INDIA-A LAST LOOK

Looking back at my travels, I've done close to 3,000 blogs and this effort was disjointed and irregular. I've missed events, lost or misplaced pictures  and today I'm laughing about it. I thought I'd blog pictures that I didn't fit into any narrative, like the Bengal tigers, snatched from the film we saw. Aren't they magnificent animals?


We learned a lot about the Hindu Gods. The great Mahatma Gandhi was  much admired,  But I never mentioned his seven dangers to Human Virtue:
Wealth without work; Pleasure without conscience;  Knowledge without character; Business without ethics, Science without humanity; Religion without sacrifice and Politics without principle.
They resonate with me.

We learned a lot about weddings;  the groom rides a white horse, an elephant or a black horse. What about people who don't have a horse? This groom can afford to hire a horse and carriage and decorate it. But, I never found out how even poorer people get married?  Maybe next time.

And wouldn't you just once like to ride free and unfettered on top of a car or truck? As a farm girl growing up, I had that experience. And many times rode in the back of a pick-up. In California even your dog can't ride untied in the back of a pick-up.

OAT is such a great company to travel with because of the great off-itinerary items included in the experience.  Though my cricket  lesson was canceled, one of the employees posed with his cricket racket for me. A cricket serve and return is like a baseball pitch. You can't see it unless it is coming at you at 112 miles per hour. I missed the lesson, but enjoyed the match.

And I have to wonder, will I ever enter a bus with a crowd of people waiting to get on, and look for a vendor holding belly dancing beads or some other fascinating item you can buy nowhere else?

I'm an art nut and an artist. I took pictures of art everywhere.

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Art isn't only about paintings, prints, sculpture and fabric wall hangings. What about this doorway in the Palace Hotel?

And this carved door into Agra Marble Company.

Bronze carvings on the hip of a hippo at Chandela.

And a foot rest on the end of our bed at our last hotel. Some flights were early. Others were late in the night.  We got to enjoy a professional sari fitting. A yoga class designed to remove tensions and let go of all cares. I marked down every posture he taught us.  I learned to breathe out loud. Ahmmm. Ooohhh. Mmmmm.

The gift shop had an interesting assortment of things.

These shoes have tread miles of India. A country I'd recommend for its wonderful traditions; its diverse and colorful  people. People here are warm and giving; they speak 607,000 languages. It is hard for me to imagine. My nearby town of Stockton has 22 ethnicities, which means great food.

At the airport in Dehli I saw something I'd never seen before. A smoking lounge. Paid for by Camel cigarettes my guess.

Even a decorated camel is art.  Those of you who know me, know I have to get my art "fix". And, I did.
Alaviha. I'll let you guess which of the thousands of languages it is. It means, goodbye.

PREPARING FOR WINTER IN OREGON.

I spent a week in Oregon to get ready for winter. A storage building matches the house my son, Doug, built for me. It was full of leftover building materials, necessary tools and "stuff". It is small but useful except it was boiling hot at the end of the day and freezing in the morning. You couldn't work in it with any comfort.  First, I had a trench dug from the house to the building for electricity and water. Over that a new driveway put in.

Paisley, helped her grandfather rake out the gravel. Grandfather Frank is driving the equipment in the background.

The rake is a bit heavy, but helping grandpa is important.

Frank emptied everything out of the shed and with a special machine, hoisted the sheet rock up to the ceiling with a helper.

Everything inside got put outside.

I brought home stuff no longer needed to donate to Habitat for Humanity. Then the rains came, a day earlier than predicted. We were able to quickly get things under plastic and protected.  I didn't get a picture.

We put some stuff back in the building. It is still raining, and no more work has been done on the storage building.  My next project is a car port for my van. Then, I'll be finished with my place in Oregon. I mapped out the spot to put the car port, but I'm told I have to be there. Another trip is set for the last week of October-early November. Then I'll snuggle in and work on my genealogy and quilts during the cold months of winter.

I know my storage building is pretty boring stuff, but from Oregon I hope to do some road traveling in my van if I ever get my projects in Murphys completed.
Ciao

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES, TAKE NOTE.

FROM A FOOD WORKER IN ONE OF THE MOST EXPENSIVE CITIES IN THE U.S.-WASHINGTON D.C.

