Every now and then, after all these years, I can still crack my husband up by saying something unexpected.
Retirement carries some unexpected adjustments. There was a time, when he was managing a major contract in Germany, where over dinner, I once told AdventureMan I needed him to look at me and to listen. He looked at me in horror; he told me later he thought I was leaving him. No. No. I just looked at him and told him that I am very independent, but that at least once, every single day of our lives together, I need five minutes of his undivided attention.
“Five minutes isn’t much,” he said to me.
“Five minutes is more than I am getting now,” I responded. I knew he was busy, and under a lot of stress, but relationships require nurturing, and I knew I could get by on five minutes, as long as I could count on that five minutes to stay connected.
Now, years later, the shoe is on the other foot. AdventureMan LOVES retirement, and he comes into my office all the time to tell me about a new Tiger Swallowtail in his garden, or to update me on our financial worth, or to use me as a sounding board for a political item that has come up in his garden club.
There are times I need focus. All the years we were married, I had that time, and more, I had all this time to myself, and I learned how to fill and manage my time. I rarely had to coordinate anything with AdventureMan, he just trusted me to manage the house and finances and making sure everything was in its place.
Once he had time, I had to learn how to share my time. I also had to let go of a lot of control. The first time he organized and cleaned out the garage, I almost had a heart attack. He was so proud! And I was so horrified! I am very logical, and more than a little compulsive, and I knew where everything was, in its logical place, and now . . . things were, very literally, out of control. A part of me wanted to kill him, and another part of me said “hey, cool, now you don’t have to clean out the garage, he he he” but making that gain meant giving up control over where things were!
AdventureMan started cooking, and suddenly pots and pans and measuring spoons were not where they were “supposed” to be. AdventureMan took over the garden, and I danced for joy at not having to go out and water in the heat, but I lost control over what was planted out there.
It’s hard. We are both managers, and both very good at it. We’ve had to draw some lines. I’ve had to share territory I always thought of as mine, and he has had to consult with me, when he would much rather carry out his plans directly.
We’ve both had to draw some lines. We don’t touch stuff in one another’s offices. We consult. When I clean out the pantry, the first thing I do is show him the logic, even put little signs so he will know where to find things when he is cooking. I put up with things ending up in the wrong place, except for the spice drawers, where all the normal cooking herbs and in spices are in the left drawer and all the chilis and peppers and exotic herbs are in the right drawer, with all the teas. It can be irrational, but sometimes it is the smallest things that matter.
From time to time, I need a pocket of silence.
I welcome my sweet husband into my office; he is always welcome. From time to time, however, if I am working on paying bills or a blog post or designing a quilt, or trying to get my readings done for my bible study, I tell him I can listen for five minutes, and then I need a pocket of silence.
The first time I said it, he looked at me in horrified disbelief, what I was saying was so astonishing to him that he couldn’t even take it in. Once he comprehended, he started laughing, and now he tells his friends he has a wife who needs her “pockets of silence” – and I do. As he has become more relaxed and stress free, he has become chattier. As I live a life of commitments and connections in retirement, I need some times with no talking.
I need silence in my life the way some people need to be around other people hanging out. Silence refreshes me. Silence helps me focus, helps me think things through and develop a strategy. I am never bored with silence; for me silence is a resource I use with great respect and gratitude. I love my family and my friends, and then – I need a pocket of silence.
Every time I see this commercial, it gives me a big grin. These little babies and children need so much attention, and we applaud the loving care their parents put into cherishing them, sustaining them, nurturing them, civilizing them, educating them, exercising them, and sharing with them until they can care for themselves.
Young parents, you are doing the toughest job in the world. We see you. We see your sacrifices, and the effects of sleep deprivation, we see you giving, giving, giving to those who cannot give back, and we are in awe of your loving patience to your children.
I also love it that men are also featured prominently as caregivers 🙂
If you are squeamish at all, do not read this blog post or look at the last photo, which is graphic.
