Bridget of Arabia

January 27th, outsourced

2012-01-27T15:42:00.001+04:00

I had to strip this image from its source in order to not give away the answer: can you tell what these are?

Here's a moderately entertaining video spoofing Lionel Richie's "Hello."

All those babies who were adopted from the former USSR (and other places) are teenagers now and seeking out the countries of their birth. Fascinating.

This article about an Arizona political candidate's English proficiency coming into question interested me on so many levels. Not least of which was the party where the BYU's own Dr. Eggington was called in to consult on the case.

This is an old article, but it's never a bad time to share an argument for email communication being more efficient and less bothersome than telephone communication. I know there are times when the phone is best...and yet.

Musandum, Oman

2012-01-26T23:19:00.000+04:00

Musandum, Oman is pretty amazing. We drove up to Khasab on Tuesday and found some dudes to take us around the fjords in a boat. Miriam wasn't too sure about the whole operation until a real, live dolphin started swimming along the boat. It was smooth sailing from there.

I can't imagine how my life would have been different if at some point during my childhood a real, live dolphin had swam alongside a boat upon which I was a passenger. Isn't that every 6-year-old's dream come true? Heck, I'm 30 and it was kind of a dream come true for me.

We cruised around the fjords for several hours, until late afternoon. When the weather is warmer, the dhow (traditional boat) will drop anchor and you can swim in the turquoise water. It was not that warm on this day so we stuck to the boat.

Along the way, we passed villages that are accessible only by boat. They have electricity thanks to the wires some intrepid soul has strung along the mountains, but the villages themselves have no roads or cars. It's kind of strange to think about, and behold.

We didn't go far off the beaten path on this first trip to Musandum. I know there is a lot more to do beyond the standard dhow cruise, but those activities will have to wait for another time. One major strike against Musandum, however, is the dicey drive up there from Dubai/Sharjah. It's a scant 160 kilometers or so away but once you reach the end of Emirates Road (the 311) you have to make your way through what has to be the ugliest and most truck-trafficky section of Ras Al Khaimah for what seems like forever. Then the border crossing process is less than seamless (and costs more than free). The drive into Musandum on the Oman side is truly breathtaking, or I imagine it would be if you're not the one driving and thus are able to take your eyes off the road, which is cut into the side of the mountain, for more than a moment. I think to truly be enjoyed, and to shake the bad aftertaste of the annoying trip to get there, you should spend at least one night and two days in Musandum. We'll see if we can work that out the next time. Maybe we can camp in the village with no cars/roads...

The Koreans who wouldn't go away

2012-01-24T20:25:00.000+04:00

We went to Musandum today, which is technically in Oman but which is separated from the rest of that country by the entirety of the UAE, perhaps in a bid to extract more visa fees from visiting foreigners. I'll write more about Musandum itself another time, including how a dolphin swam along in the turquoise water next to our boat as we sailed among the fjords.

But this post is about the Koreans who wouldn't go away. We first ran into them at the border crossing from the UAE into Oman. As they got out of their car next to us, one of them asked me about Oman car insurance and after I gave him the information he needed, we exchanged friendly well wishes for a great trip in Musandum and said goodbye.

Then of course we saw each other ten minutes later at the Oman half of the UAE/Oman border crossing.

Then, later that afternoon, entirely by chance, we spent four hours together on a hired dhow, cruising along the fjords. There were only two parties who had hired out that dhow from that group of sailors on that day at that time - their party of five and our party of six. It was a fun afternoon with our Korean friends.

We parted ways (again) at the dock at the end of the boat ride and I'm sure we all thought that was that. BUT NO. At the last moment on the way out of town, we decided to stop at the LuLu Hypermarket that is randomly in Khassab. A few of us had a hankering for some Pringles so I headed to that aisle. In the extensive chip aisle, who did I see browsing the selection but the Koreans?!? "How funny that they are in the very aisle I am in!" I thought. Then I noticed that they were right by the Pringles. Then, as I grabbed a can, I noticed that one of the Korean men was holding the exact kind of can of Pringles that I had just selected: sour cream and onion, reduced fat, supersize can. WEIRD. We said hello and goodbye (again!) to each other and parted ways, surely for the last time.

Except then we saw them at the Oman/UAE border. They were in front of us in the passport control line.

And that was the last time we met.

I'm thinking next time we should just arrange an outing together with the Koreans ahead of time. It would really cut down on the awkward non-goodbyes.

Oman 2012

2012-01-23T13:39:00.001+04:00

Can you handle another blog post about Oman? Good.

You'll be happy to know that we didn't get stuck on any two-lane winding camel-ridden mountain roads for five hours this time. We stumbled onto the brand new dual carriageway from Muscat to the south just as we hoped we would and had hardly any wrong turns after that. Oman is still throwing down new highways like it's going out of style but the signage is still abysmal. Oh well. We had a lovely trip. Here are some highlights of things I haven't blogged about Oman before.

Church. I really enjoy going to church in foreign countries. It's trickier to do than you think - you have to be in the country on the day they have church (Friday, Saturday, or Sunday), in the city where there's a congregation, and in the know about where the building is. We finally made it to church in Muscat and although I spent 1.5 of the three hours dozing on the couch in the foyer (as the designated Oman driver, I was allowed this privilege), it was awesome. It was also the perfect travel break - we got to stretch our legs, be spiritually uplifted, meet some new people, use a clean bathroom, and the girls got to play with children. Yep, perfect travel break.

We tried to go see the Muttrah Souq in Muscat but it was closed. So I took a picture of this nearby fort instead and called it good. We have never properly visited Muscat but there is so much else to do in Oman that I haven't felt its absence from our itinerary too keenly...yet.

We found a camping spot with its own private pebble/boulder beach near Al-Fins on the coast.

We pitched the tents up on a small bluff overlooking the ocean. The next morning after breaking camp, all us adults one by one disclosed how nervous we had felt during the night about the waves coming up over the edge. It's a good thing we didn't share those thoughts in the middle of the night (and a good thing the waves didn't come up over the edge) or we would have packed up and moved the site.

We drove down the coast a ways to enjoy a softer beach and while the water was cold, it was gorgeous.

At Wadi Shab, these boys were playing on the playground. Cute little mini-Omanis.

After exploring Wadi Shab and the Bimmah sinkhole, we headed up to Jebel Akhdar, upwards of 2000 meters elevation (about 7000 feet). Then, in a brilliant stroke of adventurousness/naivete, we camped there. We put on every article of clothing we had and all of six of us (with my mom and Carolyn) slept in the same tent to share warmth. You may scoff at our wussiness, but consider that it has been almost two years since I've been able to see my breath outside. It was COLD. Deliciously so. It was good to feel nice and cosy while camping for once.

The next morning when the sun came out, we explored our surroundings a little more. We camped up on a ridge that is called Diana's Viewpoint, after Princess Di, and this was our view. She visited here some years ago, although she was flown in by helicopter instead of braving the impossibly steep road that winds 25km up the mountain.

Enjoying my own Princess Di moment (photo taken by Miriam).

The setup. I should take a moment to recognize our new tent, which was brought over from the US by my mom in her luggage. It is so functional, so big, and glorious to behold. We love it.

Magdalena is a great camper, but she can only handle so much of the wild before she has to find a way to remind herself of civilization. On previous camping trips, she has just worn a dress over her rugged clothes. On this trip, she chose to get out her coloring book and markers on top of Jebel Akhdar.

We had a great hike among the villages in the mountains, with lots of terraced gardens that are lying fallow for the winter season.

This is what a school bus looks like in the mountain villages of Oman.

In the middle of this extensive mountain range were two lovely playgrounds. I have no idea why they are there. But they made for a great pit stop!

The next day (we're on day #3 now), we decided to go a little out of our way home to visit the 5000-year-old beehive tombs at Al Ayn, Oman. You know how sometimes you're on your way home from a trip and you're in your groove and you reach the point where you don't even want to drive five minutes out of your way for anything? Well, these beehive tombs are about 45 minutes out of the way but they are well worth it.

In conclusion, Oman continues to be awesome. We had a great trip and enjoyed some new experiences. I have to say, Oman has to be the cheapest international vacation destination EVER, at least if you live in the UAE. On our first trip to Oman in 2010, we changed about 200 dollars into Omani Rials. And guess what? We are still working through that original wad of cash, a few trips to Oman later. If you pack a lot of food, as we tend to do, the only money you ever spend in Oman is on the entrance visa (50 dhs for residents) and gas. That's it. Like I said, cheapest international vacation destination ever.

January 20th, outsourced

2012-01-20T14:00:00.000+04:00

As you read this, I am probably in the wilds of Oman. OK, or Muscat, on my way to the wilds. I don't have much for you, but what I do have, enjoy!

Have you ever wanted to read the classics with the genders reversed, so all the men are on the hunt for wives instead of the other way around? Here you go.

It's been twenty years since the fall of the Soviet Union. This makes me feel old, and happy.

I haven't actually taken it yet because I'm afraid of Season 2 spoilers, but here's a Downton Abbey personality quiz for you.

This is how they serve ice cream in Dubai. OF COURSE.

This is a gallery of the best street art of 2011. Some are funny, some are clever, some are beautiful, and some are downright disturbing. My personal favorite is the building painted to look like its teeth are falling out.

An Indiana Jones British colonial India childhood

2012-01-19T16:16:00.000+04:00

About a week after we moved here in the fall of 2010, a friend of mine took me to these two huge warehouses on the outskirts of Sharjah filled with...stuff. It was mostly furniture but there were also a lot of odds and ends, a lot of which I couldn't even identify a purpose for. When I walked in, I at once felt like I was in that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark (except with the crates removed) and also that I was suddenly a young British child growing up in British colonial India. Mary Lennox, maybe?

I got to repeat the experience the other day and also introduce my mom and my friend Carolyn to it:

Most of the furniture is of Indian workmanship, with a mix of old and new. They'll take an old shutter or door, for example, wrench it off its hinges, and then re-work it as a table or cabinet. Some of the pieces are quite beautiful.

This small chest of drawers with colored accents is my favorite, and someday it (or something like it) shall be mine.

Seriously, just HEAPS of stuff lying around.

I'm not really a shopper but I think I will take anyone and everyone who comes to visit me shopping at this mystery warehouse (I don't know its name - you just drive around in the industrial area of Sharjah near National Paints and it's there). We didn't happen to buy anything on our last visit - shockingly, furniture is tough to fit in your suitcase - but maybe we'll make a return trip soon.

Al-Noor Mosque @ Sharjah

2012-01-17T18:53:00.000+04:00

Even though I've lived in Muslim-majority countries for several years now, there is still a lot I don't know about Islam. You can pick up quite a bit through that phenomenon of cultural osmosis I talked about before, and of course I've also read some books on the subject, but my picture of that religion remained incomplete.

My knowledge is still incomplete, but not nearly as much as before, thanks to a visit to Al-Noor Mosque in Sharjah. Unlike some other countries in the Middle East, the UAE does not allow non-Muslims to visit their mosques. There are three exceptions: Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi (one of the largest mosques in the world), a mosque in Jumeirah (Dubai), and just recently, Al-Noor Mosque in Sharjah. Every Monday at 10am, they run an information session inside the mosque meant especially for non-Muslim visitors and residents in the UAE.

Now, being a Mormon, I know a thing or two about presenting one's religion to unbelievers. And the workers at Al-Noor did a fantastic job. A nice lady gave a one-hour presentation about Islam and included information about the five pillars, a demonstration of how they pray, and a run-down of the national dress. Then she took questions. She wasn't pushy, or self-righteous, or haughty, or disdainful of us foreigners. It was all carried out in the spirit of mutual respect and learning. At the end of the session, they gave us water, dates, and a picture of us at the mosque that they took with their own camera and then printed out for us. Basically, they were the nicest people ever.

While Al-Noor didn't have a Putting On Special Clothes Room, they did deck us out in abayas before we could enter the mosque. I believe that I am obligated to post a picture of myself in the abaya.

Anyway, the mosque visit was great and I would recommend it to anyone. Every Monday, 10am, Al-Noor Mosque in Sharjah. Ready, set, go!

Like magic

2012-01-16T14:01:00.003+04:00

Every once in a while (OK, every day...) I get to wishing that dinner would just clean itself up for once. Like I could finish eating and then go do whatever and when I came back, it would all be washed up, cleaned up, and put away. Like magic.

Well, last night, it happened. I finished eating, left my plate on the table, and then went to read Little House in the Big Woods on the couch with Miriam. When I looked up, the table was clear and the dishes were done. How did this happen? My mom is in town, that's how.

She and our family friend Carolyn arrived on Friday and it has been fun fun fun ever since, interspersed with the occasional work period since the semester still isn't quite over. They came to the UAE bearing belated Christmas gifts from our families in the US as well as a bunch of things Jeremy and I ordered on Amazon and had sent to my parents' house. (One of those Amazon things is a Kindle Touch, by the way. I'll get to that another day.)

When we're not gorging ourselves on Kirkland Signature natural peanut butter, York peppermint patties, instant breakfast, and Tillamook cheese (!!!!!!!), we're enjoying our time out and about in Sharjah with our guests. It's always nice to have visitors. Especially when they clean up dinner.

January 13th, outsourced

2012-01-13T15:11:00.000+04:00

Sometimes I enjoy reading train wrecks like the comments on this Consumerist post.

I saw this article about (not) loving every moment of parenthood everywhere at once, and for good reason. Because it is true and awesome.

Finally, some good news re: kids and balconies in the UAE. Bravo to the policeman. Boo to the parents.

I've actually never seen the Rocky movies but this song (for the hypothetical (?) musical) cracks me up.

One of my students showed me this video that features interviews with Gazans talking about the new year and I really enjoyed it! I thought you might, too.

My favorite painting-as-a-photograph was #9. [HT Kathy]

Newest rediscovered nerdy pastime: playing with the MLA nationwide language distribution maps. You're welcome.

Introducing the newest, best beauty product. [HT Missy]

This Socially Awkward Penguin meme has changed my life, and I only saw it for the first time this morning. It's as groundbreaking for me as that The Atlantic article about introverts was. There are so many behaviors mentioned on this meme that I never imagined anyone else besides me ever experienced. Now I know that I am not alone. Wow. Just WOW. (Warning for some language.) [HT Scotty]

Apple salsa

2012-01-11T16:40:00.003+04:00

I love seeing a cooking refuse pile like this one:

Those are the peels and cuttings and clippings of apple salsa, something that sounded really gross but tasted really good.

Making apple salsa has helped to lift me out of a cooking rut. Thinking up all the breakfasts/lunches/snacks/dinners for an entire week, breaking them down into their components for the grocery list, doing the shopping, and then cooking, serving, and cleaning up all that food takes a lot of effort. Who knew?

It's nice to have something fresh and delicious to add to the rotation once in a while. I've got my eye on Citrus Pomegranate Quinoa Salad next, though I haven't been able to find quinoa here. I picked up some barley at the store, though. We'll see how that works out.

Things I learned from watching The Amazing Race

2012-01-10T11:23:00.002+04:00

The Amazing Race turned out to be the perfect show to watch clips of over the holidays. I also put it on quite a bit while I was grading homework. Here's what I've learned from consuming parts of seasons 14, 15, 17, and 19 over the last few weeks.

1. There is, sadly, no shortage of jerky guys out there who treat their petite, blonde girlfriends like crap.

2. What are they carrying in those backpacks?? I realize the contestants are probably under contractual obligation to look hot at all times, and thus must haul around all the accoutrements that make that possible, but dear goodness their backpacks look heavy.

3. So, what is so hard about reading the words on the clue? I cannot believe how often people fail to pay close attention to directions that are trying to teach them how to win a million dollars.

4. Perhaps this is putting too fine a point on gender roles, but hear me out: I think it's just easier for a team that includes at least one male to win the whole race. A lot of the challenges involve sheer physical strength, and I think it's a fact that men are generally stronger than women. I saw one episode where a team of two women that was adequately qualified in all other respects had to quit (not get legitimately eliminated) because there was one tiny part of a task they could not complete due to not having enough physical strength. Which, fine. If the show wants it that way, they don't have to make an exception. BUT. Then there was another episode where a challenge involved putting on traditional Chinese opera makeup. Just as we can generally state that men are stronger than women, I think we could generally state that women are better at applying makeup than men. Sure enough, one of the men on a team did a horrendous job of applying the makeup. It was awful in comparison to the work the girls on the show were doing. But they let him pass the challenge! If they're not going to make exceptions for brute strength, maybe they should hold a higher makeup-application standard, as well. I'm just saying.

5. Another thing I've learned is that people should be nicer to taxi drivers. You probably won't get to where you need to go any faster by being mean.

6. I have to admit that I was super gratified to see that a team was eliminated from the race in Oman due to the poor signage and maps and roads that exist in that country. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who made one wrong turn in Oman and wasted the next five hours driving on a two-lane country road. Also, in Dubai another team got horribly lost on the confusing highways here and was eliminated. So it's not just me.

I would LOVE to stumble upon The Amazing Race filming somewhere around here. I also think it would be fun to be on the show with Jeremy. Too bad you have to be a resident of the United States. Hmph.

Downton Abbey Season 1 Review

2012-01-08T12:19:00.002+04:00

Please talk about Downton Abbey with me. Jeremy and I recently re-watched Season 1 in preparation for the legal release of Season 2 on iTunes/PBS.org this week. Ask me about my self control in resisting the YouTubed and pirated versions that I know have been out there for months. It took a lot.

So, what do you think? (No Season 2 spoilers allowed. I have been studiously avoiding any headlines or promos or articles or reviews or anything so that nothing is ruined.)

I think Downton Abbey is brilliant. I realize it's essentially a soap opera that takes place in the olden days (the surprise pregnancy, the indecisive fiancee, the backstabbing, overlooked middle child) but good heavens, is it well-acted and lovingly produced. How do they even find these delightful actors and actresses, and how do they play their parts so naturally? It's marvelous. My favorite straight-up character is Sybil (the youngest daughter) because she is a gem of humanity. I appreciate the nuance and unabashed cynicism of Mary even as I recognize that she is a flawed, flawed person. I loooooooooove Thomas as a villain. I love that O'Brien is a villain too, but I was moved by her transformation in the final episode - don't we all have the occasional "O'Brien, you're better than this" moments when we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror?

Lady Violet (aka Maggie Smith) has the best lines, of course, with my personal favorite being "Well, we can't have [the Turkish ambassador] assassinated...I suppose." Mwahahahahahahahaha.

I do have one quibble with the show, and that is the way it deal with the Kamal Pamouk plot. The show wanted us to take Kamal seriously, like he was a really genuine guy who showed Lady Mary how exciting life could be. But then it also wanted us to giggle when Lady Mary and her mom and her maid were shuffling his dead body down the corridor in the middle of the night. But then it wanted us to feel sad with Lady Mary that her One True Suitor was dead. But then also, it really WAS hilarious when they were dragging him down the hall, am I right?!!?!??

Also, I feel like that scene in Lady Mary's bedroom danced uncomfortably close to that "Yes means No" misconception. When it was all over and done with and Lady Grantham asked Mary if Pamouk had "forced himself" on Mary, I honestly expected her to honestly say yes. Because he totally did! At least in the scene we were shown. In all the conflicting elements of that awkward plot, I was rendered incapable of feeling genuine grief for Mary at the loss of her "lover" (because I felt he was not voluntarily taken), and also unable to feel jolly amusement at his death because wasn't it creepy that he basically raped her?