"Every day, I serve food to some of the most powerful people on earth: I’m a cook for the federal contractor that runs the US Senate cafeteria. I’m a single father and I only make $12 an hour; I had to take a second job at a grocery store to make ends meet. But even though I work seven days a week – putting in 70 hours between my two jobs – I can’t manage to pay the rent, buy school supplies for my kids or even put food on the table. I hate to admit it, but I have to use food stamps so that my kids don’t go to bed hungry.

"I'm tired of hearing platitudes from millionaires who are running for President.  I want the presidential hopefuls to know that I live in poverty. Many senators canvas the country giving speeches about creating “opportunity” for workers and helping our kids achieve the “American dream” – most don’t seem to notice or care that workers in their own building are struggling to survive.

"I’ve done everything that politicians say you need to do to get ahead and stay ahead: I work hard and play by the rules; I even graduated from college and worked as a substitute teacher for five years. But I got laid-off and I now I’m stuck trying to make ends meet with dead-end service jobs. American voters should ask themselves: if presidential candidates won’t help the workers who serve them every day, will they really help the millions of low-wage American workers who they don’t know or see? I’m a Bible-believing Christian, just like a lot of the candidates. Scripture says to “Love your neighbor” and “Do unto to others as you would have them do unto you”. It’s a shame too few candidates follow the guidance of the book in which they say they believe."

He and his coworkers' multinational employer had its contract renewed without being required to provide a decent living wage to its American workers.

READY FOR FAMILY REUNION.

For the last three days, my son and grandson’s came to help set up for our family reunion. Mason and Stewart sanded chairs to be painted.

Doug discovered a picnic table had cracked and  rotted boards, so he rebuilt it. We know it would be cheaper to toss the stuff and go buy something new, but none of us like to do things that way.

Nothing works as smoothly nor as quickly as you think it will. My truck wouldn’t start and I had to have it towed to the garage in Angels Camp.

The second day, the boys picked gobs of weeds and we went to the dump with a full load. (Truck is back) The rebuilt table is beautiful.

Stewart scrubbed decks, did weed eating, trimmed shrubs among other chores. The jobs the boys did in Las Vegas were easier than working for grandma.

Mason cleaned off the roof, set up the cooler, chased gobs of weeds. He doesn’t like picking weeds, or any of that stuff. But, it gives him an idea of what he doesn’t want to do with his own yard some day. In fact, apartment living is looking very appealing to me at this moment.

By the second and third day, Laurie decided to lend a hand. She primed the chairs. Painted benches and tables and kept everyone hydrated and fed.


Day three, the chairs are looking good. We have two blue, two yellow, two green and two red. And, a matching coffee table. She has some artistic ideas in mind for the chairs as well.

Things got a little easier for the boys,  but not much. Mason uses the compressor to blow up the tubes.

Stewart scrubbed up the trampoline. They moved heavy barrel plants around with a dolly, cut and hauled tons of brush for another dump run today. The boys are heading for Reno for Mason’s college orientation over the weekend. I’m still getting chiropractor treatments and hoping to be well by late July to return to the motor home. We had an outdoor plug to the sprinkling systems clock die just as the temperature hit over 100. This morning at 5 a.m. I was out reprogramming the clock. The new digital clocks are no match for the old mechanical clocks. I have one that has run for 18 years without any trouble, and it can be programmed in two minutes without double glasses, a flashlight and a book.

THE NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT

Yesterday, my congressional candidate brother, Will, visited  Cousin Gary visiting from Southern, CA. Gary had never been to an Occupy Wall Street protest because, as he put it, “I’m not interested in closing ports and businesses where people have jobs. And, I don’t want to lay down in the street.”

He also confessed to not quite understanding what the point is. While vitriolic radio show hosts criticize and condemn the movement as pointless and leaderless, I notice that all National news organizations are covering this movement- because  it has legs.  As one local protester, Rick Mines put it, “Protesting the concentration of wealth and power held by less than 1 percent of the population is an effort to  save capitalism.  Capitalism has to be fair,”  (And I would add regulated.)
You can’t compete when some guy is putting $100 million down to put a  Supreme Court Justice in place, or when 80% of congress regards their major job in governing is to get rich by way of  hand-outs, insider trading, and million dollar jobs when they leave. I take heart because the long term apathy among the general population is finally over. You couldn’t get people to take to the streets. That has changed all over the world as well as  in our highly conservative mountain counties, Tuolumne, Calaveras and Amador.

