The Quest for a Florida Driver’s License
I thought it would be a piece of cake.
One of the hardest driver’s licenses to get is a German one, unless you are a driver’s license holder from select states who have an agreement with Germany. I was not a resident of any of those states, but my husband’s company was located in one of them, so as I went through one year, I exchanged my current state license for that state’s license by showing my license and letting them punch a hole in it, getting a new photo and a new license from the needed state – it took like ten minutes.
So AdventureMan and I show up at the Florida Driver’s license place with our old licenses. The man hands us a check list of items we need, and it is like a scavenger hunt! You must have one from column one, one from column two, one from column three and two from column four.
Aha! The Queen of Paperwork, one of my aliases, assures AdventureMan we can cobble together what we need. I have utility bills! I have a 1099! We have passports! We have a deed to our new house, with our names on it!
We walk back in and meet a very nice Florida driver’s license guy and discover our paperwork is not quite so adequate as we thought. My 1099 does not have my FULL social security number on it. I haven’t seen my social security card for – decades. No one has EVER asked to see it before. I know my number, and it isn’t enough that it is on the several other cards I pull out to verify who I am.
We have 9/11 to thank for this, and the Orwellian Patriot Act, life has gotten a lot more complicated.
AdventureMan does not have exactly the right papers either, but very close, so the attendant allows me to write out a statement verifying that I am responsible for him and verify he is living at my address with me (the utility is in my name.)
On our way down to the Social Security Administration, which, by the way was amazingly efficient for a bureaucracy, AdventureMan started laughing and said it’s not unlike when we first got married and he, being four months younger than I am, was not old enough to rent a car, so I rented the car in my name. I laughed and told him he was lucky that when I vouched he lived with me, I did not check the block where I said I was his guardian!
Less than an hour later, I have a letter verifying I have a social security number, and will have a new card, and we are back at the Driver’s License office for the third time; the third time’s the charm, and now I am a legal Florida driver, a registered voter, and an organ donor.
I still have my lifetime-good German driver’s license, which has been handy many a time, and my Kuwait driver’s license, valid for eight more years, and a valid Qatar driver’s license, although maybe now that we are no longer legal residents, we no longer have valid licenses, either, LOL!
Olive Oil: Reading the Labels
Ever since I read the New Yorker article on The Olive Oil Scandle I have been goosey about olive oils, reading the labels. My friends (Palestinian) tell me I should always buy Palestinian olive oil, and from the oils they have shared with me, holy smokes! I think they are right.
Try finding Palestinian olive oil in Pensacola. Honestly, sometimes I am afraid they are going to arrest me in the stores as I stand for a half hour, turning all the bottles and trying to read the labels, some of which are in very very tiny print. One thing the Gulf States (Arabian Gulf, my friends) have going for them is some excellent labeling on the foods they import.
When I came across this label, I could hardly believe it. I am sure they probably don’t like me photographing in the stores, but as long as no one says anything to me, I do it. Often I am saying something nice, anyway.
So here is the front of the bottle; it looks promising:
Here is the reverse side, showing the origin of the oil, or at least where parts of it might come from . . .
Horrors! What a mess! Every bottle could be different, it’s like cat food and dog food, it’s what the oil bottler could find that was the cheapest at the moment, and maybe it is from Spain, or maybe from Tunisia or who knows where? I will NEVER buy an oil that looks like that!
Meanwhile, the search for Palestinian olive oil goes on . . .
Pensacola Navy Exchange and Customer Service
One of the things that totally blows us away in the United States is customer service. Every now and then you run into bad customer service and it is so noticeable because most of the customer service is so GOOD. It is so good so often that you take it for granted, if you haven’t lived in countries where sometimes they treat you like you are lucky they notice your existence and maybe you aren’t good enough for their product, LOL!
I have a sweet, very elegant Indian friend in Kuwait. One time she told me she wanted to buy a beautiful pen for her husband, but when she went to the store, the man behind the counter didn’t want to show her the pen she wanted – because she is Indian. She said “here he is, working behind the counter, and he treats me like he doesn’t think I can afford to buy the pen I want to look at!” How insulting is that??
Oops. I digress. Sorry.
