pictures

The view from where I live. When the clouds clear you have a wonderful view of Dehra Dun (quite stellar by night as well). When the clouds are out I quite feel like I'm living on the edge of the ethereal plane (or at least visiting the restaurant at the edge of the universe).

The view of my front door as you would normally approach it.

My backyard.

The side yard.

Let's go in and take a tour eh?

Kindly take off your shoes as you come in. Lord knows what you've been walking in around here. There's a bench here you can see in another picture that I call my Mr Rogers bench. I come in and change my shoes there. It's such a good feeling to know you're alive...

What you see when you first come in. It's my steps and a set of dressers. Bathroom through the door on the right.

Kitchen, the room I'll probably be using the least.

My Aquaguard. Gives me clean potable water. I've been sticking with bottled water for the most part but it works just fine for brushing your teeth.

The living room as viewed from the kitchen.

The mantle. Just a few knick-knacks. I want dad to notice the moose is up and even has my safety goggles on. The trophy was left behind.

Up the stairs. At first they were a bit daunting but you get used to them and now I'm running up and down them with ease.

The bedroom area of the loft.

A little crossing to the office area.

A top down view of the living room. You can see the Mr Rogers bench in the top middle.

Indians are brilliant. Stick a lightbulb in your closet and it dries out your clothes during monsoon!

The view from my bedroom window. Not that great right now.

The ever present monsoon black mold.

A shower visitor. This guy is about the size of my palm. Post-monsoon they're supposed to get the size of your hand.

Mussoorie has a ferris wheel. Man-powered. They climb up and use momentum (p=m*v) to start and stop it. They hop in the middle like a hamster wheel and even dangle from the backs of the carts.

Ok, hopefully this will satiate your hunger for pictures for the time being. They take especially long to upload here and I'm sure the IT people won't be happy with the bandwidth usage.

Just something a little fun. Here's a list of the critters I've seen so far in India:

• rats
• mice (next door has a good story about this one)
• Jackals
• monkeys (Two kinds, they like to make a lot of noise and look in your windows. Yeah, I live with monkeys, get over it.)
• Scorpions
• leeches
• Really big spiders
• Really small spiders
• numerous stray dogs
• one schizo cat
• a few birds
• cicadas
• these worms that all hatch at once when it rains and look like a pile of noodles in the dirt

I think the most surprising thing to me since coming here has been the weather. I knew it be monsoon but I didn't realize just how cold it would be. Obviously I knew cooler but it's been really cold, especially during the nights and mornings. Just coming back up from Dehra Dun yesterday I was very warm in the city and freezing by the time I got up to school. The worst thing is that you can't really wear warmer clothes because of the humidity. Any amount of walking and you'll immediately break into a sweat.

I'm acclimating fairly well. I still get winded walking around but it's not that bad.

Anywho, time to go to high tea.