!
Eunuchs: Isaac's 7th Birthday

For Isaac's birthday we invited all of his classmates. I think all in all we had about 25 kids. The balloon man came, as usual and blew up around 100 balloons with his mouth. This time though we had an interesting addition to the party--a hijera! Here he/she is doing a little dance. They show up at big events and want you to pay them money to take away the evil spirits from your event. They're sort of like atonement figures, I guess. I think Rich gave them some money and they went on their way.

The theme for the party was magic, so we played "The Disappearing Kid" with toilet paper! This is Isaac magically making Yotam disappear. Isaac and Dad also did a pretty successful magic show with ropes that go through people and magical reading of cards and ipod speakers that magically turn on. Isaac was so excited for this part and has now enrolled in a magic class after school taught by a professor (of magic?) who tells the kids over and over never to do a trick more than once for someone. So Isaac's not getting much practice! But he's pretty good judging from the ONE time I've seen him do each trick . . .
Here's the cake that Merinda made herself with some help from Margaret at the beginning and end. I don't know why I keep insisting on making my own cakes because it makes me crazy and tense and I'm not even good at it. This one is supposed to be a magic hat with a bunny popping out. The hat collapsed though. :(
And that's all for the birthday season for the Cutlers. Stay tuned for more festivities at Diwali and Christmas!

Pink Pudding

Just wanted to share this great story from our friends up the road, the Smiths.

The Most Amazing Breakfast Cereal EVER

So a couple of weekends ago Merinda sent me to the local grocery place and one of the things on the list was some breakfast cereal. To save a few rupees I picked up the local brand.

Just a disclaimer: It always bothers me when people mock foreigners trying to speak English. Let's give them credit, I mean, how good is your Hindi?

So grammer aside, just check out the wonderful things that this breakfast cereal can do. Here's the printing on the back:

Avee's Family Crunch Muesli
It's origin has been from Switzerland and other western countries, which proved magnificent results on mind, mood, physique, stamina, tummy, digestive system, tolerance, longitivity and general health. Hence the Avee's Family Crunch Muesli has much been appreciated and motivate the liking and love of maximum personalities of various spheres of life in the world.
Benefits
Avee's Family Crunch Muesli avoids dowdy or slacking & keeps one alert, smart, attractive, young, impressive and dominating. Being a most be-fitting low-fat-diet keeps a person ever ready to take up any task successfully any time of a day or night & produce outstanding results.
Gives stamina to devote more hours on work without break & without feeling dowdy or dour.
Least time consuming and is a perfect low fat diet and a fastest food available any time without much of struggle.
Boost vitimans, reduces cholesterol, maintains youth-fullness.
Taste & Consumption
Avee's Family Crunch Muesli consumption goes up for its delicious taste, health giving ingredients, life-long benefits, and facilitates fast food.
Fibre Editable Grains
Regular use of Avee's Family Crunch Muesli boosts appetite-an orderly healthy routine, maintains smart physique, stamina & sexual urge.

So of course I had to eat this stuff every day for a while. I mean long life? Good looks? Succeed in ANY task day or night? The very Fountain of Youth sitting before me in this box? Not to mention that bit at the end... How could you not eat it at any and all possible times?

As it turns out, the task was not easy. The stuff tasted like moist cardboard. Still, I did feel something different. The mystical renewing powers of this ancient land's breakfast cereal? Or just the power of positive thinking?

Happy Vishwakarma Puja!

Today, September 17 is Vishwakarma Puja. I was happy to learn that there is actually a Hindu God of Engineers. Vishwakarma is his name and he is supposed to have designed temples, palaces, missiles for ancient warfare, and the Universe.

One really neat thing here is the sense of the sacred that is everywhere. Today engineers and craftsmen stop and worship their tools. At our office a priest came into one of our labs and some offerings were made and prayers given:


Although not a Hindu myself, I think it's pretty neat that people stop and pay attention to what makes their livelihoods possible. Especially in my profession of engineering there is a lot of pride we take what we make.

