More of the Same

Today I went shopping for light fixtures. To be honest, I hardly ever paid attention to light fixtures before but now that we need them for our own house, I can hardly pass a house without noting the style of their lights. Lantern, wall-mounted, polished brass, bronze, iron, traditional, modern, rustic....And I cannot choose one! This is where one needs a good sense of dimensions: too big and your lights are all that people can see, too small and they disappear. I spent an hour or so at Fairfield Lighting. They are smaller than their competitor in South Norwalk but that was precisely their strength. Fewer but more invested sales people, one of whom took a lot of time educating me on what sizes and styles to look for. I like that, not that I have anything against Klaff's, with whom I have done a lot of business too over the last year. And maybe I will still order something online after all, let's see.

Thunder, Lightning, and War

Thunder, lightning, hail, lots of rain, and a sick child! That was last night. You would not believe it today, it is so clear and sunny and relatively mild. As if the weather had a giant temper tantrum and now is all sweetness and light.

We are leaving for India soon, where the government has banned blogger. So probably there will be no updates unless whichever bureaucrat thought this up decides to relent. Still, there are too many other things happening there, like the Bombay blasts, and the water logging because of the monsoons. I wonder if I will have the time to think about this blog. I do hope that there is not some insane crackdown on the internet in general. I rely on it more than on TV for my daily fix of news.

Speaking of news, at least our trip to India will not be as nervousness-inducing as this poor Stamford guy's story. The situation in the Middle East continues to deteriorate rapidly. Poor Lebanon is of course between a rock and a hard place. Hizbollah backed by Syria on the one hand and Israel backed by the US on the other and both sides are reducing the country to an absolute rubble. The civilian casualties, the stunningly callous term "collateral damage" always infuriates me, are amazingly high and disproportionately Lebanese. That in itself is cause for anger. The utter disregard for civilian casualties in Lebanon is amazing but fairly typical given the attitudes to people of Middle Eastern origin in the west. Angry Arab raves and rants about the war there. But do be advised that he calls himself an anarchist so his opinions are, well, anarchist. I sometimes agree with him but being an army brat, I am less scornful of rightfully appointed government or authority than he is. Note, I said "rightfully."