Kuwait House in Pensacola
We were exploring a new neighborhood to look at a house I’d seen. We loved the neighborhood. As we were driving, I said “Oh! Look! That’s what I’ve always loved!”
A new house is being built, and high up, it has a large covered terrace. I used to see something like it in Safety Harbor; a large screened, covered terrace.
“It’s a Kuwait house,” said AdventureMan. “Look, it has a dome. It just LOOKS like a Kuwait house.”
He’s right. I agree. This house, sitting on the Bayou, could be a house in Kuwait.
Bad Grandparents: Disaster Averted
“No! No!” he shouted, and pushed away the spoon full of rice and beans which he normally loves. No. He wanted BaBa to walk him around the restaurant some more, showing him serapes and sombreros and gaudily crowing roosters.
‘More. More,’ he signed.
“It’s dinner time, time to eat,” GaGa said calmly, signing for ‘eat.’
“No! No! Done!” He may not have a large vocabulary, but Happy Baby knows how to communicate pretty clearly. BaBa goes to pick him up, but I say no, it’s dinner time. Very calmly. The shrieks begin, the arched back, the tears. Baba looks at me accusingly; what to do? I know we need to hold our ground, but it is so hard when the piercing shrieks start.
And then, a miracle. The waiter shows up with a small plate of whipped cream with chocolate sauce over it.
What self-respecting grandparent would allow a child to feast on whipped cream??
Desperate grandparents. Grandparents who can’t bear to hear him shriek. We let him eat the whipped cream, but he had to eat it on his own, with the spoon. He’s not very efficient with the spoon yet, so he couldn’t really get much. And, between tiny spoon tastes of whipped cream, BaBa and I have discovered he will eat beans and rice after all. He ate all the beans and rice, and only got a little of the whipped cream, but he was happy. And so were we.
On some deep level I feel like we have shirked our responsibilities, but oh, those shrieks . . .
When we are at home, we can ignore the shrieks. One time he was shrieking, and when we ignored him, he stopped, came closer and then flopped down and started shrieking again. We couldn’t help it, we just laughed. It was so hilarious. When he saw us laughing, he gave up and got involved with something else. He is so much fun. 🙂
Polonza’s on Palafox
We tried to go to Polonza’s on Sunday morning, after church, but it was closed. (It’s now open for on Sundays, hurran!) We tried to go during the Saturday morning, but it was closed (I think it still is.) Polonza’s is perfectly located in the middle of what we call ‘The Church Souk’, i.e. next to the Methodist Church, catty-corner from Christ Church Episcopal, just down the street from 1st Baptist, the Lutheran Church and the Presbyterian churches, and several others. It only makes sense to open on Sundays for brunch.
Service was attentive without being intrusive. (Very good!) He brought us extra sauce when we asked, and was quick at refilling our glasses and asking if we needed anything.
They do a booming lunch time business during the week. Great lunch specials, sandwiches, main dishes, lots of choices for sides, and BBQ, wooo hoooo.
Whoda thunk? The soup of the day was GAZPACHO, which AdventureMan said is almost exactly as good as mine, and mine is really good.
I couldn’t resist trying the BBQ chicken, which was good. I loved their BBQ Sauce, a little vinegary, not too sweet. You’ll notice I ordered the vegetables (in addition to the sweet potato fries 😦 )
AdventureMan ordered the BBQ Pork Sandwich, which he said was also really good.
Overall, a very positive experience. If you get there between 11:30 and 12:15 you will have to wait for a table on a week-day.
What’s Lost is Found
I published the last entry – about my lost thimble, the thimble I have looked for over three weeks now – and I went to lunch. I have a project I have been putting off; I need to stitch down a binding on a quilt, but without my silver thimble, I didn’t want to do it. I have other thimbles. My finger loves my little silver thimble.
It’s down to the wire. I need to get started, no more putting it off. I have a deadline, tomorrow, and I need to start NOW to be finished for tomorrow.
Oops – no needles, but I know where they are. They are in my sewing kit. I pull out my sewing kit – and there it is. My thimble.
What’s lost is found. Thanks be to God. And here is what I can’t figure out. I looked in this little sewing kit several times. It was one of the logical places. I felt it, for the unmistakeable shape of the thimble, I could swear it wasn’t there, but I would be wrong.
It’s a GREAT day. My little thimble is found!
Foolish Worries
I am a believer. I am not a superstitious person. Neither am I a big worrier. Having said all that, and I think it is important to put the forementioned on the record, so you have context, I have recently suffered a series of losses, and it troubles me.
First, I lost my YMCA card, which I always keep in the same place, and suddenly, it just wasn’t there. Not only was it not there, but it wasn’t in any logical place, where it might have dropped, or where I might have placed it in a careless moment. Just gone, totally gone.
Second, my credit card disappeared. I know exactly the last time I used it, and I remember seeing it NOT in my wallet, in its accustomed place, and picking it up and thinking “I need to put this in its accustomed place, so it doesn’t get lost.” Then, I noticed it wasn’t there. Just not there. There isn’t any other place I would put it, even to keep it safe. I spent a couple days going over just about any place it could be, and it is simply gone gone gone.
Third – and I hope last, because we have a saying that bad things come in threes (yes, yes, I know, it’s pure superstition) I can’t find my treasured silver thimble from Oman. I bought it at the Al Bustan Hotel gift shop, and I paid way too much for it, and I have never regretted it. It fit perfectly. I love using it. It has beautiful silver filigree embellishment, not a lot, just right, so it is both beautiful and useful. It’s not that I LOVE my thimble (I really do) but I appreciate that it is so beautiful, and it works so well for me. And it is gone. I always keep it in the same place, and it is not there. I am thinking I might have put it in “a safe place” as I was cleaning off my quilting area to be able to quilt a large quilt, but it’s been a couple weeks I’ve been looking, and it isn’t in any obvious ‘safe place.’
I am a very organized person, bordering precariously on obsessive-compulsive. I think about where to put things, and then I put them there conscientiously. It sounds prideful when I say it this way, but I always know where to find things. If they are not in the first place, they are always in the second or third. I am not in the habit of losing things.
It’s just my husband and me in the suite of rooms where thee things went missing. Oh yes, and the Qatari Cat, who shows absolutely no interest in my Y card, or my credit card, or my silver thimble. I totally know these losses are on me, and I am at a loss. Am I beginning to lose my mind?
No! No! I won’t even go there!
I trust that I have thoughtlessly misplaced, even lost these items. I replaced the Y card, and the credit card, but my silver thimble is irreplaceable, and I can only hope that it shows up, once again, in a place I never expected. I do have other thimbles. Still, I mourn the loss of my beautiful Omani silver thimble.
In The Middle of the Storm
When you’re in the middle of the storm, it is hard to imagine just how BIG it is. It isn’t a hurricane, because the winds are not high enough, but oh man, the rain. Poor Pensacola has been about 10 – 15 inches short of its annual average, and I think we are getting all caught up this weekend.
AdventureMan is outside, picking up dead tree branches that came down last night. On our way to church, early this morning, we saw the electrical crews out trying to fix a line that went down. God bless these heroes who get out of bed on a national long weekend, early in the morning, so that people might have lights, and power, and air conditioning. We take them for granted, and yet they are everyday heroes.
A Different Perspective
“It’s going to be a great weekend! We’re expecting sun and temperatures of 85°F!” my Mom enthused, from Seattle.
“We’re expecting a great weekend, too,” I enthused right back, “the temperature will be down to about 85°F and it’s going to RAIN!”
We laughed. It’s all a matter of perspective.
“We’re staying in this weekend,” said one of my co-mother-in-laws. “When it gets like this, we just hunker down.”
“We went out to the beach!” I crowed! I wanted to see the waves, and when the temperatures go down and it rains, I feel re-energied!”
We laughed. She’s married to a man from the Pacific Northwest, so this perspective is not new to her.
What was not funny was when I had just started a load of laundry, and the electricity went out. Electricity goes out all the time, or from time to time, with frequent thunder and lightning storms, but this time it went out and stayed out. Without the ceiling fans going, it wasn’t hot, but it got stuffy. We have a covered and protected area outside, so we went outside and sat and watched the gusting winds and the flying rain beating down our tomato plants. Mostly, the rain has been drizzling down, but for an hour or so, it really battered and flew about. It’s just a normal small storm, though, nothing like it could be, nothing like Hurricane Irene, which devastated the East Coast last weekend.
And it was a good thing. We have hurricane preparations, but . . . sometimes we rob the Hurricane supplies, or borrow them, and forget to put them back. While it was still daylight, I wanted to check on candles, matches, etc. and I discovered the matches had been MISPLACED. I finally found them. I gathered candles, and checked the weather station on my radio that you wind up during electrical outages (it worked fine) and started a list of additional things I want to gather to have on hand in case the electricity goes out for any length of time. It’s good to be prepared. 🙂
Electricity is back on now, adventure over.
Sobering Reading on Wealth
It’s a long weekend, Labor Day weekend, and Pensacola awakes to rain-sodden streets and forecasts of a rain soggy three day weekend (bad for hotels and restaurants at the beach who hope for a sell-out Labor Day) and high surf from off-shore storms.
The reading for today from James is equally gloomy. I always think of “Insh’allah” when I read it, because it probably has an equivalent somewhere in the Quran, and my Muslim friends say “Insh’allah” (As God wills, or If God wills it) when they state a planned event.
While we are not rich, we have a large homeless population in Pensacola, sleeping out under the skies in hidden camps, scrounging for food, often with a dog, seeking handouts, seeking scraps. They are a constant reminder, to me, of how comfortable we are, and how comfort wars with the religious spirit. When we are too comfortable, we often fail to keep our focus on God, and are distracted by our toys and interests.
(I told you this would be gloomy.)
On the other hand, I wonder how spiritual I would be if I were hungry, worried about getting enough to eat, worried about my safety sleeping out in one of the camps. I wonder if their community looks after one another, or if it is a brutal and chaotic life. I wonder how you can keep your mind on things of the spirit when the search for basic necessities takes up a large part of your life.
James 4:13-5:6
13 Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.’ 14Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. 15Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’ 16As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. 17Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.
5Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. 2Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. 3Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure* for the last days. 4Listen! The wages of the labourers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.
5You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts on a day of slaughter. 6You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you.
Neighbors Key to Survival
“Americans don’t know their neighbors” my dinner guest said, in response to my asking him what surprises him most in his visit to this country. “In my country, we all know our neighbors. It’s important to know your neighbors.”
I agreed, and quoted him this article supporting his view that I heard on National Public Radio, one of those ideas I hear so often on NPR because they cover news other news sources ignore.
Below is just a portion of the story, which you can read in whole by clicking on this blue type. Even better, if you want, you can listed to the story yourself by clicking on the “Listen to the Story: All things Considered” button on this same page.
When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, one victim was political scientist Daniel Aldrich. He had just moved to New Orleans. Late one August night, there was a knock on the door.
“It was a neighbor who knew that we had no idea of the realities of the Gulf Coast life,” said Aldrich, who is now a political scientist at Purdue University in Indiana. He “knocked on our door very late at night, around midnight on Saturday night, and said, ‘Look, you’ve got small kids — you should really leave.’ ”
The knock on the door was to prove prophetic. It changed the course of Aldrich’s research and, in turn, is changing the way many experts now think about disaster preparedness.
Officials in New Orleans that Saturday night had not yet ordered an evacuation, but Aldrich trusted the neighbor who knocked on his door. He bundled his family into a car and drove to Houston.