We decided to check out the Navy Exchange in Pensacola. Pensacola is a big military retirement area. It is a beautiful place, beautiful white powdery sands, green to turquoise to blue to purple waters, green palms and trees and right now azaleas blooming everywhere – many military people think it is heaven on earth, and come back to retire here. It’s a fun place, the Blue Angels practicing on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings; you can hear them thundering through the skies and over the Gulf, practicing their moves.
We get to the exchange (the souks, for my Gulf readers 😉 ) I am disappointed – it’s small. There is another building, but it is also small, and I am looking for big appliances, like a clothes washer and dryer. As we are leaving, a store guy asks us if we found everything OK, and we said ‘no, not really’ and he listened to us and then laughed and told us we were at the wrong place, and he took his time to tell us how to get to the right place, and to make sure we understood.
When we got to the right exchange (and it is HUGE!) there were lots of parking places – I love this place. We parked next to a reserved space. There are lots of reserved spaces – remember, this is a military base. The commander of this, the commander of that, a space for flag officers (generals) and then . . .this space. It gave me a big grin. And there are TWO of them, right in front of the Naval Exchange:
In my seven years in the Gulf, in Qatar and in Kuwait, I saw some amazing changes, including going from total disregard of handicapped spaces to increasing respect for the handicapped spaces. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a couple Expectant Mother spaces reserved in front of the Co-ops, and maybe in front of Toys R Us, and the hospitals?
Once inside, I was looking at washer and dryers, and a lady asked if she could help me. I said no, but then I couldn’t find the ones I was looking for, the ones recommended by Consumer Reports and I saw the lady behind a counter so I asked her. She said if we didn’t see them, we could order them, looked them up and told me the price, which was only minimally lower than I had seen them off base, except that on base we don’t have to pay the sales tax, which would make a difference.
But then, she started telling me more. Right now, we could take off 15% for this sale, and get a $50 mail-in rebate (better!) but if I could wait to order until April 12, the price would be 20% off for three days (woo hoo, even better!) AND if I used my Navy Star card for the first time, I could take an additional 10% off anything I purchased on the first day (WOOO HOOOOO, better and better!)
We are about to set up an entire household in a country where we haven’t lived for 12 years. We need EVERYTHING. We’ve been saving, so this isn’t going to put us in debt, but it’s like God just handed us this huge gift when he sent this woman our way to explain how it all works. So I applied for the credit card and was instantly approved, and I asked if I should put AdventureMan on the card and she laughed and said “no!” because what if we wanted something else BIG down the road, then he could apply for his own card and we would get the 10% all over again.
Now, my friends, THAT is customer service. What a woman!
Washer
Dryer
Vacuum Cleaner
2 Plasma TVs
wireless BlueRay/DVD player channels Netflix
All-in-one fax/scanner/printer
etc.
We are going to save a bundle.
First, AdventureMan is coming with me to our Water Aerobics class at the YMCA. He has toured the Y, met the instructor, and no longer thinks this is going to be ‘girly’. From there, we will head for the NEX (Naval Exchange) to make our purchases and place our orders.
Next week, the major start-up grocery shop. Imagine, starting your kitchen once again from scratch. No, I have pots and pans and tools, but the basics, from salt and pepper, through olive oil, flour, sugar, etc . . .everything. oh, AARRGH.
Car Seat Base
My new little Sand colored Rav4 is a workhorse! I lug groceries, furniture, boxes, bedding plants and soil, huge pots, and even bookcases, with just a flip of a lever, the middle seats fold down and I have a long flat bed to carry longer items.
The accessory I like the best doesn’t come with the Rav4. I had to buy it separately. It is a Chicco car seat base, so that I can load and lock my little grandson in my car when we need to pick him up or take him somewhere. 🙂 We had our first trial run taking him to lunch at the Jordan Valley Restaurant in downtown Pensacola, where they had decent baba ghannoush and hummus, bland olives, and felafel – but it isn’t the Beirut. 😦
There are camels on the wall. There are some fabulous cushions. They have some gyros platters and I had a chicken shish taouk . . . it isn’t the Gulf, or – it isn’t the Arabian Gulf – but I am thankful there is one place in town that has felafel and tabbouli. 😉
The good news is, baby Q slept the whole time. 🙂
Y.M.C.A.
