The Devil’s Queen by Jeanne Kalogridis
“I need an ESCAPE!” I shouted to AdventureMan, at the end of my rope. So many things going on in my life that are out of my control, I just don’t want to deal with it any more, and I just want to run away and hide. “I’m going out to buy a BOOK!”
I found just the book, The Devil’s Queen by Jeanne Kalogridis.
I don’t know much about the late 1500’s in Europe, do you? At first, reading about this rich, spoiled little girl growing up in Florence, I felt a little impatient with her. All around her people are starving, and she hasn’t a clue. The plague strikes, and people are dying, but she survives. She starves, she suffers cold and fleas and is tossed by fate like a little cork on the water – all before she is 12 years old. Catherine de Medici learns early in life that she has no control over the forces of history and society swirling around her, over who she will love and who she will marry, even over whether she lives or dies. Surviving an attack on her family compound, held prisoner – alone – in nunneries until she is 12 years old – this girl’s life makes mine look peaceable!
I’m feeling better already.
Kalogridis is no Phillipa Gregory, but she has done her research, and draws us in. By the time Pope Clement betrothes Catherine to Henri of France, we are totally hooked. Thirteen years old, and off to live in a strange country as the bride of a man she has never met. She studies French as quickly as possible, but then again – this is a very bright young woman, who has been trained – by life and by education – to survive.
One of the paragraphs made me laugh out loud – as Catherine enters France, she is aware that her very fashionable Italian clothing is very unfashionable in France. She also notes that all the French women are painfully thin, thin to the point of gauntness, and are whispering behind their hands at her more normal size.
Lack of thinness is the least of her problems. She marries Henri, who is also 14, scared, and not in love with her, and they are expected to consummate their marriage under the eye of the King. Oh aargh! Catherine is on a steep learning curve, mastering French culture, diplomacy, the art of war, court politics and fighting the threat of repudiation the only way she can – with utter humility.
What I like the most about this book is that I feel like I was there with her. She is very human, and also very royal. People who are royal have different ideas than the rest of us, and are entitled in ways we can never imagine. They have obligations we can’t imagine. She makes choices I would never make, and yet the author convinced me that given her circumstances, she does the best she can with the resources at hand.
I also like it that Catherine of Medici was a brilliant and educated woman who held her own in a world where the balance was definitely in favor of being a man, and women were greatly at a disadvantage. While she made some horrifying choices, she had her reasons. This is not a book for the faint hearted; it is very earthy and it feels like an accurate portrayal of the times.
As I read these books, I think, too, how little we appreciate how free women are these days, and how recent that freedom is. Being able to choose our own mates – this is very recent. Being able to inherit and to manage our own money – this is very recent. As I talk with my friends who live in the Arabian Gulf, where marriages can still be based on family alliances, maintaining wealth and power, and where divorce can still equal personal disaster, it no longer seems so alien to me – we have this in our own history. We used to marry by contract, and our husbands had full use of our wealth. We used to be judged by whether we could bear children, how many, how many were sons, and how well we managed our households. We used to die in childbirth, and many of our children didn’t survive their infancy.
If you are looking for a good escape, this is a book that will take you there. It will make your own troubles look small in comparison. This book will keep you engrossed, horrified, and entertained, and, in the end, you might learn something, as I did.
You can find The Devil’s Queen at Amazon.com for a mere $10.40 plus shipping, and yes, I own stock in Amazon.com. LOL, we invest in that which we believe to lasting and important, and books play a large role in our lives. 🙂
Old Spice Man Goes Viral
Today on NPR I listened to a lengthy interview with Ismail Mustafa, the new Old Spice Man, and actor in what has been called the most successful advertising campaign, EVER.
My friends, this is totally hilarious. Old Spice is so old that my father wore it. It is so old that is has been way past unsexy, and this campaign boldly reversed everything.
Not only is it getting hit after hit on YouTube, Old Spice is now flying off the shelf. This is a total hoot!
Bank of America Account
They just keep getting worse and worse. This one has atrocious grammar and punctuation, and keeps changing font size!
Chaos Once Again in Pensacola
I believe the word that will ultimately characterize this year is chaos, and the struggle to bring order out of chaos. You might have noticed I have not been able to blog. Once again, chaos has hit Pensacola, this time in the form of our Doha shipment.