I think it would have been better/funnier/less creepy if Kamal Pamouk had burst into Lady Mary's bedroom, propositioned her, and then died suddenly before anything could happen, preferably right after Lady Mary said that her reputation would be ruined if anyone even knew he was there. Then it could have been ha-ha funny, potentially damaging to Mary's prospects, and a scandalous adventure for her to look back on, all without the creepy overtones. I'm just saying.

That aside, I am a proud member of the Downton Abbey is AWESOME club. Feel free to chime in with your own thoughts, but no Season 2 stuff allowed!

January 6th, outsourced

2012-01-06T16:06:00.000+04:00

Unfortunately, we didn't go, but the fireworks at the Burj Khalifah this year were AMAZING...

...but were they so amazing that it was worth it to not get home (within the city of Dubai) until 5am? I'm not sure.

This is winter in the UAE. [HT Ashi]

It is a fact that I read this article well after midnight when I was taking a break from working on a paper all day, so it's possible I was a little slap happy. But still, HILARIOUS.

Also hilarious, and smart, and true: Why the GOP Nomination Should be a Romantic Comedy. [HT Liz]

I loved reading about this cartographer's beautiful, handcrafted map! [HT Ken Jennings]

It's possible you will violently disagree with her, but Katie at The Red Kitchen has an interesting take on what baby items are worth it.

I'm trying to decide if this guy's tale of lost luggage is better than ours. It certainly involves more policemen. [HT BCC]

Now I am officially allowed to say, "When I was a student at the BYU and lived in Heritage Halls, there were six girls in each apartment and only one bathroom." Because apparently it's not like that anymore.

You WILL end up watching this video a few hundred times. [HT Anna Ray]

I loved this article if for no other reason than that the rule about the shameless attention-getting headlines you see these days is SO TRUE and should be implemented immediately. [HT Jen]

2011 Book Stats

2012-01-04T11:26:00.001+04:00

Here are some interesting (?) stats about the books I read in 2011.

The books I read in 2011 were:

53% fiction.

47% non-fiction (obviously).

Furthermore, 66% of the fiction was Young Adult (just like last year!).

Overall, 35% of the books I read were Young Adult.

18% of the books I read in 2011 were non-first-time reads.

17% of 2011's reading list were books that Jeremy also read this year.

69% of the books were checked out from the library. The rest I either own or were downloaded through a free trial with audible.com.

Speaking of which, 12.5% of the books I read in 2011 were audiobooks.

The longest stretches between completion of a book were two periods of 25 days each. The first time was in October when it took me almost the whole month to read The Count of Monte Cristo. The other time was in November when I finished Mud, Sweat, and Tears and didn't pick up (well, download the audio of) Between Shades of Gray until the second week of December.

Which leads us to the great item of nerdery that is my 2011 reading progress chart. Still haven't figured out how to make it pretty, sorry.

As you can see, my reading slowed down the second half of the year, especially once the fall semester started. It got to the point where I didn't even want to start a book because then I would just be wanting to read it when there was so much else I needed to do. Fridays were by far my most productive reading days - there were a few Fridays in the year when I read an entire book in an afternoon. Which leads me to my last stat: my most productive stretch of reading. In April, I read Baghdad Without a Map, Three Cups of Deceit, and Girls of Riyadh in three days total. (However, Three Cups of Deceit is only about 70 pages long.)

The end!

Edited to add: Except I just figured out how to do an animated version of the chart. Check it out.

I feel like Hans Rosling, except that I, unlike him, have no reason to exclaim, "WHAT a catastrophe!" in a Swedish accent. Which is a shame.

H&M and a pool

2012-01-03T21:17:00.002+04:00

Two recent shopping experiences gave me pause.

1. Not to complain about H&M again (because I love that store), but I had another unfortunate experience where the final attitude of the staff was "we don't care." Take a look at this rack of girls' leggings:

How much do you think they cost? If you said 29 dirhams, you're WRONG, as was I when I took a few pairs up to the register. It turns out that most of them cost 49 dirhams. When I protested, at first the cashier tried to tell me that I must have grabbed the leggings from a different display. So I physically walked her over to the rack and showed her the display sign that clearly said, "Leggings, girls 1-8 years, DHS 29." That really stumped her...but only for a moment. Because then she told me that oh, the signs only display the lowest price of any item on that rack. Somewhere in there is a pair of leggings that costs 29 dirhams. If the pairs I actually pull from the rack cost 49 dirhams, well, it's on me to notice that.

I escalated the situation (nicely, I promise) to a manager, and then to his manager, and the answer I got was the same: H&M signage is allowed to post the lowest price of an item in any given display. I have a problem with that, and I'll tell you why. "Leggings, girls 1-8 years, DHS 29" to me means that any leggings in that display that are size 1-8 years, for girls, cost 29 dhs. If they want it to mean otherwise, they need to change the wording. How about, "Non-patterned leggings, girls 1-8 years, DHS 29"? Or "Leggings, girls 1-8 years, DHS 29 and up"? The way it stands, it's just plain flat-out lying. Too bad the manager was deaf to my protests. So I just filled out a complaint form (which maybe they threw in the trash after I left). And then wrote this blog post.

2. Outside of a sporting goods store in Festival City, we found a mini trampoline on display. Right next to it was a set up, filled up swimming pool. Does anyone besides me see that as a glaringly obvious safety hazard??

And now I'm wondering if the pool really costs 289 dhs or if the sign just says that, or 289 dhs is the cost of the water, or something. Hmph.

2011 Stats

2012-01-01T20:30:00.000+04:00

Here are some blog stats for your review/entertainment (2010 stats here).

Bridget of Arabia 2011 Stats

Total posts: 269

Total number of comments: 1939

Average number of comments per post: 7
Number of posts with no comments: 1 (this one)
Highest number of comments on one post: 35

Number of subscribers (Google Reader only, I don't know how to find out anything else): 183

Most-discussed posts:

Mama's first day of school (35 comments)
Where are you from? (26)
Odna (24)
Every R-rated movie I've ever seen (24)
Henna controversy (23)
My favorite childhood books (20)
Pregnancy Watch (20)
The Big 1K (20)

Most-viewed posts (different from above):

Top searches leading to this blog:

bridget of arabia
hey dude
arabic
woombie reviews
h&m return policy
woombie
bridget palmer blog
my adventures in tucson
bridget of arabia library provo
h and m

2011 Visitor Overview

What is that dip on 29 September, do you suppose?

Visits: 50,953
Absolutely unique visitors: 17,861
Pageviews: 116,458
Average time on site: 2 min 8 sec

Top Referring Sites

About 55% of visits to this blog comes from referring sites. That means that the visitor clicked on a link somewhere (facebook, another blog, etc.) and ended up here. This is as opposed to simply typing the address in the address bar the old-fashioned way. So if your blog is listed below, it doesn't mean that you personally were clicking away madly at links to Bridget of Arabia - it just means some of your visitors were.

Blogger.com
google.com
Magdalena's private blog
facebook.com
heissatopia.com
casteluzzo.com
thebookofarmaments.blogspot.com
frozenhorchatas.blogspot.com
kathyhaynie.blogspot.com
jasonandlili.blogspot.com
LinkWithin widget

Top Countries

United States (73% of total blog visits)
United Arab Emirates (7%)
United Kingdom
Canada
Tunisia
Australia
Germany
Italy
Sweden
Singapore

Top States

Arizona
Utah
California
Oregon
New York
Virginia
Indiana
Texas
Michigan
Maryland

I think I've been misreading this chart all these years. I thought I didn't have readers in all 50 states but it turns out I do. Delaware and South Dakota are tied for the sparsest concentration of fans, with only 19 visits each in all of 2011. Perhaps even more disturbingly, Idaho is not even in the top ten for visits. Perhaps my in-laws don't read my blog anymore??

Reader Browser of Choice

About 3/4 of the people who view Bridget of Arabia are right-minded individuals. The other 1/4 uses Internet Explorer.

Thanks for indulging me, and thanks to Google Analytics!

CANDY (oh, and Happy New Year)

2011-12-31T21:46:00.000+04:00

If I don't wake up tomorrow morning, it's probably because I will have entered a candy-induced coma. I haven't had candy since 27 December 2010. I've spent the last year stockpiling some favorites in preparation for 2012. Here's what I've got on hand for tonight after midnight:

Toffifee is readily available at any store here. If you haven't ever had Toffifee, you haven't lived. Try it, it's good. Good & Plenty came in a package from my mom sometime in September. The Chocoa was a gift from a friend for Christmas. The peanut butter cups are only available at Carrefour around Christmas time, so I bought a bag a few weeks ago and then hid it from Jeremy. The toff-chocs or whatever were actually supposed to be for a friend (she was looking for Da'im but IKEA was out), but she ended up not needing them so I gladly kept them. The mentos are from Turkey. Yes, Turkey - I've never seen those flavors before so I bought them in Goreme and then put them out of sight in my underwear drawer for lo, these five months. The only thing I'm missing is York peppermint patties. I know they have them at the Hershey store in Dubai Mall, so a trip there may be in my (imminent) future.

I'm going to keep the "sweets on Friday only" rule for 2012, and I'm sure I'll remember pretty quickly how candy really only tastes good at the moment you're eating it, but hoo boy, am I going to have fun tonight!!!!!

December 30th, outsourced

2011-12-30T16:12:00.003+04:00

Image via

If you are someone who enjoys being inspired, you will like this video.

If you are someone who enjoys amazing piano music, you will like this video.

Have you ever wondered what the Disney Princesses would look like in real life? [HT Elena]

The Arab Spring, in videos. Not all of them are touchy-feely inspiring, by the way, so take care what you watch.

The only person I understand less than Bashar al-Assad these days is Asma al-Assad. [HT Suzanne]

A few weeks ago we saw the honorable mentions. Now we have the winners of the National Geographic photo contest.

Remember last week when I confessed an interest in women giving birth in a country other than their own? Well, a few days later, I found this blog, all about just that.

Advisory: if you are Sudanese, and you happen to be in Abu Dhabi, and you happen to give birth to quadruplets, be aware that the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi may cover your hospital bill. Awesome.

Books 2011: Favorites and others

2011-12-29T13:56:00.000+04:00

As promised, here are my ten favorite books of 2011. To make the list, I had to have read the book for the first time in 2011 - otherwise the list would be crowded with old favorites I re-read. Links are to my Goodreads reviews. Sorry for the huge spacing. I have no idea why it came out that way. Just pretend it increases the drama.

Columbine by Dave Cullen

The best kind of books make you feel like they were written personally for you. Columbine is one of those, and I think it has special worth to anyone who was a high schooler in 1999.

The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It by Neal Bascomb

This is another book that was just my style. I could hardly stand the suspense, even though I already knew the eventual ending. The journey was just so dang fun. Warning: you WILL find yourself on YouTube after reading this book, looking up all the races.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

Yet another deeply personal book. If you have spent more than a few years in grad school, or are married to someone who has, then this book might be worth a read. If you are looking for grand, dramatic plots...not so much.

Divergent by Veronica Roth

This was probably my favorite (first-time) YA read of the year. The good news is, I hear there's a second book coming out in 2012.

Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia by Tony Horwitz

Jolly, endearing, and informative. There's nothing not to like.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

It's about time I joined the rest of the human race and read this book. Even though I had heard so much hype about it, it lived up to all the praise.

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

A flawless account of, well, Al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11. Even if you've already read the 9/11 Commission Report, this book has more to say and does it better.

What to Eat by Marion Nestle

Who knew a book about food and nutrition could be so riveting and easy to read?

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

I hesitated including this one because it was really hard to read at times. But it really was an amazing story, well told.

Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick

No one is more surprised than me that I liked this book. I stand by my original review: "Hush doesn't take itself seriously. It knows exactly what it is. It is very self-aware and hits all its marks. It reminded me so much of those Hardy Boys books where the mystery is kind of cheesy and obvious and the bad guys are always bursting into monologue before killing anyone and the hero/ine makes foolish, unrealistic decisions in order to advance the plot, but it's done in kind of a "wink, wink" way so all is forgiven."

Now for some other distinctions.

Most unexpectedly good book: Hush, Hush, by Becca Fitzpatrick. See above.

Most unexpectedly bad book: The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, by Wendy McClure. So promising. SO AWFUL.

Longest book: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1276 pages).

Shortest book: Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way by Jon Krakauer (77 pages).

Most-read book: 2011 marked my third reading of The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas), A Pair of Blue Eyes (Thomas Hardy), and Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte).

Best bad book: Probably The Luxe (Anna Godbersen) or Shadow Hills (Anastasia Hopcus). Because I enjoyed them even as I mocked them.

Worst good book: By the formula established above, Unbroken (Laura Hillenbrand; see above) has to be the worst good book I read all year. It was brilliant, and yet exhausting to read.

Worst book I didn't finish: The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett). Unfortunately in this case, "didn't finish" still means "I read 200 pages." Ugh.

Worst book I did finish: To avoid mentioning The Wilder Life twice, I'll give Life: An Exploded Diagram (Mal Peet) the honors here.

Worst cover: If by "worst" I mean "most embarrassing," then it's Abandon (Meg Cabot), a hundred times over. But I actually think the Hush, Hush and Crescendo covers are the most visually unappealing.

Best covers: Columbine and Spoiled (Heather Cocks). Aaaaand that's probably the only time ever that those two books will be placed next to each other in any kind of space.

Spectacle

2011-12-28T21:24:00.000+04:00

Today when I dropped her off at school, Magdalena begged me to let her ride her scooter home later that day. So when it was time to pick her up, Miriam (who is on winter break right now) got on her scooter and together we walked to the school. I was carrying Magdalena's scooter and also holding the leash of our foster dog. Did I mention we have another foster dog this year? Her name is Judy.

She's a rescued street dog, just like Snowflake was, so her leash-walking skills are very poor. She zigzags all over the place and cuts you off like nobody's business. We were quite a spectacle walking to the school - a girl, a scooter, a mom, another scooter, and a dog. But that was nothing compared to the spectacle we were a few minutes later when, not 100 meters into the walk home, Magdalena decided she was too tired to ride her scooter. Then we were a girl, a scooter, a mom, a girl, a scooter, a backpack, and a dog. And one of the girls was crying.

There was really no choice but to just press on. Magdalena cried the whole way home and wanted me to carry her, which was physically impossible since I had Judy's leash in one hand and Magdalena's scooter in the other. It was the longest 800-meter walk home EVER and we made quite the spectacle of ourselves. The best part was when Judy zigzagged right in front of sad Magdalena and tripped her. Sigh.

But it turns out Magdalena really was tired, because a little later, this happened:

I submit that to fall asleep on the floor in the middle of playing, you have to be pretty dang tired. The end.

Cultural osmosis

2011-12-27T21:34:00.000+04:00

I've been abroad - entirely in the Middle Eastern region - for close to 16 months straight now. In the last few weeks, I've started to feel more and more out of touch with American culture. I'm reading all the same news sources, talking with all the same friends, checking all the same blogs. And yet. I'm missing that certain something, that general, baseline knowledge of culture that is not acquired in any deliberate sense but is picked up almost through osmosis, just from being around Americans and listening and watching.

It's getting to the point where if I catch a glimpse of the United States on the news or a TV show, it already seems just a little bit foreign to me. Just a little. Like oooh, the sidewalk curbs aren't painted black and white there! It's almost like that time we went to Jordan for four months and when we came back, everyone in the US was saying "absolutely!" instead of "yes." It was sudden, inexplicable, and it happened while we were gone. Now that we've been "gone" for over a year, these little changes are racking up and I can't keep up with them all. I don't know who Tim Tebow is. I don't know what the rank and file really think about all this Occupy stuff, or about the Republican presidential candidates, for that matter. It's been ages since I heard anyone complain about gas prices in person. Today, just for the sake of forging a common bond with my fellow Americans, just to be in the know, I looked up the price of gas.

I felt a pang of...something (I'm not sure what) when I caught a glimpse of the most recent Good Housekeeping cover the other day. It was so AMERICAN, and ever so slightly so other. It was as if for the first time in my life I was able to take a step back from my own native culture and regard it from afar. All at once I could see what the world's perception of American culture is, which is difficult to do when you're immersed in it. And I have to say, I liked a lot of what I saw. America gets a lot of grief from other countries, but there is something so spunky and carefree and young and earnest about it, too.

America reminds me of these young Emiratis I teach, in a way. They're full of energy and relatively new to the world and until they learn otherwise (and they will), they believe there is nothing they can't achieve.

And that's how you know I've been in the Middle East too long, when I start comparing the US to Emirati youth. I'll stop now. My point is that I feel like I'm drifting away from essential cultural knowledge when it comes to the US. Who can fill me in on the minutiae I'm missing that I can't pick up from news and blogs and talking with other similarly disconnected expatriates?

Books 2011

2011-12-26T17:50:00.000+04:00

I'm going to present my 2011 book data a little differently this year. Instead of putting the favorites in with the masses like I did in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010, I'm going to give you the (loosely and probably inconsistently) categorized list of everything I read this year and do the favorites along with some fun distinctions in a few days. Here you go!

(An asterisk means I didn't finish the book.)

Books I read with Miriam
*The Last Battle (C.S. Lewis)
The Magician's Nephew (C.S. Lewis)
The Horse and His Boy (C.S. Lewis)
The Silver Chair (C.S. Lewis)
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (C.S. Lewis)
Prince Caspian (C.S. Lewis)

Young Adult/Juvenile Literature
The Luxe (Anna Godbersen)
Shadow Hills (Anastasia Hopcus)
The Scorch Trials (James Dashner)
The Maze Runner (James Dashner)
I Am the Messenger (Markus Zusak)
Spoiled (Heather Cocks)
City of Fallen Angels (Cassandra Clare)
Divergent (Veronica Roth)
East (Edith Pattou)
Stolen: A Letter to My Captor (Lucy Christopher)
Abandon (Meg Cabot)
Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
Crescendo (Becca Fitzpatrick)
Matched (Ally Condie)
The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman)
Hush, Hush (Becca Fitzpatrick)
Clockwork Angel (Cassandra Clare)
Delirium (Lauren Oliver)
Mockingjay (Suzanne Collins)
Between Shades of Gray (Ruta Sepetys)

Classics
The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
A Pair of Blue Eyes (Thomas Hardy)
Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)

Fiction
Life: An Exploded Diagram (Mal Peet)
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Annie Barrows)
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag (Alan Bradley)
The Help (Kathryn Stockett)
Room (Emma Donoghue)
Crossing to Safety (Wallace Stegner)
Snow Falling on Cedars (David Guterson)
*The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)

Middle East
One Day in September: The Full Story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and the Israeli Revenge Operation "Wrath of God" (Simon Reeve)
City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (Jim Krane)
Girls of Riyadh (Rajaa Alsanea)
Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia (Tony Horwitz)
Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices (Mosab Hassan Yousef)
Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination Attempt on Hamas Leader Khalid Mishal and Its Unforeseen Consequences (Paul McGeough)
Inheriting Syria: Bashar's Trial by Fire (Flynt Leverett)
Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir (Marina Nemat)
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Lawrence Wright)

Biography/Memoir
Mud, Sweat and Tears (Bear Grylls)
Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Bill Bryson)
Come, Tell Me How You Live: An Archaeological Memoir (Agatha Christie)
Known and Unknown (Donald Rumsfeld)
Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea (Steven Callahan)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot)
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (Laura Hillenbrand)

Historical Non-Fiction
We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (David Howarth)
33 Men: Inside the Miraculous Survival and Dramatic Rescue of the Chilean Miners (Jonathan Franklin)
Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi (Neal Bascomb)
*Devil's Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy (David Roberts)
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (Simon Winchester)

NPR-type Books
Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (Ken Jennings)
*Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (Stefan Fatsis)
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (Jon Ronson)
The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie (Wendy McClure)
The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It (Neal Bascomb)
The Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy (Robert D. Kaplan)
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (Mary Roach)
At Home: A Short History of Private Life (Bill Bryson)

Other
Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds (David C. Pollock)
What to Eat (Marion Nestle)
Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way (Jon Krakauer)
Columbine (Dave Cullen)
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (Christopher McDougall)

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T11:15:00.004+04:00

Please enjoy my favorite Christmas song rendition ever.

