Tagged by This Lady
Some tags are silly, but fun. This one . . . someone took some time. These questions are genuinely thought provoking. Thanks for tagging me, Lady.
*Do your closest friends have any nicknames for you? No. If they do, they don’t use it to my face! But when I have grandchildren, I am going to be called “Shisha.” I won’t tell you why, but it has nothing to do with smoking.
*What would your ex-(boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse) say about you in one sentence? “Life just isn’t the same without you.”
*What is the greatest achievement of your life so far? Staying married for years and years and years, and producing a son who is a successful adult. Sharing the triumphs of his graduation(s) and career and marriage with his father/ my husband.
*How should people think of sex in this, the 21st century? Often, and with joy.
*Where would you live if anywhere was possible? If anything were possible, I would live in a house with a view of the sea and mountains.
*Is there a religion that’s fulfilling for you and/or the masses? I am a Christian, and one who has come to believe that the ultimate truth will be a grand adventure. We all have glimpses, and we are limited. One day, we will see clearly, and not “through the glass, darkly.”
*What inspires awe in your life’s experience? People who create something out of nothing. People with vision who make things happen.
*What was/is your best pick-up line? The most interesting women don’t need a line; they are good listeners.
*What and when is the most potent emotion you’ve ever experienced and why? Anger. I am not an angry person, but once I knew I could kill to protect my son. On the very rare occasion when I get angry, my anger scares me, my primitive nature scares me.
*On what occasions do you act self-absorbed or just plain selfish? When I am tired past being able to sleep, or sick past being able to be gracious, or depressed beyond my ability to fight on. Then I need quiet, and rest, and miso soup, and to just curl into a ball until it’s passed.
*If someone assigned you a quest, or if you decided your own, what would you be looking to find? I would want to find the secret to helping us all just get along.
*If you had to choose between them, would you live in Hollywood, Washington D.C. or New York, and why? Oh please! Spare me. Neither!
*Who or what makes you feel “wholeβ? I feel whole when my spiritual life, my family life and my friend-life are all in order.
*Where is your greatest opportunity for change? I love living in places where my husband and I can walk. I feel the need for walking as exercise.
*What do you consider to be the greatest opportunity for humankind? To learn to live together, and to find a fair way to allocate resources.
*What surprises you about getting older? The betrayals of the body. Inside, you are still young!
*What or who makes you feel younger or rejuvenated? Walking, a good haircut, a great conversation.
*Where or when do you feel most alone? When my husband and I disagree.
*Where or how is society most ripe for change? When people are willing to step forward and take their part in making changes.
*Do you think of yourself as attractive to the opposite sex? π
*When or where do you feel the most free? In Seatttle, on the west coast, women are about as close to being equal people as I have ever hoped to see. I feel most free there.
*What is the greatest memory of your life to date? The night I discovered my brain had not turned to jello during childbirth and child-raising. You can read about it here.
*Where and when did you find out who you really are? A female mentor laughed and said “you have no idea yet what you are capable of” and I was so shocked I decided to start finding out.
*How and when do you collect your thoughts and why? I take a bath. I wash off any defilement and pray for discernment.
*If someone told you when and where you would die, what would you do immediately after being told? I would thank God for the many many blessings he has given me, especially seeing our son dance at his wedding, and living happily, and for the years I have had with my husband, and the lively and exciting life we have had together, then I would make lunch dates with my dearest friends one-on-one, to say goodbye and thank them for their contributions to my life.
*What are the best parts of being in love? Learning how many many kinds of love their are, and that love is a verb, and a choice.
*What’s your favorite libation (a drink offered to a god)? I really like coffee! And ginger beer (it is not really beer)
*What “life philosophies” have you adopted since you’ve become an adult? Serve God first, live life so that you have no regrets, stay out of debt, invest for the future, life’s true riches are the blessings of the angels God sends you in family and friends and even brief moments of connection with others.
*How would you like to be remembered? I would love for people to say “Whoa! She was a pistol!” π
I TAG star blogger FONZY, Kuwait’s premier blogger Don Veto, sweet True Faith, Touche, who thinks outside the box, Chirp, because I want to know the answers, and a blogger I think is going to have a very interesting life, MirimtheMirim. I also tag my niece, Beiruti-blogger Little Diamond.
Every Sunset is a Beautiful Sunset
We were walking along Clearwater Beach, in Florida with a couple who had been our friends for years. We have so many stories with this couple, stories that make us all double over in laughter.