Last week I joined the Y.M.C.A. I joined it because I really really need to exercise, and I don’t think exercise is a lot of fun. In fact, mostly I think it is boring, and I don’t keep up with it. The only exercise I ever keep up with is water aerobics, and I don’t know why, except it isn’t as bad as all the other kinds of exercise. I might like dance-aerobics, if I could ever learn the moves, but I always get discouraged – or embarrassed – before I have been there long enough to figure out the sequences.
So this morning, I attended my very first aqua aerobics class. I was late. I think the devil didn’t want me to exercise; I slept badly last night and then overslept this morning. I walked into class late, and if you have ever taken an exercise class, you know that all the best spots are taken, and I had never been in the pool before. I got in, and discovered where I had entered the pool was over my head.
In the meanwhile, the class goes on, and it is kick-a$$.
I had been trying to talk AdventureMan into considering taking the class with me, but he pooh-poohed it and said aqua-aerobics was girly. No No No, AdventureMan, not this class! This class has participants from teen-age to creaky, men and women, all trying to keep up with the instructor, who sets a relentless pace. We have one hour to get through the entire repetoire, including cool down stretches, and then O-U-T so the next class can get started. There is a hot tub and a steam room, and a totally dry floor policy – like after you shower, you have to be dry before you enter the locker room so no one will slip and fall. There are several elderly women, and people are very protective of them.
I was lucky. There was a very nice young woman who would whisper explanations to me as we went along, and, of course, in the water the fact that you are totally out of your league is not so obvious. She clued me in to the dry floor policy as she helped one of the elderly women get her pool-shoes off, and told me to hang out in the hot tub so my muscles wouldn’t seize up. You wouldn’t think an water exercise could be so demanding, but I can feel some of those muscles already. 🙂
“Think you’ll be coming back?” she asked as I was leaving.
Oh, YES. 🙂 It was actually . . . fun!
A Day in the Sun
Pensacola weather is shifting, from an unusually cold winter into it’s normal steaming summer. The day after I arrived, I headed for church, but while dressing I discovered I had nothing climate-appropriate, and ended up going to church on a cold day with bare legs.
Now the sun is shining, the big-box stores are advertising garden specials and I cannot resist. Even if I can’t live in my house, I can get some things started, and I am eager to start some bougainvillea; I love the way it doesn’t need a lot of water – it grew in the ground in Qatar, and flourished!
It is hard for me to go into a Home Depot, or a Lowe’s; I am still so greatly lacking in sales resistance. The garden section is loaded with temptations:
There is also a beautiful local market, Bailey’s, where I found some gorgeous and irresistable bougainvillea. Just enough, not too much. They also provided me with a six-pack of basil, and a couple gorgeous rosemary starts.
After getting the plants potted and in places where, God willing, they will flourish, I spent another hour pulling weeds out of the lawn. 😦
All in all, it was a great day in the sun. 🙂
Before and Now
No, my house is not undergoing a ‘remodel.’ It is undergoing a rewiring. About the best that will happen is that when it is finished, it will look a lot like it looked before, except with invisible copper wiring instead of aluminum wiring, which, as it turns out, is problematic.
Sigh. And then again, what better time to have this all done than BEFORE you move in? If it had to happen, it couldn’t have happened at a better time, and we have some truly great contractors. How many times have you ever heard someone say that?
Today I went by the house to pick up the mail and holy smokes – the garage is full of ceiling, and my house is bare bones!
Here are some before and after shots:
Family Room Before:
Family Room Now:
Kitchen Before:
Kitchen Now:
Living Room Before:
Living Room Now:
And last but not least – the Garage before:
And the Garage now:
Every Monkey Gets His Turn in The Barrel
AdventureMan and I have this phrase, and I cannot imagine where it came from (from where it came, for you grammar sticklers!) “Every Monkey gets his turn in the barrel.” It’s particularly true in the workplace, or at least almost every workplace where I have worked – it’s like the stock market, sometimes your stock is high, sometimes your stock can fall, and often, it is not so much your performance as the PERCEPTION of your performance.