Of course we never use our bare hands, we use tools and they came from somewhere. The next generation of computer chips are designed using computers that have in them the previous generation of computer chips running sophisticated software. The tools that are used to do what we do are the really astounding part of the whole deal. And those tools were in turn designed and built using other tools. And so on.

Once you take into account all the effort put into generations tools and infrastructure, one engineers' contribution to anything we build is but a small fraction of the overall effort.

And when considering our Maker who gave all those tens of thousands of people upon whose shoulders modern engineers stand their hands, minds, and inspiration, we can easily say that we do almost nothing. Just tiny little tweaks to move the whole thing forward.

So although taking a day for engineers to worship their tools might seem a bit funny to us, we should take that anytime over us engineers taking all the credit for our creations to ourselves!

Heading to the Hills

Over labor day we got the notion to head out of Delhi to get some fresh air. So, we went North to Dehra Dun at the foothills of the Himalayas.

The tour book talked about all the biking that was available down there. Nobody who actually lived there was sure about what we were talking about, but finally we found a nice spot in a forest research institute. Isaac the rickshaw-wallah saddled up and took his brothers around while Merinda and I ran behind.

To keep ourselves busy in the hours spent in the car, we started counting things.

• Wild Monkeys: 57
  

So the drive can be very interesting to say the least. It's like one big game of chicken. At one point we got stuck in a little muddy town in traffic for the good part of an hour. Much to the chagrin of the driver, we got out and walked around in the mud for a while to streach our legs. The reason for the jam?

There was a roundabout up a ways. The convention in a roundabout is to yield to the people going around. Of course here, the convention is not followed and the practice is to cut off the people circling around while entering the roundabout. You can imagine that if everybody is cutting off the people already in the circle that it is possible to get into a deadlock situation where it is impossible for anybody to move and the roundabout stops functioning. At that point everybody starts getting out and shouting at each other to direct traffic.

I didn't think to take a picture of that (because that sort of thing is just so common here that you get used to it.), but I did take a picture of a truck we followed behind:
It's hard to read but it says "Bio Hazard - Keep Away". Imagine this thing insanely careening down the road (like everybody else does) except as you can see from the shot below as we were finally passing it....

...the door kept flapping open! Didn't see any bio-hazardous material spilling out onto the road, probably because it had already fallen out, who knows.

This is why going to India is way more exciting than a trip to Disneyland. You just can't make stuff like this up.

On our way back we stopped on the Ganges River at Haridwar: This is one of those places where people bathe themselves in the water as a ritual to wash away one's sins.

Lots of pilgrims come from all over India. All in all we counted on our trip:

• Orange Pilgrims: 69 (we didn't get a good picture of one, but they're usually dressed in bright orange and have dredlocks. I often think hippies must have gotten some of their ideas from India's religious folk)
• Ladies with stuff on their heads: 37 (usually bundles of grass like the one in Isaac's bike picture above)
  

These ladies have holy water from the river Ganges that they are taking home. We considered taking some with us as well, but weren't too sure what to do with it.

• Stray Cattle: 232!!
  

We all took a little wade in the Ganges, but the folks there were insistent that we get in all the way. None of these well-meaning strangers spoke a word of English, so we got lots of pantomimes of pointing to the baby and making baptizing motion. this woman in pink next to me in the photo wanted me to take a drink of the water from this cup she offered and I think was trying to tell me that if I baptized myself and Graham in the water then my milk supply would increase. If only I'd found this place sooner before I weaned the little tike a year ago. . .


Some nice priest came and dotted our foreheads....



Other things we counted during our drive (when we were awake):

• Horses: 23
  
• Donkeys: 11
  

Finally, this is everybody sacked out on the way home!

Summer Vacation Continued...

So I know that this is out of order but we are finally documenting the rest of our Summer home leave.

After meeting up in Utah, we went back to Texas our Texas.

Austin

We got to hang out with Janielle and Jeremy outside of San Antonio and meet their cute dogs (Graham and Isaac's favorite part by far). We went to the local children's museum. One of the coolest things was the legal graffiti that they let us do on the "art car". Notice what Rich wrote on the hood . . . Awww!


