Doha Cat Television
“Cat channels?” asked Little Diamond, mystified, listening to a conversation at the dinner table.
Oh yes. He’s got the Gardener channel, two or three pigeon channels, the songbird channels, the cleaning lady channel – life is very interesting for the Qatteri Cat. Today, I set up the Quilt Room Cat Sleeping Station – he likes to be in the same room I am working in, and it is a help to me if he has his own place so he is not on top of my work. (My friend who organized my quilt room thinks the Qattari Cat is spoiled, LLLOOOLL. OF COURSE he is spoiled! He is an only cat!)
Here is the cat sleeping station:
Here is how the Cat Sleeping Station is utilized:
But then – the one remaining sort-of-non-flying-baby-pigeon has begun spreading his wings, little by little. Yesterday morning he was on top of my car – this is a giant step for a pigeon who walks everywhere. Last night, he was on the garage room – an even bigger step.
No sooner had I set up the Cat Sleeping Station then the little walking pigeon figured out how to make it to my windowsill:
Never a dull moment for the Qatteri Cat:
The Qatteri Cat Kicks Back
While I am moaning and groaning about unpacking boxes, the Qatteri Cat just happy as can be. He hates air conditioning, so he is always looking for a nice warm place, and that place changes from time to time. Right now, he loves my favorite chair, which is fine with me because I’m not using it these days while I am unpacking. Every time we unpack a rug, he rolls around on it in delight, and says “Hey! This rug smells like HOME!”
This room has great light. When I need to do some work my hand, I can sit in this chair – that is when QC is not already occupying the chair – and put my feet up on the other chair. Once I get the boxes unpacked, and everything put away, QC and I will spend a lot of time in this room. 🙂
Just wait until this weekend – AdventureMan is going to put together his scratching post and his cat stand!
Thick
Pete, also known as The Qatteri Cat, loves living back in Qatar except for one tiny little detail. Suddenly Mom, as he thinks of me, has become particularly thick.
He, on the other hand, is making things very clear.
“Miao! Mioaw! Miaow!” he hollars, winding his way through my legs, guiding me to the nearest door the the heaven he can see – OUTSIDE!
I ignore him. He is not going outside. There are some very mean street cats out there, and also some very mean people who put out poisoned fish to kill the mean street cats. Either or both would be very bad to a cream puff who has lived indoors all his life.
“Not all my life!” he assures me, remembering his origins as a street cat – well, a street kitten, abandoned on the Corniche in Doha. And, from time to time, he would break free and spend a happy half hour roaming, and then another less happy couple hours trying to figure out 1) how to get down the very tall tree or 2)how to get out of the yard he jumped into that has a high, unscalable wall or 3) where home is. We spare him those problems and keep him inside. There is lots to keep his attention, but none of it matters, he yearns to be OUTSIDE!
Poor Pete!
Pigeon Update
One egg hatched! There is a tiny, scrawny, downy little creature. I don’t want to take a photo because I don’t want the Mama pigeon to be gone too long, even in the heat, the little baby needs the Mama. Pete is now sleeping in that room where he can keep an eye on the pigeons.
Some Are Silver and the Others Are Gold
Life gets funny when you move. Like 5 minutes after I landed, my Kuwait phone stopped working except for advertisements. The company provided me with a loaner, just so AdventureMan could keep in contact with me, and then like a light bulb going on in my head, I checked to see if the problem was lack of money – yep.
I used to have a phone plan. I am not a big phone user. I discovered those wonderful Hala cards, and at the very max might use 10KD per month – I really am a light user.
When I arrived, my good friend two villas down had her movers – she is leaving. We had like six days of overlap. Three of those days, she had her movers there and I had people here helping me get the new villa set up. We would grab a few minutes when we could – not even enough time for a cup of coffee, but as I left, I thought “this is just like old times.” We’ve both always had busy lives, and we would grab time together when we could.
In the USA, when kids go to camp, we learn songs. It occurs to me that many cultures transmit cultural values in songs – I know I can still remember French and Spanish songs I learned in language classes . . . there must be something about singing that imprints things in your memory. One of the songs is:
Make new friends – but keep the old,
One is silver and the other is gold.
You sing it once, all together, and then you divide into four groups and sing it as a round until it is all finished. You sing it when you are leaving camp, and you cry.
