Josh Simons sent me a link to his interesting blog entry and photos on
Bangalore Traffic from last summer. Listening to the
beep-beep of the auto rickshaws in the street below, John said
they sound and look like budgies – little bright parakeet birds
flitting about and cheeping constantly.
Filed under News & Reviews
When we went to the Sun office at Divyasree Chambers this afternoon,
everything just worked: our access badges got us past the guards and
the electronic doors, and my Sun Ray card brought up my home environment
and current email session immediately. It was especially pleasant
to have so many people I know come by to visit on our
first day in Bangalore.
Except for the polite-but-very-pushy airport porters, the local people
with whom we have spoken have been very friendly and helpful. My
ignorance of the complexities of Indian culture, language, and religion
is largely pristine but I am working to learn a little.
Business hotels try to reduce the inefficiencies and disorientation
of travel by being mostly the same from place
to place: making a cocoon of dull consistency despite all of the local
differences. The hotel rooms that John and I stayed in while in Beijing and
St. Petersburg have much in common with this one in
Bangalore. Some of what is different here:
Now that we have settled in a bit, we need a local bank to
accept our ATM cards. We talked with our home bank before we came
but still none of our cards work here.
One of the books on India I enjoyed reading most was Traveller’s
Tales: India, True Stories (Edited by James O’Reilly and
Larry Habegger, ISBN-13: 978-193236101-4, Traveller’s Tales, 2004).
This is part of a book series offering excerpts of stories and
commentary from a wide variety of experiences and points of view.
Some of the section titles:
Filed under Mentoring & Other Business
John and I arrived in Bangalore, India, very early this morning after
two uneventful flights (San Francisco-Frankfurt, Frankfurt-Bangalore).
The flight to Frankfurt showed Hollywood movies but the screen
on the United 747 was so far away we could not see a thing. The Lufthansa
flight to Bangalore showed Bollywood movies fraught with romance,
followed by Mickey Mouse cartoons. I haven’t seen many Bollywood
movies but they remind me of early Shakespeare comedies, particularly
of Comedy of Errors. In the Bollywood movies I have seen,
the emotions are simple, the plots complex,
and there are great opportunities for staging, costumes, and sets.
Our hotel is pleasant but even on the 6th floor, we can hear the
incessant beep-beep-beep of the cars in the busy street below. The 3
wheeled yellow auto rickshaws are particularly noticeable as they dart
between the cars, motorcycles, trucks, bicycles, and busses. There are
relatively few pedestrians. Even in the middle of the night coming in from
the airport, the driver beeped constantly at the mostly empty street.
We are catching up on our email in the hotel before going into work.
The plug adapter we brought from home broke immediately so we borrowed
one from the hotel. We had to ask the guy who cleaned our room how
to get the electrical plug into the wall socket (you stick something in
the ground pin hole to move the cover away). Wanting to use two laptops in
one room surprised the hotel but they adapted (and charged double).
I was here in Bangalore 3 years ago at a different hotel but both
served extensive and varied breakfasts as part of the regular rate. Since
we will be here for several weeks, we will get to try everything on the
menu. Today, John asked for a masala dosa with sambar (spicy vegetable
soup), and cocoanut and tomato chutney. It was very good.
Filed under Mentoring & Other Business
The SEED Engineering mentoring program here at Sun is currently matching two very senior terms: SEED-2 (for alumni SEED participants who wanted a subsequent mentoring partnership), and the Distinguished Engineer (DE) term. The DE term is for a group of newly promoted DEs to work with more experienced DEs.
7 of the new Distinguished Engineers have now been matched with DE-mentors.
I have 4 more to match. 5 of the SEED-2 alumni participants have also been matched
with mentors. 5 to go in that term. It is harder and takes longer to match
very senior staff since they need to be paired with the most senior executives.
I will continue to work on matching
these terms while kicking off the application period for the SEED 4-Site Term (for Bangalore, Beijing, Prague, and St. Petersburg) this week from India.
Filed under Mentoring & Other Business
This busy week in my church life started on Sunday with preparations for
the Shrove Tuesday pancake supper and races. My daughter will be in college
next year so she wanted to manage the event once more before she goes. John
and Jessica made pancake batter early and left it in a 5 gallon bucket in
the church kitchen refrigerator. (Of course, it expanded out of the bucket and
made a mess but the pancakes made with the remaining batter tasted very good.)
Jessica then organized more than a dozen cooks, servers, and cleaners to put
on the annual celebration held on the day before the start of Lent. I wrote about
the 500+ year history of
Pancake Races in my blog before. This year’s event was also fun and a success.
We asked people to donate what they thought the simple dinner was worth and
collected over $241- to go toward the Youth Group’s Mission Trip to work on
cleaning up New Orleans.
Thursday, I attended the first meeting of the
Diocese of El Camino Real 2008 budget committee. Saturday, I ran the
meeting for the Department of Intercultural Evangelism and Mission (DIEM) of which I am the Convener. DIEM is changing
its name and structure over this next year into the Department of Missions. So,
in addition to planning our department’s 2008 budget submission to support the
13 Central Coast missions, we also set up an additional meeting to work out
the details of our new charter.