Here's Jeremy in his friend's boat. He took us skiing down the local river. I got to drive a boat for the first time and the kids had a blast sitting on the tubes (until Russell and Mom took a big spill).


Back in Austin we got to hang out with friends including our friends the Wells. Our little guys warmed up to their old pals Joseph and Jacob fairly quickly. Here they are at Costco getting into trouble...

Merinda had one of her "girls nights out" with some of her old crowd as well. She stuck bindi on their foreheads and they were less than sympathetic with her stories of how hard it is to have people around cooking, cleaning and driving for you!

Here are our boys down in Austin. We got to meet up with Uncle David, Aunt Robin and Liz and Don. The kids (and me especially) were super-wowed with their new Uncle Don's old radio collection.

Michigan

Then it was on to Michigan for a family reunion with my side of the clan. Uncle James and Aunt Amy got set up for the summer in an amazing little town where he is interning for Whirlpool.

Here's Spencer's 1st birthday. Note his size next to our nearly-two-year old who is clearly gunning for that fancy cake!


The sunsets by Lake Michigan were spectacular...



We had a blast going to pick blueberries. Graham, the only one of our little dears who seems to like fruit, stuffed himself silly.







AND it was Merinda's big 30th birthday! To be honest, the evening was a bit stressful with so many kids around, but once they were out for the count we had an amazing dinner.


Just recording this one for memory's sake: A small fraction of the luggage that we managed to haul around with us across the world. It was a total of 8 bags (about 50lbs each), carry-ons, and 3 car seats. We were a nightmare everywhere we went.

Our luggage was lost twice, a few bags didn't make it to Denmark (once coming back badly mangled), and then when we arrived back in Delhi they were ALL lost. The good news was that they arrived the next day, were delivered straight to our house, and we got a good chunk of money from the airline to make up for the inconvenience. What a great blessing!


Denmark

Visiting Copenhagen was a great stress relief after all the running around, shopping, and work in the USA. Why Denmark?

So we have this book which we'd recommend to anybody who likes to travel or even think about traveling: 1000 Places to See Before you Die.

As we browsed around the book looking for a place to go on the way back, I had it in my head to go to Istanbul, Turkey (probably because we just bought the They Might be Giants album) but upon reading about it, we saw that the big things to do there was to look at old Muslim buildings and explore crowded markets, which we can do just fine from Delhi, thank you.

Denmark caught our eye for two reasons: 1) It is supposed to be bicycle friendly and 2) it has one of the world's oldest amusement parks. So we thought it would be fun for the kids and us.

We were right. Copenhagen is tiny (there are more people who live on our block here than live in all of Denmark) and you can get around easily by bike since there are special bike lanes and even bicycle stop lights to boot.

Here's Isaac and Russell at Tivoli, the old amusement park.

One of the best things about it is that they let the kids ride most of the rides if they have adults around, even Graham who loved the roller coasters. The world's oldest roller coaster is there complete with a girl who controls it with a hand brake!

To get around we put Russell and Graham in a trailer and had a tandem attachment for Isaac:

Just for any fellow bike buffs, I include a picture of what we found that the real locals hauled their kids around in:



Graham at the Queen's place after the changing of the guard. Denmark claims the world's oldest monarchy!

Of course we had to go see the Little Mermaid statue. We bought a Hans Christian Anderson book while we were there. The real stories are good stuff, no Disney happily-ever-after with the Prince for any merfolk who disobey their parents. You end up as foam on the sea if your don't listen to Mom and Dad.


We spent a lot of time just hanging out at the lush green parks they had throughout the city.
If the Mormons were to build a cathedral, I think that this one would be it. The original Christus statue is there (you can see it in the back) with wonderful statues of the 12 apostles lining the side.

This is the cathedral that Spencer W. Kimball went with Boyd K. Packer. In the few seconds where we weren't telling the kids to stop running and be quiet, we got to stand at this statue and think about the great story that Elder Packer told in this talk.
Long vacation, especially for Merinda. 7 weeks on the road with about 500 pounds of luggage and 90 pounds of children! Here she is, jet lagged and heading home in a non-air conditioned, no-seat-belt, New Delhi ambassador taxi, happy to be back. Mostly.