Good news for all my expat friends, concerned about packing out of Doha, or Kuwait. This has been the very best move, ever, and the second best move was the move from Kuwait to Qatar. I rate this one higher only because it was so much longer, and across a sea, and there is so much potential for damage – humidity, being left out on the pier in a storm, a leaky container, theft, lack of careful packing . . . not a single element was wrong with this shipment. Not a thing missing. Not a single thing damaged.
For your information, we were packed by GAC. We marvel at how carefully they packed even the most humble drinking glass. 🙂
So here is what we look like right now:
Chaos in the entry – we have all our artworks stored here, except for the really large pieces, and most of the large ones we already know where they will go . . .
It seemed like we had a lot of cupboard space, until this shipment arrived. I had left room, but . . . not enough. More donations to the Pensacola Junior League Sale coming up!
Most of this is my stuff, a tiny bit of winter and evening clothing and . . . a lot of fabric which will move to the quilt room when there is room . . . My quilt room used to look so big!
Now, for AdventureMan’s chaos – we are heading to his office:
Yes! Yes! Hide your face, AdventureMan! All these boxes . . .
I can see the end in sight. Once I have all this put away, there is just one more shipment, all my strays from Seattle. I have a storage locker there, and things left at my mother’s, and a whole underbed area at my sister’s house. Who knew they would be inconvenienced this long? We are going to drive up and haul all this stuff back, and at that point – the move is complete.
Truth in Packaging?
I am always skeptical of the products I call “hope in a bottle” (to my great amusement, there is actually a great product line which is now called Hope In A Bottle) but people will buy anything in hopes that it will keep their skin looking young and fresh.
When you live in heat, and when you do water aerobics, you need more. I was looking for something light I could put on often, something for day, and something for night. This is above and beyond the magic elixirs I put on my face that show “amazing, visible results in 7 Days!!!!” although seven days later I wonder what my face might have looked like if I hadn’t been using Product X . . .
So I bought some hope in a bottle to use days and nights, and yes, partly I will admit I bought the beautiful packaging. It is beautiful, isn’t it?
And it wasn’t that hard to open, which is a bonus. But wait! What is this inside? I paid for a lot of AIR!
The next package was the same – beautiful packaging; a lot of air . . .
Maybe, in its own way, it is more true than fiction. After all, when we are buying vanity, when we invest in the hope of beautiful skin, a lot of it is illusion and air, isn’t it?
Credit Card Fraud
The call caught me totally by surprise, so much so that I suspected that the call was a scam.
The caller asked for my husband or me by name, and asked if we had charged two thousand plus on our card. Ummm. . . nope. That card is now closed down.
I suppose the good news is that our credit card company has such excellent security that they identified the fraudulent charge immediately.
The bad news is that we have had this card for a long time, and I have the number memorized. There have been a couple problems previously, small things. One time I found some calls to a phone sex number. They showed the number the calls were made from; I called that number. The woman who answered assured me that no calls were made from that number to a phone sex number because her husband had promised her he wouldn’t do that any more. I called our credit card company, told them what had transpired, and my account was not charged for the calls.
Another time, the company called and asked me if I was trying to make calls to Nigeria using my credit card. Nope.
But this time, their solution is that the card has to be shut down, and new ones issued. Oh aarrgh. I will have to memorize a new number.
Our credit card company’s security division never asked for any information a scammer would ask, like the security number on the back of the card, the expiration date – none of that. They already know that information.
Pray – then Listen
(Warning – this is religious based musing; if that is offensive to you, skip this post 🙂 )
Jesus often used the phrase “if you have the eyes to see” and “if you have the ears to hear” after telling his listeners a metaphorical story.
Yesterday, AdventureMan and I had another huge surprise. We filed for a tax exemption, and we were told that for this year, the previous exemption would hold, and then next year, our exemption would start. You would think that might be bad news, but in our case, the previous owner had all kinds of wonderful exemptions, and in a year with a lot of expenses, not having a huge property tax bill sounds really good to us.
“Humd’allal!” I said to AdventureMan as we left the building. (Thanks be to God!)
