you don't need a reason

Moved into my very OWN apartment for the first time in my life!
Jeremy (ex husband) and I broke up late November but I couldn't get a new lease until January 1st. I just switched apartments here in Buckeye Village to a one bedroom, and I instantly fell in love with it. (Moving day ADIML)

Part one.

hit CTRL and - or CTRL and mouse scroll wheel to make everything smaller for easier viewing if 800 is too big for  your screen resolution.

This is where the women of the palace would sit and view the proceedings in the public meeting hall below. Purdah was strict back then, so the women could never be seen by strange men.

And now.. from Mumbai (all the mumbai pics can be found in the travel pics tag)

Jaipur is the capital of the desert city Rajasthan (Raja=king sthan=state (basically)). Population just over 3 million. My favorite place in india, the Amer Fort, is just outside of Jaipur, but first I thought I'd show some of the random pictures I took in the hotel and from taxis and stuff. It looks very different than the modern megacity in tropical Mumbai.

62% of the people who live in Mumbai live in slums. 62%!!! On what is only 6% of the city's land! 1/3rd of the residents have no access to clean water. And in 2015, Mumbai will become the world's largest city. It will have more people than Australia or all of Scandinavia. IN ONE CITY. Seriously, think about draining every human being in Scandinavia into one city with poor infrastructure. 30% of the city's GDP happens in the slums (the output OF DHARAVI SLUM ALONE is 600 million to 1 billion US DOLLARS a year. I believe a JFC! is in order. Now, Dharavi is a particularly successful slum, but all of them have significant economic output. 

A "hutment" that might not be any larger than a parking space yet usually hold 4-12 people there can go for 9k without title. That means these families who are living in shanties with no water access have at one point had more money than I've ever had at any time in my life, or my mom has ever seen at one time in HER life. That's pretty crazy to think about, and I think it does a lot to shatter this dirt-poor, lounging around in doorways and stairwells with flies in their eyes type image many westerners have in their head about slum dwellers. 

Mumbai is one of the most expensive real estate markets in the WORLD. In order: London, NYC, Moscow, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, MUMBAI. Rent averages 5k-10k a month. USD! Call center agents, who are upper middle class in most of India only make 3-4.5k a YEAR, for comparison. In South Mumbai (the fancy area) rents are $9-10.2k per square meter (for comparison, in Delhi it's $2k-3k, and in Bangalore it's $950-2k)

Right before I left for India I did a project on Mumbai Slums for my Housing class, so that's why I'm dropping some knowledge on ya'll. I have an underutilized powerpoint sitting right here, full of facts! And, I would like to remind you that the west was full of these slums until the hygeine movement in the 1939. In our planning classes we hear how every slum in the western world was cleared and how it has always been seen as a good thing, and the highways now usually go through areas where the slums used to be. But, only 1/3rd of the number of houses destroyed in those clearances were ever rebuilt. America still has an ENORMOUS shortage of housing to this day.

Plus, this was probably the best part of the trip for me. Now THIS was India. Not the gorgeous forts (just wait for my jaipur and Delhi posts you guys... unbelievably beautiful) or any of the other tourist traps. This was where Indians live, work, and where few tourists ever go. Our beloved Couchsurfing hostmom, Anu took us & her other couchsurfer from San Francisco here, so she was able to translate for us and talk to everyone and it was a really amazing experience. I knew all this stuff (having studied development and especially dharavi itself just the week before) but Thomas and Helen- especially Helen with no knowledge of development and a former wealthy SF financial person at all was BLOWN away. It absolutely destroyed all her preconcieved ideas of slums and the people who live in them. It was actually really fantastic to see someone's very worldview shift before your eyes.

I love hotels. I'm kind of a connesieur. By far my favorite hotel ever on earth was at the Intercontinental Marine Drive, overlooking the ocean in Mumbai. I really wanted to go to The Taj Hotel (infamous now for the terrorist shooting there in 2008) but it was expensive. We used Thomas' business points to get into this one for two nights, and it was AMAZING. SO glad that we did. We later stayed in the Intercontinental in New Orleans and it couldn't compare even a little to this one. 