There was the time we were dining at a castle in Germany, a very lovely place, and when we ordered dessert, it came . . . chocolate mousse, but carefully placed, a la nouvelle cuisine, and striped with a chocolate syrup. As it was being put before us, we didn’t dare to look at one another. Only when the waiter left did the giggles start, growing into full grown guffaws, as we laughed helplessly.
The mousse looked like dog poop.
My husband was laughing so hard he had trouble breathing for a while. The gales of laughter, the whoops of laughter continued as we remembered the utter shock as the dessert was placed before us. To this day, we still don’t know if this was seriously supposed to be haute cuisine or if it was some kind of German joke. It still makes us roll with laughter thinking of the horrified surprise we each felt, and our fear of laughing in the waiter’s face.
There are other stories, stories funnier to us than they would be to you in the retelling.
Bill had a heart attack earlier in the year. AdventureMan and I were going through career transition issues. It was a time of struggle for both couples, and we were talking about what we were going through as the sun began to set. We all stopped and watched.
“What a beautiful sunset!” AdventureMan said.
There was a pause, as we all watched the last fading rays of the setting sun.
Bill took AdventureMan’s arm and looked at him intensely.
“Every sunset is a beautiful sunset,” he said, and added “when you think you may never see another.”
It changed how we see the sunset. It changed how we see the sunrise. Bill died this last year, having had many more sunsets after our sunset in Florida, and we still miss him grievously.
Saturday, 5 January Sunrise
Clear horizon . . . . looking for snow clouds . . .
Scary – that’s not the horizon the sun is over, it’s the veil of (smog?) (pollution?) (fog?) that seems to hang over the Gulf perpetually.
Why all these sunrises? Well, for one thing, because I can, because when I wake up I usually can’t get back to sleep, I am AWAKE and ready to go. My best time of the day.
A Matter of Centimeters
If it had happened today, with the wet, slippery streets, it could have been a totally different story. As it was, it happened yesterday, while the streets were still dry, thanks be to God.
On my way home from grocery shopping, there was this kid who cut in front of me, but he isn’t just driving, he is also on his phone (left hand) and talking with a friend, and gesturing (right hand) and his car isn’t staying in the lane. In fact, he isn’t paying attention to his driving at all, too much going on in his life I guess.
Traffic slows, the kid drifts left and into the left lane and that car, who was passing, honks. The kid gets embarrassed, or shook, I don’t know what, speeds up and cuts in front of the honking car, and cuts back in front of the car in front of him (also in front of me.)
At the same exact time, a bus pulls over from the right into the left lane, and the car in front of the kid slams on it’s breaks, we all slam on our breaks and I am also watching that land rover behind me coming up fast and praying he also slams on his breaks. In the end, there are six cars stopped within two seconds, centimeters apart – and not a single crash.
Thanks be to God. And thanks be to God we are not carrying guns in this country.
What True Love Looks Like to Me
Here are three of my very favorite presents given to me by AdventureMan. I like diamonds just fine, and at the same time, I really am not a diamonds kind of girl. I worry about losing things like that. I’m hard on watches, I do things with my hands and I break things. Better for me are gifts I don’t have to worry too much about breaking, losing, burning, misplacing . . . all the things that break my heart about earthly treasures.
Every time I look at these things, I see love. These are presents that protect me, that might help me help someone else at just the right time. You probably recognize two of the items, the third is a wind-up flashlight, so that I never need to worry about batteries failing – when the light begins to dim, you just crank away.
Actually, I am going to share two photos, because while the first one is the one I had planned:
This is the one that happened first, and it made me laugh because it also is about true love:
AdventureMan knows what will make me feel safe. It may not look romantic to you, but it looks like true love to me.
Here is today’s challenge. Grab your camera – or your keyboard – and show us / tell us what true love looks like to you?
The Great Migration (2)
After two wonderful days in Grumeti River Lodge we transfer to the CCAfrica’s Serengeti Under Canvas Program, with the first camp being a short drive from the Grumeti River Lodge.
We LOVE tent camping. We used to camp out of a Volkswagon bus across the US with a baby and a cat (now that was an adventure!), in Tunisia, in Jordan. Now, I still love camping, and I particularly love it CCAfrica style – maximum 8 tents to a camp, a huge bed with good linens, an indoor shower and toilet, brass water containers, all very Hemingway in feeling. I love having coffee brought to the tent early in the morning, and I love the quiet shuuussshhhing of the wind through the high African grasses. We have our own dining tent to the side of our tent, which is high on the ridge, or we can choose to eat with the others.