Of course, we are all grown up now. We don’t cry when friends leave. (Liar! Liar!)
The movers are gone, my friend SMS’d me “how about a swim tomorrow?” and I SMS’d back “Sure!”
We lolled around in the pool, sort of theoretically exercising, but her equipment is en route back to the USA and mine is en route from Kuwait, so we were pretty lax, sort of bobbing around and laughing and catching up. She is trying to bring me up to speed on what is going on in Qatar, and I am trying to remember everything she is telling me. We walk home, head in our separate directions again. I have a loaner car, and I get to go grocery shopping ALL BY MYSELF!
I am down to putting away my last two bags of groceries when my loaner phone rings and it is my good friend saying “I have to drop my son at school, have you eaten, want to have a late lunch?” and I laugh and say “sure” and we plan to meet at 1:30, but the QTEL (Telephone) man comes (the company sent him so I wasn’t expecting him) and the problem is too complicated, so he will come back and I just barely have enough time to get to the meeting-up restaurant.
Ooops – no, forget that, I am going to be late, I had forgotten about the traffic, so I break the law and call my friend on my mobile and say “I’m going to be another five minutes at least, I am so sorry, go ahead and order for me” and she just laughs.
We have a great lunch together, still catching up on all I need to know, and I ask if they have plans for dinner tonight and she says “no” and I say we would love to have them come to our house for something simple. Like I have napkins; the ones she gave me because they were leaving, but I don’t even have a tablecloth with me, it will be something casual like spaghetti and salad and garlic bread and she says she thinks they would just love that kind of evening but she has to check with her hubby.
We talk talk talk and then her hubby calls and she forgets to ask if he can do dinner with us, but then my hubby calls and says we need to do blood work for our residency and can we do dinner another night (we already have another date set up with them) and so I get off and have to say “uh, I am sorry, but I have to take back that dinner invitation.”
This all seems convoluted and round about, but this is where those GOLD friends come in. She just starts laughing (I love it when she cracks up) and says “OK! But I’m NEVER going to let you forget this! You WITHDREW an invitation!” and then we are both laughing and oh, Lord have mercy, I am so thankful just to have a little overlap with this crazy friend, and oh, how I am going to miss her.
Some friends are just THERE, they know what the important things are. This friend has me all set up with a really good cleaning lady who will start on Saturday, she told me the really good tailor she has found, the best car rental place, and which car wash guy to keep far away from. She borrowed a cup of laundry soap. Tomorrow, she needs to come here and iron her son’s shirt for graduation, and she and her husband are bequeathing to us their leftover (legal! legal!) booze. Here is what takes it beyond gold – our husbands like each other, too. Our cats . . . not so much. Her cat wants to make nice, my cat gets all hissy.
Inside this grown up expat body is still the little Girl Scout from camp, making new friends, and treasuring the old . . .
Facets: A Little about who we were in Kuwait
I saved some photos from our Kuwait life to share with you once we were gone. I know some of you think I went overboard with the anonymity thing, but I have had stalkers, even here on this blog, and I would rather error on the side of anonymity than have to deal with people who know too much about me.
We present a single facet, or maybe even a few facets or our multifaceted lives as bloggers. I am just sharing a few more little facets:
Here is where we lived – in Fintas, which means “large water container” from what I have been told. When we first got to Kuwait, and I would tell my new friends where I lived, they would gasp and say “Fintas!” like it was the end of the world. On a good traffic morning, it only took us ten minutes to get from Fintas to Salmiyya, maybe 20 minutes to the airport. It takes a whole lot longer, we have found, just to get out of Jabriyya!
This photo is taken from the pier in Eqaila Family Beach. My apartment was over the park and swimming pool. It was a never-ending source of lost hours for me, watching families, watching the school groups visit. My favorite is the families of ladies in abayas who would bring inner-tubes and float in the shallows on the hot days, keeping cool, keeping covered.
I have a good Kuwaiti friend who would tell me that when he was growing up, Fintas was just a small beach place, a place he and his friends would camp out in the hot Kuwait summers. There was just a tree or two, and a shack on the beach, he told me. He also used to camp on the empty beaches of Salmiyya. (!) I loved listening to his old Kuwait stories.
This was my living room. It had great light from morning ’till night. No, none of this is my furniture, except all the bookcases. 🙂 It was a furnished apartment.