****** END WARNING *********************
Qatari Cat Before
The Qatari Cat is home now, quiet and relaxed, stretched out in his favorite area. The Vet told us, as he scratched his head, that they would really like to keep him for another day, but he wasn’t acting normally. He’s all groaning and moaning and biting anything around him. They were at their wit’s end, and hated to see him so unhappy. Did we want to leave him or did we think he might be better at home?
We didn’t hesitate.
“We’ll take him home,” we said, knowing home is a quiet, safe place where the Qatari Cat can calm down and focus on healing.
Who knew? Who knew cats could bust their anterior crucial ligament? Who knew that it doesn’t repair itself, and that it would put stress on the other leg and that one would eventually tear, too?
We are learning all the time. In the old days, cats didn’t live long enough to get diabetes, to need a knee replacement. Cats went outdoors and had fatal run ins with cars, or racoons, or bad dogs, or mean people, or poisons. We’ve had five other cats in our lives together, and the Qatari Cat is the one we expected would not live so long, a tiny little street-cat with an infection when adopted.
We’ve kept him indoors (except for the rare instances, in Qatar, when he escaped, but not for long). Once, when he escaped, he climbed a tree. It was a very skinny tree, and as the wind blew and he got frightened, he kept climbing higher, until he was swaying back and forth, back and forth, and yowling at the top of his voice in pure panic.
Good thing he had that set of lungs, so I could find him. It took me another hour to talk him down out of that tree. “Qatari Cat” I said, over and over, “You are OK. You can come down,” and I would pat the tree. Over and over – you have to keep it simple for a scared cat. At long last, we locked eyes, he turned around and slowly edged his way down the tree, head first. I think that was a very scary thing for him, but he trusted me, and he came down. When he would hesitate, I would pat the tree and say “Qatari Cat, come.” He still comes when I call him and pat.
While we were still living in Qatar, he jumped from somewhere and developed a limp. From time to time, especially when the weather is cold, the limp, always the same leg, would become more pronounced. Recently, as he was trying to make a sharp turn, he screeeeeeched in pain, and after that, he had a serious limp.
The vet showed us his x-rays; his knee was totally torn. We waited until we were back from Alaska, so we could be here exactly for his reason – the Qatari Cat does best at home. He also does well at We Tuck ‘Em Inn, but he does not do well when he can smell fear and when he is fearful. When he is fearful, he is a fearful and awesome creature, spitting, hissing, biting and twisting. He instills fear in the most stalwart heart.
When we first saw him, at the vet’s office, (they were SO glad to get rid of him) he was growling and snarling, and he settled down in the car, a little, growling only now and then.
As soon as we got him home, we opened the carrier door and left him alone. Then the moaning began in earnest. He wanted to come out, but when he would turn to get in leaving position, his leg hurt, his wound hurt – a LOT, and he would let out a long, low, pitiful GROOOO-AAAAAAAA-AAAANNNNNNNNN. We had to leave him be. We had to let him do it himself.
AdventureMan had a special treat for him, canned catfood with SALMON. It helped him move himself out of the carrier:
And this is what his leg looks like. The instructions say it should heal in 10 to 14 days. We’re hoping he feels a lot better before then.
For the first time ever, the announcer tells us, the groups are all ready on time and the dancers ready to go – they are astonishingly ahead of schedule.
We return as a group of mixed dancers, from many Alaskan tribes, and some dancers with roots in classic “lower 48” tribes, so they all respect one another’s traditions, share, and do a little bit of everything. I kind of like this kind of flexibility. Some of the female costumes are a little ummm . . . skimpy . . . for the cold Alaskan climate, LOL, and some of the tattoos a little un-Alaskan and it doesn’t matter, they make it work.
The Celebration Hall is full and brimming over, dancers and their families in the waiting rooms, behind stage, in the halls, in the gift stores, children wailing for their Moms or Dads, it is totally a family affair. Grandma’s step in and help, and the dance goes on.
One of the sweetest events at Celebration 2014 is scheduled early early in the morning, so early, we missed a part of it. The families of the clans take great pride in creating their ceremonial robes with clan markings, and get the children started in the tradition early.
These children were SO adorable, and their costumes finely and lovingly wrought. They had an enthusiastic – if fairly sparse – audience at the early hour, but it was necessary with all the many different groups dancing throughout the day.
