Monday, August 27, 2007

Adventurous, that's me.

My mother-in-law is really very nice and very tactful. Instead of, say, describing me as "certifiable" or "totally delusional" or "a few bats short of a belfry"...she just says that I'm "adventurous." I make stuff from Indian cookbooks in the wild hope that I won't ruin it! I come home from the lab at all hours of the night, or stay the whole night even! I knit fourteen useless complicated things at a time! And if you say it's all in the spirit of adventure, rather than insanity, it all sounds so worthwhile and desirable! Some politician should hire Aai as a spin doctor, I swear.

One adventure I had this weekend was dyeing my hair with henna (left over from the Hindu ceremony). Tejas egged me into this one. I've never dyed my hair before, so I was kind of looking forward to it...unfortunately the color didn't change much, though my hair does feel nice (Aai says henna is a natural conditioner). The henna was kind of old, and it was pure henna without chemical darkeners, and my hair is brown with kind of reddish undertones anyhow...sigh. I'll try again later. It'll give me an excuse to go to the Indian grocery store, which I love to distraction. Spices! Crazy contorted veggies! Icky-sounding sauces and pickles that actually taste really good! Forty kinds of lentils! It makes grocery shopping into an adventure, and me and adventure...well.

I also finished knitting the Yellowstone vest! It's blocking on the futon right now in the hopes that the edges will quit curling (stupid stockinette stitch, I should NEVER EVER trust patterns with St st and crocheted edging. They never work). Now I just have to sew up the shoulder seams, crochet all around the edges, and sew on the buttons. Woohoo! I'm hoping to get at least one more sweater or vest done, in a smaller size, before the due date in October. But my REAL goal for the end of August is to finish the horrible interminable melon shawl. I WILL PREVAIL! Then it will be time to start on Christmas presents!

My exciting agenda for today: work in lab, go to gym, go home and scrub tub (which briefly looked like an ax murderer had come to visit--thanks, henna--but now is just soap scummy), crochet border, write thank-you notes, attempt to manage tango club business, bundle up knitting and blankets for all-nighter in the lab tomorrow. It's going to be my first lab all-nighter without Tejas here with me...usually he comes and sleeps on the couch, but he's going to stay home with Aai. Waaaah!

(On the other hand, Tejas accepted the job offer with Big Prestigious Company today! And his advisor says he should be able to defend by the end of October! Hurray for my hard-working husband!!)

Wedding part 7

The two families seemed to get along all right. :)The next day, we took Aai on a tour of downtown Portland, including riding the tram to OHSU (it was a free transit day, woohoo! so we rode it both ways!) and the Rose Garden, which was looking more beautiful and bloomy than I'd ever seen it. Nice timing, Rose Garden!
But really, I think she liked the pets best. Even Kiki consented to sit on her lap and not attack her/scratch her/gum her wrist with toothless impotent fury.
We also went to the Clackamas County Fair, which was loads of fun, and had the biggest rabbits I have ever seen in my entire life (we have pictures, but you can't see the scale. You wouldn't get the full impact). My favorite part was the sign in the bunny barn: "Buy a rabbit, take home a rooster FREE!"

Tejas poses as an Oregonian:
He's one of US now! :)

Wedding part 6

It was cloudy during the ceremony, but while we were eating cake it started to rain. Luckily we had some canopies set up... Tejas' mom said it's good luck to have rain at a wedding (she is a kind and tactful woman). Shorty was too busy hiding under the table even to beg for cake.

Amber didn't beg either. She was too busy being adored.
We'd agreed that we were going to tango for our first dance...but we knew everyone was expecting a flamboyant stage tango, so that's what we gave them (for ten seconds). :)
Then we did the real tango, to the alternative song "Tango to Evora." (By the way, I made this blue skirt that I'm wearing here. It was my compromise between really wanting something that I had picked out to wear and The Budget. While I did like the other dresses I wore at our two ceremonies, and my mom's choice of one of my old dresses would have been okay for wearing here...this skirt, uglyish though it may be, is my small assertion of independence. I am an adult and I shall choose my own clothes! Fabric, pattern and notions from stash: $0 (original total cost ~$15). Time spent stitching/ironing: ~4 h. Asserting independence in one small detail: priceless!)
My (courtesy) Aunt Sandy and Tejas' brother, here all Oregonized before my dad took him off to play. (Only my family celebrates weddings by flame-toasting the weeds in the driveway and driving four-wheelers around the backyard. Now you see where I get my bumpkin blood.)
(To be continued...)
We had a recording of a hymn sung by my grandparents' church choir to walk out to. (Don't Tejas and his mom look nice? :) )

This is Rev. Beth, who was an extremely good sport about all the weird things we wanted in our wedding, and did a very fine job. Even my dad liked her okay, and he thinks most pastors are Satan's second cousins.
Tejas had his heart set on a shotgun wedding photo. (Dad and Thomas were only too pleased to humor him.)
My parents decided it wasn't so bad after all.
My aunt, uncle, cousins and grandparents...

