Isabel Has Been Drawing Too

Barn Owls Outside our Windows

photo and drawing by Clio

     I was the one that saw the owls first. I saw owls in a tree outside my parents' window.   The owls that we've seen are barn owls.  The first time I saw them I thought they were grass owls but later I found out that the owls couldn't be grass owls, because grass owls nest in tall grass, and these owls live in the side of a building.  There are six owls.  There are three owlets and three grownups.  Yesterday I saw four in a tree: one owlet and three grownups.  
                                                    by Clio

  Besides becoming avid owl spotters,  what else have we been up to?  We went on  a fabulous five day trip with Eric Worby, wife Gul Rukh and daughter Sharoda.  We made a nice circuit starting from Chennai, to Mahabalipuram, to Pondicherry, to Traquebar, to Thanjavur, back to Pondicherry and home to Chennai.  We saw, we ate, we traveled.  It was great fun to have old friends to share the adventure with.  Sharoda, at age 17, is the girl of every parent's dream.  She lovingly and patiently shared her interests in drawing, writing and books with the similarly interested Isabel.  Isabel was in heaven and is still recovering from their departure. 

   If Barney were writing this, he'd give you wonderful historical facts and impressions about the ancient and fantastic sites we saw.  I offer images:    

   http://www.world-heritage-tour.org/asia/south-asia/india/chola-temples/thanjavur/brithisvara-s-temple-nandi-s-pavilion/spere-quicktime.html

  The above link gives you a 360 degree video of one of the temples we visited.  At this temple, a group of school girls were smitten with Isabel and after many false starts, approached her and took her by the hands to escort her around.  

  My photos from the trip can be seen on my Picasa site.  The easiest way to get there is to click on a  slide show.  If you enter the slide show at the end of the cycle, you may miss some photos so select "view all" to get the thumbnails.  Then,  once you are in Picasa, enter the slide show mode because the colors are richer and more true --it may take a bit for them to load but once they are loaded, you can cycle through easily.  Also, once you are in Picasa, you can access any of the photos by selecting  "My Photos" directly to the left of any album title.

Catherine

P.S.  Noah will be here in a few days and we will be traveling for the the better part of his month long stay.  We will be out of Internet contact for much of that time.  We are looking forward to a quiet, simple Christmas in the mountains.  

Announcing Clio's Dog Album

   For those of you who know Clio, you know that she loves animals.  I remember, with astonishment, having arrived in India and driving home from the airport. We were jet- lagged and seeing India for the first time.  Clio sat in the car oohing and ahhing over the dogs.  She'd remark about how some dog was adorable, so I'd look out the window at the object of her attention.  All I could see was a skinny, mangy, pathetic dog lying in the street.

    Clio has continued to be enamored by the dogs she sees.  Her enthusiasm is contagious:  we have all come to see the beauty in these dogs.  They have great ears, long necks, and because they live mostly on the street, aggressive dogs don't last, so by and large,  they are docile.  In fact, we'd love nothing better than to bring one home.  (Barney has dubbed them, "The Perfect Dog".)   Meerkat Dog (see album) is the one of the most beautiful creatures I've ever seen. 

   Please follow the link on the slide show to see Clio's pictures of dogs.  I also have a new album posted:  "In Our Neighborhood".  Please vet the album before sharing it with children: there is a dog with a tumor, a woman with leprosy, and a very sad, sick dog.  

Catherine

The girls had henna applied to their hands in Madurai.

Hulk

Hulk is a gray and black Great Dane puppy.  She is six months old.  She is not trained very well so she jumps up on people.  She is very fun to play with.  When we went to Nagercoil, we bought her a squeaky chew toy because she didn't have anything to chew.  At first, Hulk did not know how to make her toy squeak until I showed her how to.  

Clio

All Catherine's recent photos can be viewed at:

http://picasaweb.google.co.in/muanddu

Madurai >Thekkady> Madurai> Nagercoil >Madurai

A tea estate

We spent  October 18th through the 31th traveling in South India.  We took the night train to Madurai, the city Noah had his first several birthdays.  I hadn't been to Madurai in over 15 years and the girls met their Indian family (Ismail's clan) for the first time. From Madurai, we took two side trips: one to Periyar Tiger Sanctuary and the other to Nagercoil.  We took several trains, watched a feast for 700+ being prepared, learned how to check for leaches, saw rice being harvested, got sick, saw elephants in the wild, and received many hugs.

  

Catherine

How to Cook for 700

Isabel here:

I am on a two-week vacation, which is half over.  On the first day of the vacation, we traveled on a night train to Madurai, where my father’s teacher’s wife lives.  We stayed for two nights: on the second night, the power went out and I got 222 mosquito bites because the fan and the insect repellent went out, as they are generated by electricity.  The mosquitoes kept buzzing in my ear every three seconds, even when I covered up my face.  After a while, it was too much, so I woke up my mom and she got out a mosquito net.  We took the mosquito net outside, and tried to sleep under it.  About an hour later, when no one fell asleep, we went inside and managed to get some sleep for the last hour or two before morning.  That is the story of my 222 mosquito bites.