I think all is prepared for my working from India in the next few weeks. It
will be interesting getting email on these local church activities while working
in such a different place.
Filed under Church
John and Paul and I and one of our neighbors were in the San Jose City Council chambers this morning at 9 a.m. for the hearing on our Development Variance to move caboose WP668 into our yard as an “accessory structure”. It was approved on the Consent Agenda without discussion! Hooray!
The Permit will be signed this week. Some of the entertaining parts of the 7 page long document:
After we have the Building Permit, we can move the caboose!
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Updated 5 April 2020
Filed under Caboose Project and Other Trains, News & Reviews
I have been preparing my garden for me to be away in India for several weeks. We have arranged for a housesitter and our daughter will also check in on our plants and pets (2 dogs, 2 cats, and a bird) but other than “mow-and-blow” upkeep, no actual gardening will be done. I have put down weed cloth and mulch and trimmed and tidied and hope that all is in readiness.
We have about 1/4 acre of yard and garden (including 170 feet of the Guadalupe riverbank) and all the plants and trees have just woken up for Spring. My almond trees are in full bloom, the jessamine vine flowers are just opening, the orange, apricot, and peach are in bud and I have pots and beds of daffodils and narcissus cheerfully nodding in day’s warm breeze. The weeds and stray grass are working to colonize any bare ground; snails and slugs are always with us. My garden is still recovering from the long hard frost we had last month. There are sections of bougainvillea and trumpet vine and bird of paradise which are yellow brown. I am not sure yet whether these hardest-hit plants will sprout green soon or are as dead as they look. By the time we are back, I will know.
Karel Capek is most famous for having introduced and made popular the word robot, which first appeared in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) in 1921. However, my favorite Karel Capek work is The Gardener’s Year from 1929. Here is Capek’s description of a dedicated gardener leaving on vacation:
[The amateur gardener] departs, however, with a heavy heart, full of fears and cares for his garden; and he will not go until he has found a friend or relation to whom he entrusts his garden for that time.
“Look here,” he says “there is nothing to be done now in the garden in any case; if you come and look once in three days, that will be quite enough, and if something here and there is not in order, you must write me a card, and I will come. So, I am relying on you then? As I said, five minutes will be enough, just a glance round.”
Then he leaves, having laid his garden upon the heart of an obliging fellow-creature. Next day the fellow-creature receives a letter: “I forgot to tell you that the garden must be watered every day, the best times for doing it are five in the morning and towards seven in the evening. It is practically nothing, you only fasten the hose to the hydrant and water for a few moments. Will you please water the conifers all over as they stand, and thoroughly, and the lawn as well? If you see any weeds, pull them out. That’s all.”
A day after: “It’s frightfully dry, will you give every rhododendron about two buckets of tepid water, and each conifer five buckets, and other trees about two buckets? The perennials, which are now in flower, ought to have a good deal of water — write by post what is in flower. Withered stalks must be cut off! It would be a good thing if you loosened all the beds with a hoe; the soil breathes much better then. If there are plant-lice on the roses, buy tobacco extract, and syringe them with it while the dew is on, or after a rain. Nothing else need be done at present.”
…The sixth day: “I am sending you by express post a box of plants from the country…. They must go into the ground at once…. At night you ought to go into the garden with a lamp and destroy snails. It would be good to weed the paths. I hope that looking after my garden doesn’t take up much of your time, and that you are enjoying it.”
In the meantime the obliging fellow-creature, conscious of his responsibilities, waters, mows, tills, weeds, and wanders round with the box of seedlings looking where the devil he can plant them; he sweats, and is muddied all over; he notices with horror that here some damned plant is fading, and there some stalks are broken, and that the lawn has become rusty, and that the whole garden is somehow looking blasted, and he curses the moment when he took upon himself this burden, and he prays to Heaven for autumn to come.
And in the meantime the owner of the garden thinks with uneasiness of his flowers and lawns, sleeps badly, curses because the obliging fellow-creature is not sending him reports every day on the state of the garden, and he counts the days to his return, posting every other day a box of plants from the country and a letter with a dozen urgent commands. Finally he returns; still with the baggage in his hands he rushes into his garden and looks round with damp eyes —
“That laggard, that dolt, that pig,” he thinks bitterly, “he has made a mess of my garden!”
“Thank you”, he says dryly to his fellow-creature, and like a living reproach he snatches the hose to water the neglected garden. (That idiot, he thinks in the bottom of his heart, to trust him with anything! Never in my life will I be such a fool and an ass to go away for the holidays!)
While I am in the Garden City of Bangalore, I know I will enjoy being where I am (and not behave like Capek’s gardener!). I will visit the Lal Bagh Botanical Gardens and maybe bring back new gardening ideas.
Filed under Home & Family
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