December 23rd, outsourced

2011-12-23T16:33:00.000+04:00

I've written about $800 strollers before, but this one takes it up a notch.

My students showed me this video that made the rounds in the Middle East (and beyond...?) a few years ago and it at once terrified me and impressed me. My Saudi students, on the other hand, were totally blasé about it - "oh, speed skating in sandals on the freeway? That was SO four years ago."

In really weird cloud news, we have tsunamis and UFOs. [HT Jeremy and Kathy]

Falling is the new cone-ing, which was the new planking, I guess? It's good for a laugh, anyway.

2011 was The Year of the Mormon. It used to be that months would go by without any kind of Mormon-related article in the newspaper. Not so anymore.

WHAT ON EARTH. [HT a bunch of people on FB]

Finally, here's a collection of the best media errors of 2011.

The greatest adventure

2011-12-21T14:17:00.002+04:00

(Before reading this post, please note that I am currently on a grad school exemption from PregnancyWatch and adjust your conclusions accordingly.)

Is it totally weird that I am jealous of American women who give birth in foreign countries? Because I totally am. I've had a lot of great adventures in foreign countries, some of them even health- or hospital- or kid- or kid-in-hospital-related. But I've never had THE great adventure.

I feel so robbed that Miriam wasn't born in Syria. She was due in mid-September, and Jeremy's PhD program at the U of A started at the beginning of September, so it wasn't too hard to do the math and see that it wouldn't work to birth her in Damascus. Still, we thought through a few scenarios. None of them were possible, so we ended up just staying in Syria as long as possible and then moving to Arizona, where Miriam was born a month later. To this day, when people ask me where she was born, I have to think twice before answering, "Tucson." Miriam herself has told others that she was born in Syria. She also told me the other day that she is part Syrian. (Wishful thinking on her part to help her fit in more with the Arab kid crowd here, I think.)

And now the University of Sharjah just opened up their brand new hospital down the road, and it has a fabulous maternity ward (or so I've heard) and it seems like the majority of my friends are pregnant and I just get to thinking about what an adventure they're about to have. It's like a club that I don't belong to.

One more thing: I wonder sometimes if this strange jealousy I have is because I had such a terrible experience giving birth to Miriam in Tucson, and there will always, always be that question in my mind: how beautiful could it have been in Syria?

I guess I'll never know, and so the jealousy continues to eat away at me.

Avoidance behavior

2011-12-20T14:16:00.000+04:00

I have five major assignments to turn in before the end of the semester in January. One is the bilingual program I described the other day. A couple of them are papers that I have worked on to varying degrees. When I'm not working on all this stuff, I'm exhibiting avoidance behaviors, which lately have taken the form of watching clips of the latest season of The Amazing Race on YouTube.

This surprises me, because I never thought I would like that show. Over the years, people have told me that I should watch it but the only episodes I ever caught glimpses of never sparked my interest. It seemed like it was just a bunch of people arguing with each other.

Until I had a bunch of research papers looming - then TAR was somehow riveting. I am really enjoying it, even though so many of the scenes remind me too much of stuff I've lived in real life. I hate hate hate that feeling of getting off a train after a night of crappy sleep and being hungry and you have to go to the bathroom but you don't have time because you have to get somewhere before a certain time but you have no idea where to go or where to even begin to find your way. It's stressful enough when you don't have a million dollars on the line.

Nobody give any spoilers for this season, please. I understand that it's already ended (?) and we'll see if I can get through the rest of the episodes without finding out who wins. As far as avoidance behaviors go, The Amazing Race is pretty dang enjoyable.

An Arabic/English bilingual education plan

2011-12-18T22:16:00.001+04:00

It's time to turn a homework assignment into a blog post. This particular assignment was to design a bilingual English/Arabic education plan that a) develops proficiency in English and Arabic while b) preserving the national and cultural identity of the students.

You see, the fun thing about Arabic is that it's not just one language. It's one standard formal/media language that is learned almost as a foreign language even in schools in Arab countries, plus that country's dialect (this is called diglossia, remember?). Some dialects of Arabic are mutually unintelligible. That's why I sometimes go crazy with jealousy when I hear of someone moving to, say, Russia, and teaching their kids, say, Russian. It's so uncomplicated for them! Here, our kids play with Tunisians and Egyptians and Palestinians and Emiratis and for all intents and purposes, those kids all speak entirely different languages. It's maddening, from a language-learning point of view, because all that unstructured play time with native speakers of Arabic does very little to reinforce and promote the formal Arabic they learn in school.

So it was with particular relish that I set about completing my assignment to design a bilingual Arabic/English education program. The very first thing I did was decide to include an Arabic dialect component, rather than putting MSA (the formal stuff) on an unimpeachable pedestal. Because dangit, I want my kid to be able to play in Arabic, not just read poetry or listen to the news. In my bilingual education plan, MSA has its place in literacy and literature classes only. English gets literacy, science, and math (and yes, I know that this may cause students to harbor unrealized attitudes that assign English a more prestigious position in the language hierarchy because science and math are allocated to it, but the truth is that scientific and mathematical research is conducted in English these days). Arabic dialect gets social studies. Everybody's happy.

To that end, Jeremy and I recently engaged the services of an Arabic teacher for our girls. We're Levantine Arabic snobs so we found a young Syrian woman to come over and play with the kids (and a couple of neighbor girls) in Arabic. They don't do drills or write sentences or have any kind of systematic approach to learning Arabic - Miriam and Magdalena get that (via MSA) in school. The point is for them to use real-life, every day Arabic dialect to play and communicate on a child's level.

That's the solution we've found until a bilingual education program like the one I designed for my assignment exists in real life. And believe me, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

December 16th, outsourced

2011-12-16T15:03:00.001+04:00

If this SMS exchange about Snuggies is fake, I DON'T WANT TO KNOW.

Sometimes a cappella song and dance routines creep me out, but I have to admit that this particular performance by Vocal Point had me mesmerized.

Personally, I never unpack into hotel drawers. You?

People Are Awesome. I showed this video to both of the classes I teach and they loved it beyond all reason. So do I, actually. [HT Jeremy's cousin on FB]

If any of your less-informed friends try to pass off Gingrich's "Palestinians are fake" line as genuine, here's an article you should read so you can be prepared to correct them in a polite and informed manner.

This article in the WSJ about Christmas card photos features some friends of mine from Portland. I saw their Christmas card before it appeared in the article and it is lovely.

Reading about the logistics of Santa visiting every Christian kid in the world on Christmas Eve kind of broke my brain.

"The end of the semester" lasts a whole month

2011-12-15T16:02:00.001+04:00

I can tell from the pile on my desk that the end of the semester is here.

I think the box of tissues gives it a little more heft and panache, don't you think? There's a second round of sickness going on these days so it's just as well the tissues are in my "to do" heap, just in case.

"The end of the semester" is going to last almost a whole month, though, so I have to ready myself for a race of endurance, not speed. I'm already trying to decide what book I'm going to read on January 13th to celebrate the end. Because on that day, unlike now, there will really, really be nothing else that I'm supposed to be reading or critiquing or teaching or analyzing. Until next semester starts, anyway.

Let this be a lesson for you

2011-12-14T12:06:00.000+04:00

I'm going to be very, very oblique on the details of this incident, for obvious reasons. You see, I recently sent an email to the wrong person, causing me a lot of embarrassment, anguish, and and a constant refrain of "I am so STUPID!!!!" to echo through my head for the better part of a day. Those feelings (and even the refrain) have since subsided, but all I have to do is open up my inbox to feel the shame and humiliation come rushing back.

Basically, I needed to send an email to a group of people. I found a previous email exchange among that group of people and clicked on Reply All and then smugly and smartly edited the Subject line to what the new email was about. "How smart I am to change the Subject line," I thought, "I just hate it when people Reply All to old emails but leave the same old irrelevant subject."

Since I was so busy being smart with the subject, and also since (in my defense) the particular email window I had up was quite small, I didn't notice that the entire substance of the group email exchange remained at the bottom of this new email I was writing. And really, this wouldn't have been a problem since I was writing to the same group of people, who all had access to that original exchange anyway. Except. Oh, EXCEPT. At the last moment before sending, I thought of one more person who might benefit from this new information I was sending and I added that individual to the list of recipients. And then I sent the email.

A few minutes later, I opened up the message as it entered my Inbox, this time in a larger window. There in front of me I saw the old email conversation laid out in all its glory, now forwarded on to someone who was never supposed to be included in that discussion. All at once, I felt sick, humiliated, and STUPID. It was such a dumb mistake.

The worst part about it all was that I was so powerless. I immediately wrote an email to the people whose words I had inadvertently forwarded on to an unintended recipient and apologized, which of course was basically a worthless gesture, if the best I could do. But there was no way I was going to call or write that unintended recipient, though I considered it briefly. Anything I said to that person would just call attention to my mistake, a mistake that there was a chance they hadn't noticed at all. I just hoped and prayed that their email window was as small as mine, or that they didn't have the time to scroll down after the "Best regards, Bridget" line.

And I'll never know of course. Maybe that person saw it. Maybe they didn't. But I can never ask about it. I only know that I had to face this group of people not too long after I sent the email, and most of them knew what I had done. The moment that I walked in to see them reminded me of that part in Gone With the Wind where there's been a huge misunderstanding and everyone hates Scarlett:

Oh well. I know this kind of thing happens all the time and I'm just glad it wasn't worse. I asked for sympathy on Facebook and heard a few stories of truly terrible email overshares. At least I'm not alone in my ignominy.

Rear window

2011-12-12T16:48:00.002+04:00

Our 4-year-old neighbor broke his leg a few weeks ago and now spends a good deal of his time sitting in his wheelchair, broken leg propped up, looking out the window. Yesterday evening, the girls were outside playing and our front door was open. I walked from the living room to the kitchen, passing momentarily in front of the open doorway. Almost immediately, I heard a "Briiiiiiiiidgeeeeeeeeeet!"

It was our 4-year-old neighbor. He'd been watching. And he wanted to say hello to me.

The whole situation was so eerily reminiscent of Rear Window/Bart of Darkness that I had to laugh.

He gets his cast off in a couple more weeks. I'll have to make sure I don't do anything to arouse his suspicion before then.

I think parenting is harder for introverts

2011-12-11T16:10:00.001+04:00

Not long after the realization that I am an introvert changed my life, I discovered something else: I think parenting is harder for introverts. Think about it. Introverts may enjoy spending time with others (I do), but we need time to recharge in solitude after sustained social encounters. And what is parenting if not one long, continuous, sustained social encounter? (With a tiny person who is often irrational, non-verbal, immune to compromise, and deaf to cues that usually signal the need for the interaction to end soon, no less.)

I was reminded of this negative aspect of introversion on Friday. We spent more than six hours at church, first in the regular three-hour service and then enjoying (and partly orchestrating) a congregational Christmas party. It was very festive and I certainly enjoyed myself, but by the time we got home I just wanted to be in a dark, quiet room by myself so I could recuperate from all the interaction that can be so draining for introverts.

But guess what? Sweet Miriam and Magdalena felt no such fatigue and wanted to carry the fun and energy of the Christmas party over into our precious Friday afternoon. It was one of those times when I longed for a Grandma or Grandpa or passel of cousins to take over and absorb the energy that was crippling my introvert self.

I've noticed that in such situations, my body copes by shutting down emotional response. It's almost as if I unconsciously decide that if I can mute the input that is overloading me, I can pretend I'm recharging in a dark, quiet room by myself when in reality I'm playing My Little Ponies on the living room floor with two little girls. It's a way of coping, I guess, but I don't think it's healthy. Sometimes it gets to the point where if one of the kids trips and falls and hurts her knee (or whatever) when I am in that mode, I can see her crying and know that I should feel empathy or concern at that moment but it's all I can do to mimic the appropriate words and reaction. I'm just too drained to drag up the genuine emotional response, and to do so would destroy the recharge period that my body is trying so desperately to approximate.

Now, it's possible that this post really weirded out some of you, especially if you're an extrovert. It's OK, I don't expect you to understand. Just know that once I DO get to spend time alone in a dark, quiet room (aka, when I go to sleep at night), I am fresh, recharged, and things go back to normal and I bet I could even talk myself into spending six hours at church again...

December 9th, outsourced

2011-12-09T17:58:00.001+04:00

OK, I actually hate Wheel of Fortune, which maybe is why I laughed at these poor, inept contestants.

Hooray, a spoiler-free review of Downton Abbey Season 2, from Ken Jennings of all people. OF COURSE it's good.

WHY DO WE STILL HAVE PENNIES???????

Literary genre translations from McSweeney's.

Have you ever wanted to explore the demographics of word usage on Twitter? Well, here you go!

Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie was my Friday treat this week, and it was GOOD.

And that's all I have for you this week. I spent three whole mornings in UAE government ministries this week (Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday, Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, and the SDNR on Wednesdsay) so I wasn't able to click on all the good stuff out there.

BYU-Idaho's official position on skinny jeans

2011-12-08T16:29:00.001+04:00

YOU GUYS. I thought the glory days of self-righteous arguments about the immodesty of one-strap backpacks were over. Turns out, they're alive and well, at least at BYU-Idaho, but they've moved on to skinny jeans. Behold.

That article at once fills me with indignation and glee. Indignation, because who the HECK FIRE does that guy think he is, treating Miss Rachel Vermillion like that? It must have been humiliating.

And then glee, because I am thoroughly enjoying the firestorm that has erupted around this incident, but only because most people (even the Mormons!) are saying that Miss Vermillion should have been able to take her test. I'm glad to know there are still right-minded individuals out there.

Gosh, there is so much more to say:

- Pants show the shape of your legs, pretty much no matter what. Sorry, that's how it is.

- I can't believe I have now experienced James 1:6 being applied to skinny jeans. Again, I have a love/hate relationship with this (love, because it is just so crazy, and hate, for the same reason).

- I am really trying to hold back on judging the male employee but he sure seems like a jerk. I would love to hear his side of the story, like maybe he had a quota for the number of women he had to turn away and it was getting late? Ha ha.

- In my days at the BYU, we mostly heard complaints from the men about being turned away from the Testing Center for too much facial hair. I guess times have changed.

- I swear I heard a story once about when jeans were not allowed at the BYU (yes, really) and a woman wearing them was denied entry to the Testing Center. So she took off her jeans and buttoned up her long coat and went in to take her test like that. If true, that is AWESOME.

Sorry if this post didn't make sense to anyone who is not a Mormon. I have class in 20 minutes so I didn't have time to explain, but I really wanted to get this particular piece of hilarity out there.

PS - here is "the official position of BYU-Idaho on skinny jeans." I can't believe that phrase even exists!

My quest is almost over

2011-12-07T14:33:00.001+04:00

For almost a year now, I've been attempting to capture that most elusive prey, the Certificate of Degree Equivalency from the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in Abu Dhabi. Basically, I need the UAE to recognize that I came by my BA honestly, and certify said fact to the American University of Sharjah, so I can continue to study for my master's degree. AUS has kindly granted two or three extensions for me to keep working on the process, because like I said, it's taken me almost a year. SO FAR - I'm not even done.

Anyway, this post is not about that whole process. If you're relieved to hear that, sorry, because a post about that whole process is coming, soon. Today, I'm going to tell you about an unexpected hiccup in the process, a mere blip on the radar of the hunt for the Certificate of Degree Equivalency, a single morning in the year of my quest.

The Ministry of Higher Education in Abu Dhabi said that there was an additional, unexpected hoop for me to jump through, and that was a visit to the bowels of the Sharjah Directorate of Naturalisation and Residency. Why? Well, to prove that this is my first period of residency in the UAE, of course! I'm sure it's really obvious why I would need that information in order to get a master's degree here, so I won't even bother explaining. Ahem.

So I got myself down to the SDNR (which was positively bustling with people) and walked into probably five separate buildings within the compound before finding someone who did NOT send me somewhere else. Actually, I take that back - the place where I ended up getting help actually did try to send me somewhere else, but I had already been there, so. Maybe that's how you lose the game. In any case, I finally had an employee who was going to help me. He walked me over to a different building and talked with a whole bunch of people and then sat near (not with) me while the process continued. I really felt taken care of, like I had an advocate for my cause, except maybe he just really didn't want to go back to his office. In any case, it was nice.

But then that office sent me somewhere else, and my minder had to leave. I was on my own again, until I was again taken under an employee's wing in that new building. It was the same deal - he walked with me everywhere, he carried my paperwork, he did all the talking, and he explained the process to me (well, the "what," not the "why"). The only thing he didn't explain was why four military men (with blue uniforms adorned by epaulets and stars and patches) had to spend a good ten minutes discussing my situation.

My favorite part of the whole morning was when I was finally getting the papers I needed and the three ladies behind the desk asked me how I did my hair. I undid it to show them and they were fascinated with the spin pins I was using to secure it:

Then they asked me to turn around and re-style my hair so they could see how I did it. They literally gasped when it was done. Then they had me take the pins out again so one of them could take a picture of them. I offered - genuinely - to just give them to her, but she said she had friends in the US who could get some for her.

The paperwork that I needed is as done as I could get it. My minder left it on the director's desk for him to fax to Abu Dhabi, and I was dismissed. I have to say, as annoying as it was to spend an entire morning at the SDNR, and even if the process was slow and unclear, the people were all really nice. Anytime I had to walk to a different building with my minders, our progress was hindered by all the hellos they had to say to friends and coworkers. And you can't just say "hi" and keep walking - you have to pause and grasp hands, or pause and kiss cheeks, or pause and ask after their health.

Plus, I got to spend a long time in this waiting room:

Does your local immigration office have a gramophone and a stuffed falcon on display? I submit that it does not. The end.

Dubai's version of swimming pool deaths

2011-12-06T20:51:00.001+04:00

I read the Gulf News online a few times a week, and the headlines there don't refresh in any systematic way. Sometimes old stories stay up there for a week or two and are then replaced with a slew of new stuff all at once (in its physical form, it's a daily paper, so I'm not sure why the online version is so irregular). I thought that's what was going on when I kept seeing all these headlines about little kids falling to their deaths from high-rise buildings. I honestly believed it was all one article about one kid who fell out of a window a few weeks ago.

