Sorting Through Our Lives
At lunch, on our anniversary, AdventureMan and I played a game, a game we call “the top three”. He started it. “What are your top three thrills in our life together?” he asked . . .
We came up with contenders, debated relative merits, but agreed on #1 – the birth of our son. Then there were the top three vacations, the top three surprises, etc. It’s always fun; and together remember things you wouldn’t remember on your own.
Every now and then you get a glimpse of what makes life worthwhile, and you are additionally blessed by knowing how happy you are at the time you are happy.
One of those days was today.
Yesterday, we went by to see our son and his wife and our little adorable grandson had a cough.
“Do you need for us to take care of him tomorrow?” we asked.
Oh! If we could take care of him in the morning, that would be wonderful! And so, promptly at 0730, we were at their doorstep, and our morning passed – oh, happily! – taking care of our adorable grandson. He has a bad cough, but he is on the mend, and we had some fun.
He loves his jumpy-thing, which we call a Johnny Jump-Up, but it isn’t, it’s like calling all tissues “Kleenex” or all copies a “Xerox”:
He has discovered his hands and feet; I love watching him, it’s pure motion, every leg and every arm going at once:
Well, he can’t talk yet, not clearly, so he blows bubbles to tell us how much he loves us:
“Oh!” exclaims AdventureMan, “You have to take a picture of him while he is sleeping, he is so beautiful.”
LOL! I had swaddled him, and he tried to tell me I had done it wrong, but I didn’t listen. When I went back 10 minutes later, he was still squalling AND he was no longer swaddled. I re-swaddled, this time, doing it right and tight, and before I even put him in his crib, he was sound asleep.
He did manage somehow to get one arm out:
On the way home, we picked up some roasting chickens for dinner, to roast with fresh rosemary and basil from our own garden. Yummm. AdventureMan will deliver one to our son and his wife around dinner time.
We are happy AND we know it. It’s a great day in Pensacola.
OOops! Ops!
The silence tipped him off.
He had just finished referring to his study as “The Command Center.”
The silence continued, then I broke it, quietly asking “and just whom would you be commanding?”
“Ummm. . . err . . . Ops Center! Operations Center!” he corrected himself.
We both laughed.
We’ve been married 37 years. 🙂
AdventureMan Cooks a Florida Bouillabaisse
One of AdventureMan’s retirement dreams was to have time to cook. There have been two times in our lives together when he has had the time – one, when our son was born and he learned Chinese cooking so he could stir-fry while I held the squalling baby (he had colic, and squalled from about four in the afternoon to eleven at night. Do you know how long every single minute is when you are holding an inconsolable baby?)
The second time was when he retired from the military, and spent several months at home, keeping house, taking our son to visit colleges, and serving up some of the most fantastic meals we have ever eaten. (I was working; it was a total role reversal. Kind of fun to shake things up, do things differently in a relationship now and then. 🙂 )
So when he started thumbing through cook books, I started grinning to myself. This man is very talented, and while I am very good at ‘survival cooking’, i.e. getting a meal on the table that will nourish and quell hunger pains, AdventureMan takes cooking to an art form.
First we had to make a trip to the grocery store for some basics. When you set up housekeeping after a (yet another) move, you are missing some of the most basic things – like cayenne pepper, or garlic.
Then – oh heaven! – we visited Maria’s Fresh Seafood Market, heaven on earth for this little old Alaska girl.
Fresh, fresh seafood, and people who know how to cut it. The prices are good. As we entered, a drama began, a woman buying a lot of (something) picked a fight, first with the man serving her and then with the cashier. We were there about half an hour, and during this time, she complained, loudly and vigorously, to anyone who would listen. I think she wanted her purchase comped.
AdventureMan bought what he needed, got it cut mostly how he needed it, and also got a fish head and tail for making stock – a great big grouper! He said as he cooked it up, the head and mouth were sticking out of the pot like “Help me! Help me!” but I wouldn’t know because I was upstairs minding my own business while he worked his magic on the Florida fish bouillabaisse. 🙂
Soon, tantalizing odors drifted upstairs, rich, complex odors, with a hint of sherry . . . it was divine. I had to pop down to let him know how much I was appreciating his efforts.
“Do you think it’s a little too thick?” he asked.
“I think it’s like a fish stew; I think thick is OK. You can add a little more liquid if it seems to need it,” I added, but actually, he is doing just fine without any input from me.
Finally, it was time to eat. AdventureMan dished the concoction into some shellfish soup bowls I found many years ago at that exotic resource store, TJ Maxx (LOL) and dinner was served.
Total YUMMMMMM. Bravo, AdventureMan, Bravo! I am having a lot of fun with your retirement! 🙂
What Matters?
For twelve years, most of my life prior to 1998 was in storage. When we first headed to Saudi Arabia together, then back to Germany for several years, then to the Gulf for several more, we had thought it would be just a few years . . . actually, we didn’t think of any time, we just never expected to pack almost everything we owned for that long.
As we were awaiting our shipment from storage, AdventureMan asked me what mattered most. In the greater scheme of things, what matters most isn’t coming out of storage. What matters most is the lives who have connected with mine over the many years.
But there are a couple things I wanted to see again.
First, when we married, we started saving for our first trip to Africa. We didn’t eat meat. We didn’t go to movies. We saved, and a little after we had been married for a year, we went to Kenya and Tanzania for a month, three weeks on safari and then a week on the beach at a marine reserve, where we could snorkle. During that time, we saved every penny, but out of his lunch money, AdventureMan saved enough to buy me this little candleabra, which I cherish. He bicycled to the shop to pay the $25 per month until it was paid for. It was a total surprise, one of the best surprises I have ever had in my life. I wanted to see it again:
Also during that first year, we were looking for wedding china. We had met and married. We hadn’t gone through a long process, just made a decision and followed through. It seemed so sensible to us at the time. Then we had lots of time to search for just the right china.
It took us forever. We would ‘kind of’ like one or two, but not enough to buy it. Then, one day at the Heidelberg Officer’s Club, we found it. We visited it again three months later, and found we liked it just as much, even more. We also had an income tax refund, so we made our first major purchase together, and, after all these years, we still love it:
It is simple, white, with a little encrustation, and – to us – still as beautiful as the day we bought it. It is made by Reynaud, an old porcelain manufacturer in Limoges, but they were bought out several years ago by Cerelene, and now this pattern, Cheverny, is no longer made. I am registered on several replacement sites, but not a single piece has appeared in all the years I have been registered. One year in Germany, just before we left, we bought four more plates and coffee cups, but the replacements are not the same. The china was thicker, not so refined as the original. And then they stopped making it altogether.
Every piece arrived intact. We have a couple chips – we’ve had the china around 36 years, so a broken piece here and there, a chip from time to time – it’s hard to avoid.
We also have an Ethiopian cross, and some very old cookbooks and etiquette books I have collected – I was happy to see them again, along with some French hunting ducks I found once in the Metz flea market. 🙂 Old friends. By the grace of God, we have come through these 12 long years with only a few chips ourselves, nothing broken, and nothing of great importance missing.
A Normal, Wonderful Day
Yesterday, Friday, AdventureMan and I had our first “normal” day in Pensacola, a day where we are living in our normal house doing very normal things. Normally, I find normal kind of boring, but after the last month, I find normal very comforting. I was beginning to wonder if life would ever be normal again, and what normal would look like.
Here is what normal looked like: We got up and went to our water aerobics class, which was really HARD (hard is good; we want to be living healthier lives, it was hard in the way that it was challenging, not hard in the way that is discouraging.) On our way home we saw a coffee shop we had heard about, and on an impulse, we decided to have breakfast on the way home.
I had an egg sandwich on a biscuit, and AdventureMan had biscuits and gravy. We were in and out in about 20 minutes, eating food that was probably not good for us, but it gave us all the energy we needed for what came next.
We cleaned house.
That may not sound like a fun normal day to you, and no, we don’t get a lot of joy out of cleaning house, but when you have lived in a chaos of boxes, and everything is put away, but it is all messy and disorderly still, you can see how dirty the floors have gotten. AdventureMan took the upstairs vacuum and he READ THE MANUAL (I know, I know, I am still in shock) and he vacuumed upstairs AND mopped the bathroom floors. (!) (!) (!)
