Big Island Bliss

After roughly 20 delightful hours in Seattle, and about 20 gazillion hours on the plane we're here in Hawaii.  Banish those postcard images of white sand beaches and palm trees - we're in the rain forest, hanging out on black sand beaches and exploring lava flows.  This place is amazing.

Val and the boys picked us in Kona Thursday night.  The airport is tiny and almost entirely outside (wish I had pictures).  Intuiting our extreme hunger, Val brought bags of burritos for us and we all happily drove across the island to their house near Hilo.  The kids were thrilled to be together and talked and sang for the full 2 and 1/2 hours in the car.  

We crashed hard, sung to sleep by the coqui frogs.  We were up with the sun around 6, again serenaded by all sorts of delightful creatures.  Sitting up in bed Ben said, "what's that Nuk-Nuk-Wuk-Wuk sound?"

After a mellow morning Val and the kids and I headed into town for lunch and adventures.  First stop was a crazy stir-fry place for lunch, and then Liliukalani Park.  The kids tried to catch fish and Isaiah (and Val!) caught a nap.

  

After the park we visited the most crowded, retro, Asian-inflected grocery store I've ever seen.  You really have no idea how many flavors of soy sauce there are!  And then on to Richardson's Beach to swim and explore.  

Back home there was delicious soup (and Delicious Bread!), movies and grown-ups staying up way too late catching up.  Not a bad beginning at all!

Volcanic adventures to follow....

Welcome!

Welcome everyone, to the India blog!  I'm so touched by the outpouring of good wishes and love that so many of you have sent in response to our little blog announcement.  I hope you'll stay with us through the year - please do leave comments here (there's a link below each post that says "comments" - just click and type and your response will be appended to my post for all to see.)  And email as well - as the wireless I'm using here in rural Hawaii confirms, we are truly living in a wired world.  

The Journey Begins

We're off!  

Moving day came and went uneventfully, if tearfully.  Morning was spent at the GP's doing last minute packing and re-packing and playing some Pin the Tail on the Donkey.  (Come on, doesn't everyone play Pin the Tail one the Donkey before they leave for a massive trip?)  

World's Greatest Babysitter Katie came by to say goodbye and gracefully posed for Ben, World's Greatest Pig Nose Photographer.  

Then the four of us set out for O'Hare.  Dropped 5 enormous suitcases with a very accommodating employee of a very humongous international corporation who bent a handful of big-league rules (laws?) for us.  Hooray for stickin' it to The Man!  I'm not a terrorist and there is no sense in making us pay a gazillion dollars to lug all our India gear to Hawaii and back.  

Lots of hugs goodbye for Chris, whom we will reunite with in Delhi in about 2 weeks.  Still feels surreal to think that we'll be in Delhi in 2 weeks...

O'Hare was just about as unpleasant as usual, but we did partake of every parent's O'Hare salvation, the in-house playground.  

The flight to Seattle was uneventful and we arrived a bit early.  Uncle Dan met us, hauled our gear and took us home to meet Bailey the Dog.  Truly, this is an excellent dog.  Sweet, mellow and so very good with children.  Jen and Dan got very lucky in finding this guy!  

We stayed up waaaaaaay past our bedtimes, crashed in UD &J's family room and slept like logs for.....  about 6 hours.  Awesome.  

Our first full day on the road holds a bit of shopping, a lot of quality time with BtD, and hopping a plane to Hawaii in the afternoon!  Stay tuned for a report from Hilo....

303 Forever

This move has been so long in the coming that I still have trouble believing that we've actually done it.  Packed all the stuff, cleaned out the stuff and finally moved out of our beloved 303.  Thanks to super-star neighbors who watched Ben and Caitlin while Chris and I worked, the packing went quickly.  And thanks to more super star friends who pitched in with cleaning and hauling our belongings around.  All in all it was a pretty painless and minimally stressful process!  But without the help of so many people I'm certain we'd be in really rough shape, so huge a huge thank-you to everyone who helped out during this move!  (Hoping Chris has pictures of the storage space...  a sight which must be seen to be believed)

I'm also so grateful to our good friends and neighbors who moved out before we did.  We felt like old pros this time around, thanks to all we learned from you guys!  And now that we're out the original 303 Posse goes global.  

In Which I Praise My Husband

Lest you think I have overlooked the many wonderful contributions of my husband (and who would dare think such a thing?!), I present an enumeration of his accomplishments of late...

1.  Gave me a freakin huge quantity of Ferrero Rocher candies.  (Show up at our garage sale and I might give you one.  Two if you show up in the rain...)

2.  Looked at all of the pictures Caitlin took today so I could talk to Amanda.  Continued looking at her pictures on the way to dinner so that I would not go nuts/blind from trying to see them in the car, on the puny display screen of her camera.

3.  Moved a very full van load of stuff to our storage space.

4.  Retrieved for me the letter of affiliation necessary for our visas.

5.  Cooked both breakfast and lunch for the children while I was working on visa applications.  (Yes, it took that long.  No, not because I'm incompetent.  You try making sense of Travisa Outsourcing.)

6.  Before breakfast, went to the store to buy me yogurt so that I might have my favorite breakfast on my birthday.  (Plain yogurt + Hemp Plus Granola = manna from heaven, with more chewing.)

7.  Also bought croissants so that I might have a Delicious Snack while working of visa applications.  

8.  Got out of his cranky no-fun-havin' funk with a minimum of fall-de-rall.

9.  Removed the van seats from the van.

10.  Replaced the van seats.

11.  Walked Ben around the Capitol when he got fussy at dessert.

12.  Schlepped to Walgreens in the rain for last minute garage sale supplies

and for the baker's dozen of today's Excellent Husband Acheivements...

13.  Faithfully lay on the floor beside the couch while I blogged.  

How lucky can a girl get?  

Happy Birthday to Me

Today was the big 3-3.  The "one quarter of you life" mark as my husband keeps saying.  Despite the stress of moving in 5 days, this was one of the best birthdays I've had in a long time.  

I begin my 34th year with plane tickets in hand (or as close to that as is possible anymore in the digital age) to both Seattle and Hawaii, because why shouldn't we go see some of our favorite people and places before we go to India?  The kids and I leave home the 17th, fly to Seattle and then on to Kona the next day.  Val and her excellent crew are meeting us in Kona and promise to gleefully drive us around the Big Island.  (Must be the Costco fumes...)  About a week of all the Hawaiian awesomeness we can stand and then back to Seattle for a few days with Dan and Jen (and the new dog!)  Then back to Chicago, rendezvous with my mom (and all our bags and visas - hopefully!) and we're off to India at long last.  Not too bad a way in which to begin our year away!

And today itself was not at all a bad way to begin my 34th year.  Lots of packing done around the house, 3 rooms just about totally stripped down, and plenty of administrative kakalakas crossed off the list.  Our wonderful neighbors watched Ben much of the day and even brought me a gift of cookies and yarn.  Our friend Amanda, who has spent the last 9 months in Varanasi stopped by to give us an Indian cell phone and share some insights about life in India.  Then out to dinner and dessert with my parents.  The kids made me lovely gifts and were super company for the evening.  (Not to mention being totally adorable at dessert.)

When All Else Fails, Chocolate

A few hours and a slice of cake later, and wouldn't you know it?  Everything looks much better than it did last post.  For everyone out there fighting their own battles, I offer you salvation in a 9x13....  Vegan Chocolate Cake!

(Don't be scared off - the cake is very moist and very chocolaty, and involves no strange, hard-to-find ingredients.)

Pre-heat oven to 350.  In a large bowl combine:

3 Cups flour

1/2 Cup cocoa

2 Cups sugar

1 TBS baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

Dump all dry ingredients into an UN-greased 9x13 pan.  Make 3 holes in the mixture and pour into them:

3/4 Cup cooking oil

1/2 TBS vanilla

1 TBS vinegar

Pour 2 Cups water over the top of everything.  Mix it all very well, until everything is totally combined.  

Bake 30-40 minutes

For the brave, you can do all the mixing right in the 9x13.  For the hard-core, add 1/2-1 cup of chocolate chips.  And for the artistically inclined, break out the jimmies and go stark-raving-mad.  (Bonus points if you can frost and endangered species and/or a south-Asian country onto the cake!)

If Its Not One Thing...

... its everything.  

(If you'd rather not read a whiny post about the ridiculous hurdles before us as we try to get to India, bail out now!)

Before 8am this morning I found out that our drug insurance will not cover the cost of all of our medications for 3/4 of the coming year.  The many many medications which we have, here in our home, in bulk, enough to prevent malaria, cure infections and do many other happy things for 4 people for a full year.  The medications we cannot do without.  The medications which we have spent roughly $7000 on.  Not covered.  If I wasn't a believer in universal health care, I sure am now!  How is it that our government can give Chris a fellowship (but not release the money until we leave the country), require him to take no appointment at the UW (resulting in a loss of our health coverage, and income), and then somehow expect us to be able to buy things like all our meds and plane tickets?  Had we known that we were going to take a financial hit roughly the size of Chris's annual income before we received any fellowship money I think we would've made very different choices about how we executed this whole project.  I don't know how people who are living on the bleeding edge of the grad student margin can afford to do such a thing.  