The next morning, we left for the mountains and went on a boat ride to see wild animals.  Near our cabin there was a nice restaurant.  I was delighted to see that our cabin had a mosquito net and repellent.  They kept away mosquitoes for the whole night so we could get some sleep.  When we woke up, we went on a jeep safari, and saw many animals.  On our second jeep safari, we saw two elephants.  When we came back, I felt sick.  I was sick the whole night, and couldn’t go on the last safari, (a walking one), so my mom stayed with me.  Afterwards, my dad said he could have stayed behind, because it rained.  Then we went back to Madurai.

My Trip to the Mountains

by Clio

I went to the mountains on Tuesday, October 21st 2008.  There were a lot of leaches.  (Isabel wanted us to call the leaches "spaghetti" because she couldn't even stand to hear their name.)  I got three and Isabel got two leaches.  

We went o a jeep safari and we saw two elephants eating, some Sambar deer, buffalo, monkeys, wild boar and a peacock.  We had a lot of fun riding through the jungle in the jeep.

In the lobby of the lodge we were staying at, there were a lot of nature books and there was a TV and I watched Animal Planet.

I was sad when we had to leave.

Go here to see more pictures from the Madurai portion of our trip:

http://picasaweb.google.co.in/muanddu/MaduraiIndia#

Go here to see more pictures from Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary:

http://picasaweb.google.co.in/muanddu/PeriyarTigerPreserve#

Photos by Catherine

The Roof

 I love the roof.  It is a large space on top of the apartments.  People hang their laundry on ropes tied around water towers made of concrete.  The roof is much larger than it appears in the picture, the water towers you see father away are also part of the roof.  My sister my mom and I, go up there for the breeze during the daily power outage at 3:00, lasting until about 4:30.  It is so hot inside, that we need to go up to the roof to escape the heat. Sometimes, the power goes out a lot earlier, like today-- 11:00.  During the power outage, we can't even get the Internet.  The roof is really big, and it is very high up, so it escapes most of the heat.  Of course, you have to wear shoes on the roof or else your feet will burn.  I find that in India, it is better to test any metal that has been in the sun for a long time before touching it.  It is the same for the floor of the roof.  The roof is really fun and I go there whenever I can.

Isabel 

10/17/08

The Breezy Beach

The Breezy Beach
     The beach that at the end of our street is part of the Bay of Bengal. The Bay of Bengal connects to the Indian Ocean.  Our beach is called Breezy Beach.  The name tells the truth; it is fantastically windy.   
     Every evening I go to the beach with my dad and my sister. Sometimes my mom comes but mostly she does not come. I sometimes go in the water. The waves are pretty big.  Other times, I build sand castles and find clams and call one Mr. K and the other one Mrs. Q.  Mrs. Q and Mr. K try to get away when you put them in water and you see their foot.  The clams are longer, more brightly colored, thinner and smoother, than the ones that are found in Connecticut.  
     The crabs here look a little strange. Their eyes are directly one top of their head.  The crabs are sand-colored and they dig holes in the sand.  They are everywhere.  I like to run on the beach and chase the really big crabs.  They run away into the water.  They are super fast.  
     People throw plastic garbage bags of flowers into the ocean.  My dad thinks it's a funeral ritual but we're not quite sure.  
      Breezy Beach is connected to a walkway that is called the Breezy Beach Walkway. There are puppies on the walkway but mostly we see people on the Breezy Beach Walkway.  They are running, sitting, walking, bicycling and doing yoga. There are lots of street dogs on the Breezy Beach Walkway.  They look like they are exercising too except the dogs are not bicycling or doing yoga.  
     There are always interesting things happening on Breezy Beach and its walkway.  

Clio 

10/17/08

    

We live in an apartment in Chennai that has a living room, a dining room, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, and a balcony.  In the living room there are two red chairs and a red couch.  In the dining room there is a dining table, and a table for the electronics.  There are step-down plugs and adapter plugs so we can charge our things.  My sister and I share a bedroom, and my mom and dad share another.  The balcony is level with the treetops, and you can often see little tree squirrels that look like chipmunks with long, fluffy, striped squirrel tails.
    Every morning, my mom wakes me up at 6:00 to go on a walk on the beach with her, my dad, and my sister.  There are lots of people stretching and jogging on the beach at that time of day because that is the only time it is cool enough to walk.  There are fishing boats on the shore and they are all painted in bright colors.  There are also boats made of logs tied together.
Isabel 22/9/08


 MY FIRST DAYS IN INDIAby Clio
I went to India on September 15th and got there two days later. I was so tired.  The apartment we rented is nice.  When we went on a walk.  We saw monkeys and their babies.  They were really cute.  There are lots of dogs on the streets.  Mom wakes us up at five in the morning to go on an exercise walk. It's very tiring. We do home schooling every morning.  So far it's been fun.

