The Pretty Cool Canyon

As mentioned previously, we did a bit of sightseeing on our way back from San Diego last week. In particular, we decided to stop by this big hole in the ground in Arizona.


OK, it's more than a big hole; it's a really big hole (a mile deep and averaging ten miles across, to be more precise). I decided I liked it, so I would take a lot of pictures, some of which follow.

In fact, we liked it so much that, after arriving just before sunset on Wednesday evening and having a quick look (then slowly fumbling our way back to the car in near blackness--it gets dark very quickly out there, especially with no moon), we decided to spend the night in the nearby town of Tusayan, and to wake up before dawn to go see how the canyon would look, lit from the other side.

At dinner that night, we met a pleasant Irish couple named Ned and Maggie, who have a daughter, Christina, who is just a couple months younger than Shreya (and just a little bigger--grr!) They were in the U.S. for a couple of weeks, from their hometown of Tipperary (which is a long way away, as Ned pointed out immediately) and had recently driven down from Yosemite.

How was the canyon in the morning? Quite cold, actually. Fortunately, we are tough, TOUGH, and brought just enough warm clothing that we didn't need to test that. There were still about twenty other people crowding our vantage point, despite the cold and the early hour.



Despite this long face, I don't think Shreya minded the cold very much.





One of the more interesting aspects of the sunrise over the canyon was this Brownian motion we observed in the sky.

Can you tell what it is?


Later in the day, as we took a tour of some of the western viewpoints, we encountered our new Irish friends several times. The babies really seemed to enjoy each other's company!


Anyhow, we took a fair number of photos of the canyon, despite our camera battery running out in the first hour. (We went back to town for breakfast and a quick recharge.) I leave you with a few more that I like.


The canyon looks very barren, but it is not quite as barren as it looks. Also, it is surrounded by lush evergreen forests on both sides.

Looks like someone has been practicing bonsai on this windswept rock.

One of the few vantage points whence we could actually see a piece of the river.

Varsha's turn to wear Shreya.

The sun didn't let up much. Good thing we came in October rather than July!

Shreya, come here!

As the reader may have already worked out, this blog is only loosely chronological. Sometimes, one or both of us are working on a post and Something Happens, which interrupts it and puts it on indefinite hold, sometimes to the point where it is easier to do a new post than to resume the interrupted one... Such a thing happened a couple of months ago right after our trip to Seattle. Shreya was sleeping. We had written the following (italicized) lines and were in the middle of editing the video clip which we had filmed in Seattle and that was to accompany them. Suddenly we heard a whimper, followed by a thump, followed by Shreya's howling. Upon rushing to the bedroom and panicking ("Where is she?!") we found her on the floor, in the ten inch wide slit between the head of the bed and the wall. (Yes, she sleeps on our bed, and yes, our headboardless bed was ten inches away from the wall, for fear of dangerous spiders. Needless to say, now the bed is up against the wall.) So we picked her up, made sure she was OK, cuddled and soothed her and forgot all about the video clip we were editing.

Here's a little footage of Shreya from our visit to Seattle last week.

Lately, Shreya has gotten a lot more mobile, and is now a very persistent explorer of her surroundings.

Ah, Irony, how we hate thee!

**********************

Even the above was written some time ago, and remained unposted, because , of course, we still had not finished editing the video, since the main problem with it is that the sound is not good, and we still haven't figured out how to improve it. So, here it is anyway, despite the bad sound. The volume is very low, so you don't have to hear the deafening hiss... This video was filmed on August 6th.



And here is one from tonight!

San Diego, Again

We just returned from another road trip to San Diego. This time my mother, who is visiting for the month of October, came with us. Like last time, we had planned to leave on Friday afternoon. Like last time again, unexpected delays came up, (this time they really were unpredictable, and not related to Shreya) and it was quite late in the evening by the time we were ready to hit the road. This time however, we decided not to simply leave then. Instead we got an early night and set out on Saturday morning, at 4:30! This time, the stars were favorably aligned however, and we didn't run into any snowstorms or fog or major road work, and we arrived in San Diego around 8:00 in the evening.

On Sunday, Tom and I both gave talks at the INFORMS meeting. As a brief tangent from always reporting about Shreya, I should mention that this is a crazy conference. There are close to eighty parallel sessions! I don't have a good estimate of even the order of magnitude of the number of participants, and can't seem to find his information on the web, but one could see lots of participants milling around for several blocks around the convention center. The printed program is about the size of a telephone directory! When I mentioned this to my sister, she asked how one decides which sessions to attend. The answer is quite simple if unfortunate -- one just looks for ones friends. Annoyingly enough, some of the talks we were interested in were scheduled in parallel with our own. On the whole, the entire thing was rather a pandemonium.

Anyway, we both attended some sessions on Sunday and Monday, while Aai and Shreya hung out at the hotel, where Aai exercised Shreya (or was Shreya exercising Aai?) On Tuesday, Tom went to the conference site but spent the afternoon working with a collaborator instead of attending the sessions. Aai, Shreya and I spent the time in Balboa Park, where Shreya had fun splashing in the fountains and riding the tram. Tom joined us there in the late afternoon for about an hour, and then, in the evening, we began the journey back home. This time we were not so pressed for time as UNM had their fall break, so Tom didn't have to get back and teach. So we decided to take longer on the drive back, and take in some sights on the way. And that is just what we did, on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning and afternoon. More about it in another post.

HB

It's my birthday, and I hear from my father, who heard from my grandmother, that it is also Shreya's birthday according to the tithi (Indian lunar calendar, according to which Shreya was born on Diwali, which of course makes it easy to remember, if one keeps track of that sort of thing). An interesting coincidence. Happy birthday to us! I wonder when our birthdays will coincide again?

Balloooooons!

[I wrote this post a week ago, on October 9, but it's taken us a while to get the pictures ready.]

On Saturday (October 3), we all woke up at the eye-rubbingly early hour of 4a.m. to go to the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. This is a big annual event in Albuquerque, and lasts about 10 days. On the weekend days, it is apparently attended by several hundred thousand people. We were going to take the shuttle from a Park and Ride location at a mall a few miles from our home. (The Balloon Fiesta Park itself is about 13 miles away.) Of course we had the added complication that there were more of us going than would fit in our little car. Hence the need to leave extra early, to get to the mall in two shifts. There, of course, we had to suffer long lines for the bus. We waited in line over an hour and a half after we were all there, before we were finally able to squeeze into a schoolbus that transported us to the park getting us there just shortly after 7a.m. when the mass ascension event started.





None of us had ever been to a balloon fiesta before, and it was quite an experience. We walked around and saw hot air balloons being inflated. We saw them take off at very close quarters. We saw the sky full of hot air balloons. We saw the sun rise over the Sandia mountains -- it looked not unlike a hot air balloon ascending! There were lots of colorful balloons in the traditional bulb shape, but there were also some unusual shapes like a beer mug, a pair of bees (attached for at least part of their flight), a fish, a jack-in-the-box, and believe it or not, a cow. The cow was the size of about three normal balloons, and had a lot of trouble getting up in the air, but when she finally did, she flew really high! It was a spectacular sight.








I was uncertain what Shreya would think of these strange goings-on, but she seemed to enjoy herself. She did not get vocally excited, but perhaps that was due to the earliness of the hour. She definitely watched the balloons, following them with her eyes while she snuggled comfortably in her carrier.

The only downside to this lovely morning was the line we had to wait in to get back home. There was total chaos in the mad rush to get on the bus, with several lines merging into one, and confusion about which line was for which destination. Once again it took nearly 90 minutes between when we got in line and when we boarded a bus. Still, we had an interesting fun time, and at least I am enthusiastic about going again... next year.

Visitors

Last weekend Shreya had some special visitors: her uncle, aunt and grandmother. Of these, her uncle and aunt stayed for four days, but her grandmother will be staying for a whole month! What fun for Shreya!

As in Atlanta, Shreya took to Pallavi very quickly. Obviously if she was around it was safe to fall asleep.


Here she is, playing with Aji.

She was deeply suspicious of Pramod all through his visit, smiling at him or playing with him only when she was safely clinging to someone else that she knew. But one afternoon she allowed him to walk her around the house. His theory is that she didn't know who was behind her. Look at her though. She looks totally comfortable!

Lost Keys!

Saturday dawned bright and fair. We had a full schedule, with lots of things to do, and in a lazy it's-a-long-weekend sort of way, we had even begun to do them. And then, trouble reared its ugly head. Setting out to run some errands, Tom discovered that he had lost his keys. We looked for them everywhere, on bookshelves, under furniture, in closets. We pulled out the couch cushions to see if they had fallen in there. We checked in the car. We even looked in the most unlikely places (the refrigerator, the oven, the washing machine). Then Tom went and checked in his office (borrowing my keys to drive and a colleague's to access the building.) No luck. Where could they be? Was it possible that he had left them in the door the last time he had used them and somebody had passed by and taken them? Surely they wouldn't do that? Was it possible that he had dropped them the previous evening when he took Shreya for a walk? Could they just possibly have evaporated? Hours later, we still hadn't found them, and Tom went to post signs on the neighbourhood trees asking if anyone had noticed them. And then, quite suddenly Shreya found them.

Can you spot the keys in this picture?


She could not understand why Mommy and Daddy were so upset and didn't want to play with her. Eventually however, it wasn't a matter of playing anymore. She was hungry and she wanted her milk. So we went into the bedroom and settled down to nurse her. And in doing so, we bumped her crib, (which adjoins our bed) and heard a jingling sound. The keys had fallen in the small slit between the crib and the bed and had gotten wedged between the mattresses in such a way that they could not only not be seen from above, but were also invisible if one lay on the ground and looked under the bed. When we bumped the crib, they were somewhat dislodged and gracefully slid lower and got caught on the bottom of the crib's railing.



Well, all's well that ends well.