Sadly, I realized today that all these headlines have referred to different children falling out of different windows. There have been FIVE such deaths in the last month, in addition to the double window-fall-death that happened in September.

I guess this is Dubai's version of swimming pool deaths (which I don't hear much about, by the way, though it does happen occasionally). So sad. When we lived in Cairo in a sixth-floor apartment with a balcony, the girls weren't allowed on it unless Jeremy or I was RIGHT. THERE. Even then, I always got the heebie jeebies if they got too close to the railings. At times I felt like I was being too vigilant, but now I'm glad I was. So sad.

The winter charade

2011-12-05T14:36:00.001+04:00

Winter is almost here. For many of you, that means below-freezing temperatures, snow, and maybe even some school cancellations. Others of you have been dealing with that stuff for weeks now.

For those of us in the UAE, winter means that we all participate in the charade that it is cold now. We do this by wearing sweaters and occasionally scarves and sometimes even a coat (!), especially in the mornings. This morning, Magdalena rode her bike to school wearing short sleeves and shorts. Somehow, it felt wrong to have her do that in December, so I put a jacket on her for show. Never mind that it was probably about 80 degrees outside, or close to it.

Still, I eat up this season of reduced temperatures. I've paid careful attention to all four seasons and I don't think it's as bad as some people would have had us believe before we moved here. We heard all kinds of horror stories, such as the legend that there are only two seasons here: summer, and really really hot summer.

The truth is that it's very nice weather here (in my opinion) for a good seven months. From about 15 October to 15 May, the weather does not adversely affect the business of your daily life (read: it's not so hot that you physically cannot walk around outside). And really, that's about as much as you can ask of a place. Consider: the non-brutal-wintery season of Ithaca lasted a similar length.

So I'm happy to have my seven months of gorgeous weather, even if it doesn't come with all the visual cues (or even the very low temperatures) of deep winter. And now if you see me wearing a sweater when it's 80 degrees outside, you'll know why.

December 2nd, outsourced

2011-12-02T09:37:00.001+04:00

It's possible that I'm as irrationally, fantastically upset about people who complain about babies crying on airplanes as those people are about...well, babies crying on airplanes. Here's a perspective from The Economist (and I'd like to highlight FP's lovely use of the term "uncontrollable rogue states of travel" to describe said crying babies).

I loved this: a Google Earth puzzle. I only got 5/25 correct but the fun was in the journey, not the score.

Arizona state senator: Herman Cain has not sexually harassed me, even though I am attractive. REALLY. [HT Eric D. Snider]

If you're looking for some Christmas gifts for your children, here are five great toys! [HT a bunch of my friends on FB]

This article really resonated with me - it's almost like she's articulating the feelings about the Breaking Dawn movie that I couldn't express on my own.

"Mormon disco ball" is now the first item on my Christmas list. Thank you, video. [HT Andrew]

I saw this Nicolas Cage Serbian biology textbook cover on its own, completely without context, about a week ago. I think the background story actually makes it LESS funny, but whatever.

NaBloPoMo is over

2011-12-01T21:29:00.001+04:00

Another November, another NaBloPoMo done. I made it through all thirty days, but I came pretty close to not posting on two or three of them. I pre-posted (had Blogger automatically publish a post) on two days while we were camping in the Empty Quarter. I also almost consider the post I wrote about Bilingual Education to be cheating, since it was more to help me study than to contribute meaningful content to the blog.

So really, I think NaBloPoMo was easier than ever for me this year, even with my sometimes loaded schedule. Living in a foreign country provides endless fodder for blog posts, I guess. There's always something I can say about this crazy place called the UAE.

The truth is that I love NaBloPoMo more for what I get than what I give. I love reading blog updates from many friends who don't post regularly during the rest of the year. I also get to read my parents' blogs, which is nice because I get to hear stories I've never heard before. I don't think there was ever a day where I lacked for something good to read on my Google Reader queue. Thanks, everyone.

Here's to next year!

Breakfast cereal in the UAE

2011-11-30T15:22:00.001+04:00

It's been a while since I did any reconnaissance work at the grocery store. How about we talk about breakfast cereal for the last day of NaBloPoMo?

Except for my very early childhood (where I can remember eating homemade bran muffins for breakfast), cereal has been the standard first meal of the day. I guess you could almost say I was addicted to the stuff - if I didn't have a bowl of some kind of flaked or squared or circled grain in a bowl with milk, it was like my day hadn't started yet.

There are a lot of food situations in foreign countries that I've adapted to with considerable aplomb. Weaning myself off breakfast cereal hasn't been one of them. In Russia, we ate weird European mueslis but it was close enough. In Syria, the pickings were very, very slim, and it says a lot about my dedication to breakfast cereal that we choked down ghastly Egyptian cornflakes each morning while we lived there. In Jordan, we reaped a bountiful harvest of expired Lucky Charms boxes that lasted us for a few months. Those were good times.

Here in the UAE, there is more breakfast cereal selection than I've ever seen in my entire existence abroad. There may even be more than in the US. And yet. It's a shame that a lot of it is stuff like this:

Have you ever seen such a large collection of unabashedly sugary cereals? I submit that you have not, because AYE CARAMBA. It was bad enough when we first moved here, but ever since I read What to Eat, I can't look at these things without experiencing a wave of horror at what is considered to be a breakfast food (or a food, period).

The selection continues. I tend to stick with Multigrain Cheerios, Shreddies, and sometimes Rice Krispies, because those cereals at least give the appearance of being non-sugary (just don't look at the nutrition label).

Farther down, you start moving into bran flakes territory. I have tried a lot of these cereals and they are almost all disgusting. Especially the Carrefour brand stuff, yeesh.

This is the selection of muesli. The Jordan's brand is really good and it has no added anything. The ingredients are just oats and dried fruit. Sometimes I eat it with plain yogurt, and that takes it up a notch.

The abysmal breakfast cereal choices here have finally weaned me from my habit. These days for breakfast, I sometimes have oatmeal or bread with peanut butter. What I never, ever have is Weetabix. That cereal is so horrifyingly disgusting, I cannot even imagine anyone choking it down.

If I go to Spinney's I try to keep a clear eye for shredded wheat, which sometimes deigns to grace the shelves in the breakfast aisle. Sigh. Should I just give in and eat Nestle Crunch cereal for breakfast??

Maps, mines, and Bear Grylls

2011-11-29T21:18:00.001+04:00

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Just what you'd expect from a book about maps by Ken Jennings: pure, nerdy brilliance. I especially enjoyed how he related the concept of imprinting to humans and the places we grow up in (page 15). Plus, you know he's a great writer since he can make even his super-smart self come across as being totally humble and relatable.

33 Men Inside the Miraculous Survival and Dramatic Rescue of the Chilean Miners by Jonathan Franklin

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I feel like I missed out on the whole "Los 33" Chilean Miner thing because the time period in which it took place happened to span exactly the time period in which we were moving our lives over to the UAE. So when the miners were rescued, it was kind of a "huh?" moment for me, rather than a huge big emotional deal. That made me sad, so I sought out this book. I thought it might be fantastic like Alive and Miracle in the Andes (and the situations are shockingly similar, even down to the length of the separate ordeals).

However, I kind of wish I'd just read the Wikipedia article instead. The book didn't really have any additional insight and it certainly wasn't written any better. Oh well.

Mud, Sweat and Tears by Bear Grylls

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Uh, yes, I did read this book. In fact, I was the one who requested the AUS library to acquire it (you're welcome, Sharjah), but Jeremy got to it before me. I enjoy watching Man vs. Wild if someone else has it on. I enjoy BG's tweets on Twitter. I enjoyed reading this book. He seems like a really genuine guy who has had some amazing adventures and wrote a decent book about it that sounds like his voice in your head when you read it. No complaints. If I were an adolescent or teenaged boy, I think I would have DEVOURED this book. In fact, there should be a Bear Grylls merit badge that could be earned just from reading it (he is Chief Scout, after all).

UAE National Day is approaching

2011-11-28T21:14:00.001+04:00

I think some people out there assume that the United States has a monopoly on overt, gaudy displays of flag-based country worship. NOT SO. UAE National Day is on December 2nd, and it's the 40th anniversary so everything is extra decked out. My kids' new favorite car game is seeing who can spot the most flags out their window as we drive through town. Take a look (and keep in mind that I snapped most of these photos while driving, thanks):

A villa on the Sharjah/Ajman border.

Where do you even get flags that big??

We stopped at "The Discounts" in Ajman to buy some UAE-flag-ified hairbows and they were all advertising their National Day wares.

Last year for National Day, I remember a lot of flags attached to the hoods and windows of cars in dubious manners (like they rolled down the window, stuck the edge of the flag in, and rolled it back up). This year, people are getting these fancy vinyl decals on their windows. Very nice.

Even Carrefour in Ajman is getting into the action, selling UAE...cowboy hats?

More Carrefour decorations.

Another villa with another flag.

Sorry, there was just no way to crop the dripping bird poo out of this one. The flags are awesome enough that I included this photo anyway.

I think this is officially the longest flag I've seen, at least placed horizontally (by Festival City there are some really long vertical ones).

Sharjah police cars have been outfitted with the official 40th anniversary design.

This is on campus at the women's dorm reception center.

Oh, and this is Miriam in her UAE flag dress and sunglasses that we got at The Discounts. I got really excited about the dress and told Jeremy that if we ever get souvenirs for anyone ever again (a practice we called off several years ago), it should be this. But he reminded me that in the US, this would just look like a Mexican dress. Of course he's right.

In addition to the flags and banners, there are lots of red/white/green lights around town. You could almost mistake them for Christmas decorations, actually. I'm really excited for National Day this year, and what's interesting is that it's not just the Emiratis who are celebrating it. A lot of us expats seem to be getting into it, too. Perhaps the fact that the government just decreed Thursday a holiday from private AND public sector work has something to do with it.

Raising Daniel

2011-11-27T17:55:00.001+04:00

Yesterday I wrote about my experience growing up with a disabled older brother. My mom read that post and sent me the following, re: raising a disabled child. Keep in mind that she did all this almost entirely without the support network that the internet can give these days. It must have been very lonely at times.

No parent can be prepared for the bombshell of learning their child is severely disabled.   You can only accept and move forward by learning all you can, finding all the helps you can, and depending upon our loving Heavenly Father for guidance. Normalizing the experience is beneficial to the child and to the family. I've seen in a few families where perhaps out of guilt or unrealistic expectations, a parent throws every possible family resource toward the one child, leaving the others on the fringe. Of course we should do our best for the disabled child, but neglecting the others is a mistake.

A parent's perspective changes when a disabled child joins the family. It was difficult for me to tolerate other parents worrying that their child wasn't walking at a year or complaining that they weren't out of diapers yet at age 3. Or mentioning how tiny my baby was, and that their child was "bigger than that when he was born."    I know I was over-sensitive because we did not have a diagnosis for Daniel until he was 5 1/2 years old.   Since his birth I had been blamed by doctors for his non-development, and being only 23 at the time, it was a hard pill to swallow. There were times when I lay in bed at night going over every single day of the pregnancy, trying to figure out what I ate or touched or breathed that would have caused his condition. One doc all but accused me of lying when I said I had never taken alcohol during the pregnancy (this in response to his direct question).   It was years before I realized he suspected FAS. And this sounds crazy, but for a short period I was envious of a friend whose child was born Down Syndrome. It's an easily recognized syndrome, there is a definitive genetic test for it, and there are plenty of programs to help these children. I had to fight and beg for services for Daniel.

The summer he turned 5 I was given a strong impression to seek a second opinion. I mean, we had spent a huge amount of time in medical facilities trying to figure things out, yet it was time to pursue another course.   Within a short time of taking action, we were given a diagnosis by Dr. Opitz from Shodair Children's Hospital in Helena Montana, a world-renown expert on rare syndromes. I was walking on air. All the guilt and blame went out the window and we suddenly knew what we were working with. We were able to connect with the CdLS Foundation for help and understanding.

All through the years I have been amazed at how Daniel being Daniel has blessed our lives and others.   There have been extremely difficult times and those may come again.   But he brings out the best in many people.   Time after time people have looked after him in times of crisis. They have called me when they've seen him struggling in public, or brought him home when he has been confused or had a seizure. He has a group of men at church to talk sports with. Recently we attended another ward's sacrament meeting and afterwards I noticed a sister pushing her way towards us through the crowd. She went straight to Daniel to ask him how he was doing!--I had never seen her before but he knew her from some activities he's involved in.   There are angels in our midst.

When our Bishop asked Daniel to serve a local mission for 6 months, we were given the choice of where he could serve. Even though it was 1 hour 40 minutes away by bus/train, I felt the Bishop's Storehouse was the place he should be.   But no way could he manage that commute and how vulnerable he would be if he had a seizure during that time. We exercised faith and asked Heavenly Father to look out for him. He had a fabulous 6 months and never once had a seizure at the Storehouse or on his commute. This kind of experience is commonplace in Daniel's life. Heavenly Father's hand is manifest through him.

As for [Bridget's] relationship with Daniel, [she] got the brunt of his animosity because [she was] the next youngest child. [She] grew and matured and passed him up in activities and opportunities. I am positive that's why he acted the way he did. Even when [she was] tiny he was after [her]. He cut off [her] hair one time, and another time scraped [her] face with his fork. And so on. And [her] lotion/shampoo/conditioner smells didn't help . . .

Too many times other women have said to me, "I could never do what you do" or "I'm glad it's you and not me."   In some ways I feel a bit sorry for them, because they don't know what I know, and they miss out on marvelous and sweet experiences. But I know if the same challenge was presented to them by Heavenly Father, they would take it and run with it. That is the choice.

Life is beautiful!

Growing up with Daniel

2011-11-26T15:13:00.001+04:00

I've mentioned elsewhere that my older brother Daniel was born with Cornelia de Lange Syndrome. Growing up with a disabled sibling was all I ever knew, so it was my normal.

But a few weeks ago, I was talking with a friend whose second child has been diagnosed with Joubert Syndrome. She is understandably worried about her future as a mother of a special needs child, and the effect this diagnosis will have on family dynamics with her other child. She asked me how it felt to grow up in the shadow of a CdLS brother.

What's amazing to me is that I don't know that I had ever really thought of how it felt. Like I said, it was all I knew. But looking back, I realize that it did not adversely affect me, at least not on the whole (just don't ask me to tell you about the time Daniel sat behind me in Primary and made me cry by poking pushpins into my back). I think I had a positive experience as a CdLS sibling for two reasons:

1. My personality. Where it gets tricky is when I try to discern whether my personality was innately particularly well adapted to dealing with a high-needs older brother, or if my personality developed the way it did to cope with said situation. It's anyone's guess, really. In any case, I didn't seem to mind being hauled around with my mom and brother to doctor appointments and special schools. In fact, I believe I learned to read in the library at one of those special needs schools.

2. My mom. I don't know how she did it, but she managed to not let Daniel's problems cast a shadow over the rest of our family. Our world did not revolve around his disability, even though I knew that it cost her a lot of time and effort to fight for every victory she achieved on his behalf, like getting him through high school in the public school system. I think it would have been easier for her to say the rest of us kids couldn't do this or that because of Daniel and his situation, but I can't recall a time that she ever took that out.

I do think that Daniel and I had a more turbulent brother/sister relationship than normal. For most of my childhood, Daniel seemed to hate and resent me, and it was sometimes hard to flourish in that atmosphere. It was the weirdest thing, though - in 1995, when our family dog ran into the street and got hit by a car, and Daniel saw me crying about it, he was nice to me for an entire year. To this day, I have no explanation for that fluke year of peace in our relationship, but whatever. After that, we went back to our uneasy semi-truce. It is a fact that even when I drove to high school, Daniel refused to ride in my car and took the bus instead.

Anyway, all of this is to say that Daniel goes to a retreat house for disabled adults every once in a while. It's called Martha's Place, and they just put out a new video describing their services. My mom and Daniel are featured in it a few times. It's worth a watch for that reason, and also because these are good people providing an awesome service to families of special needs children who are now grown. Take a look.

November 25th, outsourced

2011-11-25T14:52:00.001+04:00

NERD ALERT: I'm re-reading The Master and Margarita, mostly in English but with the Russian by my side, available for constant comparison. That's why I'm fascinated with this discussion about which English translation is better. Apparently I am reading the much-mocked Glenny (though to be honest, I think it has some quirky, old-timey charm about it). I think next time I'll go with the Ginsberg. /NERD ALERT

OK, maybe the nerd alert isn't quite over yet: check out this guide to your favorite map projections.

Here are some m ore amazing pictures of the stuff going down in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

I will never take a bendy straw for granted again.

OK, I get that what the pepper-spraying cop did was a disproportional response at best. But here's some context for you.

I don't know that I have ever seen such an incredible collection of photographs! I'm so glad I'm not the one who has to decide which one is best. And remind me to never travel to Sindh, Pakistan, EVER (see picture #8).

It had been a while since I'd watched Hamish and Andy practicing their ghosting, or their three-step hiding game. So I watched it again. [HT a few years ago, Scotty]

I can't stop giggling at this article from The Onion: "Area Father Praised For Helping Raise Family."

Wait, so they're Amish, and it's hair attacks, and the guy's name is Mullet...? I can't...the words just...whaaaaaaa? [HT BCC]

Happy (un) Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T08:54:00.001+04:00

It doesn't really seem like Thanksgiving this year. Jeremy and I both have work, the girls both have school, and in addition, I'm invigilating (don't be alarmed - that's what they call 'proctoring' here) a midterm this afternoon, after which I have class until 8pm. Happy Thanksgiving to me!

I'm not really complaining. After all, we got a week off earlier this month for a holiday we don't celebrate, and we enjoyed our time. It's only when it comes around to the American holidays that I feel like pouting because it's business as usual in the UAE at large. The best deal we ever had was at the embassy in Moscow. There, they gave us the Russian holidays AND the American holidays.

Anyway, we're having Thanksgiving dinner with friends on Saturday afternoon. I can't wait!

Middle School

2011-11-23T20:30:00.001+04:00

Through two flukes of circumstance, I only attended Middle School for one year. First, the year that I started seventh grade was the same year the school district switched over to the 6/7/8 middle school model, from the previous 7/8/9 junior high version. That meant that the fifth-graders and sixth-graders graduated from elementary school at the same time that year (it was 1994). In any case, I would have already had a reduced 2-year sentence to middle school (grades 7 and 8), except that I also ended up skipping the eighth grade. So that's how I only attended Middle School for one year.

And to be honest, I don't know that I've ever spent more than a few moments put together thinking about my time in seventh grade. If you look through my Flashback Fridays, even, there aren't many (if any) stories from that period. Middle School was hardly a blip on the radar for me and I never thought to cast my mind back to my time there.

UNTIL. Then I listened to This American Life's Middle School episode. All of a sudden, the memories came flooding back. The awkwardness. The insecurity. The changing attitudes and moral principles and life plans and (shudder) bodies. The dances. But mostly the awkwardness. Honestly, I don't know how anyone makes it through middle school unscathed. I am so glad I only had to do it for one year and I wish everyone else could have had the same privilege. Not that high school is a rainbow-striped happy land of sunshine and flowers, but on some level, at least, it's a better, kinder world than middle school when nobody knows who they are but they're all out to prove...well, something.

