bodhi tree swaying

• I managed to get a lot of writing done yesterday. I’ve been going back over a chapter I wrote on the Water Element (for a book on the Six Elements). I think I’m going to have to fork some of the material into a new chapter either at the start or end of the book, but that’s ultimately a good thing. I find sometimes I have to print stuff to be able to get some perspective on it — otherwise it’s hard to keep track of where I am in the document. Since I have a quiet morning I’m hoping to be able to get some more work done before heading off for a 4th July family gathering.
• Watched the final episode of Frasier last night What a great show! I’m going go miss those characters and the wit of the script. Even

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• Apparently God does not like his followers to resign for ethical violations, misuse of taypayers’ money, lying, and dereliction of duty, as Mark Sandford attests.
• "Joe" "The Plumber" calls for the assassination of a senator, or at least comes close. He also reveals a stunning grasp of history. I had no idea that Karl Marx predated the American Revolution.
• 3/4 of people in the US who are pushed into bankruptcy by medical problems have insurance. You can read about some health care horror stories in this NYT article.
• My 2-year-old pointed to NYT columnist Maureen Dowd’s picture on my monitor this morning and identified her by name. Maia, you rock! (She’d asked me Maureen’s name at least two months ago).
• Glenn Greenwald discusses the deaths (possibly by torture) of perhaps

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I’m mainly testing out the Wordpress app for iPhone, which took a bit of fiddling before it would work, but I also wanted to say that all the adoptive families I meet are the coolest people. And here’s a picture of Maia.

A lot of people are moving on to posting “LifeStreams” or some such thing because it can be rather tedious to have to log into a blog to make a post. I sympathize. It’s a symptom of modern life can be rather daunting to log into a site to tell the world what you’re thinking about — in the way that one might inwardly groan when you realize you have to print out a letter, put in in an envelope, find a stamp, and make a trip to the Post Office. Anyway, here are a few tweet-like highlights of the last day or so.

• Here’s an audio tweet:
  
• In the middle of writing a blog post, Xmarks gets stuck while syncing and crashes Firefox. I’m experiencing some frustration.
• Posted a new Meditation Zeitgeist article on Wildmind
• Puzzled by the fact that wildmind.org is not on the first page of results for

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This is the window of Malkias’ aunt’s house in Aleta Chuko, south of Awassa. She had a lovely, spacious house, with a bamboo floor and a large garden to the rear.

In Oromia province, south of Addis, I saw a lot of men plowing with oxen. It was hard to get pictures because by the time I’d spotted them we’d have zoomed past.

There are loads of these storks at the fish market at Awassa. It’s hard to get decent pictures of them; every time I would point a camera at one, some “helpful” young boy would throw fish at it, hoping for a tip. It’s hard to photograph a stork when it’s running to get a piece of fish….

I’m typing in an internet cafe on Bole Road in Addis on one of the world’s oldest and most rickety keyboards, so please excuse any typogaphical anomalies.

We moved in to Horizon house on Friday and took charge of malkias on Saturday. BY that time he knew us quite well since we’d been visiting him every day for two weeks, and we’ve had no problems with him accepting us. in fact he’s very calm and happy with us. By the time we moved in he was smiling broadly when he saw us.

He’s well, but is cutting a tooth (top left) and the excess salivation is causing him to cough, especially at night. This has caused some lack of sleep, but we’re all doing fine.

Maia’s showing some signs of jealousy, but she also loves him. She’s learning which way his body doesn’t bend.

We had our trip to the US Embassy yesterday (monday) …

We’re at the end of the stay at our funky guest-house, which means we’re moving to a lovely suite at the orphanage guest-house and won’t have to schlepp across town anymore. Hurray!

Yesterday we went to visit a shop that sells goods made by former women wood-carriers, who have very hard lives lugging wood from the countryside into the city to make pitifully small amounts of money. We also visited Entoto market. So we’re now well stocked on souvenirs. We took Maia to the Ghion hotel, where there was a fairground. And then we walked over to Horizon House to spend some time with Malkias.

Maia’s getting very good at football.

She loves holding her little brother.

So do I….

Here’s a picture of me, Maia, and Malkias.

