Stop Means Stop!
From time to time, we can hear the police pulling people over outside our residence. It gives us a big grin. One of the things they say, in English, is:
“Hey Buddy! Pull over!”
And the other thing they say is:
“Stop means STOP!”
We hear these two phrases over and over, so it must be part of their training.
Shrimp Or Clam Salad
This is a great salad to take to a potluck / covered dish lunch. It can be made with either clams of shrimp, and can be made more or less spicy by the addition of Tabasco sauce.
Shrimp / Clam Salad
3 cups freshly cooked hot rice
3 -4 Tablespoons Miracle Whip or Mayonnaise
2 Tbls cocktail sauce (or ketchup + horseradish)
2 -3 chopped green onions
i stalk chopped celery
1/2 cup chopped sweet pickle
12 – 16 oz cooked frozen shrimp
or
2 cans whole clams, drained (use the clam liquid as part of the water for cooking the rice)
Cook rice, add solid ingredients (no need to thaw shrimp if rice is hot). Add sauces and very little pepper to the rice. Stir, cover and refirgerate until cold. Serve on lettuce leaves, if serving individually.
Stinni’s New Blog?
About twice a day for the last few days, I have seen new blog messages from Stinni. Stinni? you there? Hello?
What’s going on, Stinni? I am guessing you are trying some new formats, maybe working on moving your blog from one place to another?
We are waiting, Stinni! We are eager to see what you come up with! All these teasers are building up the suspense!
Rich WordPress Upgrade
Today WordPress announced a huge increase in free upload space: Free Space to Three Gigabytes.
“Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get half that much space (1GB) at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. We’re doing the same thing for free.”
They also announced, important to people like me who like to illustrate heavily with photos, that if you bought a 1GB upgrade, it is now a 5GB upgrade, at no extra charge.
moar funny pictures
I upgraded when I got up to 75% capacity, but never even reached 1% or capacity yet. I feel like the (space) richest woman in the world today!
Hummos Wa Burghul
Do you see that black stone dish on the table, the one that has a dish in it called Hummos wa Burghul (Chickpeas and Cracked Wheat?)
I am trying to find a recipe to make it. Please, if you are Syrian or Jordanian, and you know how to make this, or maybe you have a mom or an aunt who knows how to make this, would you please share your recipe with me?
I found one recipe, for a Burghul Pilaf, from a 1959 Lebanese cookbook. It calls for 1 1/4 lbs of butter. (!!! AACK !!!) I remember it really did taste buttery, it was really yummy, but that sure seems like a lot of butter!
It was delicious. I’d really like to try to make it, if someone out there can help me out.
270,000 KD for What?
I found this in today’s Kuwait Times. I think maybe I am out of touch . . . I haven’t heard of anyone sending or receiving a telegram for a long time. I don’t believe my husband’s office even uses a telex anymore? Am I missing something?
Kuwait Times: 20 January 2008
Telegram, Telex services
Kuwait: The Ministry of Communication is planning to create a new telegram and telex service system. The system will cost KD 270,000 and will be using modern equipment and up to date methods. A contract for creating the system was first given to a Bahraini company, but then the ministry decided to create the system themselves. The ministry will start working on creating the system two weeks from now.
Anyone? Anyone?
The Qatteri Cat Sleeps Through Winter
You’ve been asking about QC. There isn’t much to tell you. He decided it was too cold, and all he does is sleep. Occasionally, he will wake up, take a walk to the food bowl and water dish, make a visit to the kitty litter, but then it’s back to sleep – waiting for warmer weather.
Yesterday, as I was working, he was following me around, “miaow, miaow” which meant “please sit down and provide a warm place for me to fall asleep” so I made him a little bed in the work room, and it wasn’t his first choice, but he made do, keeping me company while he sleeps through winter.
Scary Sunrise 20 January 2008
When I got up this morning, the sky was all pink, the water was all pink, it was a world of pink haze, very beautiful. Within moments, the light had shifted, the pink haze was gone and the sun began to rise, very dramatically, lighting up the clouds like you see on the ceilings of Renaissance chapels.
But wait! What is this? The sky is lit, the clouds are illuminated, but the brilliance of the sun is having a hard time breaking through the sludge hanging just over the horizon. I have a bad feeling, whatever it is that is strong and thick enough to block the sun, we are also breathing it.
It’s about 5°C warmer at 0800 than the last few days, with forcast of clouds and possible rain through Wednesday.
Leon: Friends in High Places
After reading two stinkers, I needed a read I could rely on for a good fix. I needed escape, mixed with good food, good clothes and some social awareness. I needed Guido Brunetti, Donna Leon’s Venetian detective, and his smart, savvy wife Paula, and his family meals of pasta with soft shell crabs and risi e bisi, his children, his disgust for the politics that impinge on his doing his job.
If you think Kuwait has “wasta” (doing business by connections, influence, calling in favors), you aint’ seen nuthin’ till you’ve seen how Byzantine Venetians operate.
Friends in High Places opens with Commissario Brunetti lying on his couch re-reading Anabasis when he receives a visit from a building inspector, who determines that the apartment he owns, on the very top of a building in Venice, was probably built illegally – there are no plans or restoration approvals on file at the bureaucracy regulating residential buildings in Venice – and may have to be torn down.
Wouldn’t that be a shock? It’s a shock to Brunetti and to his family, just as it would be to us. We learn all the ins and outs of housing codes, the impact of becoming part of the EEC, and how the clever Venetians devise ways around the codes, all while Brunetti is investigating one murder – and then three other murders.
It is a VERY satisfying book. I will share with you a lengthy quote from Friends in High Places as Guido and Paola discuss how to deal with the problem:
At no time did it occur to him, as it did not occur to Paola, to approach the matter legally, to find out the names of the proper offices and officials and the proper steps to follow. Nor did it occur to either of them that there might be a clearly defined bureaucratic procedure by which they could resolve this problem. If such things did exist or could be discovered, Venetians ignored them, knowing that the only way to deal with problems like this was by means of conoscienze: acquaintances, friendships, contacts and debts built up over a lifetime of dealing with a system generally agreed, even by those in its employ, perhaps especially by those in it’s employ, prone to the abuses resultant from centuries of bribery, and encumbered by a Byzantine instinct for secrecy and lethargy.
I am sorry to tell you that the only copy of this I could find on Amazon.com cost $99.98. I must have bought this one in England, where, I promise you, it was the normal cost of a paperback book.
I will warn you in addition, I was looking forward to reading a second Leon novel, Quietly in their Sleep, only to discover when I started that I had already read it, as The Death of Faith. The books published by Leon in England are often retitled for the American market. Leon fans, beware!
Sunrise and Widget
I wasn’t sure there was going to be a sunrise this morning, when I woke up and the sky was full of clouds and DARK! At around sunrise (I can check on Weather Underground Kuwait when that is going to happen) I started clicking. When I looked at my results, it looked like two different mornings, but it is all today, Saturday, January 18th, 2008.
Will we really have a sunrise?
I guess so! (5 minutes later)
I hope you have all noticed the new weather widget on my closest right hand column, giving the current temperature in Fahrenheit and Centigrade. After more than a year of blogging, it occurs to me that other people using WordPress have widgets from outside WordPress, so there MIGHT be a way. (Yeh, I’m slow, but I’m slow.) Now that I have figured out how to do that, I am getting all excited about maybe changing format. (Maybe around June; I have a list of things to get done first. 😉 )
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