Here is a view looking out from our tent across the Serengeti Plains:
There is one little fly in the ointment – to get in and out of this camp, we drive our open vehicles through an area infested with tsetse flies. I am terribly, horribly allergic to mosquitos and to tsetse flies, and of course they find me irresistible. I am totally wrapped up in local large cotton wraps called kikoy – I look like a very colorful bedu woman, all covered except for my eyes.
But it’s worth it. I take tubes of Benedryl2 with me and lather it on morning and night to keep the size of the bites down.
First trip out of the game camps we find gnus at a water crossing. No hungry alligators, but it’s wonderful getting to watch them crossing:
There are only four of us in the Rover, so we can spend all the time we need watching the elephants. It’s always a delight to find a mother with a baby. The elephants are so sweet with the babies:
Early one morning, we catch a group of hyena:
Even better, as sundown nears, we find a pride of lions, catching the last rays of the day and preparing to hunt:
I have one of the early Lumix models, an FZ10. It takes beautiful photos, even under very low-light conditions. It is small, lightweight, fairly fast, shoots movies as well as stills, captures audio, and oh – did I mention small and lightweight? It has the equivalent of a 420mm lens, in a small body. It is an amazing camera and gets amazing shots.
Sundown has it’s own rituals, with a stop every night for refreshments and a toast to the setting sun:
We spend two nights at the Grumeti River Camp, following the herds, photographing as they drink, as they trek, but in truth, you simply can’t imagine the scale of The Great Migration unless you see it for yourself. At one point, we sat in the center of a road as thousands of gnu and zebra filed past.
We sat for an hour, shooting stills and shooting movies, and when we left, the line just kept going. We were surrounded. Sometimes it would thin a little, and sometimes the gnu would start to gallop and they would all start to gallop and the sounds of their hooves would thunder on the ground.
Other times, we would be sitting, and we would hear the sound of the gnu just shhhhussshhh, shhuusssss, shuussshhhhhh, interspersed with the occasional “hungh? hungh? hungh?”
Watching the zebras drinking, all would be quiet and then all of a sudden one would twitch or panic or something, and then you would hear loud “SWWWOOOOOOOSSSHHHing” noises as they rushed out of the water. We loved the vastness of the Migration, the enormity of it, the huge, grand overwhelming scale of it all, but for me, it was these sounds that have stuck in my memory.
AdventureMan and I find these experiences nourish our souls. We feel close to God in the African wild. We love the sights, and the smells and the sounds. We love meeting the African people. When we get back, we can still sniff the smell of wood-burning campfires lingering in our clothing.
Next, we head for Klein’s Wilderness Camp.
Big Bubbas
I found my way to my seat, and looked around hopefully to see how full the plane was getting. Sometimes, this flight has some empty seats, and I am hoping one of them is next to me so I can sleep, get to Kuwait a little refreshed.
Two seats up, two very large men are looking at one another in dismay. I can hardly keep from laughing out loud – these are big, beefy American contractors, look like boys from the mid-West, one in farmer-like denim coveralls, both with big bottoms, big bellies, and huge big beefy shoulders. These kinds of guys spill way over the armrests, if you know what I mean.
“This isn’t gonna work,” says one to the other. They look around. One spots me, and says “Once the flight takes off, I’ll find a place to sit with a little more room.”
Ya’ll think I am really nice, but not so nice when it comes to having my territory invaded. I fluffed myself out to try to look bigger, and I scowled a very very UNFRIENDLY scowl. I would not want to sit next to someone who looked mean and unsociable like me!
Fortunately there was a lot of room on the flight, and the bubbas found places where they could be comfortable. I had an extra seat next to me, too, and got the sleep I needed. I no longer needed to scowl.
I still get a big grin though, thinking of the look on their faces when they thought of trying to fit those two great big bulky bodies into the already skimpy spaces allotted for two people.
Hotel Glasses “Sanitized”
A good friend sent me the following link. If you stay in hotels regularly, this video will change the way you do things, trust me! It is GROSSSSSSSS!
Hussein Hustle, Montezuma’s Revenge, Etc.