In middle school, I was worried I wouldn't find a locker partner, and worried that when I did find one she would be cooler than me, and worried about whose locker would be next to me, and worried about changing in front of people for gym class, and worried about all the kids who came to middle school from those other elementary schools and maybe they were all cooler than me and my friends. I was worried about my clothes because they consisted entirely of hand-me-downs from my two older brothers. I loved Spanish class and I excelled in it but I had to rein it in so my classmates didn't think I was too good, you know? I hated having to do that. I read the entire Spanish textbook on my own in my spare time, then pretended I didn't know stuff in class and took care to miss a question or two on each test in case anyone saw my scores.

I hated how mean the boys got in middle school and I worried that I didn't understand their dirty jokes, that I'd laugh at something I shouldn't or not laugh at something totally innocent and everyone would make fun of me. I was scared of the eighth-graders who appeared to be members of some kind of gang (but who probably weren't...maybe?). I never looked forward to lunch time and the uncertainty about where to sit (I still almost dry-heave just thinking about that anxiety). If I brought a lunch from home, I worried that it wasn't cool enough. If I brought money to buy something from the lunch line, I worried about choosing the coolest items (a bagel with cream cheese, tater tots, or these tasteless cardboard packaged chocolate chip cookies were the only acceptable choices, and YES I STILL REMEMBER THAT).

I wanted out of there, and thanks be to God, I got out of there in one year flat.

The TAL podcast reminded me of all that, but it also reminded me that I am not alone in my feelings about middle school. Heck, even the middle schoolers apparently feel that way. And I wish them strength on their journey through that difficult period of life. Because holy cow, they're going to need it.

Maybe it was the Basques

2011-11-22T21:07:00.001+04:00

My friend Nancy called my attention to the fact that a jewelry store in Provo was robbed on Monday. In fact, it's the very same jewelry store where Jeremy and I got our engagement/wedding rings.

I read through the article and one part really caught my attention. It's the part where the men were "described as being about 5 feet 10 inches tall with olive complexions, and they spoke in a language the clerks didn't recognize." Now, I understand that the only witnesses were tied up and gagged at the time, but how obscure does a language have to be for you to not recognize it? I am honestly wondering. I am not poking fun here. I remember a few weeks ago at IKEA there was a lady in front of me in line speaking a language that I could not have placed on the globe to save my life. I could not have told you if it was a Romance language, or Germanic, or Slavic, or anything. I finally decided it was Basque so I wouldn't have to think about it anymore (Basque is famously a language isolate, meaning it doesn't seem to be related to any other language now extant on earth).

So maybe the robbers were Basque, too. Who knows? The bigger issue here is (as Jeremy pointed out) that the article ends with a police officer's assessment that the crime "does not sound random. This sounds like they planned it." Well, yeah.

Brain dump re: diglossia

2011-11-21T09:03:00.000+04:00

I think one of the most cited linguistic texts ever is Ferguson's 1959 treatise on a phenomenon called diglossia. It's been on my mind lately because I have a midterm in my Bilingual Education class on Tuesday and I'm trying to wrap my head around everything we've learned in the last few months. From what I understand via the legends surrounding this particular professor, we are all going to fail the midterm. All of us. And then we will pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off...and beg for a curve.

One of the texts for this class has been Ofelia Garcia's Bilingual Education for the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. My classmates complain about the book a lot because the text style is not the most lucid out there. Also, the author really has a chip on her shoulder about oppressed language minorities and those dang pasty United Statesian monolinguals imposing their bigoted ignorance on all the cute little Mexican kids and blah blah blah. It may get my blood boiling every once in a while, but at least it is engaging, you know? I quite liked having a textbook with ATTITUDE and SASS. Anyway, about two weeks ago, we switched to Baker's Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, which is much more vanilla. Oh well.

Back to diglossia. In 1959, Ferguson got to writing about how some societies display signs of bilingualism on a macro level, where two varieties of one language are in use in mutually exclusive, clearly defined, functionally separate contexts. Take, for example, oh I don't know, Arabia. There's the "high" variety of Arabic, MSA, which is used in the context of media and education and literacy. Then there's the "low" variety of Arabic, or colloquial dialect, which is used in everyday real life. If you use MSA in a context normally reserved for the colloquial, they're all going to laugh at you. Similarly, if you use colloquial in an MSA context, they're all going to laugh at you. It's a system that's been in use for a long time, but it's showing signs of leakage. More on that in a minute.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a guy named Fishman extended Ferguson's diglossia principle and said that diglossia can occur even between two languages, not just varieties within a language. So then you have societies where there is bilingualism with diglossia, and bilingualism but not diglossia, and diglossia without bilingualism, and neither diglossia nor bilingualism. It's all a rich tapestry.

However, these days you can't go around attaching labels like "high" and "low" to languages or dialects without offending people. So Fishman politically corrected the model of diglossia and moved away from using the term to describe language hierarchies as normal, accepted structures. Just because colloquial Arabic occupies the so-called "low" slot doesn't mean it is inherently less valuable than the "high" MSA, so let's do away with those archaic, harmful designations. Furthermore, those mutually exclusive, clearly defined, functionally separate contexts I mentioned earlier are leaking. These days, you can find printed material in the colloquial dialects of Arabic (HALLELUJAH) and people on TV (including Arab leaders trying not to be deposed) mixing in colloquial with MSA.

So now we talk about "multilingualism," or "transglossia" in societies, not diglossia. These terms more accurately describe the "stable, yet dynamic" functions of two or more languages in society (Garcia, 2009, p. 79). We've got Paraguay (Spanish/Guarini), Luxemburg (French/German/Luxemburgish (!)), Switzerland (French/German/Italian), Haiti (French/Haitian Creole), Lebanon (Arabic/English/French), etc.

Doesn't all this make the US sound like the most boring place on earth, linguistically speaking? Maybe it's just Garcia's disgust with monolinguals rubbing off on me, but what is our deal, anyway? Why on earth have some states actually outlawed bilingual education in their schools? What are we so afraid of?

On the other hand, I wish Garcia would cool her jets a little. There are plenty of people in the US who just want to learn English, and that is FINE. There are kids in Kansas who will never go anywhere but Kansas and we should not turn up our noses at them just because they are not chomping at the bit to learn Mandarin Chinese. Maybe this sounds ethnocentric, but I'm really just trying to be inclusive: if someone only speaks English, and it's not for lack of opportunity to study another language, and it's not because they hate other nations, and they're just going to live and travel within the (expansive!) United States quite happily for the rest of their lives, maybe that's ok. Sometimes I get tired of Europeans imposing their linguistic and geographical paradigms on us Americans. You guys, our country is huge, and sometimes we have to drive for hours and hours just to get to another state. It's not like Europe where you can hit three countries in two hours. Besides, at least allow Americans the satisfaction of knowing that even if they only do speak one language (English), at least they picked a useful one, right?

But yes, it would be more exciting if the US experienced more ~~diglossia~~ multilingualism or transglossia. Don't you think?

And that, my friends, is how you turn studying for a midterm into writing a blog post for NaBloPoMo.

10-year marriage review

2011-11-20T12:23:00.001+04:00

Ten years ago today, Jeremy and I got married. Let's take a look at how that's going for us, shall we?

I married Jeremy for a lot of reasons, including because he always made me laugh. Status: he still always makes me laugh. With some of the exact same jokes as ten years ago, even!

Another reason I married Jeremy is because I knew he came with a lifetime of international adventure guarantee. Status: Yep, we've had a lot of international adventures, and I couldn't be happier. (Note: a lot of people have assumed that Jeremy sprung the whole international living thing on me after we were married. Fact: that is not true. I went into this with my eyes wide open, people.)

I loved Jeremy because he was a nerdy linguist like me. Status: he is still a nerdy linguist (and I still love him). A nerdy linguist with approximately four more degrees than when I first met him, no less. (He technically has two master's degrees. Linguists do not get any nerdier than that.)

Of course, I also married Jeremy because I knew he would be fabulously wealthy right out of his undergrad degree. Status: hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. But you know, a lot of people go to college for seven years. And Jeremy IS a doctor, so. I'm ok with Jeremy not making absurdly huge amounts of money as long as he's ok with being married to a cheapskate.

Before we got married, people were fond of telling us that the first year would be the hardest. Those people were liars. Turns out, the first year was AWESOME. Now, I'm not about to recommend that everyone hop up and move to Russia six weeks into their marriage, where they will be isolated from any and all family members and have to rely entirely on each other to hack out a living in one of the bleakest places on earth, but...HOP UP AND MOVE TO RUSSIA. Some things about that year sucked, but I treasure our time in Russia for the solid family foundation we built there. It was just Jeremy and Bridget, Team Walker/Palmer against the world.

I don't think there is a universal part of marriage that you can point to and say, "that is the hardest." But high up on the list has to be having children. Jeremy and I were married for almost four years before Miriam was born. She was a long time in coming, and very much wanted and yearned for. And she completely rocked our world. Sometimes you can judge the strength of your commitment to your spouse by how often you take the time to go on dates together. I think the more meaningful tests come at 3.30 in the morning when the baby is up for the seventeenth time that night and spit-up/vomit/poo is involved somehow and you have to discuss with your spouse, right then and there, what to do about it.

A final note: you may recall that I wrote recently about turning 30 years old, and now I am writing about my tenth wedding anniversary. So yes, I got married when I was 20. And what of it? Do I think 20 is a terrifyingly young age to get married? Absolutely. I will require my own daughters to be at least 45, thanks. But in my defense, I was a more robust 20 than you might think (weren't we all, right?). I got engaged in October, married in November, and then graduated from the BYU in December. I knew what I wanted out of life, so I was ready when it came time to take it to the next level with Jeremy.

And I'm so glad I did! Happy anniversary to us.

By the way, if this isn't enough sap for you, feel free to check out the When Bridget Met Jeremy saga.

Kindle?

2011-11-19T19:29:00.001+04:00

I've been considering buying a Kindle for a few months now. It would really fit with our lifestyle: when your possessions are valued by their weight, books take up more than their share of poundage (but only just). And it would be nice to be able to access e-books that I can't get here in the form of regular books. Still, every time I get to seriously thinking about it, I decide I'm not going to buy one.

But then. For some reason I was on Amazon and I typed in the name of one of my Linguistics textbooks. It came up as being available in Kindle format and the price was $10. TEN DOLLARS. Do you know how much I paid for the huge, hulking, physical book at the AUS bookstore here? Well, it was more than ten dollars. All of a sudden, the Kindle is a lot more attractive to me.

However, one of my main complaints about the Kindle is that while it supports our lifestyle of living abroad where English books are not always available, as well as acquiring books that don't weigh anything, I don't like that it encourages purchasing books (aside from textbooks, anyway). I am not one of those people who, you know, buys books. I get them from the library, or I borrow them, or I (ok, ok) buy them at the library clearance sale for 50 cents. But I almost never go to a bookstore and pay upwards of $15 on a book, even though I love books forever and ever and they are very dear to my heart. So if I bought a Kindle, then I'd have to buy books. And I don't know if I'm down with that.

Does anyone who has a Kindle feel like convincing me either way? Does the availability of cheap(er) textbooks make it worth it?

November 18th, outsourced

2011-11-17T21:24:00.001+04:00

OK, so maybe this is more of an advertisement than a news article, but the Gulf News recently ran a piece about rental properties in the tallest building in the world. It's worth a gander to see what life on the other side is like. Also: what happens when you flush a toilet in the Burj Khalifa? [HT on that second article, Andrew]

For some reason, this one lady gets any SMS messages intended for any person named Leila that are misdirected by the senders. She started a blog to document the weird, one-sided conversations she has with hundreds of strangers.

This is the most coherent, lucid, nuanced article about - for sad lack of a better term - Mormon Mommy Bloggers that I've ever read. The author really gets it, you know? [HT Lyse]

I had a few good laughs looking through this collection of LIFE magazine's worst covers ever. Seriously, some of them are SO BAD. [HT Kathy]

Of these 11 Sounds That Your Kids Have Probably Never Heard, I can personally remember seven. How about you? [HT BCC]

I know where I'll be getting the bulk of my information about the 2012 presidential candidates.

I mentioned a few Amazon review bombs before. Here is a new one to add to the list (check out the user-submitted photos). [HT Jeremy]

So, um, Jeremy and I are still rabid fans of Out of the Wild: Venezuela and it's possible that we make an effort to check up on the cast members' lives from time to time (via Twitter, FB, Google searches, etc.). This video (featuring Ryan and Nick) may not be interesting to you unless you've seen the show, but then again...maybe it will. [HT Jeremy]

Let it be known that Arab teenage boys like Twilight, too

2011-11-17T14:33:00.001+04:00

The new Twilight movie opens in the UAE today. I know this because almost every one of my students informed me of that fact as s/he walked in the classroom door this morning. Most of them are going to see it sometime this weekend, and that includes the boys. In fact, the boys were more excited about it than the girls. One of my students is going to see it with his two brothers. Another is going with a group of male friends. It's not like there are a lot of co-ed activities going on among Arab youth in the UAE or anything, so it's not unexpected that the men are going with other men instead of being dragged along by significant others. But I have to admit I was surprised to learn that it wasn't just hordes of teenage girls who were interested in Breaking Dawn.

As long as we're on the subject, did I tell the story on my blog a month ago about when I was asking my students about their weekend activities? One of my (female) students said she went to see a movie. I asked her which one. She said she didn't remember the name, but that it was the movie with "that very handsome actor." I told her that there were a lot of handsome actors. She said, "no, miss, the REALLY REALLY very handsome actor." Can you guess who she meant? The movie was Abduction, and the actor was - wait for it - Taylor Lautner. The funny thing is that most of the girls in the class knew exactly who she meant after the first "very handsome actor" bit.

In conclusion, I would like to say that I don't think I will go see Breaking Dawn in the theater. I can't even get through the trailer. Something about it really bothers me. I'm sure I will see it on video but in the meantime I bet my students will be able to fill the whole class period on Sunday morning with descriptions of how good/bad it was...and how handsome Taylor Lautner is, I guess.

ps - you are free to share whatever sentiments you have about the Twilight series in the comments. There is no judgement here.

Hazardous working conditions

2011-11-16T16:52:00.001+04:00

It's really amazing how much work I can get done in a single quiet morning when I'm home by myself. This happens on exactly one day a week, and I milk it for all it's worth. This morning, I plowed through a whole bunch of writing assignments for my Writing & Research Methods class, AND calculated a workload estimate for a master's thesis I'm editing (this semester's editing season has started already! I can't believe it). I was a machine.

Then the kids got home from school and things came screeching to a halt. I've been working on my only remaining active writing assignment (which is due tomorrow) for five hours now, and I've only just barely punched out a reasonable draft that I can work with. I was working for four hours on and off, of course, hacking out a sentence here and there between trips to the kitchen to get the girls a snack and trips to the bedroom to get a new pair of panties for the 3-year-old and trips to the playroom to break up squabbles. It's a miracle I've written down even one coherent thought, really.

Sometimes I get to thinking about trying to be a mom + grad student (or a mom + anything, really), and I realized that a lot of men would never stand for such working conditions:

She's a very cute workplace productivity hazard, but she definitely takes her toll. And I love that my "office" (= a corner of the living room) is constantly strewn with kid projects and toys and trails of sand from outside.

So what I finally did, to get a stretch of unbroken work time, was send the girls outside with a fun-size leftover-Halloween-candy Twix each, telling them it was a piece of meat and they were pioneer girls who had been walking on the Oregon Trail all day. They immediately grabbed some play dishes and headed out to the back alley to cook it up.

OK, OK, so I gave them each TWO Twix bars. I'm that desperate to get some writing done, all right??

Rest, at last

2011-11-15T21:05:00.001+04:00

As per Matthew's suggestion (in my post about hacking up NyQuil pills), I got myself to the pharmacy last night and procured some Toplexil. The description of its intended use said it was for dry, itchy coughs that persist especially at nighttime. Folks, that is ME. So I took some last night and had the best night's sleep since November 4th (before the onset of The Cough).

The night before, I had tried the Dextrolag I got from the doctor. It was ok, I guess. The taste of it was appalling, though. They love their medicinal syrups here, which works for me since I hate taking pills, but the color, aroma, and flavor of Dextrolag is exactly like that ghastly pink soap you only find in freeway rest area bathrooms.

So not only is Toplexil more effective for my purposes, but it tastes about a million times better. Like crème caramel, in fact. I found myself thinking about how good it tasted today and then I was immediately worried that I would slowly turn into Lily Bart from The House of Mirth. If you hear me arguing with myself about whether or not to have another sip of tincture of laudanum (or whatever it was), BE CONCERNED.

Goodnight!

The yellows, rescued

2011-11-13T20:57:00.001+04:00

On Friday, Magdalena spent a long time after church separating all the yellow pieces of construction paper from the pile, and then drawing a picture on each and every one of them. It was her magnum opus. As she worked, she stretched out each picture on the living room floor to show it off.

She enjoyed looking at her pictures and enhancing them with more coloring on Saturday.

Later that night, I was tidying up and somehow I grabbed her stack of papers and took it out with some other items to the neighborhood recycling bin. As I dumped it in the bin, I realized what I had just thrown away, but I thought it wasn't a big deal. The girls produce so much paper artwork that we couldn't possibly keep it all. I usually take photos of the best stuff and then recycle it (go ahead, judge me).

Well, yesterday after school, Magdalena started asking for "the yellows." I hedged and said that I had put them "somewhere," but under her persistent badgering and increasingly specific questioning, I finally had to cave and admit to her that I'd recycled them. She instantly burst into tears.

So - you guessed it - I grabbed a stepstool and the three of us headed out to the recycling bin (it's the size of a dumpster) at the end of our street. We were all relieved to see that the truck hadn't come yet. I fished around for a while and moved aside some larger bags of recycling items (THANK GOODNESS IT WAS NOT THE GARBAGE BIN) and spotted a pile of yellow papers at the very bottom. Miriam fetched a stick for me but I still couldn't quite maneuver them into my reach.

At that moment, some AUS operations employees passed by. I threw all shame and caution to the wind and asked them to - yes, really - help me fish out some papers from the recycling bin. The guy who volunteered to help was taller than I am and he was able to get at the stack of papers without too much additional trouble.

When he handed them to Magdalena, she clutched them to her chest and embraced them fervently. We all said thank you to the man who saved the day and then headed home to play with "the yellows," rescued, from the recycling bin.

Another entry in the "worst night's sleep" list

2011-11-13T14:23:00.001+04:00

So it turned out I did come down with a case of The Cough, and I still have it. It is slowly driving me insane.

Things came to a head late last night when I gave up trying to suppress my own freaking coughs while I attempted to sleep. Sometime around midnight, I went rooting around our medicine box looking for any spare pills of anything that might hold a shred of a promise of relief for me. Certain cough suppressants are controlled substances in this country, which means that unlike most other medicines (even stuff like antibiotics), you must have a prescription to purchase them - and then insurance doesn't cover it. I knew I wouldn't be able to go to the health clinic to get a prescription until the next morning.

I dug up two pills of generic brand NyQuil and noted happily that the ingredients included a cough suppressant. Unfortunately, I often choke on pills even as small as normal ibuprofen tablets, so I knew there was no way I was going to get the NyQuil softgels down.

So if you walked into my kitchen a little past midnight last night, you would have found me using a sharp knife to hack maniacally at a NyQuil softgel, trying to get at the sweet, suppressanty goodness inside. The end result was this:

Thankfully, I fell into a restless sleep soon after.

HOWEVER. A few hours later, I was woken up by the chirping of the smoke alarm in our hallway (did I mention I was sleeping on the couch at this point, to avoid disturbing Jeremy with my coughing? Well, I was). Our smoke alarms don't run out of batteries without putting up a fight - they chirp loudly every minute or so to let us know what's happening. Why the smoke alarm decided to run out of batteries last night, of all nights, and at that particular hour of night, of all particular hours, I have no idea. But it almost put me over the edge.

I was disoriented by the effects of the NyQuil but I dragged a stool over to the smoke alarm and tried to disconnect the battery. I was terrified that I would accidentally press the test button and set off the alarm. That didn't happen. I successfully removed the battery, but then the smoke alarm started chirping faster than before, in a continuous beeping pattern. So I re-connected the battery and resorted to desperate measures, namely, waking up Jeremy.

He took care of it, I went back to "sleep" (= that horrible NyQuil-induced haze) and woke up a couple of hours later, ready (or not) for a full day's work.

BLAH. Let's hope tonight is better. I went to the health clinic as soon as I got a break and the doctor prescribed me something called Dextrolag. Sounds promising...?

Before & After: the garden

2011-11-12T16:38:00.001+04:00

When we moved in to our house, our backyard was a pile of sand and our front garden was...well, also a pile of sand. Fortunately, Jeremy has developed quite the green thumb over the past 14 months, and he's put it to good use transforming our outdoor spaces.

Here's what our backyard used to look like:

Here is what it looks like now, 14 months later:

From one end of the porch...

...and then from the other end.

I can't name all the plants back there (Jeremy can), but we've got a few plumeria trees and a citrus tree and some jasmine and a grape vine and an aloe vera plant. The trellises are all hand-built by Jeremy. Most of the plants are from the Sharjah plant souq, but a few are from the Sharjah nursery.

We also have this happy little row of greenery along our back sliding doors (we only use one of the doors, so these plants don't get in our way).

The plants here include another tree that Jeremy is nursing back to health, a basil plant, some mint, and a sicus/ficus/I can't remember what it's called. The smallest pots are tomato and lemon seedlings that Jeremy started. He has a secret lab (as the girls and I call it) upstairs in his office with all kinds of little plant experiments, to see what will grow.

How about the front? Here is 14 months ago:

And here is today:

I love love love our front garden. I can see it from our kitchen window and it brings me great joy just to look at it. Again, I can't name everything here. I know there is bougainvillea and portulaca (I love that stuff) and another plumeria. Jeremy will have to name the rest. Not pictured is our beautiful morning glory plant that runs up one of the carport pillars. Miriam likes to count how many flowers are blooming each morning as she waits for the bus.

Jeremy already has so many skills that I wouldn't dare to expect excellence in gardening, but it turns out he has a way with greenery. One of our neighbors calls him "the tree whisperer," and it is a fact that one of the official Sharjah city gardeners once asked him for some cuttings. Thanks for the beautiful gardens, Jeremy!

11/11/11, Outsourced

2011-11-11T15:37:00.001+04:00

In case you missed it, I had some photographs featured in a Foreign Policy Photo Essay (A Grand Tour).

I don't know why this video is so funny. It just IS. [HT Eric D. Snider]

Who first used the term 'Arab Spring'?

Turns out, moms feel guilty a lot about untidy houses and neglecting their children. Well, DUH. A few hours after I read that article, we had some people over for dinner. The first thing one of our (male) guests said to me was, "Wow, your house is so clean!" I told him that was the nicest compliment he could have given me (besides "your children are so un-neglected!" I suppose).

Here's the latest flash mob, this time in the Dubai Airport. Jeremy and I are both suspicious of the amount of smiley-dancey people there. They must have been shipped in for the occasion, because there sure aren't that many around town naturally. [HT Mariko]

I swear, years before this article was ever written, I used to tell Jeremy how celebrity cartoon voice-over work didn't used to be a thing, until Robin Williams did the genie in Aladdin. Of course I was right. [HT Jeremy]

How does the world look when you map its languages using Twitter? Pretty dang AWESOME.

The rest of the links today have to do with Republican candidates for President. First, we have Romney looking at a fellow passenger on an airplane "blankly." Now, let's talk about this for a brief moment. On the one hand, I get that this lady was offended when Romney didn't take detailed notes of her health care reform plan. Romney chose to run for President and that means his leisure time is kind of public property. On the other hand, dude, we've all been there: sometimes you just want to sit in your seat and be quiet and still and not talk to your fellow passengers, OK?!!?!?

As for Huntsman, first we have his appearance on The Colbert Report. Then we have an article dissecting how much Chinese he speaks (answer, according to that article: not much). Then we have another article talking about those allegations and wondering if it really matters. I read all of the above and had my indignation all ready to bash out a reply about the improper use of the term fluency, and how proficiency is a better word, and register, and context, and blah blah blah. And then I read THIS article, and now I don't need to write a single word in reply because that article is amazing and everyone in the entire United States should read it forever and ever and commit it to memory. Amen. [HT Jeremy and Ashi]

Like family

2011-11-10T14:13:00.001+04:00

This morning, we dropped our kids off at a friend's house, and we won't pick them up until tomorrow. You see, our tenth wedding anniversary is coming up in a week or two and since it's right in the middle of the semester, we won't have a chance to properly celebrate. So Jeremy and I are having a free 24-hour vacation together, at home, for now, and during the break between semesters maybe we'll go somewhere more exciting.

(Perhaps I should have mentioned at the beginning of this post - or five days ago - that we've been off work all this week in honor of Eid al-Adha. Real life starts again on Sunday.)

The girls went to the friend's house without looking back, and Jeremy and I debated for a minute about what we wanted to do for breakfast/lunch. Should we go out to eat? I was only interested in a breakfast-all-day type restaurant. Specifically, I wanted Lucille's in Cairo to suddenly be transported to Dubai. Lucille's is the kind of restaurant where you can spend $30 on breakfast and it's totally worth it. There's no Lucille's here, though, so we ended up going to Spinney's in Mirdif and spending what would have been our restaurant budget on sundry delicacies and groceries: real shortening (which I haven't seen since I moved here), A&W root beer, fancy Greek yogurt, and those dreamy Dutch strawberries that cost $10/lb. Then we went home and made deluxe omelettes with pepperoni purchased in Spinney's ~~infidel~~ pork room.

The point of this post is not food, though. The point is that living 24+ hours of plane travel away from any and all family members means that we rely more on friends to fill some of those roles. The role of watching our kids for us, for example. Normally that's something that Grandma and Grandpa would do, or your SIL across town. But nobody here has Grandmas and Grandpas around, or SILs across town. So we rely on our friends.

Even though it's sometimes hard to live far away from family, I find that I enjoy the increased sense of community it brings to our neighborhood and church congregation. Everyone watches out for everyone else, because by definition, we all know how it feels to not have Grandma or Grandpa to turn to when we need help. We're all in the same boat. So while you may feel sorry for us - and believe me, we sometimes feel sorry for ourselves, like on lazy weekends when it would be nice if the kids could just go play with the cousins for a while - living all the way over here, away from family, please know that we have our support network. Even if it doesn't look like the traditional one.

Now, back to my strawberries and yogurt...

On nannies

2011-11-09T13:19:00.002+04:00

Nannies are very much a part of the family landscape here in the UAE, more so than anywhere else I've lived. I grew up in the United States, where nannies (at least in the socioeconomic circles I ran in) were almost unheard of. Where they existed, they were for the very rich, or it was just a precious term for the 13-year-old who came over on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to help with the kids.

So it was quite an adjustment to move here and have to reorient myself around an entirely new nanny paradigm. Here, nannies are the norm. They are almost exclusively live-in nannies - in fact, many (if not most) of the larger apartments and villas have a designated maid/nanny room built in to the floorplan. This room is at worst as small as a closet and at best a real bedroom. I heard that some regulation has decreed that all such rooms are supposed to have their own bathroom. Ours does, though I've heard of some that don't (and of the occasional apartment/villa that has no such room at all).

Our "nanny room" when we first moved in. It's a bit more jazzed up now.

There is no universal standard on the nationality of nannies, though they tend to come from the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, or Ethiopia. There is also quite a range of salaries. Most of the nannies I know are probably paid around 1000 - 2000 dirhams ($270 - $540) per month. If they are here legally on their employer's visa, the employer pays additional (and substantial) fees to the UAE government for the privilege. I'm sure these fees vary widely as well, but I've heard they can be thousands of dollars a year. Housing is obviously an included benefit for nannies. Other benefits vary, but could include things like certain regular days off, transportation to somewhere else (a cousin's house, a friend's house) on their day off, a plane ticket to their home country each year, a clothing allowance, a cell phone, etc.

Even with all these differences in nanny situations, I have to say that the greatest variable I see is how these nannies are treated. Some of them are like members of the family, not just out of necessity because hello, they live there and they see everything, but because the mom and dad of the family value them as such. One of Miriam's KG2 classmates last year was brought to school every day by his nanny, and she came to all the school functions and participated in the role of a parent. She carried herself confidently and looked you in the eye and generally seemed to be her own real person independent of her job as a nanny.

Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Some nannies here seem to be very oppressed. They wear ridiculous maid-like scrub uniforms, even out in public, and shuffle along with their heads down at all times, a good ten paces behind their employers. If you see one of these nannies at the park with their charges, don't count on having your presence acknowledged. They usually avoid eye contact and are hypervigilant about avoiding anything going wrong with the kid(s) they're in charge of. It makes me sad, and I can only hope that the situation they're in now is better than the one they left to come work here.

Some families elevate nanny-ing to the next level and employ a different nanny for each of their children. Really! At Miriam's ballet class, there is hardly ever a place for me to sit down because there are so many nannies there with the kids. Even without multiple nannies, I often find that I am the only mother at the park with my kids, or at swimming lessons with my kids, or at the grocery store with my kids. And I often get sympathetic looks from passers-by, who seem to say, "Why doesn't she get a nanny?" In fact, I've been approached at the park by nannies who ask if I'm looking for a nanny for my kids. It's just that weird that I would be at the park with them myself.

Now, before we get all judgy - as I would have been tempted to do before I moved here - let me say that I wholeheartedly support the institution of nanny-ing, at least when it's done properly. Here's the thing, people: having a nanny is like having a wife for the wife. Think about it. A nanny is someone who is paid to take care of the kids while mom is out or at work. Someone who can run the kids to the park for some fresh air and fun while mom is working on a project or organizing the filing cabinet. Someone who can help make dinner, and then help get it on the table, and then help clean it up. A nanny is someone who will put the kids to bed if you ask her to, and who will be at home, watching over the children if you decide to go out at the last minute with your husband. A nanny is someone who will make you her special tea when you're sick (this literally just happened to a friend of mine) and make sure you don't strain yourself with the housework. Don't worry, mom, the nanny's got it under control.

So what were all those negative things we were going to say about nannies? The only nanny employers I judge these days are the ones who seem to treat their employees abominably. Otherwise, I see healthy, functioning, happy families who make the nanny paradigm work for them. You don't even have to be a working mom to have a nanny, did you know? I didn't, not before I moved here. SAHMs have nannies, too.

You may be wondering why Jeremy and I don't have a nanny. Believe me, we have thought of it. And it's not beyond the realm of possibility that someday we could employ one. But for now, we're managing just fine. Honestly, I think we're too introverted to have a nanny. Just the thought of someone else being in our house all the time (even if she does have her own room with a bathroom) makes me feel all shy and awkward and less inclined to walk around in dishabille.

And that puts me in a certain minority. I was at a neighborhood playgroup the other day and while the moms, not the nannies, were in attendance with their kids, I was the only one without a nanny at home. The thing is, these women didn't hire nannies to replace themselves, or to get out of raising their own kids. In fact, they think it's strange that the traditional American construct has us putting our kids in crowded daycare programs to avoid the cardinal sin of outsourcing periodic parenting to a one-on-one, loving caregiver. They have a point.

I've definitely seen a revolution in the way I think about nannies ever since moving to the UAE. Do you have any anti-nanny attitudes? Where do you think we pick up those attitudes, and has this post turned any of them around for you?

Empty Quarter 2.0

2011-11-08T21:09:00.004+04:00

We went camping in the Empty Quarter again earlier this week, this time without any freaky thunderstorms swooping in to put a damper on our fun.

Also increasing the fun factor was that we went with two other families, for a total of six adults and six kids.

However, the trip wasn't quite as epic as it could have been since both Jeremy and I were battling colds. Jeremy was on the tail end of his, while I was in full panic that I had a nascent case of The Cough. I spent most of the four-hour drive into the literal middle of nowhere assessing the relative scratchiness of my throat and whether it was increasing or decreasing (it was increasing).

But the Empty Quarter has a lot to distract you, even from sickness.

We camped in the same general area as last time and I believe the kids were out of the car for approximately 0.25 seconds before the shoes were off and they were out exploring.

Gigantic, never-ending sandbox = Magdalena's wildest dream come true.

Miriam was the oldest of the six kids along for the expedition and she made the most of being the leader.

We ended up camping a couple of dunes over from the site of our previous adventure, and drove in farther to avoid having to hike our stuff over the dunes like last time.

We hit a little snag when "driving in farther" meant "getting stuck in the sand." The first to fall victim to the deceptive sand/salt flats was not us, but one of our traveling companions. They got out with relatively little difficulty (says me, who watched from afar).

I have learned that you should never leave home without taking along your friendly neighborhood Australian With A Land Rover (that's him on the left). Indispensable.

You see, the next morning on the drive out, it was our turn to get stuck. We were first in line in the caravan. The tricky thing about driving off-road is that to avoid getting stuck, you need to maintain a good clip. You also need to watch out for soft, sticky areas. Speed + on-the-fly navigation is not my forte, which is why THIS happened:

Jeremy did his best to make me feel better by telling me how nice it was that I hadn't gotten us stuck about 50 meters earlier, in a patch of muck that was far from any solid ground that a second vehicle could perch on while it pulled us out. At least here, we had a random rise of semi-solid sand nearby for our Australian With A Land Rover to work with.

I have to admit that after I realized it was going to take a while to get us out, I totally wussed out and sought refuge (along with the girls) in our friends' car while everyone else (plus two SUVs who stopped to help) worked on solving the problem. I know that some people are able to see situations like this as part of the thrill and adventure of off-roading, but I was feeling sheepish/ashamed/humiliated/stressed that I'd gotten us stuck in the first place, so it wasn't exactly super happy fun time for me.

Anyway, by some small (?) miracle, they pulled us out, and we pressed on through the Empty Quarter for a scenic drive.

Then we drove a little through the Liwa Oasis towns. I don't know how much of the above picture (a villa on a hill) is oasis per se, and how much is super directed irrigation, but it sure was a sight to see.

The highlight of the trip for the girls was the part where they found a dead baby camel. Seriously. The first I heard of it was when Miriam came busting over a sand dune telling us to "come see, we found a dead baby camel!" I thought maybe she saw a rock that looked like a camel, or had got all the kids to pretend that a bush was a dead baby camel. But no: next thing I knew, Magdalena came over the same dune, grasping a bone in her little fists and saying, "look, it's a camel bone!! It came from the body of a camel!!!" Best/most disgusting camping moment EVER.

So far, our trips to the Empty Quarter have been surprisingly eventful. I hope next time can take it down just one more notch toward everything going as planned. Just one. Please?

A Grand Tour

2011-11-07T11:22:00.000+04:00

For about five minutes, I entertained the idea of saving this until Outsourced Friday. Then I realized there was no way I'd be able to wait that long. I've already been sitting on this for two days and now I'm delaying my post about the camping trip we just took to the Empty Quarter to talk about it.

You know how sometimes...ok, A LOT of times, I link to those gorgeous photo essays on Foreign Policy for Outsourced Fridays? Well, take a look at this particular gorgeous photo essay:

(iGoogle gadget blurb)

How about a closer look?

A little closer...

A LITTLE CLOSER...

Check it out!

Yes, it's true. My two greatest accomplishments in life are now 1. giving birth, and 2. having three photos be featured by Foreign Policy. (I'm kind of joking...but also kind of not.) They're numbers 3, 6, and 17 in the photo essay.

How did this come about, you may ask? Well, remember that Jeremy and I had a whole bunch of photos featured on Creative Syria. Then Foreign Policy got to talking to Creative Syria, and the editor of CS emailed me to ask if it was ok if FP used some of the photos on their website. It took me about 2 seconds to say YES. The result was "A Grand Tour."

If the 18 photos in this Foreign Policy spread aren't enough for you, I encourage you to poke around Creative Syria's "Images" section. There are also photos from 100+ years ago at Creative Syria's Mideast Image project. Enjoy!

The busiest part of my week

2011-11-06T11:00:00.000+04:00

I've been in the wife/teacher/mom/student/grad assistant routine for almost two months now, and it has come to my attention that there is one part of my week that just kills me. I love everything I'm doing, but it's all a bit much. That part of the week is Thursday + Friday morning. Allow me to explain.

On Thursdays, I wake up at 6.25 and get myself ready for the day until 6.40, at which time I get Miriam ready for the day. She goes off to school on the school bus and then I get Magdalena ready for the day. I take her to school and then go right to my classroom to teach two classes, one from 8-9 and one from 9-10. From 10-11, I get errands done on campus or work on my grad assistant stuff. From 11-12.45, I have office hours (look at me, all grown up!). Then I go pick up Magdalena at school and go home to be a mom for a while. This means that, among other things, I clean up the mess generated by the morning get-ready routine...and possibly some things left over from the day before. Wednesday night is toward the end of the week so I'm often so exhausted that I let things slide.

Miriam gets home around 2pm and I set the girls up with an activity so I can frantically finish whatever readings/papers/assignments have been left hanging all week before my class at 5pm. But first I get a dinner ready, one that can sit on the stove simmering until everybody's ready to eat (without me, since I walk out the door at 4.45 to go to class). Sometimes I have to hustle the girls along with me to drop them at Jeremy's office. Other times he is able to be home so I can just walk by myself.

I have class from 5pm - 8pm and it's glorious. At 8pm it's back to real life. Sometimes the girls are in bed when I get home. Sometimes they're not. Usually Jeremy has helped them clean up any whirlwinds of mess that were generated in my absence, but other days he's just as tired as I am (more, probably) so we clean it up together after the kids are in bed.

Sometimes I eat some dinner late at night. Sometimes I try to get a head start on homework while it's fresh in my mind. Sometimes I skip all of the above and go directly to bed to read a book or whatever.

Friday morning brings church with it. I love church and I enjoy going but it's definitely not a "kick back and relax" three hours. Oh no. I am the piano accompanist in the main worship meeting and then I'm in charge of the children's class (Primary) for the remaining two hours. I love every single one of those Primary kids to death but it certainly is exhausting to take care of them and teach them. Finally, after church is over (unless there's choir practice, which I am also the accompanist for), we head home and RELAX. It's my favorite part of the Sabbath day. Of the whole week, really.

This post has ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would be, just as my Thursday/Friday is a lot busier than I thought it would be at the beginning of the semester. It's tough that my weekend is so curtailed since I am on grad student duty until 8pm on Thursday night and back at teaching at 8am Sunday morning. I treasure my Friday afternoons and I am so glad there is really nothing that can creep into them and take them away from me.

Right?

A true friend

2011-11-05T09:39:00.000+04:00

When I was a freshman at the BYU, I lived in Heritage Halls. Our 6-girl apartment adjoined another 6-girl apartment. Basically, we shared a back-door exit and the dividing door between us and them ended up being open more often than it was closed. As a result, at times it seemed more like I had 11 roommates rather than just five. And would you believe me if I told you that I remain good friends with most of those 11 girls (now women)? It's true, though I can hardly believe it myself. But the ties you form during that first year at college are strong. Thanks to the internet, we can keep them that way.

What does this have to do with anything? I'll tell you. A while ago, I complained on my blog about the unavailability (later revealed to be more of a scarcity) of black beans in this country, nay, REGION. A few weeks later - last Sunday, to be exact - Jeremy received a large package in his office mailbox. It was an unusual enough occurrence that he gave me a call in my office to tell me about it. I at once could not, and yet absolutely could, believe it when he said it appeared to be a mass shipment of dry black beans from my old roommate Jen in Boston.

I opened up the package when I got home and sure enough:

Now, I happen to think that I have a lot of amazing friends who have done a lot of amazing things, some of them for my benefit. For example, another one of those freshman year roommates once met me at a park near the freeway in South Bend, Indiana on our way Out West to feed us lunch and have her kids play with my kids. Who even does that?? (Answer: Liz.) But I have to say that Jen shipping black beans across the world just so I wouldn't have to go without is possibly the most outlandishly generous thing anyone has ever done for me.

It's so generous, in fact, that I can't resist publicly calling her out and saying, THANK YOU. From the bottom of my black-bean-loving heart.

November 4th, outsourced

2011-11-04T15:14:00.001+04:00

Somehow I missed sharing this last week: Hacked, from The Atlantic. What's really funny is that it was published the day after I got an email from my brother saying he was robbed in Spain and needed me to wire him money. I remember the days when you chose a password that humans couldn't guess. Now we choose passwords that computers can't guess.

Does your interior designer friend have her own gorgeous textiles business? No? Well, mine does. Check out the beauty that is Caitlin Wilson Textiles.

The only prior knowledge of Sandra Lee that I have comes from that terrible Kwanzaa cake video (also the one with Mario Lopez and the "$400 cake," but I can't find it). So I was able to take this video (The Best Four Minutes of Sandra Lee's Ridiculous Halloween Special) entirely in stride. Especially the part about having my own craft store...? [HT GFY]

To add to all the confusion surrounding the Emirates IDs, apparently you're supposed to show up for your (passport-sized) photograph session wearing national dress. My favorite comment from the article is the Mexican asking if he needs to wear his sombrero. [HT Andrew]

I wish I could be a teenager again so I could pull this dummy trick-or-treater prank on people for Halloween. [HT Andrew]

I was getting tired of all those recent inapplicable (to me) articles about how cheap wines are just as good as expensive ones, so I appreciated that this one was about maple syrup instead.

Foreign languages, translation, AND baby names. I'm in heaven.

In Mormons in the News news, anti-Mormonism is bigotry too. Also, maybe we are Christian (The Economist thinks so) (and I'm also thrilled to learn from that article that Glenn Beck is "fading"). All I have to say to the writer of this anti-Mormon letter is...well, nothing. I have no words. There ARE no words.

Finally, I bring you a link to my friend Crystal's blog. She went into labor with her fourth child almost three months early and ended up in the hospital. Her baby was born almost a week ago, at 29 weeks. Some people shut down and disconnect when something scary like this happens, but Crystal has remained very open about her experience and has documented it day-by-day on her blog. And I think the blogging universe is better for it.

Henna controversy

2011-11-03T10:16:00.000+04:00

Yesterday was Henna Day at AUS, so hordes of ladies took over the Women's Lounge in the student center and got their henna on. Of course I couldn't resist taking the girls. They caused quite a stir among the crowd of student ladies and they even let us jump the (sizeable) queue.

Having your small children get henna is fun but also stressful. Miriam is a pro at sitting still and not smearing it, but Magdalena still has a lot to learn. She sat still enough for the application but then managed to smear an edge of her flower design as she got off the chair. The henna artist re-did it and there were no major mishaps after that (key word: major). The girls have never made it long enough to see it dry all the way - I end up getting tired of stressing out about it staining their clothes and make them wash it off early. But even with a shortened soaking-in period, the designs always last at least a week.

And they are gorgeous!

These small flower designs are about all Magdalena can handle at this age.

Miriam loves getting the big-girl designs.

In the above pictures, the henna is still drying and so it's very dark. When you scrape off the paste, it's a much lighter orangish/brownish color.

Now, let's discuss something. I have been familiar with the Middle East for so long that I don't recall having a negative opinion about henna, ever. It's so normal to me that I can no longer pass judgment on it (except to say that I'm totally OK with it, obviously). However, over the summer I was talking with an American friend who had just moved here and I mentioned that my girls enjoy getting henna done every once in a while. She gave me a brave look that showed how hard she was trying to not judge me, but I could see that the idea of henna was strange to her, that she thought it was more akin to a verboten tattoo rather than, say, face-painting.

After that, I realized how I might have been offending my girls' grandparents and aunts and uncles right and left with all my talk and shared pictures of henna on the girls' arms. So I ask you, blog audience: what do you think of henna? Answer the poll and then elaborate in the comments.

What do you think about henna?

The Cough

2011-11-02T09:40:00.001+04:00

Image source

A commonly held opinion among expats in the UAE is that sicknesses here are abnormally varied and hideous. The people who live here come from all over the world, and they don't stay put. It's a very mobile society that is always going to one country to visit and then coming back to work and so on. Thus, the sicknesses that get passed around also come from all over the world, and are also very mobile. We get the best, strongest, most virulent strains of the cold and flu you could imagine. It's even worse than Egypt.

The latest sickness to rear its head I have dubbed simply, The Cough. There's not a large runny nose component, not even a general feeling of malaise. It's just a cough. But oh, WHAT a cough. Both my girls have had it and it's the ghastliest thing you've ever heard. It comes from deep in the chest and it is so tight that it hurts just to listen to. No medicine can touch it. You get it, and then you suffer for the next 2-3 weeks while you wait for it to pass.

Since the powers of dextramethorphan are useless against The Cough, we've been doing a lot of the honey + lemon juice remedy (and ginger, if only Miriam could stomach it), and that thing where you put the Vick's Vapo Rub on their feet instead of their chest. That's all I've got in my arsenal. It's hard to be so helpless in the face of sickness, but that's just how colds roll in the UAE.

Halloween 2011 @ Sharjah

2011-11-01T12:21:00.000+04:00

We had another fun Halloween in the UAE this year. I felt like the UAE got a little more into it this year. For starters, while there were still super expensive pumpkins available, there were also these gems for only 15 dhs ($4) each! I couldn't believe my eyes...so I took a picture.

Magdalena was faithful to her Rapunzel costume idea all the way up until the day before Halloween, at which point she decided to be a kitty. Miriam drew the whiskers on for her.

Miriam has wanted to be a pirate for Halloween for months now. That's how you know your kids are growing up - when they choose something and then stick to it. We assembled this costume out of things we already had, except the sword, which Miriam designed and then fashioned (with help from Dad) out of cardboard, duct tape, and twine.

The rule about Halloween on campus at AUS is that you can only knock on doors where the porch lights are on and Halloween decorations (or a simple Trick or Treat sign the university sent out by email) are displayed. Just like in the US, some families here aren't too keen on Halloween. It's unfortunate that the divide here is sometimes perceived as falling along religious lines. I feel like we got the stink-eye from a couple of Miriam's Muslim friends as we heathen Christians walked by in our costumes. But maybe it was the stink-eye of envy, who knows? There were Muslims who got plenty into it as well, so like I said, it's really no different than in the US. Some people love it. Some people hate it. Some people feel that it goes against their principles, religious or otherwise. Whatever.

Halloween was definitely a success, anyway, and now begins the part where my kids beg me for candy all day, every day, until it's gone. The worst/best part is that I'm not eating any of it. Sigh. Maybe I'll tuck away a Bounty or two to enjoy on January 1st.

NaBloPoMo, anyone?

2011-10-31T20:55:00.001+04:00

Please feel free to use this image on your own blog!

I'm going to try to post every day in November. It's called National Blog Post Month and I did it in 2008, 2009, and 2010. I think this year will be a real challenge, but I'm willing to give it a try.

Who's with me?

Update: The following people are with me.

Jen
Liz
Suzanne
Anna
Crys
Katie
Lark
Bryan (we will accept his offering as being on behalf of Chris, as well)
Kathy
Craig (I am going to take this opportunity to point out that Craig has not blogged since January 1, 2011, so his NaBloPoMo posts should be GOOD.)
Joe
Lauren
Nannie
Britney
Katie

Blue Eyes, a Count, and the Cuban Missile Crisis

2011-10-30T14:51:00.000+04:00

A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Third reading.

This is one of those books that I like to read every couple of years. There is something so relatable and beautiful and tragic about the story, and it is so splendidly written that it is a joy to experience. Chapters 21 and 22 are some of the finest chapters in classical literature, in my opinion. They bring everything together so perfectly and then turn the story on its head.

One of my favorite passages:

"There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness."

A Pair of Blue Eyes is a great read no matter what mood you're in. Romance, deception, misunderstanding, drama, tragedy - it's all here. My favorite Hardy for sure, and one of my favorite books in general.

I'm still waiting for someone to make this into a movie, by the way.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Second (or third?) reading.

Is TCOMC freaking long, possibly even overlong? Is it overwrought and at times ridiculous? Is its attitude toward women occasionally hilarious/offensive, even for the time period in which it was written? Are some of the events that take place in TCOMC hugely irrelevant to the plot and highly improbable? Yes.

Despite all this, is The Count of Monte Cristo one of my all-time favorite books? OH YEAH. I can't get enough of it, even though it's 1200+ pages long. Long live Edmond Dantes. I just wish someone would make a movie that is worthy of the book.

Life: An Exploded Diagram by Mal Peet
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I liked Tamar by the same author well enough, but Life: An Exploded Diagram read like a very bad The Book Thief. It's a pity, too, because the premise - young love during the Cuban Missile Crisis - is quite good. But I didn't care about any of the characters. They were oddly drawn and underdeveloped and did not inspire sympathy. The story was dull and cloudy and muted, like I was trying to read it underwater.

Plus, I am so tired of books (YA ones, especially) reaching outside of their purview to include hints of sex, whether it fits or not. For example, check out this ridiculous specimen from page 266: "By the time I was delighted by the belated arrival of my pubic hair, the United States had developed rockets that could travel eleven thousand kilometres to dump four megatons of explosive onto Russia." The book was full of allusions like this, wedged and jammed into the prose wherever the author felt like it (which was often). Less pubic hair, more Cuban Missile Crisis, please.

(And now I hate this book even more for making the composition of such a sentence possible.)

October 28th, outsourced

2011-10-28T15:55:00.001+04:00

We don't have them here (that I've seen, anyway), but these Coke Freestyle machines intrigue me. Here is an article where some food critics take pop super seriously and taste-test all available beverages from a Coke Freestyle machine. Mmm, caffeine free diet Coke with raspberry.

Luckily for me, there is no real fashion runway on the sidewalk outside of Magdalena's school at drop-off in the mornings. However, I will say that the muhajibaat have a major advantage over us infidels because if they're wearing their pajamas under their abaya, or if their hair is a mess under their veil, nobody knows about it and they still look fabulously put-together at 7.45am. Hmph.

Remember when TV shows used to have episodes that were like extended "The More You Know" bits? Shudder. [HT Eric D. Snider]

Some guy drove his Honda Accord 1,000,000 miles. Neat.

This week's I-saw-it-everywhere-at-once link is Cheese or Font? Try it - it's strangely addictive.

My blog friend Jessie (who I've never met) used to live on a Caribbean island and there was this one beach that was right by an airport. Like RIGHT. BY. AN AIRPORT.

Another guy I've never met but whose blog I enjoy always writes about scary stories from his life around Halloween. Here's his most recent post. My favorite one is this one, from 2005.

Diwali

2011-10-26T14:09:00.000+04:00

Miriam's school is off tomorrow in honor of the Diwali holiday. Also in honor of Diwali, they decreed today a uniform-free day, meaning the students could wear whatever they wanted to school. Miriam was so excited about that. She thought for a while about what she wanted to wear, and finally decided on her Indian dress (that we bought in Qatar) because, after all, it's Diwali.

Jeremy and I had momentary concerns that this would somehow be wildly culturally insensitive, but neither of us followed up on them beyond having Miriam ask her teacher if she could wear an Indian dress to school on Diwali. Her teacher said yes, and that was good enough for us. After Miriam got on the bus this morning, I went to trusty Wikipedia and read that it is traditional to wear new clothing on Diwali, so I think the white girl wearing an Indian dress should go over just fine.

Happy Diwali! Holiday season has definitely started here. Diwali, then a whole week off for Eid in early November, then Thanksgiving (though that's hardly a blip on the radar here), then National Day (a big deal since it's the UAE's 40th), then Christmas. Woohoo!

What do Bill Gates and Queen Rania have in common?

2011-10-25T21:26:00.002+04:00

Teaching is going so well. I'll tell you what, I love teaching, and I love teaching in the UAE. I know the answer is probably "a lot of places," but allow me to rhetorically ask you, where else, when you assign students to give a presentation on a successful person they admire, would you get a variety such as this?

Quite a few students talked about successful people who are not famous, like dads, moms, and aunts. I loved just sitting there and listening to them talk about someone they admire, and why. The most entertaining presentation was the one about Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, aka Dubai's crown prince, aka the UAE's (and possibly the entire Gulf's) most eligible (albeit engaged) royal bachelor. His picture (third one from the top, above) went up on the first Power Point slide and half the class - the female half - about sighed itself out of their seats. After the presentation, the students got into some kind of minor dispute about something His Highness did and it only came to an end when one girl snapped, "He's handsome, so maalesh [no problem]!"

Like I said, I love teaching in the UAE.

Halloween preview

2011-10-24T16:19:00.000+04:00

In the 12 months since last October, I've learned that if I want to hit the jackpot with Western-themed holiday swag (or black beans), I need to go shopping in Dubai, not Ajman or Sharjah. I was at Carrefour in Mirdif today and I could hardly believe the (well, relatively) huge display they had of Halloween stuff.

Of course, I didn't buy a single thing, but it was a nice gesture. All I'm really looking for is an eyepatch to complete Miriam's pirate costume, but I haven't been able to find one. At this point, I may just have to jerry-rig a black sleep mask and call it good.

On the other hand, I had absolutely no trouble tracking down a flowing yellow scarf for Magdalena to use as hair for her Rapunzel costume. It even came with sparkly jewels tacked on it.

I also found two very tiny, very cheap pumpkins. They're technically Indian pumpkins but they'll do. We'll see how they carve.

I'm so glad to be having some Halloween success already! Many thanks to Dubai for catering to to the strange holiday-themed whims of us Westerners.

Bilingual schizophrenia

2011-10-23T15:50:00.000+04:00

A classmate presented this article (Aneta Pavlenko (2006). "Bilingual Selves." in Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation), not me, but here are some of the interesting things I gleaned from it.

Basically, this lady Pavlenko did some in-depth research via questionnaires and surveys and found that a lot of bilinguals (anyone who can function appropriately in two languages in different contexts, remember) experience a metaphorical schizophrenia, in that they sometimes feel like a different person when they speak each language. This effect is intensified when bilinguals have learned one language in one context, and then moved on to another, separate context that is removed from the first and then learned another language. (This is as opposed to someone learning two languages but using them both in an ongoing manner in a bilingual society.)

For example, she told of a French/English bilingual author who was writing his memoirs. He put them down in French initially, and then went back and started putting them into English. As he finished some early chapters, he realized that the stories that had emerged in each version were so different that you could have mistaken them as coming from two different authors. For him, language was more than a medium in which to tell his story: it was a lens through which he focused the story.

Other bilinguals spoke of feeling like they were putting on a performance in their second (or third, etc.) language, like they were actors presenting versions of themselves that were not the true one. Similarly, participants self-reported (and psychoanalysts confirmed) being able to feel more emotion in their first language as compared to their second. Childhood stories came alive with detail and even fictional accounts were more vivid in the first language. Seemingly paradoxically, some bilinguals felt that it was easier to speak of taboo topics (or use taboo language) in their second language. Really, though, this confirms the finding of them being able to feel more emotion in their first language: by using a second language, they were distancing themselves emotionally from these awkward topics and inappropriate language. (So maybe that's why the first words some people want to learn in a foreign language are the curse words??)

Finally, the article talks about how the way we feel while speaking a certain language will affect our idea of our "selves" in that language. Remember that most of this holds especially true for those whose first- and second-language experiences are separated by social or cultural divides, but I confess I see this principle at work in myself. When I think of my Japanese self, I feel confident and literate and with-it. My Russian self is very culturally aware and is good at blending in with the crowd (not drawing attention to myself through language). My Arabic self is the one I have the most trouble with. In Arabic, there is no way for me to not be a freak, and it's in a different way than with my Japanese self. In Arabic, I feel anxiety about talking with men. In Arabic, I feel anxiety about only knowing one dialect. In Arabic, I feel anxiety that I basically can't read a newspaper - something I can (or could at one time) do in all of my other languages. In Arabic, I don't feel a strong connection to the literary tradition because there isn't much of a colloquial literary tradition to connect to. In Arabic, there are some sounds that I still. can't. freaking. PRONOUNCE.

So yes, all the intricacies of emotion/skill/proficiency when speaking a language are bound up with how I feel about each of my bilingual selves.

Do you agree with the author's proposed concept of a metaphorical schizophrenia? I'm not sure that's the term I would use, but I definitely see where she's coming from.

October 21st, outsourced

2011-10-21T15:15:00.001+04:00

Hooray for unstructured play time for children! On a related note, boo for homework for those same children.

Reading this - about why it's so hard to take an original photo in Tehran - reminded me of all the challenges we face when trying to take pictures in certain countries. I've become quite skilled at the inconspicuous snap but there are so, so many photos I haven't been able to take that I regret to this day (like the armed guards standing outside the McDonald's in Beirut - we tried to get a clandestine shot, couldn't, then asked them if we could take a picture, and they said no).