This was my kitchen, which I loved because it was well planned, had great light and great shelf spaces. It also had a great place to store/display all my baskets:
This is Little Diamond’s bedroom, which was also my project room, this is what my project room usually looked like:
Here is a photo of one of the best parts – the moon rising over the Gulf, right outside my window, and shimmering over the park:
This is what I look like:
Here is my other blog:
World in Stitches
I haven’t asked my husband if I can share his photo. When I get a chance, I will ask, and if he says OK, I will show you a photo of him, too. 🙂
You know what Pete looks like!
Safely in Doha
Yes, my friends, we are safely in Doha, with the normal out-of-touch sort of things that happen when you move. For some reason, and partly it’s because I am a technology dunce, unless things are clearly spelled out in the instruction booklets, I could never figure out how to include the plus sign in phone numbers, and without them, things don’t seem to be working. I still have my Kuwait phone, but I all my messages fail, and the only ones I am getting are from advertisers.
Just after I wrote the last entry, a team of FOUR customer service – or maybe three and some slightly more elevated personages – a guy in a suit with a radio – came to get me in the lounge; they were taking me to see my cat. The lounge – God bless them abundantly – came up with a plate of salmon for Pete, and with my escort, we went down to immigration.
This is the really funny part – and it’s all technicalities, but my residence visa has been cancelled, and I have been stamped out of the country, so I cannot go to Lost and Found where Pete is being held pending our flight, the immigration police are very clear about that, but since he is just baggage, they can send someone to bring Pete to me.
Surrounded by my escort, and now also by four or five immigration policemen, they bring Pete to me, and I get to give him a little scratch under the chin and collar, he gets to hear my voice. He is not terrified, but he is healthily intimidated by all the unknown persons and noises – and he is alert, so alert. He is not hungry. His pupils are dilated. I only keep him for about three minutes when I send him back; I am holding up about ten people at this point, all of whom dropped their duties so that I could comfort my cat.
When it came time for my flight, I asked the lounge to call Lost and Found and find out when the cat would be loaded, and the answer was – he was just being loaded now. I checked again at the gate, and they were prepared. Everyone apologized profusely, and explained that the pilot on the first flight just could not take a chance; the ventilation in the pressurized cargo compartment was not working and he didn’t want to put Pete at any risk. God bless him. I don’t mind the inconvenience; I honor his carefulness. Sometimes what appears to be an inconvenience is really a protection; the blessing I had this time was to know and understand that this, truly, was a blessing.
But I also needed to tell you about it, or you might have the wrong impression. It was not an airplane annoyance. It was a conscientious pilot. Thanks be to God.
Pete was carted separately to and from the plane, and hand carried to me in arrivals. LOL, I had no other baggage, just Pete! I got through the screening quickly, AdventureMan had schmoozed his way into arrivals and was there with the importation paperwork, and we were out of the airport in a flash, and in our villa a mere ten minutes later.
Another LOL, by the way, at all of you who like the name Qatteri Cat better than Pete! Honestly, one reason I don’t unveil is that as long as I am Intlxpatr, married to AdventureMan, I am so much more interesting than the very ordinary person that I really am!
Pete will always be the Qatteri Cat, because he was found, as a small, tiny, hungry kitten, wandering on the Doha Corniche by a family who had to give him up when he was around 5 months. I loved him the minute I saw him, but he only had eyes for AdventureMan. And poor AdventureMan, he was so worried about Pete he was in a nervous tizz when we arrived, he had been so afraid something would go wrong.
Seeing the two of them reunite in Doha was a beautiful sight. Pete’s food and cat litter were all set up, and he has a whole new environment to explore.
Kuwait Miscellaneous and Photo Dump
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
(From Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwocky)
I was in a hurry to fix breakfast, which was two lovely eggs in a little fresh Kuwait butter, but I was too hungry and grabbed a handful of walnuts from a nearby jar to chew on while breakfast cooked.
“hmmmm. . . ” I thought “these walnuts taste like Japanese rice crackers. . . ” but I knew my very favorite smoked almonds were all gone and . . . and . . . it dawned on me in horror, and I ran to the sink and spit out the “almonds.”
Not paying attention, I had grabbed the wrong jar, and had a mouth full of CAT FOOD!
“How did it taste?” my good friend asked, when I told her about it, in disgust.