I THINK this might have been the winner, but I am not sure. Not everything was in English, and sometimes I couldn’t understand what was said. Winner or not – adorable 🙂
Taking a break from The Celebration, we get up early, drive to our Juneau friend’s house and park our car and she drives us over and drops us off to catch the AdventureBound trip out to Tracy Arms. For two weeks the weather forecasts have told us that this day will be sunny, bright and warm, and ha ha ha on us, it is cloudy and cold, but not much rain. In Juneau, not much rain is a pretty good day :-).
We meet some really fun people as we wait to board – one couple married four days, one couple of young adventurers who, like us, travel on their own as opposed to group travel or cruise ship travel. Our lively conversation made us late to board, only to discover that everyone else had booked for this “sunny” day and every seat in the cabin would be occupied. Once you sit down, that is YOUR spot, oh ugh, this is the worst kind of tour for us, but we discover we can go in and out at will and this works. We spend a lot of time outside, taking photos, watching for whale and porpoise and bear and eagles – all kinds of wildlife. It’s not so bad.
Before we leave, I shoot this photo. It’s not original; I had a similar poster once from the 1920’s or 1930’s advertising trans-Atlantic boat travel on some French line. I just love the lines:
Juneau is landlocked, so everything that comes in or goes out goes by boat or plane. Container barges bring in larger items, and I was amazed how high they can stack a barge. I was also amazed that on top of the containers are vehicles strapped on tight; school buses, campers, snow plows – no wonder everything costs so much more in Alaska!
These bear made me so sad. Look how skinny they are, down at the bottom of tall, steep cliffs, eating barnacles. Bear eating barnacles – they must be starving. Some of them look all molty and have fur coming off.
I never saw these glaciers when I was little. The Mendenhall glacier is relatively large compared to the Sawyer glaciers (1) and (2) but the Sawyer glaciers are calving. The sound is unforgettable, the cracking, the thunder, and entire sections of the glacier falling into the bay. Other burgs crack off underwater, and they come up huge, whole and a sparkling, unforgettable icy deep blue:
There is equipment going all the time at Tracy Arms to record the calving, the sights and sounds:
Mama and baby seals catching a few rays at high noon near the glacier:
Here is a piece breaking and falling into the water:
You can see the tour boat is surrounded by ice and icebergs:
The glaciers are currently neither advancing nor receding, but you can read the trail of the glacier’s recession over thousands of years in the steep, ice-scraped mountains on both sides:
On our way home, we spot whale. You can shoot a lot of shots of a piece of whale, or where the whale was a split-second ago, LOL.
As we reach the dock, I call our friend to tell her we are arriving and she laughs and tells me she is already on her way; she was watching the boat arrive from her place across the channel. Within minutes, she is picking us up for home made fish cakes and chop chop salad. Best of all, great conversation, lots of laughter and wonderful stories of past times in Alaska. Her family was a pioneer family in Nome before she married and came to Juneau, so she has some great tales to share. Our families have had a lot of joint adventures, in Alaska, in Germany and in Edmonds.
She also asks great questions like “how did you buy groceries in Kuwait?” and “what did you do about laundry?”, practical questions, and exactly the kinds of things that made our lives more challenging – and interesting – to us. It was a great evening.
I hope you will forgive me; I am not able to do the same work on the iPad I can do on my computer, so these photos are uncropped, unenhanced, they are what they are. It isn’t about the photos, it is about the people they are celebrating. These are more photos from the opening parade, which was rich with colors and sounds:
This is the reason we are here – Celebration 2014. I had never heard of it, it is not well publicized. It only began some time in the 1980’s and I came across it by accident, researching a Native Alaskan hunting mask my Mother gave me. I found a blog written by a young girl from Nome, showing early Celebrations, and explaining it was a gathering of the Alaskan clans.
Wow. This was so totally new to me. Growing up, there was little or no acknowledgement of the First Nation tribes. We were told not to play with the native children; they had knives, they were dangerous. LOL, tell a kid another kid has a knife and guess who they want to play with?
