20
June
Wordless Wednesday – HAL Aerospace Museum
18
June
Relax
Our neighbourhood has a number of amenities that were a big part of the reason why we chose to live here. Sure, the food in the restaurant has gone way downhill, the local corner store has been temporarily closed for about six weeks now, and the pool bar does not have a liquor license, but there are still a number of great features. One of them is located at the end of our street, right beside the lil’s park:
The SPA. They offer a long list of services, mainly massage and facials and have gotten rave reviews from any one that we have talked to, including a few of our house guest. Yet, we have lived here for eight months and I had not yet made use of their services. This is partly because they don’t offer pedicures, my favourite spa treat, and partly because I am afraid that I will like it. Too much.
I was gifted with some Spa bucks from my brother-in-law when he was hear at Christmas, and have tried to use them on a couple of occasions, but had to cancel at the last minute with either sick lils, or travelling Willy, or a better offer (hey, boozy lunch IS important!). Earlier this month I noted that they were only good for six months, so I figured that I should get my butt in gear. The lils were off at day camp last week, so I had five whole days in which to use them. As luck would have it I was under the weather on Friday and had to move the appointment to today.
It was way worse than I thought it would be. My life here has been relatively devoid of pampering, and this was a royal pampering. From the décor in the open air lobby, the flowers that were floating everywhere, to the glass of freshly squeezed pineapple juice, everything said calm and relaxation.
I was escorted to my little hut:
Then my masseuse quickly got to business, showing me the room, letting me get ready then beginning the massage. I had randomly chosen the “Javanese” massage, which was billed as a deep tissue massage that used Balinese techniques. It involved a lot of pressure and rubbing, and not as much manipulation as generally like, but it was good. I had asked her to use medium-hard force, and she didn’t hold back. She even got up on the massage table a couple of times to work on some tense spots! The massage was billed as a 90 minute massage, which should mean a 60 minute massage and 30 minute “relaxation” period in my room. Either she lost track of time, or I was lucky, and she ended up giving me a full 90 minutes of massage. Right before the masseuse let, she started my outdoor rainfall shower and encouraged me to enjoy my calm time.
Now I need to figure out how to keep myself from going there all the time. I also booked Willy in for a 90 minute massage this weekend. I figure he can’t get mad at me if he is doing it too!!!
Just some pot pourri, under the massage table, hidden from view. Yet pretty… it’s the little touches.
15
June
Sometimes it forgets
For someone that likes to plan and overprepare everything in life, I sort of fly by the seat of my pants with respect to the tales you see here. I write when inspiration hits, and although I have about a thousand post ideas scattered all over my digital and real life, I rarely know what will be posted on any given day until I sit to write it. The exception to this is Wednesday, when I share pictures, generally from the week that was. Last night I broke with tradition and wrote a cute lil tale about Goose, how she looks up to me, and whether or not I have inspired her career aspirations. Thinking that it would make for a cute Friday tale, I decided not to publish it, and hit “save draft” one more time before going to bed.
I had seven hours a few minutes to myself today, and decided that I should start trying to at least find all of the post ideas and at least throw them into one of the several documents that I have started on the subject (all of them called ideas.doc, of course). I was but a few minutes into this thrilling task when I realized that I had a shiny new post all ready to go, so I should publish it. Two seconds later I was at my dashboard and there was no trace of my cute lil tale. It was completely gone, with no actual proof that it existed. I knew I wrote it, and I knew that WordPress had eaten it, as I have had this happen before, and have vowed to never author content in WP again. The rest of the afternoon was spent berating WP for eating something that I wrote and mental self-flagellation for breaking my only rule.
Today you get pictures that amuse me, because I needed a giggle.
From our trip to Ottawa, I went to Mud Lake with the lils and got to play around with my brand new zoom lens. This was just one of the test shots that I took, focussing on the duck on the rock.
Then I got home and zoomed in:
That turtle is in for a rude awakening!
