Egyptian Goddess in Germany

Looking for an interesting linguistics book on English-Hindi code-switching? Here’s a new book by a new and aspiring author…

Yesterday morning when we woke up and pulled up the shutters, I saw two big fire engines in front of our house. ‘Cool, seems as if something exciting is going on in our neighbourhood!’

Then I spotted a group of spectators who were all looking up and pointing to OUR roof.

At second glance I then discovered what had happened: Apparently, the storm last night had loosened a tile on the roof which had then crashed down on the sidewalk, fragmenting into a thousand pieces (and luckily enough not killing anyone). Now the fire men were busy trying to safely get down two more tiles which were lying at the edge of the roof, about to fall down as well. Quite funny to watch such a large scale operation involving eight firemen just bringing down two tiles. Gives you the impression that you are living in a very safe country.

:-)

Yesterday we went to visit my grandma. When I had just got out of the car and walked up the stairs to the main door, this cute fellow sidled from the right of the door to the left and then rolled up there cosily under the dust bin.

Initial speculations that it might be my grandma’s new pet turned out to be wrong. What we did find out though was that the cute slithery animal is only a harmless grass snake or ring snake and no threat to anyone bigger than a frog, toad or mouse. But be aware, next time you leave your house you might find this guy’s big sister (females can be up to 2 m long) lying in front of it!

As a child, Kshitij used to do a lot of drawing and painting. A few weeks back I encouraged him to resume the hobby as the drawings he made as a child were really great! So we went to our local arts and crafts store and bought a year’s supply of canvasses of different sizes, acrylic colours, brushes, oil crayons etc. Then the stuff lay around in our bedroom for several weeks and collected quite a bit of dust until we finally found the time and leisure to use it last Saturday. I have always enjoyed painting, but never ‘creative painting’, only those sets you could buy where a sketched picture was divided into small parts with different numbers which you then needed to colour with oil colours which had the matching numbers. The result was a very professionally looking oil painting which was actually rather a ‘painting book picture’. Anyways… I decided to try it out and produced my first painting on canvas! You can find the result below.

With some pride I must say that it looks much better than I would have expected any of my creations to look. Now the picture is hanging just across our flat door and the friendly Indian woman is greeting all our visitors with an inviting ‘namaste’.

Sometimes even I change some things…

As her orals come closer, she’s getting buried deeper and ever deeper
into her piles of books and folders - its difficult to find her some
evenings when I get back home

This is where Selket & Kshitij will post a few notes, about their life and times together. Keep looking for updates!