All us kids went to school together. Even as a young child, you recognize discrimination when you see it. Kids have a strong sense of “Fair”. We knew, at a gut level, that not playing with our Native classmates was not right, not fair, and . . . we went right ahead and did what kids do.
I do kind of cringe, thinking of playing cowboys and indians with real Indians, LOL . . . . but anyone could be whoever they wanted to be, so often as not, cowboys were Indian. It’s funny now that I think about it; kids see things differently.
I am not Native American, but this is my connection, my early classmates. You know how sometimes the pieces just come together? Now I know why I worked so hard to attend those nomadic festivals in Douz, in the Sahara south of Tunis, the falcon festivals, why I urge locals to gather the stories and dances and clothing traditions and to preserve them – it’s because I learned to treasure the arts and crafts of the earliest Alaskans.
So I came back not as participant, but as witness. I wanted to see the First Nation people Celebrate who they are, and their own cultures and traditions. I had no idea how very moving I would find it, but once the drums started beating and the chants started, I was weeping.
The best part was the multi-generational participation. The groups were led by elders, but at their feet were the grand children and great grandchildren, all dressed, all chanting, learning the steps, learning the songs, learning the traditions, learning more about who they are. Their faces were full of joy, and pride, and I get a little choked up just writing about it.
The opening parade was not until evening, so we were on our way to the hotel for a quick snooze and we saw the dugout canoes headed toward Juneau, full of chanting rowers.
AdventureMan quickly turned the car around so we could watch them approach and land. It was haunting, beautiful, the drums, the chant, and a woman next to me, around my own age, turned to me, weeping and said “I never thought I would see this again in my own time.” It was a moment of pure joy.
The opening parade was a small problem; we looked and looked for where the parade was due to start and finish. Many in town knew there was supposed to be a parade sometime, but were hazy on the details. Finally, we found the right places, the right street and were scouting parking when a parking police person told us that all the government workers go home at five and the parking enforcement people go off duty at 5:30 so show up after 5:30 and you can park where you want. Wooo HOOOO! Thank you, City of Juneau!
The parade started promptly at 6, led by elders carrying the American flag. Tsimshia’an, Tlingket or Haida – all American. One of the lead dancers was a Marine who took leave to come back and dance with his tribe, leading the younger men in the movements to the hunting dances.
Pregnant Pakistani woman stoned to death by family
May 27th 2014 3:29PM
Pakistan
Mohammad Iqbal, right, husband of Farzana Parveen, 25, sits in an ambulance next to the body of his pregnant wife who was stoned to death by her own family, in Lahore, Pakistan, Tuesday, May 27, 2014. Nearly 20 members of the woman’s family, including her father and brothers, attacked her and her husband with batons and bricks in broad daylight before a crowd of onlookers in front of the high court of Lahore, police investigator Rana Mujahid said. (AP Photo/K.M. Chaudary)
LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) – A pregnant woman was stoned to death Tuesday by her own family outside a courthouse in the Pakistani city of Lahore for marrying the man she loved.
The woman was killed while on her way to court to contest an abduction case her family had filed against her husband. Her father was promptly arrested on murder charges, police investigator Rana Mujahid said, adding that police were working to apprehend all those who participated in this “heinous crime.”
Arranged marriages are the norm among conservative Pakistanis, and hundreds of women are murdered every year in so-called honor killings carried out by husbands or relatives as a punishment for alleged adultery or other illicit sexual behavior.
Stonings in public settings, however, are extremely rare. Tuesday’s attack took place in front of a crowd of onlookers in broad daylight. The courthouse is located on a main downtown thoroughfare.
A police officer, Naseem Butt, identified the slain woman as Farzana Parveen, 25, and said she had married Mohammad Iqbal, 45, against her family’s wishes after being engaged to him for years.
Her father, Mohammad Azeem, had filed an abduction case against Iqbal, which the couple was contesting, said her lawyer, Mustafa Kharal. He said she was three months pregnant.
Nearly 20 members of Parveen’s extended family, including her father and brothers, had waited outside the building that houses the high court of Lahore. As the couple walked up to the main gate, the relatives fired shots in the air and tried to snatch her from Iqbal, her lawyer said.
