Henna!

One of the things I enjoyed during my trip to India is the creative uses the Hyderabadis have for henna. It's used to make elaborate patterns on hands, called mehendi, and to color grey hair, for both women and men.

a young girl having a mehendi applied

From fabianfoo.com

From "10 Incredible Indian Beards and Moustaches" at sessionmagazine.com

I've been thinking of trying henna on my hair and beard since returning from Hyderabad. I recently found henna in the Little Market in Acton and tried it on a portion of my beard. I liked it, but the henna didn't seem very intense, so I ordered some henna from mehandi.com. It came last week while I was visiting my mother; last night I mixed it up, and this morning RuthAnne applied it.

Henna is basically ground up leaves from the henna plant, and it has an odd, funky, slightly-wet-dog odor to it. It looks remarkably like baby poo. RuthAnne wore gloves to avoid winding up with orange hands and slathered it on.

From HennaHead

I let it sit in my hair for about three hours; then Katy rinsed it out (a bit of a trick where the henna had dried out), I showered and washed my hair, and - voila!

Independence Day, 2009

It's still July 4th, but I have a few moments while Mom naps to start my 4th of July entry. Mom and I were up late last night (11PM) working on a puzzle, and we both slept late this morning - me until about 7:45, Mom until about 8:30. After breakfast and some packing for tomorrow we took the shuttle to Buchanan for the picnic.

The weather is lovely; blue sky with a few puffy clouds, warn without being hot, and a bit breezy. We checked in at the dining hall and then headed outside for lunch. We sat at a table with some of Mom's neighbors, as well as a couple who have one of the duplexes at Buchanan. (Her name is Arlene; I can't recall her husband's name.) They do a lot of traveling and had very interesting stories. Here's the husband with Mom.

And here's a picture Dan (who lives two doors down from Mom) took:



After a nap we went over to Jeannie and Bob's for another picnic. We had a beautiful sunset; the fireflies came out in force, and we set off sparklers.

From Sparklers

The next three links are to video clips.







Jeannie Marie will be going to church with us in the morning; then we'll be back here for lunch and final packing.

This has been an interesting visit - certainly grist for another posting.

Meeting Tony

I'm visiting my Mom in Elizabethtown, and this morning Karen and I took her to her physical therapy appointment with Tony. This is for her rotator cuff repair; Mom has been working with Tony since her surgery, and he's really helped her regain strength and motion. Here they are, going through the exercises.


before getting started




pumping iron, like Aahnold.





cranking away at full tilt



Before heading over to Lancaster for the appointment, we took a short walk to the top of the hill near Mom's apartment.

Mom and me




Mom and Karen

Pinewoods Morris Men 2009 AGM

My Morris team held its annual general meeting yesterday at The Point, as customary. Much was discussed and little accomplished, also as customary, aside from the consumption of crisps, beer and some delicious snacks brought by Jan. We did, however, confirm the current squire and bagman for another year (or portion thereof), and the foreman was reappointed.

Business concluded, we piled into cars and drove to the Heritage Museums in Sandwich for some dancing. The hot and humid weather caused us to wrap things up after fewer than a dozen dances, and we capped the trip with rides on the carousel and some portraits in the Art Museum.

As usual, we opened with Highland Mary.

From 2009 PMM AGM

We danced at several places around the grounds and wound up at the carousel for a ride.





After one last stand outside the carousel we went back into the museum for some portraits.

"It's almost like being a Morris Team."

That's how Tom, the concertina player extraordinaire for the Pinewoods Morris Men, once described having Pinewoods dance out on three consecutive weekends. We repeated that rare event this spring, dancing at the Marlboro Morris Ale, the Marlboro Morris Men's Portland gig, and the Bouwerie Boys' annual Suds. I took a few pictures:

2009 Marlboro Morris Ale

2009 Portland Tour

2009 Suds

Spring in E-town

Kathy, one of my mom's helpers, sent me these pictures of Mom out and about near her apartment.

Mom, May 2009

Grrr - consumer-grade ISPs

I've just wasted over an hour trying to figure out why Katy was not able to access her email via POP at our Google-hosted domain. Sending mail worked fine; receiving, though, just hung.

It turned out to be the firewall settings on the Verizon-provided DSL router at Katy's parent's home in Falmouth. It was blocking outbound access to port 995, used by gmail's POP server. I switched the firewall setting on the router to "minimum" (from "typical") and the port was unblocked.