“Fishy.” I said. “Actually, probably not that bad, except that it was CAT FOOD.” I couldn’t get past the cat-foodness of it to really judge how it tasted.
This will probably be my last Kuwait mosque photo. We shot it in Maidan Hawally, and the light was fading so quickly, I just took the photo, knowing the background was totally awful. The mosque – aha – thanks to my readers, I know it is Shiite, because it has a green dome! See! I was listening! But what graceful decoration on the minarets. What a delight!
You can have your power yachts, all sleek and white and sleeping a hundred – I will take this dream boat any day. I love the wood, and the lines. Whoever owns it taunts me by parking outside my window and fishing. I would love to be fishing off this boat.
A rare, clear summer morn in Kuwait when I can see the shimmer of the sun off the buildings in Salmiyya . . .
Reviving the Parking Hall of Shame, Al Manshar Mall only has like 40 parking spots for the whole mall and this nincompoop (pardon my language) takes up two spots with his careless parking. AAARRRGGGHH!
The Qatteri Cat hates it when AdventureMan gets out his suitcase. He sent a very clear message – “Take me, and Baby, too!”
Shutting Down
Yes, I’ve been busy. Yes, it involves movers, and bureaucracy, and parties, and the normal getting-ready-for-summer activities.
But the reason I’m not blogging a lot is that I’ve been shutting down, emotionally.
Here is a truth about me. I handle bad situations by shutting down. If I feel too much, I just get overwhelmed and don’t function. When I was packing boxes – and sighing – I could only pack a couple boxes and I would have to go lie down. It wasn’t physical so much as emotionally draining, packing up a life. I can’t really even begin to think about starting up a new one; I just need to get through finishing up this one.
So I just pack away all my grief with my household goods. Honestly, it works for me. I probably appear cold and unfeeling. The unfeeling part is true – I can make myself not feel, or at least postpone the feeling part. It gets me through the tough parts. I think it helps me survive. You go on automatic pilot. You go through the motions. You are only half there.
For me, the hardest part is being around people. Keeping all the feelings shut away is hard work! It’s exhausting! Or maybe it’s the scorching heat, but I come home and cannot stay awake, I have to take a nap. I wake up feeling better. I read late into the night – late for me. It’s OK, when I count up the nap sleeping with my night sleeping, I am getting enough sleep.
I have a very few good friends who know exactly where I am emotionally, and they shield me. We talk as if life were not going to change drastically, and for us, it won’t, there will still be the e-mails and visits. When I make a good friend, she/he is a friend for life. They don’t ask too much of me right now, but they are there to protect me when I need it. They are getting me through the tough times, and these are tough times.
When I get to Doha, I will start feeling again. I will allow the grief to seep in slowly, I will cry a little when no one is around to see, and slowly, slowly, as I grieve, I will also be engaging in a new life – slowly, slowly.
The Qatteri Cat is going through the same thing. He has built himself a little hidey-hole back in my old project room / Little Diamond’s room. He crawls into a pile of pillows and comforter until he is invisible, safe, warm, and sleeps. When he is awake, it is too depressing for him – his territory has changed so dramatically, none of the old reliable places are there.
So we comfort one another.
Sunrise on the Sparkling Water
I broke my own rules this morning. The Qatteri Cat started walking around and saying “Miooooow” around first-call-to-prayer time, and AdventureMan, who has a sweet soft heart sometimes gets up to feed him.
“If you get up to feed him,” I scold in my mean-mommy voice, “he learns that if he comes mioooowing at oh-dark-thirty that someone is going to get up and feed him! You have to ignore him!”
AdventureMan just looks at me sadly, that I could be so mean and cruel. He is a lucky man; he can get up, feed the cat and get back to sleep in like zero seconds flat. Once I am awake, I am awake.
So this morning, I ignored QC two or three times as he came in and said he was hungry, and then, around five, I took pity on him and got up to check his bowl, which was empty to the last grain of cat food. (Have you ever noticed how FOUL cat food smells??)
And since I was up anyway, I went to get a cup of coffee and saw – oh, I could see all the way to the horizon! Not a speck of dust, not a speck of haze! And the sun is coming up and there is a sparkle all across the Gulf!
I couldn’t resist the sparkle on the water:
So the Qatteri Cat gets a few extra snuggles today for getting me up to see this wonderful sunrise. It is a sweet morning, and I hope you have a wonderful day. 🙂
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