(To be continued...)

Wedding part 4

The Christian part of our wedding was in Portland, though my parents wanted to know why we couldn't just elope. (We wanted an excuse to see the petses, and Tejas thought it would be unfair and lopsided if we only had a Hindu ceremony.) Shorty liked Aai a lot.

Shorty did not so much like Amber, my grandparents' dog, who came to spend a couple weeks with my parents while the grandparents take a big trip to Alaska. Amber is extremely cute and everyone adores her...until she chews up their dirty underwear. (On the morning of the wedding I tied all our underwear up in bags and put it on high shelves out of sight so Amber wouldn't drag it all over in front of our guests. I am vain, and also easily embarrassed.) Trace-trace pinned flowers to the dogs' collars so they'd at least look sweet and adorable.

Doesn't she look innocent?

I looked pretty stupid (me + dress-up clothes = lumbering disaster) but at least I was happy, right? (I'm not posting the pictures in which I look even more like a dressed-up country hick. I think I've got bumpkin in my blood. Also, you can't see it here, but I was tastefully shod in battered old black flipflops. Tejas nixed my slightly-nicer sandals on the grounds that the 2" heel made me the same height as him.)
Luckily, I wasn't the only one doing silly things. :)
We'd gone down to Sauvie Island the day before and U-picked flowers (one bucket for $10, wahoo!). They were gorgeous...and also extremely profuse. You can stuff a heck of a lot of flowers in a bucket. We had flowers EVERYWHERE.
(To be continued...)

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Mrs. R. & finishitis!

The second half of the wedding is over (pictures to come later) and we're about as married as can be! I spent this morning running around everywhere changing my name (instead of working like I ought to have been)--getting all the forms and changes and things done is becoming a compulsion, like finishitis in knitting. I just want everything done! There's just a few more steps...have to apply for a new passport (stupid rules...it'd better not take forever to get it!); change my name on the bank records, etc.; and fill out/copy stuff for/send in Tejas' green card application with all its umpteen thousand proof-of-this-and-thats (I kid you not: we're even sending wedding pictures). And even if I am officially (oh so officially) Mrs. R. now, if you call me that, I'll think you're talking to Tejas' mom.

And Tejas got a job offer from a Big Prestigious Company! We've talked about it a lot and he's 95% sure he's going to take it...but he doesn't have to tell them till Monday, so it's still up in the air. And of course, he won't be starting till January, so something could still go wrong (cross your fingers). But he got an offer! A very nice one! The very first thing he said to me after he got the call was, "I think you're going to have a really big yarn fund." :)

I'm still plugging away on the Melon Shawl for Tejas' gramma. It's really not going to be done before his mom leaves, but it's not completely my fault--she moved the date of her ticket forward by about a month, so she's leaving a week from Saturday. We'll miss her...though I have to say, it will be really really nice having some time alone with Tejas. I've spent about one hour, count it ONE, completely alone with him since we got married. (She was going to go stay with Tejas' brother's family for a while after the wedding...but Tejas thinks she's more comfortable here, since we're a little more relaxed about things. They're nice, but extremely fussy. So she's here with us. On the upside, she's lots of fun, and she's a really good cook!)

CALLING ALL KNITTERS!
Afghans for Afghans has a major goal to meet by October 10th--filling 40 shipping cartons with warm clothes for schoolkids (I think they said ages 2-14, but I could be wrong). The clothes and blankets will get to Afghanistan just in time for winter. That's a LOT of wool clothes, folks. Which is why, if you knit (and I know you do, all couple of you who read this!) you should check out the Afghans for Afghans website and knit something for them. They have links to tons of free patterns, you can use leftovers from your stash, the wool doesn't even have to be superwash!, and a little vest or sweater is pretty quick. And you don't have to worry too much about the size if your gauge is a little bit off--it's not like it's not going to fit anyone! And you can have the doubly-virtuous feeling of having used up some stash to help out a bunch of kids who've seen a lot of things they shouldn't have.