I have to believe that Verizon changed this setting recently, because email from here has worked before. Grrrr. Maybe this blog posting will save someone else a little fruitless searching...

Obamanomics and The Matrix

This week's New York Times Magazine lead article is After the Great Recession, an interview with President Obama by David Leonhardt. It provides a great window into Obama's thinking on the ecomony and other issues, including health care. Here's an excerpt from the health care discussion:

LEONHARDT: And right now we’re footing the bill for a lot of things that don’t make people healthier.

THE PRESIDENT: That don’t make people healthier. So when Peter Orszag and I talk about the importance of using comparative-effectiveness studies as a way of reining in costs, that’s not an attempt to micromanage the doctor-patient relationship. It is an attempt to say to patients, you know what, we’ve looked at some objective studies out here, people who know about this stuff, concluding that the blue pill, which costs half as much as the red pill, is just as effective, and you might want to go ahead and get the blue one. And if a provider is pushing the red one on you, then you should at least ask some important questions.

LEONHARDT: Won’t that be hard, because of the trust that people put in their doctors, just as you said? Won’t people say, Wait a second, my doctor is telling me to take the red pill, and the government is saving money by saying take the blue —

This cracked me up, as Obama was evoking Morpheus, from The Matrix:

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

This kind of red-pill / blue-pill symbolism can't be what Obama intended, and I'm sure I'm not the only person who will notice this. Ooops...

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A follow-up note: I pointed out this amusing little slip on the NYT's moderated article comment section; they declined to publish it. I guess levity has no place at the Times.

Spring on the North Shore

On Saturday Katy and I went for a series of walks at some of the parks and woodlands of Massachusett's north shore. This was Plan B; we had intended to hike up Mt. Monadnock, but threatening weather convinced us to stay closer to home. While we ended up with a much more modest day of walking, it was nonetheless quite lovely.

We began by driving north from Cambridge to Manchester and then toward Gloucester on Massachusetts route 127, looking for Ravenswood Park, a 600 acre preserve of the the Trustees of Reservations. Before we got to it, though, we stumbled across a different Trustees' parcel at Coolidge Point. This small park contains a large pond and the lovely Ocean Lawn, an expanse of grass punctuated by some magnificent trees. The coastline here is very different from the sandy Cape Cod beaches I know know visiting Katy's parents in Falmouth; the shore is much more rugged.

From 2009-04-18

From Coolidge Point it's a very short trip to Ravenswood Park. This large park has many small ponds and vernal pools, some nice views of the ocean, and lots of rocks covered with this interesting growth.



On our way out, we observed that a young visitor had made a presumably unintended contribution...




Our last walk was at Halibut Point, a park we've visited several times before. Just north of Rockport, this preserve offers a rather unusual tower, an inactive quarry, some stupendous rock piles, and interesting tidal pools.













We capped the trip with a visit to Passports restaurant in Gloucester. The food was superb.

Feroz comes through

Yesterday when I arrived home from work I found a delivery attempt notice from TNT hanging from our back doorknob. I called the number on the card and discovered that they were trying to deliver a package from India. Their depot in Woburn would be open for another hour, so RuthAnne and I hopped in the car and picked up the parcel.

When we got it home, the cats immediately claimed ownership; they seemed to find the smell enormously exciting.







Katy was on her way home from my mother's house, and I decided to wait for her to arrive before opening the package. I knew what it had to be.





Over a year and a half ago, at the very end of my assignment in Hyderabad, I ordered - and mostly pre-paid for - a silk-on-silk, hand-knotted 5x7 carpet from Kashmir, through my friend, Feroz. This was an interesting exercise in trust. I'd gotten to know Feroz by playing backgammon with him at the shops he worked at as a salesman. We'd become friends and discussed carpet designs often; I occasionally brought him pictures of carpets from other shops that were close to the design I was looking for, but not quite it. Feroz persuaded me to order a unique carpet through him, sight unseen, to be made to order and delivered in about a year.

On the face of it, this was crazy. The amount of money at risk was enough that this would be a painful lesson on human nature if the carpet never materialized. But - I'd known Feroz for 6 months, and we'd spent a lot of time together. I liked and trusted him.

Over the course of the past year I've received occasional updates on the carpet's progress from Feroz, and when I was back in Hyderabad last fall I paid the remainder of the amount due on the carpet. Finally, last week Feroz advised me to be on the lookout for the carpet's arrival - and here it is.





Thank you, Feroz.