Tonight, as I prepared the lils for bed, I shut down all the windows (they spray for bugs in the evening – and that is nasty stuff). When I got to Goose`s room and looked down on our neighbour`s back door.
There are a number of stray cats in the neighbourhood, but this one seems to have found a pretty cozy spot. She was OUT.
The punchline to Goosie’s tale? She wants to go to clown school and become a clown when she grows up. You can decide whether or not I influenced that path.
12
June
They are not even that big!
I spent the better part of Sunday trying to plan our summer vacation. It started out as a fun exercise, looking at all the pretty pictures of hotels and beaches, picking room types that were outrageously expensive and dreaming a little, then crashing to reality and trying to pick places that were in our budget and met our needs. We had simple needs, or so I thought. We wanted a trip that involved one flight, restaurants that could understand and deal with our food allergies, and resorts that were family friendly. There were two basic signs that I looked for in determining if a resort was family friendly; that there was a mention of a “kids club” or play facilities on the website, and that you could actually add children to the room to get a price quote. That narrowed the field considerably, but I still had a list of 20 or so possible places.
At this point I did what I always do when I am researching something. I built a spreadsheet. It listed all of the pertinent details, and might have had pro and con columns. The research was slow, as almost all of the hotels used the same archaic software to generate their room quotes. Every time I changed one variable (like room type or meal options) it required that I re-enter many of the other variables. I was planning a family vacation that involved a beach, so I pushed through. Then I noticed that I had to keep changing the number of lils in my room from two to one to get a quote. When I left it at two, I would get one of two errors; either “there are no rooms available that match your search criteria” or “you must book two rooms for your needs”. It happened so often that I had to keep checking to make sure that I had not messed up and kept looking in the same hotel.
This seemed an odd quirk at first, but when approximately 90% of the family friendly hotels came back with this result, I began to get upset. At first I thought that I might get a better result if I talked to the hotel, but the ones that I reached stuck to the line that the rooms could not accommodate us, so we either upgraded to a larger room, or we got two (sometimes not even adjoining rooms). I could understand if I was trying to book a room for a group that included older children or adults, but mine are little. They don’t take up a lot of space, they can’t stay on their own, and we are going on a family vacation FFS. Even if I thought it was a good idea to leave them alone, it would not have gone well. In reality, we would have either split the family or all slept in one room any way, likely in the same bed!
Perseverance and some great recommendations from friends paid off, and we picked a resort that will allow us all to stay in the same room, without charging a premium. The others, which included both big chains and small independent hotels, won’t get any of our money, especially not the extra money that they were trying to extort from us! I wonder if they would have been more flexible if we weren’t calling in the low season, and they could have filled those two rooms with two families of four.
11
June
Expelled from day camp
We have very limited experience with day camps for the lils, and although the first experience was not entirely positive , I was willing to try again. A large part of this is that I am at a loss for cool excursions for the lils to do that don’t involve long car rides, that Willy is travelling a bunch this month, and that many of their friends are gone on extended trips for the summer. While we all love each other, we need to see other people every once in a while!
As luck would have it, there is a series of camps that are running in the community hall in our neighbourhood, so I enrolled both lils this week. The camps started this morning, and we arrived at the appointed time to be greeted by a room that was not quite ready, and a leader that had not arrived. She arrived and met each parent, but things had not gotten started when I left twenty minutes later. I was leery about how things would go, so popped in at lunch time, and it appeared that all was well.
When I picked the lils up, they were happy, but both spoke of a little boy who was bugging them. They were excited about their day, but there were little things, like Goose’s butterfly was crumpled thrown out by this boy, he threw sand on Woo… I took most of this with a grain of salt, until Woo told me that he was punched a few times, including the face. Sure enough, he had a lump under his eye and possibly the starts of a shiner. He said he told the leader and that she told the boy to stop it, but I wasn’t happy… so I went back over to talk to her.