The holiday season, and holiday travelling, is a peak time for food poisoning illnesses. Here is some information, and some reminders, from BBC News: Health on how you can avoid getting – and giving – food related illnesses this season:
Food Poisoning
What is it?
It’s estimated there are more than 9 million cases of gastroenteritis each year in England. For an increasing number of people, it’s due to food poisoning, something that’s preventable.
Gastroenteritis describes symptoms affecting digestion, such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and stomach pain. Food poisoning is the type of gastroenteritis caused by eating or drinking something contaminated with micro-organisms or germs, or by toxic substances produced by these germs.
These illnesses are often accompanied by fever, muscle aches, shivering and feeling exhausted.
What causes it?
Micro-organisms enter the body in one of two ways:
In the food – the food isn’t cooked thoroughly, so the micro-organisms aren’t killed off, often the case with barbecued food.
On the food – the person preparing the food doesn’t wash their hands before handling the food, for example.
Campylobacter infection is the most common cause of food poisoning seen by GPs. It likes to live in milk and poultry.
Other common causes include salmonella, listeria, shigella and clostridia. Some take a few hours to cause symptoms, others a few days. Serious infections with E.coli are, fortunately, uncommon.
How can I prevent it?
Always wash your hands thoroughly before preparing food, after going to the toilet and after handling pets
Keep kitchen work surfaces clean
Make sure food is defrosted completely before cooking
Keep pets away from food
Ensure food is cooked thoroughly before eating. Meat shouldn’t have any pink bits
Serve reheated food piping hot
Keep raw meat and fish covered and store at the bottom of the fridge
Store all perishable foods at 5Β°C (41Β°F) or less
Keep raw food covered up
Rinse fruit and vegetables under running water before eating
Throw away any food that’s past its use-by date, doesn’t smell right and/or has fungus on it
Michael Malone: Handling Sin
Have I told you (only a hundred times?) that our family loves books? We buy them, we discuss them, and we pass them around. The one I am about to review came from my son, who got it from the wife of his wife’s father. Heee heee heeee, figure that one out!
Have you ever read A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole? As soon as you start reading Handling Sin, you get the same impression; this book is whacky, and will probably be an underground cult favorite. The author of Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole, committed suicide – or so we are supposed to believe. I am not so sure. Handling Sin sounds SO like it, and they both heavily feature New Orleans.
Right off the top, this books starts out weird and keeps right on going. It opens with our hero, Raleigh Whittier Hayes at a Civitan (social and civic works group, kind of like diwaniyya) meeting at the local Chinese restaurant in Thermopylae, North Carolina, where his fortune cookie at the end of the meal says “You will go completely to pieces by the end of the month.” Raleigh sells insurance, he runs and watches what he eats because most of his family gets diabetes; and Raleigh likes order. When we meet Raleigh, he’s not all that likable.
His dying father takes off, leaving a message for Raleigh that he needs to do seven (crazy-sounding) tasks and meet him in New Orleans at a specific date and time, having accomplished these tasks, otherwise he won’t go back to the hospital for his cancer treatments.
His big fat best friend, Mingo Sheffield, insists on coming along. His wife, Aura, just laughs and tells him he needs to loosen up a little when he starts complaining about his Dad’s quest, and begins her campaign for mayor. His nice, safe structured little universe is flying apart, his twin teen-age daughters are out of control, reality as he knows it has just taken a big crunching shift and Raleigh is out of his element.
Perfect! It’s those times of maximum discomfort that we begin to achieve our maximum potential, isn’t it? If we stay in our safe little world, we aren’t challenged to grow, to think new thoughts, to see things from another perspective.
Handling Sin has a series of events that are at the same time heart warming, serious, and side-splittingly funny. I laughed out loud so many times reading this book, as our hero and his friend and all those he picks up along the way find themselves in the most outrageous and unlikely adventures, and learn what they are capable of (OK, for all you grammarians, do not end your sentences in a preposition, do as I say, not as I do!) I would not be at all surprised if this book were made into a movie, it is so much fun. As you rock along, Malone also deals with serious health issues, racial issues, family issues, political issues and law and order. You laugh, you cry, you learn a little and you laugh again. It’s a great read.
This was my back-up book on my flights back to Kuwait, and worth the weight – it’s a kind of big book. AdventureMan can hardly wait to get into it; he had started it but allowed me to read it while he caught up with his jet lag. Who knows who we will pass it along to when he finishes? It’s that good!
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