I'm going to start posting pictures from the trip! Pardon the shitty quality. You have to go through a really annoying process that i didn't have access to to upload DSLR pics to Fb without them losing quality.

Here are just a few pictures from the flight over. As you might have seen, on my D.C. to London flight I happened to sit next to a girl (who had happened to switch seats with someone) who is from India and living in Columbus. She was also flying to India that day but that was the only flight we shared. We were instant friends and we hung out during her layover, and shortly after she left, Thomas got there!

homes are dangerous to live in.

Yesterday I cleaned my house. (!) It was gross. I needed to clean it the day before my supposed-to-be-housewarming party 2 weeks ago during spring break, but since I was sick all break, it didn't get done, and then it continued to not get done. I took a Ritalin yesterday after Jeremy cancelled our plans to go see Mirror Mirror and cleaned the whole damn house. Scrubbing, chemical bombing, putting away winter/too-small-baby clothes, etc. My throat hurts today from sleeping in fumes last night. My bad! I cleaned in the morning and couldn't smell them anymore, but I guess they were still there.

And then if you are my friend of FB you saw that I hurt myself- LIKE ALWAYS. I should not be allowed in kitchens. Especially after my Ritalin wears off - at that point all one's symptoms get much worse, ESPECIALLY the physical clumsiness. I was doing the dishes, but I dropped a glass in the sink. My ninja reflexes kicked in and i tried to grab it.... but all that did was basically PUNCH a very sharp point of the broken glass on the base of said cup. Not only did I cut my pinky knuckle and get blood all in  the sink and glass horror-film-style, but I'm pretty sure I severely bruised(or whatever) the bone because it HURTS and not at all like a cut. if I touch it (or a toddler makes it slam into something) it feels much like I imagine it would if you hit a broken leg with a car. D':

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Shhh.

So, I may or may not be writing a novel. If I am... I may have, perhaps, trashed the whole thing, rearranged the main character structure, and started all over yesterday. I'm freaking out a bit because I am literally starting from scratch with only the two main characters the same, but it's just one of those things. You have an idea for a story, but when you start getting to know the characters and the world, they no longer fit in what you were planning, so you have to fix the story, because characters are basically as real as flesh and bone humans and they can't really be altered to fit story lines (while still feeling real, anyway). So, I'm trying to rebuilt my first scenes right now, with one character who no longer exists and three new ones. Very strange! I actually walked home instead of taking the bus today because I needed to try to figure out how the hell to get all the characters to meet  now. I think I figured it out, thank goodness, but we'll see if it actually works when I write it out. 

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Photography stuffs.

I've been practicing with my new t3i. Both around my apartment complex and when the city planning student association went up to Cleveland this weekend. I've also been messing around with Photoshop CS6 & Actions, trying to work on my style. I have a feeling it will be quite a while before I get into a style groove, but it's fun exploring. I got a bunch of Florabella actions and I'm playing around with the spring collection now. I definitely still need to work on getting "creamy" skin tones, but it involves MATH! Dumb. :p I renewed my ClickinMoms subscription and that has been absolutely invaluable in teaching me stuff. Definitely worth 30$ if you are into DSLR photography/portraiture!

I'm getting much better with shutter speed, as I've been practicing on TV mode. After that I'll work on the Aperture setting and then move on to manual. I've been bookmarking a lot of the really helpful tutorial blogs/posts on my Photography Pinterest board, if you are interested. Nothing from ClickinMoms' is on there though, since it's a private forum.

And, as part of my preparation for eventually doing this for a little side money (People were actually asking me before I even got a new camera), I bought a logo to watermark my photos with and I started a photography blog. I haven't shared it yet or anything, but I might as well get into the swing of watermarking and posting stuff now. So I'm going to do a photo dump and so if you get confused as to why the hell i would watermark some of them, that's why.

Oh and some of these the colors SUCK. You can sort of tell the style of them, but the colors are still quite weird, thanks to facebook messing with them upon upload. So just know they at least look a little better than what you are seeing here. (The watermarked ones are up on photobucket and are pretty much true to how they look on my computer).

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PICTCHARS