Saturday, 5 January Sunrise
Clear horizon . . . . looking for snow clouds . . .
Scary – that’s not the horizon the sun is over, it’s the veil of (smog?) (pollution?) (fog?) that seems to hang over the Gulf perpetually.
Why all these sunrises? Well, for one thing, because I can, because when I wake up I usually can’t get back to sleep, I am AWAKE and ready to go. My best time of the day.
Bundle Up!
If you’ve been following the weather forecasts, this week to come is going to get very very COLD. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are going to be getting down to freezing, below freezing in remote desert areas.
It’s so humid . . . is it possible to have snow in Kuwait? Has it ever snowed here?
Swedish Pot Roast
You don’t think of fine cooking when you think of Sweden, and yet this pot roast is one of my family’s all time favorites. It has a unique flavor, sweet and rich, and you need a pressure cooker to fix this. It is old fashioned, but the taste is amazing. It’s a great January kind of meal, served with potatoes and maybe some Rot Kohl / Red Cabbage.
3 lb. beef pot roast (7 bone preferred) or chuck or brisket
1 t. nutmeg
1 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. ginger
2 t. salt
1/8 t. pepper
2 T. cooking oil
1 cup water
2 onions, sliced
4 bay leaves
1 clove garlic, crushed
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup red wine or vinegar
Combine nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, salt, pepper; rub into meat.
In pressure cooker, brown meat on both sides.
Add onion, garlic, brown sugar and water, wine and bay leaves. Close cover of pressure cooker, place regulator on vent pipe and cook 35 minutes with regulator rocking slowly. Let pressure drop.
4 – 6 servings over egg noodles, or cooked potatoes.
Freecycle
There was an article within the last few days in the Kuwait Times about Freecycle but this is not the recent article. It was the only article I could fine, from April 2007. The important thing is that it exists, and that setting up a Kuwait freecycle would be of benefit to many.
In the expat community, we do a lot of Freecycle on an informal basis. When we come, people help us out with things, and when we leave, we pass our things along. Sometimes we sell them, but often as not, we give them away and would love for them to fall into the right hands. We all hate waste.
(Oh my gosh! I just went to the Freecycle Website and found the Kuwait group and it has 122 members! Holy Smokes!) Click on the blue type and you can join the Kuwait group, too!
Don’t throw it away, someone might want it
Published Date: April 25, 2007
By Pete May
Our houses are full of them: old computers, fax machines, video players, fridges in the garage, vinyl records, unwanted armchairs – things we don’t want but still work. Research by gumtree.com reveals the British dispose of over £5.6bn worth of usable household items a year, including 1.35m working fridges and freezers, and 2.6m sofas. People out there want our redundant stuff – but how do we find them? A few weeks ago, I tried to shift a 10-year-old Apple Power Mac and a similarly ancient (in computer terms) Mac laptop. Both worked, so to throw them in a skip would have been wasteful and created toxic waste (computers can contain heavy metals and chemicals). I’d checked the likes of Computer Aid International (computeraid.org) and the Community Recycling Network (crn.org.uk). Both accepted PCs, but the words “10-year-old Apple Mac” resulted in polite rejection.
So I tried Freecycle, an online forum where people give away and pick up unwanted stuff, free of charge. It has 4,009 communities worldwide and, according to its online counter, 3,401,532 users. I joined my local group and tentatively posted my message: “Offered: Power Mac with printer and Powerbook laptop, bought in 1997 but working fine, need to be collected.” Within three hours I’d had 30 replies. Suddenly my Macs were seen as a valuable resource. Jenny wanted the laptop for her 11-year-old son who was “a Mac fanatic”, while Julie wanted it for her soon-to-be daughter-in-law; Ben needed computers for his charity in Zimbabwe. It wasn’t easy to decide whom to give them to.
Freecycle etiquette dictates that you don’t necessarily give things to the first emailer – and you must reject anyone you suspect wants to sell the goods. I opted for friendly sounding people who could collect immediately: Andy, who’d been on disability benefit for three years, and Ruth, a cash-starved student. Since then I’ve used Freecycle to shift two fax machines, a Zip drive, an office desk, a child’s desk, a malfunctioning Hoover, some kitchen shelves, a washing machine and my local vicar’s sofa bed. Our fridge-freezer went to a woman with cancer who was on a special diet and needed it for her store of juices. Our rubbish was helping someone fight for life. Then I visited SwapXchange, which offers items to swap from all over the country via its website (swapxchange.org). I exchanged a juicer and a Kenwood mixer for a bottle of organic wine apiece.
(Read the rest of the article by clicking on the BLUE Kuwait Times type, above.)
Pass it along. . . !
Travel Plans
We are in the process of setting up travel plans, business, family and leisure. When I came across this today on ICHC, I couldn’t resist:
moar funny pictures
“I Sparkle Like a Crystal . . .
. . . when I am with my pistol” sings Annie Oakley, from Annie Get Your Gun. It’s been running through my head ever since I heard about the Kuwait Bloggerettes outing to the shooting range. You’ve seen Megan Mullally on Will and Grace, but here she is, singing Annie’s song and hitting her target dead on:
And here are the lyrics:
Oh my mother was frightened by a shotgun they say
That’s why I’m such a wonderful shot
I’d be out in the cactus and I’d practice all day
And now tell me, what have I got
I’m quick on the trigger
With targets not much bigger than a pinpoint
I’m number one
But my score with a feller
Is lower than a cellar
No you can’t get a man with a gun
When I’m with a pistol
I sparkle like a crystal
Yes I shine like the morning sun
But I lose all my luster when with a crumple buster
Oh, you can’t get a man with a gun
With a gun! With a gun!