“Without that information we never would’ve left,” Aldrich said. I think we would’ve been trapped.”
In fact, by the time people were told to leave, it was too late and thousands of people got stuck.
Because of his own experience in Katrina, Aldrich started thinking about how neighbors help one another during disasters. He decided to visit disaster sites around the world, looking for data.
Aldrich’s findings show that ambulances and firetrucks and government aid are not the principal ways most people survive during — and recover after — a disaster. His data suggest that while official help is useful — in clearing the water and getting the power back on in a place such as New Orleans after Katrina, for example — government interventions cannot bring neighborhoods back, and most emergency responders take far too long to get to the scene of a disaster to save many lives. Rather, it is the personal ties among members of a community that determine survival during a disaster, and recovery in its aftermath.
When Aldrich visited villages in India hit by the giant 2004 tsunami, he found that villagers who fared best after the disaster weren’t those with the most money, or the most power. They were people who knew lots of other people — the most socially connected individuals. In other words, if you want to predict who will do well after a disaster, you look for faces that keep showing up at all the weddings and funerals.
“Those individuals who had been more involved in local festivals, funerals and weddings, those were individuals who were tied into the community, they knew who to go to, they knew how to find someone who could help them get aid,” Aldrich says.
My visiting guest was from Lebanon, where neighbors have relied on one another for years as civil unrest rocks the country.
“I am guessing we move more often than your family and friends,” I ventured. “You are right, it is harder to establish long-lasting neighborly relations here where people come and go more often.”
Actually, we have settled in a fairly established neighborhood, where many people around us have lived for years and years, some all their lives. But we have only been here a year, and it takes time to build strong neighborly relations. But we are aware that connecting with our neighbors and staying connected is important in a part of the country vulnerable to life-threatening hurricanes and other natural emergencies.
You can listen to the entire report in 6 minutes and 3 seconds here.
“Is Your House Always This Clean?”
We had guests this week, visitors from overseas, and it was so much fun. One woman was full of questions. This was her first time out of her own country, and you know how it is when you are in a foreign culture, people think differently. Some of her questions bordered on impolite, according to our culture, but we could tell she was asking because she really was interested, and we didn’t let her questions bother us.
“No!” I laughed, “We cleaned because we had guests coming! My husband vacuumed and I washed all the floors!”
My daughter-in-law jumped in.
“Yes!” she laughed. “Yes, their house is always this clean!”
We all laughed.
“It’s just my husband and me,” I added, “it’s not that hard to keep it picked up and neat. We make extra effort when guests are coming.”
“Why do you do this?” she asked. “Why do you invite strangers into your home and give us dinner?”
“People have been so kind to us, in so many countries, in so many ways,” I began, “No matter how hard we try, we will never be able to repay all the kindness we have received. But we do our best.”
We were in my kitchen, which is not large, and I am trying to get dinner on the table. It is a simple, family dinner, a little chaotic, but with lots of dishes so the guests can find something they might like to eat.
“Do you clean yourself? You have no cook?” she asked.
“We clean. Both of us. We could hire help, but it is very expensive here,” I said, pulling the chicken out of the oven. “And we do our own cooking. My husband makes bread! He is very good at it.”
During the evening she continued asking questions, and now, several days later, we find ourselves thinking about the questions, and thinking . . . THIS is why we do it! We love these guests who come in with a different way of looking at things and their questions, which stimulate us to think in new ways, too, as we try to explain why we do things the way we do them.
I remember in Doha, the Philipina maids would ask me “how old are you?” because they couldn’t guess by looking at me. We never ask a woman how old they are once they are past maybe eighteen or twenty years old. We never ask how much money a husband – or wife – makes. It is culturally taboo, it just isn’t done. We never ask what kind of birth control someone is using. I am aware of these things because I have been asked, and it made me think about it.
But now I wonder what questions I have asked in foreign lands which shocked people, or made them uncomfortable?
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