Coyote Stompers: Wimberley, Texas

1st photo: Cousins Clio, Marina, Isabel and Leo
Wimberley, Texas -note the ever present Action Man

My grandparents took my cousins, mom, sister, and I, to see some donkeys. Their names are: Jenny, (she is the mother) Jack, (he is the father) and Jackson, (he is the baby). We got to feed Jack and Jenny. My grandparents are being giving Jackson because they have deer and the coyotes eat the deer. They need to
protect the deer so they will get Jackson.

Clio 9/08

2nd photo: (Future coyote- stomper) Jackson with his mother Jenny (supreme varmint killer).

The Blue Hole, Wimberley, Texas

In August, I went to the Blue Hole with my cousins. The Blue Hole is in Wimberley, Texas. I climbed a big, forty-five foot cypress tree with only knots for the first forty feet. I wanted to swing from the tree on a rope swing with a wooden bar. I had to pull the swing up using a rope attached to the swing. I had to take the rope off and step off the tree. I bear climbed to get the rope and it felt like I was going to be pulled off the tree. Then I stepped off and I fell a little, then the swing caught me.

It was scarier then last year, because there was no one there to help me and I didn’t have to get the rope myself because they handed it to me. Another reason it was scarier was because no one else was doing it. Last year I was able to do it five times. This year I was only able to do it once and I felt tired afterwards. The Blue Hole was really fun.

Isabel

Whale Watching off Provincetown, Cape Cod, July 12, 2008

At 9AM on July 12th, C, B, I and C, accompanied by our old friend Tara Perry, boarded the Blue Dolphin VIII, a whale watching ship out of Provincetown, MA. After a brief trip out of the harbor, the ship headed north along the tip of Cape Cod into an area the ship's captain and naturalist had seen whales the previous few days. The area is rich with plankton, the base of the ocean's food chain, and therefore the fish which humpback, fin, minke and the other whales that frequent these waters in the summer feed on.

Sure enough, just a few minutes after clearing the Cape people began shouting out that they saw whales, humpback whales. We could see them one or two miles away surfacing to breathe, humping back into the water, sometimes with their tales - flukes - high in the air.

The ship began to move closer to one whale named Reflection. The naturalist, Mike Bertoldi, and the captain see the same whales every year and can identify many of them by the markings on the underside of each whale's fluke. The dorsal (or back) fin is also differently shaped from animal to animal. Professional whale watchers and scientists keep logs of the animals they encounter and share them with each other, so there is a detailed record of the whales that frequent these waters year after year. We followed Reflection who came close enough for us to see her dive and come up for air several times before she moved off.

We had some fairly close encounters, including one which went almost directly under the bow of our ship. It was so close we could see its face, the light color of its side - or pectoral - fins, and tubercles, the bumps on the whale's head. We even got wet with a whale's spray! Mike Bertoldi joked that we had just gotten rained on by whale's snot - but we didn't mind. In the picture below, the white line under the whale is one of its pectoral fins.

Perhaps the most amazing thing we saw was whales feeding. First they slap the water with their flukes and dive down below. Then they create something called a bubble net underneath a school of fish. Blowing bubbles deep in the water they swim in a circle which scares the fish upward and inward, trapped in a tube of bubbles. Then the whales come straight up with their mouths open wide and catch fish at the surface of the water. Sometimes they do this in pairs, as in the picture at the top of this entry.

Catherine knew where to aim her camera to get this amazing picture because you can see the bubble net forming as the dark green water turns light - almost florescent - green in a circle just before the whales come up to the surface. The seagulls know where to go, too, and there are lots of them flying around just above the bubble net hoping to snatch a fish. We could see the gulls flock about the heads of the whales, very close to their mouths. Mike the naturalist told us that he has seen birds get caught in whales' mouths; the whale's throat is only the size of a grapefruit, so it has to surface again to spit the bird out. "The birds never look happy," he said.

Other than these close encounters with twelve or so whales, we were in sight of some two dozen more between one and three miles away. There were moments when we could see whales coming to the surface to breathe, feed, or on one occasion, breach, wherever we looked. They were all around us. It was amazing. We were seeing whales.

That said, the naturalist told us that there are only about 80,000 humpback whales in all the world's oceans. That's not many, perhaps only one tenth their numbers before whaling. Scientists have only been studying whales seriously for about thirty years; naturalists on board the old whaling ships had made drawings of their bodies, inside and out, but we only recently started studying them in the wild.

It struck me that we would be a much wiser people if everyone got a chance to see wild whales at least once. BB