Alright, so after the long and frustrating conversations with various bureaucrats about the insurance I tried to tackle the visas.  The sort of visa the kids and I have to have is effective from the date of issue for exactly 1 year.  Regardless of the fact that we must be in India for one year, no matter what, or else Chris loses funding.  And regardless of the fact that it is impossible to go from no-visa to visa and then arrive in India in zero elapsed time.  So it looks like we'll end up having to try to renew the visa in India sometime after we get there.  Can't begin to tell you how excited I am to try to do that.  There just aren't words.  (OK, there are, but this is a family blog.)

Icing the cake is the infection in my thumb and resulting generalized crap-tastic haze I'm trying to work in.  Also the dissertation chapter Chris was supposed to have finished for his advisor today and the accompanying stress of that. 

And maybe toughest of all is the death of a friend last week.  Someone we hadn't been in touch with recently, but someone our whole family cared an awful lot about.  For some reason he's in my thoughts so much and the whole situation is just tough for me to come to terms with.  Hits a bit too close to home, maybe.  Anyhow, we love you Jim.  

Cheerier post to follow...  thanks for reading this far.  

A Bit of an Explanation

A few comments and the why's and wherefore's of this blog...

1. We're going to India and instead of trying to keep up with everyone via email (or even snail mail) we figured a blog was the best way to go. Pictures, updates, etc - all in one place. Email and real mail are of course still VERY much welcome - we'll miss you guys and voices from home will certainly help. Contact info will be disseminated once we have it.

2. The title perhaps warrants a bit of explanation itself. Chris gets all the credit, but he was quick to point out that the cultural reference may be lost on folks under 14 or over 40. (I'm willing to bet there are those of you better than 40 that get it...) But for those who are lost, the grunge movement more or less blew up with a song by Nirvana called "Smells Like Teen Spirit" Wikipedia says, "the song was dubbed an "anthem for apathetic kids" of Generation X." Have a listen...



India is pretty much synonymous with incense, and Nag Champa is the crown princess of incense, at least by our reckoning. I bought a box at The Farm and stashed it in my knitting bag for the rest of the vacation (more about all that to come soon!) and wound up with lovely-smelling everything. So nice. Have a look at the Nag Champa website or the Wikipedia page. We looooooove it.

3. Finally the clock on the right will faithfully provide you with current India time. One time zone for the whole darn country. Just last night I was telling Chris how I really seem to be happier and more productive if I'm doing whatever seems best whenever it seems best, without being bound to externally imposed constraints. Living in a country where the sun could easily rise at 3am or set at 3pm seems like good deal to me - the absurdity of "breakfast time" is foregrounded nicely. I'm hoping to add an India population clock and a currency converter too.

Just in Case

In preparation for the move Chris and I made lots of lists. Lists of tasks to be accomplished, lists of things to pack and store here, lists of things to pack and take to India, and a list of things to buy.

The "things to buy" list has been mostly my domain and in executing it I realize I am deeply infected with some sort of strange American Consumerist Paranoia. I go into any store with a specific item in mind, and am seized with a burning desire to buy, in bulk, many MANY other things - just in case.

In Walgreens: "Maybe I should buy extra toothbrushes for everyone, just in case. And notebook paper. And pens and chap-stick. "
In REI: "Oh hey, these are excellent hiking socks, and look! Pre-made first aid kids. Oh, and Keen sandals for the whole family. Maybe I should buy some, just in case."
And let's not even go into what was running through my head in Target.

What is it with me? I'm moving to a country that is home to over a BILLION people and somehow I worry that there won't be toothbrushes?!?! Quite subconsciously I have internalized the notion that American stores are the one and only source of all the things that I will need to make my life livable. This is ridiculous!

Certainly there are things that are better (only?) purchased here, before we leave. But toothbrushes? And am I really not capable of making my own first aid kit?

Its been interesting to be snapped into focus about consumption and assumptions...

The $41K Question

So right now you are all asking, "When are you leaving?", the most natural question in the world. And I tell you the truth - we don't really know. Thus prompting you all to ask, "Doesn't that make you crazy?" And I honestly tell you, no, I'm really calm about this.

Really. (But I appreciate you all knowing me well enough to know that this uncertainty holds great potential to drive me stark raving mad.)

Before we can set a firm departure date a number of things must happen. 1. The Indian government must grant Chris a visa. 2. The Indian government must grant the kids and me visas. 3. The U.S. government must release Chris's fellowship funding. 5. We have to buy tickets.

Early indications lead us to believe this will all happen sometime next week allowing us to leave sometime around Sept 17. At least I hope so.

We absolutely have to be out of our apartment by the 17th.

T-minus 12 Days (more or less...)

Less than 2 weeks until departure and its high time the blog went live. Stay tuned for updates as we prepare for, and then embark on our year in India!