The Problem with Monogamy...

...where knitting is concerned, is that it provides so little blog fodder. It doesn't help that I've put in 100+ hours at work over the past two weeks, or that David was away for the past week at AOBA Nationals. On top of all that, it was cold, grey and rainy all last week, so I couldn't even get out and do anything garden-wise.

The shawl has been proceeding steadily, though. I just finished the 20th and final pattern repeat for the body and worked out a chart for a basic, but hopefully very effective, border last night and sorted out how deep it needs to be to make the edging repeats fit on just so. I'd post a photo, but at this point it's just more of the same, so it seems, well, pointless.

There Is One Thing, Though...

...that's kind of been going on recently that I haven't blogged about yet. When I went to Knit Camp last month, one of the farthest-flung knitsibs who was able to make it was Joy, who is living in India these days (though here in the States for the summer).

We talked quite a bit about Rewalsar, where she's living, and in particular about the dog and cat overpopulation there. Aside from the general concerns related to having too many dogs and cats running around making babies and getting sick or run over by cars, it's also a huge human health concern. India has fully half the world's human rabies deaths, more than any other country in the world. Some 20-30,000 people die in India every year from the disease, most of them children and most from dog bites.

So this got me to thinking about the possibility of trying to set up some sort of program to do some sterilization & vaccination. It wouldn't do much for the national picture, but I figure it would at least be something. So I've been looking into programs already in place, since it seems crazy to duplicate effort, and I've been in contact with two different ones - one 1000km from Rewalsar in Jodhpur that's got some technical assistance from WHO and Humane Society International and might be a useful model to look at, and a homegrown effort in Shimla, the state capital of Himachal Pradesh, which is run by the veterinary school in the state in conjunction with the Department of Animal Husbandry.

So the past month has been filled with a lot of research (and a lot of time trying to teach myself devanagari script) and now I'm looking into the possibility of making a fall trip - a recon mission of sorts - to see what sort of groundwork I need to lay to make something happen. It's possible that there may not be much, as Nyondo just posted about seeing a couple of recently spayed dogs around town.

The other reason for an advance trip is to figure out how best to get David around if I can manage to drag him along at some point. He may have lived in and around Manhattan for 10 years and seen a lot of weird shit, but I'm pretty sure that he'd have a rough time handling Delhi without someone who at least has an idea of what to do. I may, too, for that matter, but I'm usually pretty good at landing on my feet in those situations and a lot better at picking up other languages. Still, at this point, nothing's firm and I have to figure out whether it's even possible.

One Last Thing

So this isn't a completely photo-free post, I offer you the latest yoga asana as demonstrated by Bosox, one of my patients from last night. I give you "cat licking ass" pose: