Recipe For Life
Thank you, Renee, for sending this lovely little reminder of how to lead a happy life:
Great Recipe (one of the best that you will ever read)
1. Take a 10-30 minute walk every day. And while you walk, smile. It is the ultimate antidepressant.
2. Sit in silence for at least 10 minutes each day.
Talk to God about what is going on in your life.
3. When you wake up in the morning complete the following
statement, ‘My purpose is to__________ today. I am thankful for______________’
4. Eat more foods that grow on trees and plants and eat less food that is manufactured in plants.
5. Drink green tea and plenty of water. Eat blueberries, wild
Alaskan salmon, broccoli, almonds & walnuts.
6. Try to make at least three people smile each day.
7. Don’t waste your precious energy on gossip, issues of the
past, negative thoughts or things you cannot control. Instead
invest your energy in the positive present moment.
8. Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a college kid with a maxed out charge card.
9. Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.
10. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
11. Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
12. You are not so important that you have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
13. Make peace with your past so it won’t spoil the present.
14. Don’t compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about
.
15. No one is in charge of your happiness except you.
16. Frame every snowballed disaster with these words: ‘In five years, will this matter?’
17. Forgive everyone for everything.
18. What other people think of you is none of your business.
19. GOD heals everything – but you have to ask Him.
20. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
21. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your
friends will. Stay in touch!!!
22. Envy is a waste of time. You have everything you need.
23. Each night before you go to bed, complete the following statements: I am thankful for__________.
Today I accomplished_________.
24. Remember that you are too blessed to be stressed.
25. When you are feeling down, start listing your many blessings. You’ll be smiling before you know it.
26. Send this to everyone you care about.
“);
Presenter Ses Condoléances
Some things you do. Some things are hard, and you do them anyway. I always think of them in the formal – pour prendre conge’, respondez, pour rendre petite assistance . . . must do’s, societal niceties, the grease that keeps civilization running, never mind smoothly.
I had to call a friend this morning to tell her how sorry I am that her husband had died. When she came to the phone, I was initially shocked. For months, since her husband’s stroke, she has been subdued and tired, but this morning she sounded happy and energetic.
“He’s free!” she said to me. “”As it says in the Bible, his passing was a breath; if I hadn’t been holding his hand and paying attention, I wouldn’t have known he was gone. It was so easy.” She was joyful. We wept together, for joy. He was free of the burden his life had become.
What I thought was going to be a sad call turned out to be a joyful call. She loves her husband still. They had years and years and children and grandchildren together, and she let him go with joy because he was ready.
Thanks be to God.
Happy 7th Blog-iversary to Me!
Once a year I get to troll the internet looking for cakes. It is so much fun. I had no idea there is so much creativity out there, so much daring. I found a wedding cake that is tilted! Something in me loved it, loved the spirit of a woman who would marry knowing life is often off-kilter and messy.
I love white roses, so this year I have sent some to myself:
Come on by, have some virtual cake with me to celebrate seven years of blogging:
And here, an elegant combination of cake and white roses:
Seven years ago in Kuwait, I started blogging. There was a wild blogging scene in Kuwait, a lively community. Blogs were candid, and many were substantial, dealing (carefully) with political and economic issues in Kuwait. I remember reading and learning, and finally gathering up my courage to write my very first entry, and it has been a recurring theme, cross-cultural communication. I learned so much from my life in the Middle East, Tunisia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait. I made the most amazing friends. It changed my life and my perceptions utterly.
Of the three Kuwait female bloggers who inspired me to start blogging, Jewaira has gone private, 1001 Nights is a good friend, a mother, and an author 🙂 and Desert Girl is still going strong. Mark, at 2:48 a.m. is also still going strong, so strong that he has been able to leave his full time employment and operate on a consultant basis.
Of course, as any blogger will, I sometimes think of quitting. There are days I find myself with nothing to say, nothing in my life so interesting that I think it is worth sharing, not even a news story worth noting. So I’ve had to ask myself why I continue.
I do it for myself. When I started, I had a reason and that reason still stands. I forget things. This isn’t age-related, it’s busy-life busy-world related; we forget the details.
My Mother saved all my letters from Tunisia. I remember reading them and laughing because at three, my son’s best friend in his day school was a boy he called Cutlet. I know his real name is Khalid, but Cutlet was as close as this little American boy in a French-Tunisian school could get. I had totally forgotten, until I read the letter. So my primary reason for continuing to blog is documentary – just plain record keeping, like an old fashioned diary. Noting things in my daily life or the life around me.
Even now, sometimes I see a post written long ago, usually one of our Africa trips, Botswana, Namibia, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Zambia – will start getting a rush of stats. It thrills my heart. It makes it all worthwhile, knowing something I have put out there is helping others, even years later. Perhaps one day, I will quit blogging, but leave the blog up, with these informational articles.
My stats make no sense at all, one of my biggest stat gainers this year was a news article I tossed off about the prank on the South Korean pilot names after the plane crash landed in San Francisco. It just made me giggle, and I couldn’t resist printing it. It ended up with a life of its own, as many entries do – and you just never know. Someone pins an image and you get a million (ok hyperbole here) hits you never expected.
In the end, I believe that those who keep blogging do it because as Martin Luther once said, “I cannot other.” We do it because something within needs to be expressed, even if it is just some kind of daily record. I know it’s why I blog.
Uwem Akpan and Say You’re One of Them
This is a very troubling book, and, for me, a difficult book to read. It has taken me weeks, and I will admit I have often interrupted the reading of it to read other, easier books. This book makes me very uncomfortable. The stories and images trouble my sleep.
Uwem Akpan is of the tribe of Annang, from Nigeria, and has committed to an even larger tribe, the Catholic Church, of which he is a priest, and this gives him a unique perspective. The stories in this book often focus on tribal differences, including religious differences, and although they are set in different African states, have parallels in lives lived elsewhere. Those tribal differences are between Moslem and Christian, but also between Pentecostal and Catholic, Tutsi and Hutu, and, most significantly, the differences between to tribe of the very poor and the very rich.
Each story is told through the eyes of a child living in a different African state – Kenya, Benin, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Rwanda.
In one of my favorite segments of the book, strife has broken out in Nigeria, strife between the Moslems and the Christians, but also throw in the Pentecostals and the Pagans and really mix it up. A bus is waiting in the bus station to take people back to the southern part of Nigeria, and on this bus is a young man, half Moslem, half Christian. The bus stands idle for hours, while the bus driver seeks fuel to make the trip. During this time on the bus, many conversations take place, and what I loved was how alliances shifted with each conversation. The people on the bus were from different traditions, but came together as a community. No community is without arguments and dissensions, however, and consensus builds, diminishes, shifts – it is a microcosm of the tensions and stressors pulling apart the Nigerian nation state.
Uwem Akpan treats the children in each story lovingly, treasuring their innocent perspective and the sweetness of their hearts and vision. The adults don’t come off so well, passing their days in drug-induced stupors, drunk, selling children into slavery and prostitution, chopping off their limbs with machetes, and closing themselves off into groups which protect themselves and exploit others.
It would be an easier book to read if it were about aliens, or if these stories were confined to Africa, but the stories of these abused, neglected and exploited children echo in every continent, country and city in the world.
Uwem Akpan writes prose that is poetry; the surroundings are described with such detail that you feel in the moment, you see through the eyes of each child, and you see things that are beautiful as well as scenes you did not want to see. As you can see, I have a lot of ambiguous feelings about this book. At the same time I can admire the writing, the stories have left images in my mind that cannot be erased. Dark images. There is hope in the persistence and resilience of many of the children, but concern about their long term survival. It leaves a heavy weight on my heart.
Retrograde 4th of July
Alternate title: Every man needs a Kubota
As we were listening to the news and weather Tuesday night before going to bed, the weather woman was talking about a ‘retrograde’ storm system. She showed us on the map; normally our weather blows from west to east, but this storm was going to blow east to west, and then reverse and go west to east again. Going counter to the normal flow is ‘retrograde.’
Our entire holiday was retrograde. Which, for people like AdventureMan and I, is not too bad. It’s a good thing we married one another; we are not to good with same-same all the time, if things get too tame, we shake things up a little bit. It’s not good or bad, it’s just the way we are wired.
One of the first differences was that we weren’t leaving early in the morning to drive down Highway 98 along the beach road; we were picking up our adorable grandson, going to his house, and as soon as our daughter-in-law got off work we would hit the interstate.
It all went well; cloudy skies but light traffic, all was well until we left the highway headed south . . . and started hitting the “Roads Under Water” signs. We didn’t see any roads under water until the car in front of us hit what looked like a shiny spot on the road and went almost a foot deep. AdventureMan cooly slowed and drifted steadily through the lake in the road – and we thanked God to be in a vehicle a little higher off the ground than a sedan.
After the lake in the road, it started raining, a little sprinkling, and then a steady rain.
The temperatures dropped.
Here is what we had planned – dinner with family and friends, a day of fun and heading out for sun downers on the boat to watch the fireworks on the 4th. Heavy applications of insect repellant and sunscreen.
Here is what happened – the deluge.
Here is what was cool about the deluge – the temperatures were the coolest, 24 hours around the clock – that we’ve seen in a month. We could sit out on the screened porch looking at the bayou, listening to the rain fall – it was heavenly! No insect repellent needed. No sun screen needed.
Our hostess is a wonderful and creative cook; unafraid to try new recipes. Dinner after our rainy drive in: Red snapper, baked in a crust of crumbs with butter and parsley, so delicious. Green beans and mushrooms; so good I had them for breakfast another day 🙂 Holy smokes, desserts. The best pound cake ever, topped with peaches in their own juice and whipped cream, or chocolate red velvet brownies.
It was a fabulous lazy day. In the afternoon, our friend got an emergency call; friends whose husband was out of town were facing a flooding situation. Loading up his Kubota, he and AdventureMan went over and (manly manly) DUG A DITCH! getting all dirty and wet in the process, coming home with those grins that only activities like a good hunting trip, a successful fishing trip or digging a good ditch can create.
We had great plans that night to visit The Blue Fig (“They have mohammara!” my hostess said, knowing my weakness) but when we got there, it was closed . . . and, oddly every restaurant along that strip seemed to be closed. And side roads were flooded, more big lakes of water in the roads. It had rained so much and for so long that the runoff had no where to go.
Our little grandson fell asleep while we were searching for a restaurant that was open, and slept in my arms through dinner. I know this might be the last time; he is getting to be such a big boy, so I just treasured the time and listened to him breathe.
I know it may not seem like such a great holiday to you, but it was fun. We focused on conversations and laughed a lot. AdventureMan thinks every man might need a Kubota. We listened to the rain fall on the leaves, the roof, the bayou. We listened to the frogs celebrate the 4th of July. We really had a great time.
“So There We Were, Two Naked Guys in the Shower and . . . . “
LOL, no, no, this is not going where you think it might go, but it got my attention, too!
AdventureMan was in the locker room with one of his exercise/aerobics buddies, cooling down from his water aerobics class when this story started, and was sharing the story with me later, at lunch, as we exchangin details of our mornings.
“. . . And he asked ‘do you know what today is?’ and I said ‘Yes! It’s the 63th anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War,” AdventureMan responded.
Guy talk. Guys discuss their combat experience in different wars. Combat is so intense, it imprints memories the way childbirth does in women, or a huge traumatic event, like the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, or 9-11, or the Kennedy assassination, or the Tsunamis that hit Japan and washed entirely over the Maldives – experiences when the earth beneath your feet shifts, and things you once took for granted are shaken forever.
Who said guys don’t connect? AdventureMan has another old friend he needs to get in touch with today, to tell him he is thinking of him; Korean War veterans are largely forgotten in the tallying of combat in our country.
Pensacola is a wonderful place to be a military veteran. There is a Veteran’s hospital, and veteran-friendly policies at the clinics, commissaries and BX/PXx. Today we had lunch at Mellow Mushroom, where every Tuesday they give 20% off to all active duty and retired servicemen and women. Home Depot and Lowe’s give 10% off on every purchase, even plumbers, electricians, contractors, banks, theaters and many stores often give military discounts. And they thank us for our service. :0
To those of you who served in the Korean conflict: Thank you for your service.
Forty Years Wedding Anniversary
“You’re going to celebrate your anniversary for three days?” my friend asked incredulously.
“No, no, actually, it’s in two parts, we are celebrating the entire weekend, three days, but it’s because it is too hot to walk around New Orleans; so this is just part one, and in December we will celebrate part two with a trip to New Orleans when we can walk around and enjoy all the Christmas decorations and stay somewhere nice.”
It’s what we do.
There have been some years, particularly years with moves, or new positions, or new contracts in them, when anniversaries have sort of fallen by the wayside. We are enjoying making up for all the missed anniversaries, now that we have the great luxury of time.
We have all kinds of fun plans, a hotel stay, a dinner in a fine restaurant, star gazing out at Ft. Pickens, maybe a dolphin cruise, and a trip up in the very large beach ferris wheel, while it is still at Pensacola Beach. We plan a day in several pools with our son and his wife and our little grandson. All. or part, or some of this may really happen, depending on what the weekend weather looks like. Ft. Pickens has already evacuated all the campers with concerns over this Tropical Storm Andrea coming in, and a dolphin cruise or a trip up on the great wheel may not be such a hot idea at 40 – 50 mph winds, LOL.
AdventureMan and I knew when we married that we were in it for the long haul. We also knew it wouldn’t be easy. We come from different cultures, different life styles. We both had independent lives and responsibilities. We moved a lot. It wasn’t always easy, but then whose life is, when you know that life from the inside? We’ve had some great adventures, and some fabulous, astounding experiences. We’ve met extraordinary people and made very special life-long friends.
When I told AdventureMan our weekend might not be as exciting as planned, he laughed and said “we can bring our books.” He always knows how to make me laugh, and taking books is exactly what we did when we first got married, and would take weekend trips to a lakeside resort called Chiemsee; it would be snowing and cold and we would go into this large old lodge with it’s double doors and double shuttered windows, with it’s eiderdown comforters and huge fireplace, and we would pack books. We would sleep and read, and sometimes go eat. If that’s how this anniversary turns out, it’s a very comfortable and familiar way to celebrate.:-)
AdventureMan loves this blog. He always looks for his name. 🙂 Happy Anniversary, dear husband.
League of Women Voters
My friends and I had an animated conversation about Florida politics as we sat around the table having a late breakfast at Adonna’s Bakery, down on Palafox in Pensacola. We were explaining how in the last election, if it were not for the voters handbook the League of Women Voters published, explaining exactly what a yes or no vote would mean for each proposed amendment, Florida would be stuck with constitutional amendments voters never intended to approve.
The League of Women Voters cuts through all the baloney and explains the issues, clearly and objectively. Without their clear, cool voice of reason, voters would be blown to and fro by the turbulent election rhetoric which blows at hurricane force during each election in Florida, obscuring the clearest issues. The League is neither liberal nor conservative, but contains members of all parties. Their goal is getting people to vote, and to understand the issue on which people are voting.
So grown up. So mature. So wise and clear sighted. Way too grown up for me, all these years, until, after that conversation, one of these friends sent me an invitation she had received for an upcoming League of Women Voters annual luncheon. As an added attraction, a local NPR reporter would be the speaker.
I hate meetings. It brings out the ADD child in me; I fidget, I wish I were anywhere but in the meeting.
And yet . . . this is a group I have long admired, and I want to support them. So I agreed, and we attended.
It was so much fun. These women – and men, about a fifth of the attendees were men – are people focused on ISSUES. They have study groups for how juveniles in the local area are arrested and treated in our jails and custodial facilities. They have groups which study the impact on the environment of legislative and local government decisions. They go to civic meetings, speak out, and report back to the League. This is a group of people who take positions and recommend actions! Exciting stuff.
You know I am a believer, so I might see things differently from you, or others, but I met some really cool members, people I believe I was meant to meet. One said wonderful things about my son as he practices his profession. There is no Mother’s Day gift on earth that means as much as the words she spoke, praising his ethics and integrity.
An elderly man sitting next to me was leaving this week to go to Heidelberg.
“Are you going for the closing down?” I asked, and told him I had graduated from Heidelberg American high school, lo, these many years ago. “Yes,” he replied, he has family who have lived there many years, and he has been back many times. It led to a discussion around the table, where I discovered two other women who had been in DoDs schools in Germany. What an unexpected blessing!
Every now and then, as you lead your life, you get the feeling you are exactly where you are meant to be at this very moment, and I had that feeling as I left the meeting. I am so thankful for the serendipity that led me there, and for the rush of blessings the meeting provided.
LOL, the group I thought might be stuffy and staid played this wonderful Lady Gaga video:
AdventureMan and the Box Turtle
“There’s a box turtle in our backyard!” AdventureMan exclaimed, coming in after making his early morning rounds to make sure all was well in the garden, and to bring us up to date on any new developments. I was eating breakfast with our house guests, getting ready to leave for water aerobics class. (If you come to visit, you get to come to water aerobics 🙂 too!)
The two guys went back out to consider the box turtle, but the box turtle had disappeared. Of course we kidded AdventureMan.
“Are you SURE you saw a turtle? How would it get in to the backyard?”
He was mystified, but certain he had seen a box turtle. They searched all the spots they could think of, but could not find any turtle.
This morning, I was up early feeding the Qatari Cat when I saw a movement in the yard, and there he was, the box turtle.
AdventureMan was still sleeping; so I ran and got my camera and took some photos. I think he was aware of me, but couldn’t figure out where I was (I was inside, he was outside). When he got up, AdventureMan was delighted to have his observation verified, and hurried outside to see if he could spot him. Nope! Turtle back in hiding.
The Baboon Coughed
We’ve had three sets of houseguests in a very short time span, and today is our first day of ‘normal.’ We saw our friends off at 0430 (we used to call it oh-dark-hundred) and I couldn’t get back to sleep, so by the grace of God (and I mean that literally) I got up and walked.
I know I need to walk. I’ve always walked. I used to run, but I suffered for it – the knees – and decided I didn’t want to pay that price. But when my sister was here, we decided to take a walk and I said “don’t worry, I walk fast” and she said “I don’t, I am so slow now, my body has to warm up.” Confidently I started – and starting is uphill from my house. Very shortly, I discovered my fast was her slow, and I was HUFFING and puffing, and so embarrassed because I guess it’s been a while since I did this walk . . . but we did it. It felt good. And I was happy for a nice cool morning so I could do it again.
I ran into a neighbor, ignored that she was in her nightgown, we both pretended she was as fully dressed as I, had a brief conversation and she went inside with her newspaper and I carried on. About halfway through my walk, as I puffed along, I heard it.
The baboon coughed.
I could even smell a faint drift of wood burning fire. I could hear the doves. But it was only very briefly, very intangential, and I quickly realized it must have been a dog barking distantly; I could still hear him. For one brief moment I was back in Zambia, and while I love the magic of Zambia, I would not be out for a mile long hike early in the morning while the lions prowl for a last meal before they settle down for their day-long snooze.
We are off this morning to a grand plant sale across the bay in Milton. Symphony tonight. Back to “normal” for Pensacola.
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Early Voting in Florida
Here There and Everywhere 