Stutzfamily blog thingie

Strange animal partner week continues here at the ole Stutz blog, as we have two more great tastes that taste great together. Our fish tank has a new resident, albeit one who lives under the aquarium (we have it on a couple pieces of wood to try and minimize water damage to the table it is on).

We’ve noticed him coming out at night – at first he would just sit on the ledge below the tank and watch the fish swim around. Eventually he began climbing on the glass itself, but we’ve never seen him making any kind of “I’m going to eat you” movement towards the fish.

Internet searches have pretty much yielded the consensus that these household geckos don’t eat fish, but Susan is convinced that he is trying to do just that. She also thinks he is too skinny and is starving to death – apparently he is incapable of going somewhere else for dinner?

My guess is that he likes the warmth of the tank (and the vibration from the bubbles?) or else hunts bugs that are attracted to the light inside. The only flaw in this thinking is that the light is turned off at night, and we’ve never seen him doing any kind of hunting at all. So who knows what is on his mind?

Maybe he just wants to adopt some of the fish and take care of them – another Mumbai cross-species love affair in action?

The webpages from our Dharamsala trip are online and rarin’ to go. This last week has been really weak on the blog entry front, and I’m worried that trend might continue as we enter the holiday season of things.

We did have an exciting event this last weekend, as we went to downtown Mumbai for dinner with the parents of one of my students. The interesting thing about it is that the husband happens to be the 34th richest man in the world (this after having his net worth drop by $42 billon last year. Yes, you read that correctly. He’s only worth $10 billion now). When all is said and done, however, he and his wife were delightful hosts and we had a fabulous time.

But that doesn’t excuse me from neglecting my internet duties now, does it? Until I get back into the real swing of things, go take your mind off your other problems and check out all the fun we had a few weeks back!

Since Susan is hosting a book club meeting tomorrow night, we figured we’d get our jack o’lanterns done a few days early. Our maid had picked up a few (greenish yellow) pumpkins from the market, and a neighbor from downstairs brought up carving magazines and stencils (I kid you not).

Oh, in case you were wondering – here’s a little bit of international Halloween trivia to keep handy: Indian pumpkins are MUCH easier to carve than Serbian pumpkins. They are soft and scoop out with very little effort.

In any case, there were some scary faces, a stenciled-on spider, and Breck even carved his very own pumpkin for the first time – a zombie! Aside from the cheesy (pumpkin) pi tattoo I gave mine, the evening was a success. Plus we’ll have lots of roasted pumpkin seeds to eat!

So now we are all set for the girls coming over to talk about “People of the Book.” I won’t be attending, but just for the record I thought the end of the book ruined the whole thing: how in the world could he have recreated – perfectly (except for the wrong skin) – the book. Silly, silly, silly, and there goes all pretense of reality for me.

Oh but wait, this post is about pumpkins. OK – so this is what they looked like in the end. Now we’ve gotta see if they last until Saturday!

No – not uncle Billy, although the name sounds the same. Billy is our “apartment kitty” – a stray that has adopted us (since we feed him and all the kids in the building love to play with him).

He is a young kitty now and very playful, so he is a ton of fun to chase around when we’re outside playing. The guards seem to tolerate his presence well enough, so we’ll have to see if he is still around after our summer break. We’ve let money for our housekeeper to give him some food, so we’ll see.

Mom will not let us entertain any thoughts of letting him be an in-house cat, so of course Breck, Alea, and dad had to sneak him in the apartment one day just to take pictures of him inside!

And his name? Apparently, the common word for cat in Hindi is billi, so it was a very easy stretch for us to name him Billy!!