Lunch at the Tuscan Oven
We took a road we don’t usually take, and suddenly, there it was – The Tuscan Oven! I had eaten there before, and loved it, but had not seen it and had assumed it had disappeared. Restaurants do that, even good ones, it takes so much work and so much effort to run a restaurant, and they run on such a slim margin that we have often been disappointed to see good restaurants close.
We were joyful to see the Tuscan Oven!
The place is packed. People who love good food are here. 🙂 You can tell that many of them are friends with the owner, and they come here often. The menu has too many good things!
We ordered the Antipasta Plate, with delicious cheeses and sausages, tasty olives and a stuffed artichoke heart. Unfortunately, we dug in before I remembered to take photos 😦
We each also ordered a small pizza, but even small was too big after the antipasta plate, so we ended up bringing more than a full pizza home.
I love the decor – an artist has painted food ingredients for the meals – this is my favorite, the artichoke:
We look forward to coming back here often!
Where The Wild Things Are (Apologies to Maurice Sendak)
First thing, early every morning, I get up to water my herbs and vegetables. I could do it later in the day, but later in the day is unbearable for me. It is hot. It is humid. The temperatures are in the 90’s, with humidity that makes you drip with sweat. I feel like a vampire; I try to get everything watered before the first rays of sun rise – directly into my backyard garden – and strike me with their heat.
Things are coming along. This weekend I will pick the first of my Black Krim tomatoes. I can hardly wait. I bought it at a garden club sale, as a little tiny plant. The tomatoes are supposed to have a smokey flavor, and very tomato-y.
There is a lot going on in our backyard.
We have a bright red cardinal who comes at late afternoon to take a bath in the birdbath. He is very cautious, looking around for maybe five minutes before he feels safe enough to splash. I don’t have a photo of him, yet.
We have all kinds of squirrels, because we have oak trees, and they are busy gathering and saving for the winter. They seem to be finding lots to eat in our backyard.
We have a dragonfly who is a regular visitor. He sits atop some of the bamboo stakes in the garden. I don’t know if he is looking for smaller insects to eat, or just enjoying a little perch in the late afternoon sun:
Our house is surrounded by chameleon, fortunately, unlike Qatar, they are not INSIDE my house! I am delighted to have them as neighbors, as they are wonderful for pest control, and in Florida – there are a lot of pests. The dreaded cockroaches, but also ants, and fire ants, and hornets, and wasps, and cutters, and lovebugs – well, you get the picture. I need all the help I can get. Insects love me, the eat me up. 😦
I think this little chameleon is looking for a mate!
(Maurice Sendak is one of my very favorite authors of children’s books, especially books for lively little boys. They have fabulous illustrations. As our son was growing up, one of our favorite lines from a Sendak book was “Let the Wild Rumpus begin!”
One Moment in Time
I would have told you if I had known about it long enough in advance. The New York Times had a photo . . . not contest . . . opportunity. They asked people all around the world to shoot a photo at 1500 Greenwich Mean Time, which is 1000 Pensacola time.
As we were leaving for the Episcopal Lite service (0800; it is amazing, they do a processional, recessional, sermon, prayers of the people and communion in 45 minutes flat, amazing!) and I told AdventureMan I needed to take a photo.
It is what I love about AdventureMan. No matter what I propose, he is up for it. OK, sometimes I get a little foot dragging, but for the most part, he is Gung Ho. We hit church, we even had time for a little breakfast at the Shiny Diner, and then we went to take photos. This is what the New York Times instructions were:
Where will you be on Sunday, May 2, at 15:00 hours (U.T.C.)?
Wherever you are, we hope you’ll have a camera — or a camera phone — in hand. And we hope you’ll be taking a picture to send to Lens that will capture this singular instant in whatever way you think would add to a marvelous global mosaic; a Web-built image of one moment in time across the world.
Please keep your photos under 5MB in size.
I didn’t read the instructions. I sent them three photos. I was only supposed to send one.
AdventureMan is going down tomorrow to volunteer with the Fish and Wildlife service; they are going to need a lot of volunteers when the oil slick hits, Tuesday or Wednesday. It is going to be a horror.
Flat Stanley: Oh The Places You’ll Go!
This title refers to two classic American books that most kids are familiar with. The first book,
Flat Stanley (at Amazon.com) is about a boy who is flat and figures out that he can go places by envelope. The second book is a book by Dr. Seuss, Oh! The Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss (at Amazon.com) one of those books parents read to their children and at some point the children say “Look! I can read!” and they will appear to be reading the book because they have heard it so many times.
Some really smart and creative elementary teacher figured out how to turn Flat Stanley into a lesson combining writing and geography, and now kids are making flat versions of themselves and mailing themselves to far-away places. My friend, Grammy, has received requests to help with these projects at least twice – and oh, the fun we have with these flat kids.
You take pictures. You explain what Stanley is doing. You make a slide show and send it to the kid to share with his class. What a wonderful way to make another country come to life! These kids will know where Doha, Qatar is! They will know some of the sights in Doha. Can you imagine? I wish geography had been so much fun when I was a kid!