When we knew we wanted to retire this year, we began praying about it together every morning before AdventureMan headed off to work. We specifically asked that God be in every detail of the move – and as you can imagine, a move back to the USA from Qatar has a lot of details. It was more complicated than “just” a move. We had a huge storage shipment which needed to meet up with us in Pensacola, a cat that needed to come with us. We needed to buy a house, and to do that, we had to sell a house, and we needed to buy cars, and basic household appliances; we needed to start up all over again with groceries, and with cleaning supplies, and gardening supplies, and the most basic items you take for granted every day in your well-established lives. There were a LOT of details, an overwhelming amount of detail, and, by the grace of God, every detail was covered.
Some details, like the total rewiring of our house, may not seem like such a blessing, but, by the grace of God, we had the money to cover the need, and we are glad we could get the rewire done before moving in, and we are really really glad not to have to worry about fires happening in our electrical system. If and when we need to sell this house, having had it rewired helps its salability, too.
Some people might call it good luck. We don’t think so. We think it is God, answering prayers, in control of all the details, and blessing us in ways we can’t even begin to imagine. Every now and then, we have “the eyes to see.”
Kuwait or Qatar or Pensacola?
Showering after my water-aerobics class, I could hear voices discussing a local political-social situation. A benefits agency has groups of families working in it, and they know all the tricks. They know how to insure more of their own family members hired, and they know how to help all their family members (and friends) take advantage of all the entitlements.
Expats abroad call it nepotism, and scorn it as a third-world corruption. In truth, it happens everywhere.
There is an ongoing schism taking place in Qatar and Kuwait, countries that have been gracious and welcoming to me. The nationals of Kuwait and Qatar control citizenship carefully. The citizen base is about 20% of the population, on a good day. The rest of the population are people who are in Kuwait and Qatar to work. Most there to work can never hope for citizenship. For many, the poverty in their home country is so brutal that no matter how hard the working conditions, at least it is a salary, and they can send something home so that, literally, their families can eat. They dream – like we do – of educating their children so that they will have a better, more secure life.
Here is the problem. When 80% of the population is NON-Kuwaiti, or NON-Qatari, your country starts to change. One way in which things have changes is that in a very short time, the highways have gone from very quiet to gridlock, due to a dramatic increase in drivers and cars. In Qatar, the situation is made worse by nationalization of the taxi service, resulting in so few taxis that hotels now use private limo services, because finding a taxi at peak times is near to impossible.
That’s one issue. The second issue is language. Imagine your elderly parents going into shops to buy something – in their own country – and the clerks don’t speak their language. As they are stumbling and bewildered, some noisy “workers” walk in, state their needs, are understood, conduct their business and exit before you even get served. This is happening in Kuwait and in Qatar; everyone is speaking English. In a country where the workers are Indian, Nepalese, Philipino, Saudi, Yemani, Omani, Lebanese, Syrian, French, Dutch, English, Australian, South African, American (and about thirty or forty others) the common language has evolved to be English, not Arabic.
How do you think you would feel if it were happening here? If the great majority of cars on the road were not “us” but “guests” in our country? If the clerks in stores couldn’t understand what you want, because although they are in your country, they don’t speak your language?
Another problem is what to do with the huge, disproportionate number of geographically single males brought in to work as builders, cleaners, heavy equipment operators, dishwashers, drivers, security guards and other fairly low-paid positions? In Kuwait and in Qatar, non-married sex is strictly forbidden, even holding hands in public is considered an affront to morality. These men are banned from malls where families might gather, and from other public places. Their existence is grim, and they often find themselves unpaid, or paid far less than they were promised for their labor.
Last, but not least, this very modest Gulf culture has people – foreign guest workers – parading themselves on their streets in various states of undress. Think about it – that’s how we look to them. We have no shame. We bare our faces. We flaunt the glory of our uncovered hair. Sometimes a shawl might drop and a glimpse of bare arm or even a hint of cleavage might shock the modest eyes of a believer.
In Pensacola, there are also fundamentalists who wear long skirts, long sleeves, and determinedly modest clothing. I wonder what these believers think about the skimpy clothing on the beaches, or in the malls?
Coming home has been a real eye opener. It was easy for me to be critical of things I saw in Qatar and in Kuwait. Coming home, we joke all the time about “Kuwaiti drivers” here in the US, but the real joke is – they sure look a lot like us.
Last week, we saw a man here make a U-turn right in the middle of the road, and rock as he tried to regain control of his truck, and almost blast right through a red light he didn’t see. The back of his truck was down, and items loose in the truck bed were heading toward the highway – fortunately he figured that out, and last we saw, he had stopped to fix his rear door. Maybe he wasn’t sober. Maybe he had had an argument with his wife or boss or someone and was not paying close attention to his driving. All I know is that we have seen a goodly number of inattentive drivers here, too.
When a bureaucracy gets corrupted, when the rules are not applied equally to all, when select groups get favored treatment – here in Pensacola, at the immigration department in Kuwait or in the traffic department in Qatar – everyone suffers. It’s a political problem, a social problem, and a systemic problem. God willing, if we are truly evolving as a species, we will find a way to create truly fair and transparent systems which will work as they are ideally intended to work.
It’s on us. We have to make it happen. We have to want it badly enough to make it happen, even making sacrifices for the greater good.
I don’t have any answers. I don’t know how to make us better people that we are, how to make ourselves make the right choices. I do know this – whether it is a tiny village in Germany, or an eagle’s aerie in Kuwait, or the lush life of Doha – we are all more alike, and share more similarities and problems, than we are different. If we could only learn to see through one another’s eyes, maybe we could find ways to resolve our differences and learn to cooperate.
Garden Gate Nurseries
We’re new, but new-with-a-difference, as we have had so many good people to help us with all the decisions that come with settling in. Today, we spent most of our day exploring health care options. We are so lucky to have a military health plan that will cover most of our needs, but it is a bureaucracy, and our daughter-in-law’s step-father helped guide us through the channels, and introduced us to people who could help explain the benefits and rules. Today we searched out doctors who might work with us. At one point, I told AdventureMan, “the problem is, if they are available, I wonder why? Like maybe all the really good ones are taken?”
Our therapy is thinking about gardens, working on our gardens, and exploring ideas for how our yard should look in the future. Again, our daughter-in-law knew just the right person to help us out, and introduced us to Garden Gate Nurseries, a little piece of heaven on earth.
Garden Gate Nurseries specializes in educating clients as to what grows well in the Pensacola / Gulf Coast Climate, how to enrich the soil, which plants are particularly drought resistant, salt resistant, which attract butterflies, or hummingbirds, etc. You don’t just plonk things in the garden, you make a plan, and work little by little to accomplish that plan.
A visit to Garden Gate Nurseries is like a foretaste of Paradise:
They have herbs and vegetables, plants that love the sun and plants that love the shade, and trees, fruit trees, flowering trees, and some wonderful and unique hand crafted gifts and garden-friendly items in their gift shop.
Best of all, they have a landscape designer, Carole Simpson, who loves gardening, gets her thrills from incorporating your dreams into her designs, is thoroughly knowledgeable about growing things in this climate, and on top of all that, is gracious and kind and generous with her time.
Garden Gate Nurseries / Carole Simpson Landscape Design
3268 Fordham Parkway
Gulf Breeze, FL
850-932-9066
Scary Phishing
I received this letter today from Bank of America:
Dear Customer,
We have received an order by phone from you or someone other than you to make changes to one or more of your Bank Of America Online Banking Profile.
If you did not authorize this change(s) please Sign On to your Bank Of America Online Banking and verify/cancel this change.
Sign On below and verify your details and ensure to be accurate. Also, note that entering invalid entries to your details will lead to Online Account lock down.
For your security we have issued this
Click Online Banking Sign On . (this was in hypertext)
Kind regards.
Security Advisor,
Copyright 2010 Bank Of America. All Rights Reserved.
It had the right logo, and purported to be from secureonline@boa.us.
OOps! I need to deny the changes were made by me? Just click right here?
No no no!
I forwarded this e-mail to:
abuse@bankofamerica.com
Who replied with a letter confirming that it was, indeed, a scam.
If you get letters like this pretending to be from your bank, do not click on anything in the letter, but go online to your bank’s online fraud section, get the e-mail address and forward the letter to them. The banks are fighting a bitter battle to protect their customers, and the sooner they know the newest scams, the sooner they can scourge the earth to eliminate these monsters, who will steal your identity and your property and your cash if you let them.
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Early Voting in Florida