The leader was aware of the problems, and let me know that she had tried to talk to me as I was leaving, but I took the lils out early and intercepted the group as they were returning from the park, so she didn’t have a chance. She realized that the boy in question, who was only three was a problem; disruptive, hitting, not listening. She was always having to discipline him, so she called his mom and asked that she remove him from the class, so he won’t be back tomorrow. While I would normally like to see the boy be given a chance to change his behaviour – it is a one week camp so that wasn’t going to happen. So he was asked to leave, and the selfish mama in me is glad that my lils won’t be bothered by him any more.
8
June
Rock’n’roll
I was a child of the eighties, and as such grew up with a pair of roller skates. They were “the” thing to have, and I was happy to finally get a pair at some point in my teens. They were hand-me-downs from my sister, which meant that I had to covet them for a year or so before I got them, which made me appreciate them all the more. They were the classic white boot/red wheel pair, and were well loved by both of us. They certainly beat the metal wheels that I had been strapping on my sneakers to that point.
As an adult I looked to reintroduce roller skates into my life and failed. I looked all over, but roller blades were the in thing then, and skates were nowhere to be found. I reluctantly settled, but soon grew to love the blades. I would frequently hope on the bike path, near my west end apartment, and head downtown and back. It was a long ride and a good work out, with no cars to deal with.
My blading was curbed a little when I moved in with Willy. We were living in the Market area of downtown, and access to the bike paths meant that I had to face my foe, the car. I was a little bit of an out of control roller blader, and cars meant that the rides were scary, not enjoyable. Then we moved back to the burbs, had two babies, and I forgot all about my blades.
When Santa brought Woo some blades for Christmas, I felt a bit of regret that I had not given in to the urge to bring my blades to India. Woo loves his, and our community is perfect for riding around. Then yesterday, these were posted on the community news group: 
They are just Goose’s size, so we snapped them up for her. They came with a full set of pads, so she was ready to go instantly. The look on her face when she first tried them was priceless, pure joy. She is so in love with them, even though she can’t actually move on them. She has mastered standing on her toes, standing on the wheels, falling, and getting herself back up again. It’s only a matter of time before she is rocking and rolling around. Now I want to get roller skates again. 
6
June
Wordless Wednesday – Last day of school!
5
June
Keeping Lakshmi
When we let our first cook go, I was certain that we would not have another cook during our stay in India. I was initially in love with the idea of a cook, but knew I was more in love with the idea of learning how to cook Indian dishes properly than I was with having someone cook for us. I actually like to cook, so figured that I would learn by osmosis, or, failing that, taking lessons.
Then Lakshmi fell into our lives. We knew after one week that she was a good fit and a good cook, and that she liked us as much as we liked her. The biggest key for us was that she made life easier. I had oodles of extra time to play with the lils now, and that just made things a little more relaxed. She started working for us part time in mid-April, with an agreement that she would start full time in June, when we returned from our Canadian vacation, and our friends (her other gig) left for their home in Minnesota. We were set.
Then, while we were in Canada, Willy got a message from our friends letting us know that Lakshmi had been offered and accepted, a full time job with another family. It was a “9-5” job, which meant that it was extremely unlikely that she would have any time to cook for us. We were crushed. We thought that we had it all figured out, that she was going to be spoiling us and the lils for the remainder of our stay in India. It stung because we were all attached to her, especially the lils. We didn’t tell them while we were in Canada, and I was dreading telling them upon our return.
The day that we arrived back in India, Lakshmi called me. I didn’t end up getting to the phone in time, but was relieved to have missed her call when I saw the call display. I was too tired to have the conversation with her and didn’t want her to be the stereotype. I had been warned about the helpers who stay with you until something better comes along, regardless of what you have pre-paid them for, or what your verbal agreement is. We knew that there was an outside chance that Lakshmi would find something else, but she assured us that she wanted to work for us, and would only be looking for something much closer to our eventual departure. We had paid her for the month of May based on that assumption and had negotiated a wage increase for her increased hours upon our return.