Often, in the work place, stocks rise and fall based on little or nothing at all. In fact, if you are really really good at what you do, you are sometimes more at risk, because those who are less accomplished always need to focus the attention anywhere but on their own work, and if you are doing well, they will often find something to criticize to keep their own lackluster accomplishments from coming into focus.
But every monkey getting his/her turn in the barrel applies in almost all factors of life. Sometimes you’re up. Sometimes you’re down. Sometimes it has nothing to do with you, it’s just the way things are.
So my trip home was sort of my turn in the barrel. I was a little late getting to the airport, which was not crowded, but there was a long back-up going through passport control to get to the departure gates. They had plenty of staff, but for some reason, they were SO SLOW. When I got to the front, the woman ‘taking care’ of me was busy texting! I asked if the computers were slow today – honestly, she had already stamped my passport, she was just killing time – and she said “No, why?” as if she were unaware of all the people standing in line, waiting to get through.
When I got to Dubai, I had to do this 2 km run from the gate where Emirates comes in to the Delta check-in counter. I always think of it as good exercise, but the humidity in Dubai is particularly high, or else the air conditioning is going out, and at the end of the trek, I am almost soaked with sweat and thinking ‘OMG I need a shower.’ I went to the lounge, but there was a sign “opening at 2100 hours’ and it was 15 minutes after nine. I could see someone in there, but later she stuck her head out and said she couldn’t let anyone in until the ‘attendants’ came, which they did, about 15 minutes later – they had been shopping!
And then I discovered that I had to go to the Air France lounge, not nice at all, near the smoking station so even inside the Air France lounge it smells stale and smokey. I am spoiled. I love the Emirates lounge in Dubai, where they even have tiny small containers of Haggan Daaz ice cream for their clients. 😉 This lounge was filled with American contractors. Yes, we are also American contractors, but this was the other kind – great big fat loud-voiced men, bragging about their salaries and demeaning their wives. I couldn’t wait to get out of there, which I did quickly after checking my e-mails.
The flight from Dubai to Atlanta is just long – more than 15 hours – and started inauspiciously. As we took off, as the plane’s nose lifted, some cupboard fell open and we could hear china and cutlery falling and breaking, a lot of it. I felt so sorry for the flight attendants; they have a lot to do during those flights, and now it was complicated by a disaster at the beginning of the flight. I got through it, mostly by escaping into sleep.
As we arrived in Atlanta, everything had changed. I just did this trip six weeks ago, but there is a new traffic pattern, a longer trek, sterner instructions about how and where to get into line. My bags, marked “priority’, were, as often is the case, nearly the last off the plane, and I trundled them through customs, and then had to run (honestly, this is like a herd of cattle) to get into another long, snaking line to go through security again – this time in Atlanta, where you have to take off your shoes, take out computers, can only use a 1 quart zippering plastic bag, etc.
I had thought I had plenty of time, but a large troop flight came in from Afghanistan, and we all had to move aside to give them priority. That is the one inconvenience I did not mind at all – I am so proud everyone moved over with no grumbling and let our servicepeople through, to get them on their way for R&R.
Security found me very interesting, and this is my own fault. I have a little Waterford crystal sugar jar that I took with me. I’ve had it since the early years of our marriage, and I often hand carry it to the next post. It’s too bad that lead crystal goes opaque in the scanners, and that the shape was a little like that of a hand grenade. I also had my wireless router with me, and this led to a long, long, very long inspection of everything I was carrying.
As I griped later to my son, he said “And I am sure it never occurred to you that you were arriving from the Middle East on a one-way ticket.”
LLLLLOOOOLLLL @ me. Nope. It had never occurred to me. I guess I was thinking about other things – farewells, clearing out the house, packing, mortgage papers, insurance papers, TAXES (Oh aaaAAARRRGGHHH, yes we have an extension, but we still have to get them done!)
So this trip, I was the monkey. I rolled around in that barrel. Actually, because I had no real agenda, other than be in P’cola by Monday to close on a house, I could roll with it and figure that I have had so many breaks, so many times, that if I needed to take this roll in the barrel, so be it, God is good and needed to give the breaks to that old guy in the wheel chair and that family with two kids in strollers, and all those fine young people who serve our country in strange and alien lands . . .