I finished getting most things put away downstairs and then vacuumed and mopped all the tile and wood floors, and holy smokes, that is hard work. And when you finish, it feels so good!
AdventureMan worked in his office. I read the newspaper.
Our son and grandson came by for a few minutes to drop off some tickets to the Chocolate Fest Benefit for the Gulf Coast Kids House, a local facility that helps kids who have been abused, investigating and prosecuting offenders and helping provide children with a safe place to tell their experience. We got to see Baby Q grin at us. It’s for these moments that we moved here; we don’t need to be living in their pockets, but a few minutes now and then is heaven.
Then we headed off for Date Night. We went to dinner and a movie – a Swedish movie called The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo which was playing in Gulf Breeze. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is based on a book by Stieg Larsson, and is a very unusual mystery book with deeply flawed characters. I’ve now read the follow-up, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and I am hooked. There is only one more, and I am waiting for it to come out in paperback.
The movie was exceptional. Although it was in color, because so much of it was Sweden in winter, it seemed very black and white, very documentary. Even when spring came, the colors were muted. Somehow it made it more real, more gritty. The movie was very true to the book. There were things left out, but not things that impacted greatly on the sense of the movie. All in all, it was a very satisfying, if disturbing, movie, which leaves you itching for a follow-up. Isn’t that the sign of a good movie?
We stopped for dinner at Billy Bob’s BBQ, and I will write that up next.
That’s it. That’s our wonderfully normal day. It may not sound like much to you, but for a normal day, it wasn’t bad, in fact, it was a pretty good day.
We’ve had two weekends of stormy winds and heavy rains. My rosebushes were sparse, and all of a sudden, there are buds – and petals – everywhere!
And here, just for you, is a view of the sunset through the heavy thunderclouds over Pensacola on a Friday night:
The Last Box
Today, as the Cox Cable man was setting up our TV, Internet and Phone bundle, we were unpacking the last box.
“Where are you going to put the phones?” the Stan-the-cable-guy asked.
We looked blank.
It has been so long since we have relied on a land-line. We hadn’t even thought about it. We carry our mobile phones with us, or at least I do. Now that AdventureMan has semi-retired, he has his people (me) carry the phone, LOL!
We actually do have a phone; we put in out in the box to send to the Jr. League big sale our daughter in law works with. It’s an old princess phone. I don’t even remember using it, it’s so old. I don’t know where the other phones have gone, but that’s phones . . .
Guess we have to go out and buy some phones, LOL!
After all our moaning and groaning, we think we have everything. Only some weird things are missing. Like we have ONE cushion for our outdoor seating area; two identical benches that used to have two identical cushions.
Now that we have internet again, I will share some photos of the last week. The first photos are from the day the movers are arriving – two days before we expected them. Notice the nice peach/rose on the walls, please. 🙂
We are lucky to have this room, although we didn’t care that much about it when we bought the house. It is a butler’s pantry, with lighted glassed shelves for glassware, and two wine refrigerators, one to keep white wine chilled, and the other to keep red wine at cellar temperature. Actually, it is good for water, and beer, too. 🙂 But since our major china cabinet has a broken foot, I really needed a place I could put things away, and this turned out to be a Godsend.
Butler's Pantry
Above is my bathroom; I love the little orange trees painted on my cabinet, and the little step that pulls out to make me taller.
LOL, here is where we were really camping out, in the guest room, while we waited for our storage goods to come. Yes, it’s a mess. There is actually a chair in the room, too, but aside from the bed and the chair, we had no furniture. We had thought we would cook, but who wants to eat standing up? Or sitting on a bed?
The moving truck arrives, some things are packed, some things are loose. It’s not all our goods; the driver tells us he has four different loads on the same truck. Aarrgh.
One of the first things off the truck was my dressing table mirror – broken. The driver said off the top that he had broken it when he was packing the truck. His honesty took away any anger we might have felt, and I know we can get a new mirror cut. It was the only major damage we had, and it wasn’t that bad.