When she resisted, her father, brothers and other relatives started beating her, eventually pelting her with bricks from a nearby construction site, according to Mujahid and Iqbal, the slain woman’s husband.
Iqbal said he started seeing Parveen after the death of his first wife, with whom he had five children.
“We were in love,” he told The Associated Press. He alleged that the woman’s family wanted to fleece money from him before marrying her off.
“I simply took her to court and registered a marriage,” infuriating the family, he said.
Parveen’s father surrendered after the attack and called his daughter’s murder an “honor killing,” Butt said.
“I killed my daughter as she had insulted all of our family by marrying a man without our consent, and I have no regret over it,” Mujahid, the police investigator, quoted the father as saying.
Mujahid said the woman’s body was handed over to her husband for burial.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, a private group, said in a report last month that some 869 women were murdered in honor killings in 2013.
But even Pakistanis who have tracked violence against women expressed shock at the brutal and public nature of Tuesday’s slaying.
“I have not heard of any such case in which a woman was stoned to death, and the most shameful and worrying thing is that this woman was killed outside a courthouse,” said Zia Awan, a prominent lawyer and human rights activist.
He said Pakistanis who commit violence against women are often acquitted or handed light sentences because of poor police work and faulty prosecutions.
“Either the family does not pursue such cases or police don’t properly investigate. As a result, the courts either award light sentences to the attackers, or they are acquitted,” he said.
I can move mountains! Today it dawned cool! I walked in the garden with my coffee, I turned off the A/C and opened all the doors and windows to get all the stuffiness out AND I re-organized our pantry.
Sounds easy? LOL. It is easy when you move every couple years, or every six months. You get rid of a lot of stuff. Once you settle, you really have to watch out, STUFF begins to accumulate. Like for some reason, I ran out of mustard once, and then every time I was grocery shopping for a while I would buy another mustard so I would be sure not to run out, and now I have like 11 mustards, no two the same, German mustards, Chinese mustards, French mustards, no, no, I won’t be running out any time soon.
AdventureMan had made a list for me at the commissary yesterday, including Penne for a Pasta Putanesca he was making to celebrate my return, he’s not so hot on anchovies, but he did a bang-up job on one of my all-time favorite pastas ever. As I cleaned out today, I found two more boxes of penne.
We changed over to a tankless water system last week, it just seems like a good idea. When we bought the house, one thing made me nervous, the hot water tank was in the pantry, right in the middle of the house. Hot water heaters fail, they all do, eventually, and when it goes, it can leak all over everywhere. The first time it happened to me, we were out of town and it took a week to get all the carpeting and walls dried out. So I traded worrying about a leaking hot water tank for worrying about a gas explosion, aarrgh. Actually, it’s pretty safe. We used tankless systems all the years we lived in Germany, and I really liked them. It feels right, just heating the water when you use it, not holding it – and heating it – when you are not.
So now the big water tank is gone, and I brought in new shelving, and put that together, it was almost idiot-proof, almost . . .
That took most of the day, putting the new shelving in, clearing the shelves, sorting out the items, labeling the shelves so AdventureMan can find what he needs, although to me, it all SEEMS very logical, signs saying “Condiments” “Oriental Condiments” “Back-up Baking Supplies” “Tomato things” “Soups” and “Canned Sea Food”, etc. I did not label the pasta and rice; they just seemed so obvious.
All this with doors and windows open and the most heavenly breeze blowing through; give me the right climate and I can move a mountain! I got the laundry all done as I was re-organizing the pantry, I even cleaned out one of the spice drawers (getting rid of spices kept from Kuwait and Qatar because I couldn’t bear to part with them, but four years . . .) it’s time, and they aren’t really good any more.
AdventureMan brought our adorable four year old grandson over to play, and we got to chat a little. There is nothing like a four year old snuggle, and conversations with him are always so interesting and so direct, it’s so refreshing 🙂
And at the end of the day, there is even time to sit outside in the bright, cool, breezy sunlight sipping a glass of tea and watching all the birds come in for one last bite before bed time.
Here There and Everywhere 