And, at the end of my journey is my son, his wife, and our grandson, and a sweet, relaxed day with them, doing not much but catching up. 🙂 The real chaos starts this coming week, early on Monday morning. Think I’d better get to church, get some fortification for the demands of this coming week.
Places I’ll Remember . . .
I’m not very good at being sad. Today is one of the saddest days of my life. I’ve been weeping all day, and I’m not one of those women whom the camera loves when they weep. My throat gets thick, so clogged with emotion that I can’t talk clearly, and my eyes get all red and swollen. My cheeks get all blotchy. I hate it, my eyes are leaking, and my nose is running. I think I’ve got it all stopped, and it all starts up again.
Most of the house is packed, the kitchen cupboards cleared out and all the goods not going with us distributed. I weep as I pack my bags. I weep as I take out the garbage. I weep as I load one last load of wash into the washer.
“What is it in particular?” AdventureMan asks me, as I weep, yet again, as I start to write this entry.
“It’s the end of an era,” I choke out, and the tears start rolling once again in spite of all my efforts not to succumb.
“We’ve lived our lives as nomads ever since we met,” I continue.
“It isn’t like we want to live in Doha forever, Doha is changing, too, old friends are leaving.”
“It isn’t like I love packing up and starting over in a new place.”
“I shouldn’t have scheduled to leave on a Friday after church,” I philosophized, but it’s too late now. The waterworks started in church and have turned on and off with ever fresh goodbye.
I steeled myself to smile cheerily at my oldest friends, knowing we’ll meet up again – a wedding, a retirement, a gathering of old hands. But small things defeated me. The friends who switched their normal place in church and sat beside us. The communion hymn “Lord of the Dance” sung as a duet. One of our friends provided our very very favorite meal for lunch. The priest blessing my travels and sending me on with the prayers of the people. The difficult ceremony of saying goodbye to the people we love in a place which has nurtured us, spiritually and socially.
And one young woman painted a watercolor for us of our new grandson.
It is a stunning watercolor, I can hardly wait to have it framed. There is something very special in it – I have a friend who knits, but is constantly telling us how badly she knits. She knit a blanket for the grandson, and it was COLD in Pensacola, and that blanket was used over and over again. The blanket is in the lower left corner of the watercolor. 🙂
It’s going to be a long trip to our new life. We are going to a happy place – sunshine, but not so much heat. Humidity and lightning, but also four seasons and seafood. Our son, his wife, our grandson. All these are happy things. Our new house, a new life, closer to our families. All good things.
I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye to my Palestinian friend, like my sister, and she shared all her children with me through these years of friendship. Saying goodbye to her was horrible. We know we may never see one another again. Her daughters assure me they will help us correspond; they will help her use modern technology to stay in touch. 🙂 I don’t know when I will ever see her again . . . and it breaks my heart. I guess I kind of thought she would come visit me. “No,” she said sadly, “no, I will never have the right papers to visit you.” Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how devastating are the restrictions on her life. And I’m just a friend. She hasn’t seen her own father, in Palestine, for years. Sometimes they can meet up in Egypt. . .
I’m not the first expat to leave here. One good friend left Doha last summer, she led the way. We all know that leaving the nomadic life is charting new territory. We’ve had a lot of fun, we’ve loved (most of) the expat experience. We know it’s time. It’s just the inner twenty-five year old is not ready.
AdventureMan’s company keeps saying “when you’ve had a break . . . ” and AdventureMan laughs and says “I’m not taking a break, I am RETIRING!” His company is savvy; they know that three months down the road the domestic life may get a bit old for these high testosterone kind of guys and they will invite him back for a special project or two. He promises me, if it is Doha or Kuwait, I can come with him. Even just a week or two, to see old friends . . . I’ll take it!
Thanks be to God, for creating us, and for giving us this wonderful life we were created to live. Thanks be to God for all these great adventures, for the exotic, the sights and smells and sounds, and for the eyes to see and the ears to hear. Thanks be to God for the generous spirited friends called to his life, who have shared the path with us. And thanks be to God for this outlet, this blog, where I can share the good, the bad and the ugly with friends from all countries who have ever lived as strangers in a strange land (even when that ‘strange’ land is the USA, LOL!) Thank YOU, friends.
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