Some of our pieces had some mildew on them, but it came of with just a little vinegar. We had to toss two old featherbeds and some of my clothing, which also seemed to have been in some area which had moisture problems while in storage.
This is the family room after the delivery.
The living room – we love these little loveseat/couches and were astonished at how well they weathered 12 years of storage without a mark – they still look new, and they are twenty something years old, but reupholstered. No, not by me, I didn’t know how yet.
First, we created an area of sanity. You have to have a place you can go where there is no mess. You create one, and then . . . you start widening the area. We started with this outside area, then the living room, then the family room. The kitchen is still a little bit chaotic, but that is because I have to wash all the dishes and china and crystal before they can go back on shelves. It isn’t that hard, it is just numbingly boring unwrapping each piece.
I think I told you about each spoon being wrapped separately:
Each piece has to be unwrapped . . . horrors!
That was the last box. 🙂
No, not everything is in place yet, but our areas of sanity, of order, are larger now. We have moved upstairs to our bedroom and study area; we have another bedroom next door to ours for visiting grandchildren or overflow guests for larger family gatherings. Our clothes are unpacked and put away, and we still have some empty places on shelves and in closets for the final wave – the Doha shipment – which won’t arrive until late June or July, we are guessing.
We still don’t have any phones. That goes on our “To Do” list, which is monstrous, no matter how we keep nibbling away at it. And the Qatteri cat is happy; the fuller the house is, the happier he is.
Whew!
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.
Unexpected Blessings
Yesterday I received an unexpected thrill – a letter from a publishing house in Zambia asking to use a photo of a quilt I made in a textbook they are publishing for Namibian children. We have traveled often to Zambia, and once to Namibia. Namibia is a thrilling country, as hot and dry and dusty as Qatar and Kuwait, and as rich, due to diamond deposits.
This is the quilt they will be using. I made it for my husband when I first started quilting, and more experienced quilters said I was crazy. It is a huge quilt, ample for a California king sized bed, but I knew I needed 3″ squares (I had some giraffe fabric I wanted to use) and as the quilt assumed a life of its own, it ended up much larger than I had planned.
It has many African fabrics, one a piece I bought in Tunisia about 30 years ago. I put a piece of it in all my map quilts.
Here are a couple of my more recent quilts. The first is the one I made for my new grandson 🙂
This one is one I started many years ago, but didn’t know how to make it work the way I wanted it to. Twelve years later, I pulled it out and knew exactly what to do and had it pieced together in one morning. 🙂
All these years of living abroad, with AdventureMan working long hours and often traveling, quilting has kept me sane. It provides me with friends who speak the same language – patterns, textures and colors – no matter where I go in the world. It is so absorbing that sometimes I look up and an entire day has passed while I work on a quilt, and it’s time to fix dinner . . . Dinner? No! No! I am going to sew for another hour and order out!
One of the things quilting groups do is to help you stretch and to try new things. Literally, the groups hold CHALLENGES. This was a challenge where it was to show you and a facet of your personality – so this is how I see me with the green Gulf in the background. I made this while living in Kuwait and participating in the quilting guild which is part of the Kuwait Textile Arts Association there. 🙂
There is a wonderful guild in Qatar, the Qatar Quilters. They meet once a month and have nearly 100 members – imagine! Women who quilt come from all Qatar to attend. At the meetings, they show what they have been working on, and teach one another new ways to create quilts. They share information on where to find quilting tools and which shop has recently received a new shipment of fabrics.
You can learn more about the Qatar Quilters by visiting their blog: Qatar Quilters The lady you see in the first photo is one of the Qatar Quilter founders.
Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced, Supporting Family with Book Proceeds
This tiny little 10 year old girl, who knew she didn’t want to be married, and stuck to her guns, has had a life-long effect, changing the laws in Yemen so that a woman must now be 18 to marry. On the other hand, if the legal age before was age 15, how on earth was she allowed to marry at age 10?