It also reminds me to tell you, our friends in the states, that living in places like Doha is NOT SCARY. Look at the faces of all the people who helped us with Flat Stanley. Every single person we encountered was delighted to help us. No one ever said no, and some even volunteered extra ideas. In the souks today were some school children groups, and they helped too, although I am not posting photos because I don’t have their parent’s permissions, but it was one of the sweetest moments of the day, with these adorable children holding Flat Stanley.
Stanley visits the maker of lutes:
Stanley rides a camel:
Stanley takes a ride on a dhow:
Stanley visits the falcon souk, only sadly, falcon season is over, so there are no live falcons 😦
Stanley takes a rest in an incense burner:
Stanley visits the scribes:
Stanley hitches a ride with a souk cop on his Segway:
Stanley tries out a model tent at the tentmaker’s souk:
Stanley visits our friend, the Yemeni honey man, who also sells some of the worlds most wonderful baskets from the Asir in Yemen:
The weather is perfect. Take a trip to the souks. Get outside your normal boundaries and explore a little. Doha is a sweet family city, with lots to do, lots of family activities, great places for walking (the Corniche, Aspire Park, the beaches). Do it now, before the weather gets intense!
Unexpected Blessings
Yesterday I received an unexpected thrill – a letter from a publishing house in Zambia asking to use a photo of a quilt I made in a textbook they are publishing for Namibian children. We have traveled often to Zambia, and once to Namibia. Namibia is a thrilling country, as hot and dry and dusty as Qatar and Kuwait, and as rich, due to diamond deposits.
This is the quilt they will be using. I made it for my husband when I first started quilting, and more experienced quilters said I was crazy. It is a huge quilt, ample for a California king sized bed, but I knew I needed 3″ squares (I had some giraffe fabric I wanted to use) and as the quilt assumed a life of its own, it ended up much larger than I had planned.
It has many African fabrics, one a piece I bought in Tunisia about 30 years ago. I put a piece of it in all my map quilts.
Here are a couple of my more recent quilts. The first is the one I made for my new grandson 🙂
This one is one I started many years ago, but didn’t know how to make it work the way I wanted it to. Twelve years later, I pulled it out and knew exactly what to do and had it pieced together in one morning. 🙂
All these years of living abroad, with AdventureMan working long hours and often traveling, quilting has kept me sane. It provides me with friends who speak the same language – patterns, textures and colors – no matter where I go in the world. It is so absorbing that sometimes I look up and an entire day has passed while I work on a quilt, and it’s time to fix dinner . . . Dinner? No! No! I am going to sew for another hour and order out!
One of the things quilting groups do is to help you stretch and to try new things. Literally, the groups hold CHALLENGES. This was a challenge where it was to show you and a facet of your personality – so this is how I see me with the green Gulf in the background. I made this while living in Kuwait and participating in the quilting guild which is part of the Kuwait Textile Arts Association there. 🙂
There is a wonderful guild in Qatar, the Qatar Quilters. They meet once a month and have nearly 100 members – imagine! Women who quilt come from all Qatar to attend. At the meetings, they show what they have been working on, and teach one another new ways to create quilts. They share information on where to find quilting tools and which shop has recently received a new shipment of fabrics.
You can learn more about the Qatar Quilters by visiting their blog: Qatar Quilters The lady you see in the first photo is one of the Qatar Quilter founders.
The Most Beautiful Baby Ever (Photographer makes the difference!)
There is a woman in Pensacola who has studied how to photograph babies. The photos she did of our grandbaby made tears come to my eyes:
She takes wonderful, joyous photographs of babies and families. She welcomes your visits and comments to her blog:
Bayou Sunset
You know me and water. I love the sun coming up over water. I love the sun going down over water.
On the Bayou, when the sun starts going down, the air gets all pink. I can’t even capture it with the camera. I see it, but the camera does not see it.
It has to do with a magical quality of light; I will probably be trying to capture it to my dying day.
Perfectly Beautiful Doha Skyline
Every now and then, the perfect night comes along. We weren’t the only ones out taking photos – it was that kind of night.
Doha 2003 – Doha Now
When we came here in 2003, I was still shooting film. I did a Doha skyline, in 2003 from what we still call the Bandar spit – where the dhows are harbored, and there used to be restaurants remotely shaped like boats and a wide terrace where you could sit out (when it isn’t too hot) and eat, or have coffee and dessert, with the vast Doha skyline to gaze upon.
Then, one day, the restaurants were gone!
You can still go out on the spit and take photos of the Doha skyline.
I cobbled together a bunch of photos to show the entire Doha skyline in 2003:
This is what the Ritz Carlton looked like in 2003:
Doha Skyline from the Ritz Carlton in 2003:
The Pearl and Doha skyline in 2003:
Same Pearl 2009:
New Doha Details
Once I shot the skyline, that perfect morning last week, I had to drive down the Corniche and pick up some details. If Doha were more stop-friendly, there would be more. Sometimes, I am holding up the camera and shooting and not even able to see what exactly I am shooting because I am really focused on driving.
The good news is, for some reason, there isn’t a lot of traffic in the “business” section of Doha. Most buildings are still under construction, still unoccupied. But there are some spectacular buildings.
Some of the new buildings are breathtaking:
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