Crocodile pics from my (very very delayed reporting of) Christmas trip :)

Hi everybody :)
I know its around half a year too late to be talking about "What I did on Christmas", but there's just so much piled up that I've got to post, and its all coming out now! Hubby and I enjoyed a scenic drive along the East Coast road, and went to see the Madras crocodile bank (it's still called that, although the city has become Chennai). Well, without yakking on too much, here is all the evidence:

The baby "Mugger" pit - they've got 356 crocs in there!

And here's the signboard to prove it!!

This is a full-grown mugger sunning himself in another of the pits; boy, I wish I could lie around all day with my mouth hanging open :)

p.s. on this pic - the signboard's in Tamil, but what it says is that this deceptively lazy-looking sonofagun can chase after you at 48 kilometres per hour if it's got a mind to eat you!!

Look deep into the eye of the dragon....

And this, children, is how they lie in wait for you.

The notoriously deadly Gangetic crocodile... a.k.a. Gharial.

That there ain't no log, honey...

The American alligator - looking exactly like a picture out of my childhood "Reptiles and Amphibians" book :)

The Morelet's crocodile, smiling at my hand getting deliciously near to its jaws...

The Crocodile bank also contains a snake pit - literally. Managed by Irula tribesmen, who have pursued their traditional occupation of snake-catching for hundreds of years, and are now putting their expertise to good use by extracting venom to make antivenin for snake bites, educating visitors about snakes, debunking common myths (No, they DO NOT drink milk) and demonstrating venom extraction. This is what I call good IEC - information, education, communication :)

Spectacled cobra with its hood spread out; the currency notes were dropped by religious minded visitors - snake worship is prevalent in most parts of India.

Guess who :)

Guess who came to visit...again! ... a.k.a. - Monkey pictures!

Last August, my husband went to the United States on a short term business trip. One fallout of that I've already mentioned in my previous post (Joppa Minerals,Hallelujah!). The other, equally pleasant outcome was that my paranoid family members (Mom, Dad, Hubby) being not at all convinced that I could spend any length of time alone in Chennai, packed me off to an unexpected Mumbai vacation. Of course I lost a month's pay, but that's nothing compared to the sheer joy of coming home. While I was there, I discovered that my favourite close relatives have learnt a bunch of new tricks. They no longer have to depend on bamboo frameworks which u only get when the building's being painted, they can now climb like spiderman all the way to the third floor getting good hand grips in bumps and crevices! Rather creepy, Gollumy, methinks. And because in the months after that previous post I've graduated from the old film roll Kodak to a cute little Canon A570, I can furnish instant gratification:

Oh look! Bananas! Oh no! A pesky human! Oh how annoying! That darned human's gone and closed the balcony door :( Oh nooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!! A camera!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

To leap or not to leap... that is the question.

Hmmm... there might be a teeny little goof up in the parts assembly ...

...good, I've got it on its side; now give it a turn, and - Eureka!! I've invented the wheel!!!!

All this monkeying around is giving me a headache - time to go home now, I guess.

Yep! I've looked everywhere. No more peanuts. Definitely time to go home.

We buy a lot of peanuts, they're very healthy for snacks. But sometimes we'll get a bad batch. Infested with aspergillus. Those ones we don't just dump in the rubbish, we use them to fertilise our little effort at fighting climate change in the balcony. Obviously, we never budgeted for this gang of freeloaders looking for an easy lunch. We live in a city - in Bombay, for goodness sake. Anyway, these critters may look cute and all, but they're wild animals and very dangerous. I was alone at home at the time, the balcony doors were wide open and if I hadn't been alerted beforehand by their screeching, they could have ruined and rampaged all over the house. A gang of angry monkeys confronting a defenseless human can maul him beyond recognition, leave alone the aftermath of unknown infections and rabies. So all in all, I had a very lucky escape. We now leave all the doors and windows securely shut even when we're at home, unless someone is actually in a particular room. We also got firm wire mesh installed on the windows that we can't close.

Moral of the story? Wildlife close-up photography is best left to Discovery Channel. :)

Bye, and hope u all enjoyed the pics :)

Changes... so many changes.

He he. Time to come out of hibernation once more. I thought the blog could do with some color co-ordination. Now before we go any further, let me make it very clear that I have nil artistic tendencies as exhibited by the F grade I received for drawing in my 6th standard class :) So after a long couple of hours spent blundering around with colours and templates, I hit upon a very simple solution. I just adopted Revlon's 12 hour color stay eye-shadow quad in 01 Copper spice to be my blog's colour palette too! :) I love the warm brown shades - so appropriate for office as well as jazzy evening looks. Here, have a peep:

This quad is real smooth. So smooth, I can blend the shades using nothing but my fingers. The shades are mildly shimmery, or should I say metallic, but the shimmer's not so obvious in the two lighter shades, and I generally prefer them for work.
So much for the blog. Now for all the changes in my life. After I typed in my last post sometime in July last year, I've had a whole deal of new experiences. The worldwide essay competition I had entered - though I didn't win, I still made it to the shortlist of finalists and now my essay's been published by "The Lancet" and "Global Forum for Health Research" in an anthology of young voices (yeah I was below 30 then :P ) Turned out I had missed the prize by a whisker, because I was invited along with the winners to participate and present my essay at a global conference on research for health held in the heart of Africa - in Bamako, Mali!! Thus I had my first ever trip abroad, that too all expenses paid :) In the meantime, hubby got a two month assignment in the United States and brought me back a whole lot of swag. I am now the proud owner of Mineral Make-up from Joppa Minerals - truly the best I've ever seen. I don't believe I will ever purchase any other foundation after having used theirs.
We've also moved from our tiny one bedroom aparment in the heart of the city into a larger flat in the outskirts, in a gated complex with - guess what - its own swimming pool! :) :) So I am now frequently to be found splashing around aimlessly, inhaling water and having a whale of a time. But I've improved; I can now swim half the pool's length without floundering.
The college bus I used to whine so much about? I finally gave it up and started using public transport. Hot, sweaty, overcrowded... those were nightmare months, leaving me completely drained and depressed. Change that too. I've perfected my driving, and anyway since after we moved house the college is a lot nearer, hubby has lent me his car. So I now have fast, hassle free and most important of all, air-conditioned journeys to and from work. Of course, the Chennai traffic is as chaotic as ever. Its a wonder how my BP's remained normal.
I now have some free time. I've realised that maintaining a blog with regular updates is no joke. It requires time, attention to detail and a whole lot of commitment. Let me see how far I can pull along this installment of the cat's cradle. Hopefully, no more hibernations after this...
Bye and see u all soon :)

Nail color shot hybridized with book review

Yuck for the fag end of the weekend. I feel like I've been working nonstop for the last ten years. And when the much anticipated two day weekend finally arrives, the powers decide to keep hubby in office till unearthly hours. So no carousing for this cat. I gotta hike my big fat rear end out of bed and off to work at six am tomorrow. And yes, I know what Ayn (Dominique) said, that if you love your work it doesn't seem like work. Ok, I do enjoy the teaching and writing and all that, but who said I gotta enjoy a two hour, 60 kilometer bus ride in the devil's chariot rattler express whose suspension conked off like in the seventeenth century, and which gives you a tantalising choice of dislocating your intervertebral discs in the back seats, or sitting in the front seats and sweating your make-up and hairdo off so you look like a freshly minted scarecrow when you arrive.

That's my weekly whine nicely rounded off :) Coming back to the post title, I recently went through this lovely book by Linda Wells - Allure: Confessions of a Beauty Editor, where she's very nicely revealed beauty stuff she's learned in her years and years as editor of Allure. I particularly liked one of her tricks, so perfect for congenital clumsies like me - don't bother tearing your hair out trying to apply the perfect nailpolish. Just "color outside the lines" ;) ;) (p'keepsie pudding, anybody?) as much as you like at night-time, and in the morning when you shower, scrape off the extra polish from your fingertips! Me likes!

(Image courtesy of Amazon.com)

(With flash)

(Without flash)

(Color detail. And no you suspicious zoink, my fingers aren't clubbed, it's the camera angle)

This here is another one of those "And" brand nail colors I bought some time back at Pantaloonz, the beigey one I was rhapsodizing about in a previous post. Dunno if the photo captures it, but it has a very fine gold shimmer too, glimmers elusively where the light catches it. I'm wearing it to work tomorrow, I guess folks should render up heartfelt thanks that I finally had the sense to wear something subdued on my fingernails :D Only one problem. The consistency being thick and lacquer like, and me being severely afflicted with klutzophrenia. In the circumstances, it would have been wiser to restrain the eager hand before that second coat. Live and learn, Billydoc, live and learn... So - all u beautiful ladies - what plans? Watz ur nail color for this week? Refined or Rocking?

Ai yai yai, yai yai...

I'm paying tribute today to that unforgettable duo of movies, "The gods must be crazy" part one and two. I sez duo bcos, parts three, four, five, six, etcetera are quite forgettable, thank you very much. But no matter how old I get, I just can't resist going back to these two for a loading dose of floor-rolling mirth. I don't even remember how small I was when I first saw these movies on that outdated bulky video cassette player. In fact, I guess me and my bro were exactly the same age as Kisa and Kirey in part two. I suppose that might account for my attaching a lot of sentimental value to the story. Oh and of course, who can keep a straight face after seeing a one tonne jeep hanging like a slightly oversized mango on a tree branch, or a streetsmart Manhattan lawyer outsmarted by a gang of baboons! And because this blog is, after all, more or less dedicated to make up, I present before my adoring (and very very tolerant) readers the most hilarious shade of nail polish I've had the gumption to wear to college. Where I teach. Medical students.

The price of this beauty is even more hilarious. All of ten bucks. As our paunchy mustachioed leading men of the movies would say, "We yaar like that wonly. Mind it!"