No you can’t get a man with a gun
If I went to battle with someone’s herd of cattle
You’d have steak when the job was done
But if I shot the herder
They’d holler bloody murder!
And you can’t get a hug from a mug with a slug
Oh, you can’t get a man with a gun
I’m cool, brave and darin’
To see a lion glaring when I’m out with my Remmington,
But a look from a mister
Will raise a fever blister
Oh, you can’t get a man with a gun
The gals with umbrellers
Are always out with fellers
In the rain or the blazing sun
But a man never trifles with gals who carry rifles
Oh, you can’t get a man with a gun
With a gun! With a gun!
No you can’t get a man with a gun
A Tom, Dick, or Harry
Will build a house for Carrie when the preacher has made ’em one
But he can’t build ya houses with buckshot in his trousers
And you can’t shoot a man in the tail like a quail,
Oh, you can’t get a man with a gun
A man’s love is mighty
He’ll even buy a nightie for a gal who he thinks is fun
But they don’t by pajamas for pistol-packin’ mamas!
Oh, a man may be hot, but he’s not
When he’s shot!
Oh you can’t get a man with a gun!
Wait Five Minutes
When I first looked out the window this morning, you couldn’t see a thing. Looking closely, you could see a tiny glow where the streetlights are, but nothing else. The fog had rolled in.
Five minutes later, you could see the shoreline.
Now, there is still a thick fog, but you can see through it.
I didn’t have any hope for a good sunrise this morning, but I was pleasantly surprised. I had a gleam of sunshine about 7:30:
Five minutes later:
And five minutes later:
And in my head, I hear the ineffable strains of Break Forth, Oh Beauteous Heavenly Light, which when I went to U-Tube, I found this wonderful version by the Florida Agricultural and Mining University, beautifully done with another appropriate hymn, Deo Gratias, or, as we say in Arabic, Thanks Be to God!
WordPress and Statistics
I was on a roll – the numbers just kept going higher and higher. The gambler in my soul knew that it was all an illusion, that it had nothing to do with my current entries and everything to do with the Christmas season and seasonal entertainment, but you know how it is, when you’re rocking along, you get this euphoria that excludes logical thinking.
Christmas Day it all came to a screeching halt.
Numbers back to normal.
WordPress allows you to see how a post has performed over a lifetime. These are my all time top performers. All in all, I would estimate that people looking for tried-and-true recipes have accounted for a full tenth of my statistics.
Christmas Divinity Candy 4483
Christmas Punch, Rum and Rumless 2418
Easy Kraft Christmas Fudge 1526
My one wish in the New Year would be that WordPress would find a way to let us click somewhere and see our posts in order of all-time “hits.”
The highest scoring non-recipe hit-getter?
Levantine-Gulf-Persian Warrior Women, 1799, one of those posts you write in an idle moment with a idle question. And oh, the responses! I learned so much from my readers on this one.
My Wish For You
A dear friend gave me a book mark with this poem on it. I had never seen it before, and I found myself greatly moved. I hope you like it, too.
This is My Wish for You
That the spirit of beauty
may continually hover about you
and fold you close within
the tenderness of her wings.
That each beautiful
and gracious thing in life
May be unto you as a symbol
of good for your soul’s delight.
That sun-glories
and star-glories,
Leaf-glories and bark-glories,
Flower-glories
and glories that lurk
in the grasses of the field . . . .
Glories of mountains and oceans,
of little streams of running waters
Glories of song
of poesy,
of all the arts. . .
May be to you as sweet
abiding influences
That will illumine your life
and make you glad.
That your soul may be
as an alabaster cup
Filled to overflowing
With the mystical wine
of beauty and love.
That happiness may
put her arms around you,
And wisdom make
your soul serene.
This is my wish for you.
By Charles Livingston Snell (1914)
Cat Scuba Diver
Today after my bath, I tossed (gently) the Qatteri Cat in the nice warm tub. I’ve done this before – it’s not his favorite thing, but neither does he completely freak out when I do it. I wish I could get him used to it so I could give his coat a nice cleaning once every now and then. I think it’s going to take some time.
But I remember a video I saw a long long time ago about a woman who taught cats to swim, so I looked it up online. There were no videos of the original woman I remember from many years ago (the film was pretty horrifying; her philosophy was to just throw them in the bathtub as kittens and they would get used to it) but there are a lot of new videos out there, people teaching their cats how to survive a fall in the water, particularly people with pools.
And I found this hilarious video about a cat whose owner made her a scuba-diving suit and taught her to dive! Hilarious and hard to believe, but the cat seems to like it!
Recent Comments
Catherine on Donna Leon Crossing Cultu… intlxpatr on Ignoring the Law thani on Ignoring the Law Anon. on British Soldier Kidnapped, Esc… Reeva Mills on Cahors to Bordeaux, Preparing… Wikipedia Donate Button
Amazina
Early Voting in Florida
Here There and Everywhere 