It was a small band on a cold December evening during the busy Christmas season. Two young students were there. The only other woman said to me, “In our county we are all part of the 99%. We don’t have any concentration of wealthy here. But, it is still important to let people know, its time to take a stand and we desperately need change and jobs and a robust middle class.”

This sign speaks to an issue that may be more important than the government laws that tilt toward the wealthy.  It is a slippery slope to a fascist state when we weaken our first amendment rights.  There are many good things in the NDAA, like protections for whistleblowers. But, we are not to know if sub-par maintenance of our airplanes is a factor in crash. We cannot know who contributed what to the congressional committee people overseeing the granting of government contracts. On any contract,  any savings realized cannot be directed to the National Debt once the money has been set aside and is not used for that project. No clue to where that money WILL go. Suspected terrorists will not have the same rights of trial, detention, and ability to defend themselves as we do now. There are good things in the act, but  many slippery areas. The idea to audit the Defense Department Budget was soundly rejected. Hmmm. It’s on-line. Read it.

BEADING AN HEIRLOOM

Not many people engage in work that is expected to last  one thousand years. My friend Sharon Sargent took up beading about twelve years ago. On this piece she spent two years, (not full-time) making Ruby, a wall hanging. Beads so small I had to get a magnifying glass to see them.

Sharon estimates that she could have done it in a year if she had devoted full-time to the piece. She has two daughters and will begin another similar wall hanging with a green color theme, in 2012.

The beads look huge through the camera lens. But, I could not see the individual beads with my naked eye.  A piece like this, glass beads woven so perfectly the wall hanging moves like a fine silk fabric;  a treat to behold and touch. Native Americans do marvelous bead work but nothing I’ve seen with beads this tiny. An amazing feat. I’ve visited museums all over the U.S and several in France, Spain, Portugal and Germany. The Louvre has at least one tapestry that I can remember, 900 years old,  made from cloth with fine metallic threads enhancing it.  Sharon’s bead work will easily, with care, last for a thousand years, most likely more. I am truly in awe.  Not surprising,  it took every prize in a recent exhibit.

Handwork is something I respect since I’m a quilter and rug maker. I’ve enjoyed the results of my projects, but I do not have the ability to stay with something as difficult as working such tiny beads. Now that I’m an avid RVer, I see Bert and Sharon, old friends, just once a year. Sharon and I were members of a stock club years ago and she was our bookkeeper. She was just as precise with the books as she is with her beading. Reminds me of that old adage, if your are going to do something, do it well. That’s Sharon.

IN TIME OF WAR

I'm an anti-war activist and I come by it understandably. One of my uncles spent a good portion of his life suffering what they used to call shell shock, and is now called  post traumatic stress syndrome. When you take a normal person and ask him to kill, and he does, it changes everything he believed about himself.
During the Cold War with Russia, my father subscribed to Russian Life if only to teach us that Russian people were not evil. They were people who desired the same things in life that we do. People around the world basically want the same things, family, security, shelter, enough to eat, freedoms to pursue a fruitful, productive life. They are not evil. They have evil leaders.
Locked away in the Hermitage for all those cold war years and beyond, were beautiful, unseen masterpieces. I found a book with Hermitage pictures and tried to get some reasonable images. I tried several websites and no one is allowed to photograph the master works and I didn't find any pictures. Hope these suffice for a peak.

High society.

A man bringing home food for his family.

A beauty.

Removing a cinder from the eye was a family affair.

One of hundreds of paintings of the Madonna. Many have been replicated on stamps and Christmas Cards.

Pregnancy watch.

The clothing and trappings are colorful and interesting.
 The Hermitage has artworks from masters around the world. Several books have been written about it with photos. It has a gold room, and priceless treasures besides paintings. 
On my bucket list is a trip to the former Soviet Union to see the Hermitage at St. Petersburg.

http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/13/hm13_3_008.html
This link gives information about the Hermitage.