I'm 3/4 of the way done with a size XL sweater vest from the In-VEST for Peace pattern (on the A for A website, free)--it went really quick and was fun and fairly mindless. Good movie/book knitting. The main color is lavender blue, with stripes of daffodil yellow and lettuce green. This color combo reminds me of a lorna's laces colorway called Yellowstone, so I'm dubbing this project the Yellowstone vest. I will put a picture here...but not yet. (I feel really stupid photographing my crafty stuff in front of Tejas' mom. Also in front of Tejas, but he thinks I'm crazy in a cute sort of way. I suspect she'd think it was more crazy and less cute.)

And last but not least...I have finishitis for sure!! I have two pairs of socks on the home stretch (second sock); Yellowstone vest 75% done; ladybug baby sweater 75% done; shawl just needs a bit more edging....I need to finish something!! Expect finished photos soon, or I'll be tearing out my hair with frustration.

Saturday, August 4, 2007

Wedding (part 3)

We enlisted Tatsu and Tim to be my brothers; they gave me puffed rice with ghee, and Tejas and I offered it to the fire goddess and walked around the sacred fire, seven times.
Then the priest called up a bunch of married women from the guests. We asked for their blessings, and then one by one they whispered in my ear "We are also married." Some of them said it in Sanskrit, some of them said it in English, and the one right behind me in this picture whispered, "You are very lucky!"
First Tejas, and then his parents, promised my parents that they would love and protect me.
And then we were all done! (Isn't Trace-trace cute in her sari?)
We ate dinner and went home, and I kicked over a cupful of rice at the threshold for luck.
And that was that!

Wedding (part 2)

The youngest member of the family was more interested in the decorations than in the ceremony.
Meanwhile our sis-in-law (his mom) was helping me change into a green sari--green is the color of marriage in Tejas' family. My wedding sari is a gift from Tejas' grandma, so I love it to pieces. It's a kind of traditional Marathi sari called a Paithani, and it's gorgeous, but I felt kind of stupid and ungainly wearing it, especially with the jewelry store's worth of beads and bangles I had on. But a tiny little old Indian lady--I don't think she was even associated with the wedding, she was just there to pray--came up to me as I left the back room and said, "Oh, you look just like a queen! I love you!" and gave me a big hug. That made me feel a little better. :)

Then we got down to the real important stuff. Tejas and I each got a garland, and they held a veil between us. The priest chanted and rang a bell (Tejas tells me the last word of the chant means, "Beware!").
Then they lowered the veil and we put the garlands round each others' necks, and were married.
We blessed a black-and-gold beaded necklace (kind of like a wedding ring for Hindu girls) and Tejas and his mom put it on me.
We took seven steps to make seven vows.

Wedding (part 1)

(This is going to be a post in several parts, since Blogger doesn't seem to want to take more than five pictures at a time. And folks, this is our wedding. There are going to be quite a few pictures. :) )

Last Saturday we gathered up the hordes, made sure we had our marriage license, and headed for the temple in Sunnyvale, where we met Tejas' brother and his family. The temple wasn't quite ready yet--they had some sort of concert going on. So we dawdled for a while, then got all dressed up in a room in the back.
Good thing Tejas' mom and sis-in-law were there...I can put on a sari, but it doesn't look very nice. Our sis-in-law is the queen of making saris look really great! (Side note: don't tell my dad-in-law I put a picture of me semi-undressed on the internet, please. :) )

The concert was still going on, so we started in a little storeroom thing in the back. It didn't really fit all of us, and it was extremely hot. Now you know why, from this point on, all the pictures show us all with a gentle sheen of sweat. (It's not just cold feet!) First Tejas' parents asked for blessings.
They decked him out in all sorts of colorful stuff. All of it signifies something, but I'm not altogether sure what. The white beads around his face are supposed to be like ox-horns, since the ox is so important for farmers in India.
Then my parents went through the same thing with me. We were amazed that they actually did it! :)
Finally the concert finished and we got to go out to the main part of the temple (a small stage or dais). My parents had a part with Tejas--reading from my little cheatsheet courtesy the priest here, I see that they're supposed to be honoring and welcoming him.