Monday came and Lakshmi came to the house as usual. She went to the kitchen and started cooking right away, and acted like nothing was different. When I finally worked up the nerve to ask her about the other job, she explained that she asked them to wait until we left. She couldn’t bear to leave us (ok, the lils), and asked them if she could work part time until we left. Happily they agreed! Sometimes, it just works out.
4
June
A day of protest – Bharat Bandh
Most days I am fairly ignorant of the day to day newsworthy happenings in India. I follow a few Indian news sites, so I can tell you about the state of the rupee, which is not good right now; some of the higher profile visitors to India, like Bill Gates last week; the corruption that occurs at all levels of government; and the current struggles of several of India’s national airlines, which is quite the saga. I do make efforts to find out more, but am frequently frustrated by the fact that I don’t follow news enough to learn more about the dynamics at work.
This Wednesday we were surprised to receive notice from the lils school that they would be closed the following day because of a country wide strike to protest a sharp increase in petrol prices. Gas prices are set by the federal government in India and there is some variation by state due to taxation. The current prices in Bangalore are 80rs/litre ($1.51CAD) for petrol and 46rs/litre for diesel ($0.86CAD). The most recent increase was on petrol, and was a significant increase of 7rs/litre ($0.14CAD). Our car is diesel, which has way more price stability, so we were not affected. Many people drive petrol cars, however, so this increase was significant for many Indian families.
The idea of an organized and country wide strike is new to us. Coming from Canada, we don’t often see protests coming in the form of an illegal strike, and I can’t say that we have ever seen one that essentially encompasses the entire country. We have heard of other “bandh” or strikes here since our arrival, but they seemed to have little effect on life in Bangalore. We were very surprised to hear that school had been cancelled, given that the reasons were that the bandh had been confirmed by police, and they were worried that the buses would be disrupted and that the staff would not be able to get to the school.
Willy asked around in his office, and was essentially told that we should use our judgement as to whether or not we should give our helpers the day off, but that we should not expect to see anything in Bangalore. The official line from his office was that the buildings would be open, but that staff should use their own judgement, and only go to work if they felt it was safe to do so. In the end, Willy elected to work from home, we told our driver (who has a fairly long commute to get here) to take the day off, and we let our maid and cook, who both live nearby, decide if they wanted to come in. Our cook decided to take the day off, and our maid elected to wait and see what the day brought.
I wanted to know what was happening, so I turned to twitter in the morning, and was surprised to see that there had been numerous disruptions and some violence in Bangalore. In the middle of the night three of the local transit buses were burned out, and over a dozen others were damaged, which resulted in the cancellation of all public transit buses for the city. Taxis and rickshaw drivers, were seemingly exempt from the bandh, and were profiting nicely by charging triple the regular fare, for any trip. There were reports of motorists being harassed, and shop owners being intimidated into closing. By the middle of the day it was apparent that Bangalore was closed for the day, or at least until 6:00pm, the designated end time for the strike. Those that did venture out reported that the roads were empty, and driving a dream. I wish I could have seen that. There were similar disruptions in some pockets of India, but most of the larger cities were in not affected to the same degree as Bangalore.
In the end, life did go on. Sheela, our maid, arrived late in the day, which allowed us to go out with friends, as planned. The restaurant had many cancellations and was fairly empty, so staff was super attentive, and we likely got a couple of extra wine refills. We were largely unaffected.
This week, the government announced a 2rs roll back of the increase, but claimed it was unrelated to the bandh. The organizers stated that the roll back was unacceptable, but there seems to be much less protest. Many who were given the day off on Thursday were asked to make up the time on the weekend. The businesses who were forced to close lost money, as did the some of their staff (who would not have been paid) and the daily wage earners who would not have been able to find work. People were hurt, and property was damaged. It was impressive to see how quickly life in Bangalore and other cities was turned upside down and then righted again. I don’t know if I would ever see such a widespread and hastily organized protest in Canada.