Divorced Before Puberty: Former Child Bride
New Book
by Amy Hatch (Subscribe to Amy Hatch’s posts) Mar 5th 2010 10:30AM
From AOL News: Parenting
Divorced at age 10. Credit: Amazon
Nujood Ali walked into a Yemeni courtroom and asked to see a judge, because she wanted a divorce. This may seem like a common tale of marital dissolution, but Nujood Ali was just 10 years old when she defied the cultural traditions and walked out on the husband who was more than 20 years her senior.
Nujood, now 12, chronicles her journey from child bride to celebrated hero in her new autobiography, “I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.” Ghostwritten by French newspaper reporter Delphine Minoui, the book details how the young girl shocked citizens of her native Yemen after she walked out on her arranged marriage to a motorcycle delivery man. Nujood’s father married her off to the man for a dowry of $250, and for two months she begged her husband every day to return her to her family.
He refused, and so Nujood decided to take action. One afternoon, when her mother sent her on an errand, Nujood took a bus into the crowded capital city of Sanaa. She then hailed a taxi to the courthouse. Not knowing what else to do, she sat on a bench outside a courtroom all day, until a judge noticed her lingering in the empty hallway. He asked what she needed, and the girl said simply, “I came for a divorce.”
Now, two years later, the girl tells Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times that she is back in her home land and is supporting her family with the royalties from her book, which spent five weeks at the top of the bestseller list in France. Her brothers, who once criticized her for shaming their family, seem to have no problem with their sister now that Nujood is the family breadwinner, Kristof writes.
“They’re very nice to her now,” Khadija al-Salami, a filmmaker who mentors Nujood, tells the Times. “They treat her like a queen.”
Nujood’s story isn’t just one in which a single child takes a stand and changes her life. The preteen’s courage set off a domino effect in Yemen, where very young girls are routinely sold into marriage. Following Nujood’s successful divorce petition, two girls, ages 9 and 12, also filed to legally end their marriages. Her ordeal also prompted Yemen’s lawmakers to increase the age of consent for marriage from 15 to 18.
Nujood has been honored and feted by journalists in many countries, and, on a visit to Paris last year, even met with France’s Human Rights Minister, Rama Yada, and Urban Affairs Minister Fadela Amara, with whom she discussed the problem of child marriage.
What are Nujood’s feelings on marriage now? She tells Time magazine she “no longer thinks about marriage.”
Waterfront Mission Pensacola
LOL, this is what a mother-son outing looks like in our family. Our son volunteered to take me shopping at the Waterfront Mission, a store like Goodwill or the Salvation Army or St. Vincent de Paul, second hand stores run by churches. I love these stores (and I donate to these stores!) because I can find treasures here to make new and usable once again, and when I spend my money here, I know it will go to help the homeless, help feed the poor, help heat a house for a person without the money for electricity, etc. These are worthy organizations, providing a great service to the community.
People get rid of perfectly good, usable furniture, because they want something fresh and new. This is good news for people like me – I took a class in furniture upholstery and discovered that it is something I love doing. Tearing off the old fabric and stuffing is GREAT therapy when you are annoyed or anxious about something, and good prayer time, too. Putting it all back together is just good fun. Many times there are pieces of wood that need to be stripped and/or refinished; at least in the pieces I like to renovate.
Wait! I’ll show you some of the potential treasures I found! I didn’t buy anything; haven’t got the house yet, but this field trip gave me inspiration for the future:
See what I mean? These pieces have potential!
For AdventureMan:
Here is a detail – how cool is that?
If you want your own massage table:
Someone spray painted this daybed a verdigris sort of green. It could be rescued, but it would be a lot of trouble . . .
For your outdoor patio, there are two marble topped tables:
And for my collector friends, a real treasure – a SINGER treadle!
There were exquisite wedding dresses for sale – makes you wonder what happened to the marriage, that a bride would part with her wedding dress. Most of these are custom made; they are available at prices that would make them worth buying just to re-use the fabrics in a quilt or cushion or Christmas stocking:
There are things I would never buy used – like a mattress. But many pieces of furniture from older times are 100% solid wood, and better made than some of the furniture you find in stores, even expensive stores, worth the effort to rescue and rehabilitate. And, for people like me, the rehabilitation is part of the fun. 🙂 Thanks be to God for a husband and son and daughter (in-law) who support my peculiar habits!
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