We had a great trip down to Awassa (actually Boracha, just outside the city) to see Maia’s aunt Manjitu, and then down to Aleta Chuko, another hour south, to see Malkias’s aunt, Yeshi. Here’s Maia and Manjitu.

We found out that Malkias is probably only 9 1/2 months old, and not 13 1/2 months old, as we’d been led to believe. That makes a lot of sense when you take his cognitive development into account.

The days after the visits we went to the fish market (much more interesting than it sounds and fed the monkeys. We got some really great pictures. Here’s a colobus monkey.

We’re going to start spending more time with Malkias this week. We’ll probably …

So tomorrow we’re off to Boracha, which is just outside Awassa, and to Aletachuko, which is about 90 minutes further south, to see Maia’s and Milkias’s birth families. We’ll be back sunday.

The stay here is going well. We’ve been doing a lot of walking around town, and everyone comes up to talk to Maia, who is “konjo” (beautiful).

There are rolling power blackouts that seem to come about every three days and last for just under a day. We dine by candle-light. I love Addis and could easily live here. For a while at least.

It’s nice to have some simplicity, and I’m finding that being offline is very good for my writing. I’ve finally tightened up the thesis of my book on the six elements, which is a relief. I think I needed to get away from the distraction of daily life in order for new ideas to percolate through.

Maia’s …

Yesterday (Tuesday) I spent the morning catching up on emails and then managed to get some writing done. In the afternoon we walked the four kilometers from our guest-house to Horizon house. Given that I was carrying Maia in a front-carrier it was a fairly long walk, but much more interesting than taking the car. We were able to notice things like boys beside the road, roasting corn on hot charcoals, and women selling candy by the roadside. My trouser cuffs were covered in mud by the time we got to HH, because of all the construction sites we passed. We tried to find out the names of the streets we passed, but many of them had no street signs. Maia slept almost all the way.

We spent more time playing with Malkias. Hopefully he’s becoming more familiar with us. Did I mention before that he’s babbling? He often says …

We arrived in Addis two days ago after a relatively comfortable journey. We all managed to get some sleep on the 12 hour flight from JFK to Dubai, and then we got some more solid sleep in the Millennium Hotel there, although we had to be up at 5:30 after getting to sleep at 11:00. The hop from Dubai to Addis is only three hours, and was also pleasant.

A driver from our guest house picked us up. The place we’re in is clean and bigger than I’d expected. The people that run it are very friendly and welcoming, and take good care of us.

Of course our first priority was to go see Malkias. Yonas, a taxi driver who does a lot of business with Horizon House, ran us over there. It’s a little under four miles away. It’s closer as the crow flies, but there’s no very direct route.

Malkias …

Shrijnana and Maia at Rye Beach, almost a year ago, in April 2008.

This photograph is part of Monochrome Friday.

Maia takes after her parents (except that dad has enormous resistance to speaking on the phone).

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had a free trial to Ancestry.com and have been intensively investigating the history of my mother’s family — the Tragheims (or Traghams — some of them changed their name during the second world war). I wanted to squeeze every last bit of data out of my trial period, before the $19.95 per month charge kicked in, and so I’ve not had much time for blogging. But I’m back! (And I’ll say more about the outcomes of my researches later).

Anyway, I was struck by an article in the NYT about how grandparents keep in touch with young children over long distances using webcams. The article had a lot of resonances for me because Maia has been keeping in touch with her grandparents that way since she was perhaps six months old. It was hard to get my …

One day recently Maia wanted to play in the car, where she likes to twiddle knobs and pull levels, but I decided it would be more enriching to go for a walk in the woods. It turned out to be a good call, and she had a great time even though she was still getting over a cold.

In an article in Atlantic magazine, author and Yale University professor of psychology Paul Bloom makes a provocative observation about parenthood and happiness:

Pretty much no matter how you test it, children make us less happy. The evidence isn’t just from diary studies; surveys of marital satisfaction show that couples tend to start off happy, get less happy when they have kids, and become happy again only once the kids leave the house. As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert puts it, “Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of ‘empty-nest syndrome’ is increased smiling.” So why do people believe that children give them so much pleasure? Gilbert sees it as an illusion, a failure of affective forecasting. Society’s needs are served when people believe that having children is a good thing, so we are deluged with

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On Monday, the processing of Maia’s citizenship papers came through. The nice people at Homeland Security gave her an American flag.