This is one of those things I heard about from three sources all within about two minutes of each other. Social media is like that sometimes. GUY ON A BUFFALO. [The first HT award goes to Miss Nemesis]

Good for this personal trainer for making himself obese on purpose so he can understand later what it's like for his client to lose a lot of weight. Also, crazy! [HT Kathy]

It's just as well I don't have a lot of links today, because this one is GOLDEN and can take up a lot of your time if you let it: The Many Faces of Fear. Personally, I've had it open in a background tab for days now and every once in a while I click through a few. There is so much to love about this feature. I love seeing how many of the guys are holding their ladies' purses. I love seeing who is trying to make a break for it and who is trying to climb inside the wall and who is frozen in fear. I love seeing how it seems to be a common impulse to hold on to other people when you are scared. I was also fascinated by the clothes these people are wearing. I've been away from North America for over a year now and seriously, is that how people there dress these days? Isn't this haunted house in Canada, and isn't it October? Why are everyone's shorts so short? Anyway, the website is a little glitchy but I promise you will want to look at every single one of the 147 photos, one click at a time. [HT Sarah Olson]

Non-alcoholic malt beverages

2011-10-20T14:41:00.001+04:00

Non-alcoholic malt beverages: they're big here. They take up a good swath of the drinks aisle at Carrefour.

The thing is, I secretly love this stuff. When we lived in Egypt, I drank it a lot. I can't remember the brand name, but the flavor was pear and it was sooooo goooooood. Really, it was just another kind of pop to me.

Then my brain made the connection between malt and beer and I started to feel guilty about it, but only in a secondary sense. It was more that I felt guilty for not feeling guilty about drinking non-alcoholic malt beverages. It reminded me of the way I felt drinking mugicha in Japan, or whatever that fake Postum stuff was in Siberia. I wasn't doing anything wrong, but I was getting all defensive in advance against the stupid (but possibly well meaning) people who would try to tell me I was.

Anyway, I haven't partaken of a non-alcoholic malt beverage in a long time now, but every time I go down this aisle I walk a little slower to take a look at the pretty packaging and the new flavors.

Aren't they lovely?

Am I the only one who's tried this stuff? How much of my strange intellectual aversion to it is grounded in my culturally American upbringing? I bet Mormons in Germany get away with more than this - at ward activities, no less.

Here's one last completely indefensible point: apparently I think non-alcoholic malt beverages are OK, but decaf coffee is something I would just never try. But feel free to go ahead and drink it yourselves, I won't judge you, I promise. As long as you don't judge me and my sweet, sweet pear Barbican (or whatever it was).

100% humidity

2011-10-18T14:40:00.000+04:00

Maybe this isn't a surprise since I don't check the weather status multiple times a day, but I have never once caught the status at 100% humidity. Even when it felt like 100%. Even when I was sure it was 100%. Even when it was so humid that we woke up to water dripping down the outside of the window panes and our sunglasses fogged up when we went out of doors. Every time I checked, it was 89%, or 94%, or 96% once, I think, but never 100%.

Well, this morning, I was so sure it was 100% humidity that when I got to class (the one I teach), I used the classroom computer to check. And what do you know: it was 100% humidity! Of course I was doomed to finally catch the weather status at 100% humidity on a computer where I didn't have an opportunity to grab a screen shot and email it to myself. So you'll just have to trust me.

Here's some visual proof:

That's what 100% humidity looks like. When the air is saturated with moisture, it can't accept any moisture from you, so you sweat a lot. As I was walking to work, I could feel myself collecting condensation on my eyelashes. It was crazy.

So now I've for sure experienced 100% humidity. I feel like I've joined an elite club, though I'm not sure membership is to be envied. Honestly, I try not to moan about the humidity here too much because I know it's good for my skin. I'm sure it's keeping me well preserved and young-looking (ha ha) and it's nice because we don't go through quite as much lotion or chapstick here.

So at least there's that.

Day of reckoning

2011-10-17T14:35:00.003+04:00

Today was the day our car registration expired. By some miracle, we'd managed to get our Emirates IDs and take out a new car insurance policy for the next year, just in time. It only took fifteen minutes (!!!!!!!!!!!) and 440 dirhams to walk out the door of Tasjeel with our new car registration. I still can't believe it was that easy.

The reason I called this post a day of reckoning is because the traffic fine system here is tied to your registration. You can rack up as many tickets as you want during the year, but when it comes time to renew your registration, you will have to pay them. Every once in a while they give a half-off amnesty for the fines but some people still pay a lot because of the ubiquitous automatic speeding cameras that are on all the freeways here.

In theory, you can check online to see what your fines are so there aren't any huge surprises when you show up at Tasjeel, but I knew that I wouldn't breathe easy until an actual employee told me the fine total. I felt so happy today when they said I only had a 50 dhs fine from when we had some trouble topping up our Salik toll gate tag a few months ago. I had thought I got flashed by a speeding camera last spring, and there was also the matter of when a Sharjah police officer took down my license plate number as I was fending for our lives in some particularly insane Sharjah traffic vortex over the summer. Apparently, neither of those things mattered because the 50 dhs Salik fee was all there was. Woohoo!

The best part is that now I know for sure there aren't any speeding cameras on Immigration Road toward downtown Sharjah. It's a new road, and there are signs saying that speed is controlled by radar, and the speed limit is a ridiculously low 60kph, but I've never seen a speed camera so I always go about 100kph (and so do my fellow motorists). I guess today was proof that there aren't any speed cameras there...for now.

So long, car registration process and speeding ticket (non-)surprises. Until next year!

Rethinking bilingual acquisition

2011-10-16T11:38:00.000+04:00

Watch me turn a presentation I gave in class last week into a blog post this week! Don't worry, it's interesting.

The class is called Bilingual Education, and although it is difficult and time-consuming, I am learning so much. Linguists can sometimes be snobs about who is and who isn't considered bilingual (please don't ask me how many languages I speak unless you have 20 minutes to hear the answer), so it was nice to discuss it in class and decide that anyone who can use more than one language appropriately in different contexts is a bilingual. Congratulations! It turns out that the idea of a perfect or balanced bilingual - someone who is exactly, equally competent in two languages - is a big fat myth, or at least a great rarity.

Anyway, my presentation was about rethinking bilingual acquisition in very young children. Back in the day, people used to think that bilingualism in children was detrimental to development and would result in all kinds of delays. Basically, the accepted school of thought was that the brain is only set up to handle one language at birth, and if you give it more input, it will be confused for a while before it figures out how to settle down.

Well, since the 1980s (though it took time to gain its place in accepted thought), they've figured out that actually, the infant brain does quite well with two languages, thank you very much. Check out some of these findings.

1. Babies can totally tell the difference between two separate languages, and they can remember those differences later on. And guess what? This holds true even while the babies are in utero. Pretty amazing. (And since you're going to ask, the research involved measuring changes in heart rate.)

2. Even as young as one or two years old, bilingual children can adjust their use of language depending on the context. For example, if they have a French-speaking dad and an English-speaking mom, they will generally speak more French to the dad and more English to the mom. Even more interesting (and telling) is the fact that this holds true even with strangers. If they are introduced to a (researcher posing as a) stranger who only speaks French, the kids will extend their use of French as much as possible when talking with that stranger. In other words, they know there are two languages and they know when to use them appropriately.

3. Bilingual kids may experience some delays in acquiring their two languages, but they also may pick up some aspects of language faster than monolinguals. It depends on the particular combination of languages. Also, even if there is some initial, temporary delay in bilinguals, they still show greater linguistic capacity overall in mixing and discriminating between their languages in the right contexts.

Neat, huh! Now let's all go teach our children a second language, mmmkay?

(All of these findings are reported in Fred Genesee's article, "Rethinking Bilingual Acquisition," published in Multilingual Matters 123: Bilingualism: Beyond Basic Principles in 2003.)

October 14th, outsourced

2011-10-14T11:06:00.002+04:00

RAIN MAKES EVERYTHING BETTER. I need to find a computer screen the size of my kitchen window and set it to this website at all times. [HT Steven]

There is so much to enjoy (from a safe distance) about this story involving two women who got involved in a bleach-and-chlorine battle at - wait for it - Wal*Mart. The funniest part may be that Wal*Mart released a statement saying that it does not expect this type of behavior from customers. Um, you guys? Have you ever been in one of your own stores?

Here's your chance to eavesdrop on what writers around the world are saying about the United States.

I am so grateful for the internet, if for no other reason than that it makes old photos like these (from WWII) available for everyone to see and appreciate. Seriously, some of them almost brought me to tears.

Have you met Feminist Ryan Gosling yet? You should. [HT a few people - it's one of those things I saw everywhere at once]

Psst: Haiti doesn't need your yoga mat. Speaking of donations to other countries, I once saw a guy in Jordan wearing a shirt from Sequent, a company in Oregon my dad used to work at.

I am considering printing this (You Don't Need the New iPhone) out and having Jeremy recite it as a calming and preventative mantra each morning. [HT Tim]

Perhaps there is such a thing as The Declining Hotness of Flight Attendants. But not at Emirates Airlines, where (the partially substantiated) rumors are that you have to be a certain age/weight/height to be hired, and you can't be married, and you have to reapply lipstick every two hours, and you are encouraged to flirt subtly with the male passengers.

I'll leave you with this video of two Mormon missionaries singing a (truly atrocious, sorry, it needs to be said) version of "A Child's Prayer." Sometimes we forget that missionaries are just regular 19-, 20-, and 21-year-old guys. This video really reminded me of that, right down to the fact that they were driving while they recorded this. [HT Kyler]

Sometimes it's nice to be a woman in the UAE

2011-10-12T17:07:00.001+04:00

Every once in a while, it works out to your advantage to be a female in the UAE.

We went to get our car registration renewed yesterday. Of course we were not so naive as to think that we would get it all done in one trip. Oh no. But we did expect to get further along in the process than we did, which is to say, nowhere. The helpful folks at the UAE equivalent of the DMV (it's called Tasjeel) told us that they couldn't renew our car registration until we obtained an Emirates ID.

Obtaining an Emirates ID is something we've been putting off, oh, since the day we arrived in Sharjah. Every time I looked at the process involved, my eyes glazed over and my brain broke and I decided to just put it away for another day...or week...or month...or year, as it turned out. It wasn't just me playing the procrastination game, either. Participation in Emirates ID was supposed to be compulsory by December 1, 2011, then sometime in January, then July, and then they said they'd start levying fees and disconnecting mobile phones, and then even those deadlines got pushed back.

But they caught us with the car registration loophole. The guy at Tasjeel gave us directions to the nearest Emirates ID building, which led us to the middle of the desert until lo and behold, a nice office building loomed out of the sand. We headed inside and that's when I realized how nice it was to be a woman at that particular time and place.

The process to get the ID involved taking some numbers from a machine and waiting in a series of lines. However, the lines were separated by gender. I had to go upstairs; Jeremy waited downstairs. Since there are at least twice as many men in this country as women, his lines were a lot longer than mine. In fact, my lines were nonexistent. I breezed through the entire process in about 35 minutes. Jeremy never got past the first step. He said he came very close to holding up his high-numbered ticket in front of the waiting masses along with a 100 dirham bill ($27), and seeing which patron with a low-numbered ticket would take him up on his offer. Bureaucracy tends to make us lazy like that.

In the end, he didn't buy an advanced place, and we left the building without his Emirates ID because - shocking, I know - we had other things going on in our lives that prevented us from spending 4 hours at a government office.

Now we're left with the lovely situation of our car registration expiring on the 17th, which means Jeremy's Emirates ID has to be issued by the 16th, but since his residence visa is dated the 18th, those two intervening days will cost us a whole year's fee (100 dhs), and now that I think about it, if the kids' fees are the same as the adults, we will end up paying 1200 dhs ($326) plus typing fees for Emirates IDs for our whole family which makes me die a little bit inside.

Here's hoping for success on the car registration front, at least!

Stuck in a (welcome) classics rut

2011-10-10T21:13:00.001+04:00

For some reason - perhaps because of the recent upheaval in my personal life - all the books I've read lately have been old favorites, mostly classics. There was Wuthering Heights, then a jump forward to The Guernsey blah blah blah, then a jump back to A Pair of Blue Eyes, and now The Count of Monte Cristo.

I've only read TCOMC once, a few years ago, and I decided back then that it was my second- or third-favorite book, behind Les Miserables and possibly A Tale of Two Cities. I remembered that it was bloated and overlong in areas (especially those pertaining to the use of hashish), but I also remembered that it was AWESOME. The humanity and principles of revenge/forgiveness on display in this book are so deeply moving that even its format as a serially published novel can't dilute its message.

I expected TCOMC to suffer from a second reading. Instead, I find that I am just as riveted as the first time around. Perhaps even more so, because I can anticipate with glee (or abhorrence, or grief) the events that are just around the corner for Edmond. The last few nights, I've gone to sleep in my comfortable bed thinking of Edmond in his filthy jail cell. I've wondered what it would be like to spend eight years secretly learning foreign languages from an old man in the cell downstairs, never knowing if I'd be able to gain freedom and use them in the outside world. And even though I knew that he would find the treasure on the Island of Monte Cristo, I, like Edmond, had to take a break from the part where he is digging and strikes a wooden box to collect my thoughts and tell myself that I wouldn't be disappointed if nothing came of it after all.

This, my friends, is the definition of a good book, one whose essence seeps into your daily life and colors all the moments it can, both sleeping and waking. I'm glad to have a go-to book like this one to turn to when all I need is something familiar, diverting, and thought-provoking to read at the end of the day.

And since TCOMC is approximately 3700 pages long, it looks like I'll be going to this go-to book for a few weeks yet.

Who has read this book and thinks it's awesome? Mediocre? What's your go-to book these days?

The oddities of a British education

2011-10-09T20:57:00.000+04:00

Actually, some of these might not be oddities because I don't have much (any) experience with American schools within the last 12 years. It's possible that all of these are standard operating procedure in the US these days. But here are some things that strike me as interesting or quirky about my kids' British-curriculum/culture schools.

1. I got a note from Magdalena's (British!) teacher one day that said Magdalena "wasn't too keen on" her carrots at lunchtime, and that she had "slightly soiled her knickers." Even though the news was bad, I kept reading the note over and over again because I got such a kick out of the oh-so-British delivery.

2. The girls both have something called a Journal, which is sent home with them every day. The teacher writes notes in it about their progress (or soiled knickers; see above) or what they did in class that day or what events are coming up. I have to initial that I've seen the journal entry and respond if I want to. The teacher initials any comments that I send to her. It's got a bit of a middle school passing notes air about it but at the same time, I love having a reliable, constantly open channel of communication to my kids' teachers.

3. They do something called Jolly Phonics to teach pre-reading skills. Magdalena is always making certain phonetic sounds while doing certain actions with her hands. It's at once adorable and odd. I don't doubt that it is an awesome, well tested system of learning. It's just that it's different from how I learned to read (then again, I distinctly remember using my finger to trace letters made out of sandpaper, so).

4. It's a canteen, not a cafeteria, ok?

5. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the US does this too, but it's "Numeracy" now, not "Math." Except I also hear it called "Maths," with an S.

6. Aside from Numeracy, Literacy, Geography, Arabic, PE, etc., Miriam has Art, Dance, IT, Swimming, and Music class. Magdalena has a cooking activity every week. Is that British, or just a relic that exists in schools that never experienced budget cuts?

7. Both my kids randomly pronounce words in a British accent. I love love love this.

So, what are American schools like these days? I felt a little pang when the school Miriam would have attended in Ithaca earned a national award for excellence, but I think we're doing ok here in our British school in the UAE, too.

October 7th, outsourced

2011-10-07T14:41:00.000+04:00

Did you know Steve Jobs was half-Syrian? Really, he was. (HT Suzanne)

Do you need some help finding a book to read? NPR is here to save the day. (HT Andrew)

I love a good public prank like this: artist mocks the absurd poses in fashion photos by showing them in real life.

If this list is later debunked as being totally false and inaccurate, I don't want to know about it. My favorite word was "layogenic." [HT Nancy]

Seriously, I'm not trying to mock anyone, but I don't really understand the rabid devotion on display in this video about Eva Longoria's recent visit to Dubai. Maybe some of those people - the kids especially! - need to find a more substantial role model.

"The Hispanic piranha prom had one Jew person" and other brilliant mis-lip-readings of Michele Bachmann. [HT Eric D. Snider]

My younger brother and sister have done goofy poses for automatic roller coaster souvenir photos, but this one was the cleverest one I've seen recently.

I can only vouch for the first few pages of these hilarious response signs, but wow, are they funny (and the ninth one down looks suspiciously like something seen on the BYU campus).

Birthday Review: 30

2011-10-06T21:45:00.001+04:00

Yesterday was one of the best birthdays I've had in recent years. I worked extra hard on Tuesday (and played catch-up today) so I could take the day off from all duties that allow such a thing. Sadly, this did not include laundry, general tidying up, and routine childcare tasks. However, my kids are juuuust old enough that they are starting to understand, "It's mama's birthday today so you need to be on your best behavior."

I pampered myself with 30 whole minutes of pilates in the morning, then got myself over to the campus ladies' salon to spend the gift money from my MIL on my annual pedicure, as well as my first manicure in 11.5 years. It was a glorious and cheap hour, and there is something about salons in Arabia that I just love. The windows are all shuttered, the women go in, the hijabs come off, everyone's chatting in their own dialect, and we see each other in all our raw, unpolished, unplucked, unstyled beauty. I have to confess, though, that having to carry on small talk with the manicurist/pedicurist falls under my personal definition of hell, so I risked offending them (it was two separate people) by reading a book the whole time (The Count of Monte Cristo).

I was lulled by the tender attention to my nails into a curious state of bravery, and decided to get my face threaded. I wrote that sentence in an email to my mom and she replied, "what is 'face threaded'?" as if it were some bizarre unit of language that defied comprehension. I'll tell you what 'face threaded' is: it's where they remove hair from your face using a thread. Really! It's a traditional method of hair removal in the Middle East and although I have marveled at it for years, I have never had it done. And wow, is it painful/amazing. And thorough. And a great cultural experience.

I spent some time in the kitchen making this beauty: Peanut Butter Cup Caramel Shortbread Bars, and the best part is that I only had to make a couple of ingredient substitutions.

Then the kids came home from school and we oohed and aahed together over a few small gifts - a new office chair, an Amazon gift certificate, a pretty bookmark, a spa gift certificate (can you tell living in Dubai has changed me?), and a bag of frozen onions that saved me at dinnertime. The best gift of all was the array of thoughtful emails from old and new friends collected by Jeremy and shared with me. It goes against my nature to just sit down and read nice things people say about me, and I actually put off reading the document for a while. Then I read it once and put it away again. I think I'll revisit it from time to time when I need a little boost to my sense of self. To all those who participated, thank you. I have to say I was surprised and amused at how many people mentioned my singular and ready way of laughing. I do love to laugh, so I'm glad people notice when I do...I guess?

Here's me at age 30, holding the pan of Peanut Butter Cup Caramel Shortbread Bars, minus the portion that I ate ALL BY MYSELF, thank you very much. No makeup, I didn't fix my hair all day, and my garments are hanging out of my shirt. It's as genuine as it gets.

Sometimes the day after a birthday can be a bit of a let down, but I woke up this morning ready to be 30 years old and feeling good about 5 October 2011. It didn't hurt that first thing this morning, a co-worker mistook me for a (freshman!) student as I left my office. Yep, still got it.

Farewell, sweet and twenty

2011-10-04T15:27:00.002+04:00

(Sweet and twenty.)

Today is the last day of my twenties.

Part of me is resisting subscribing to the standard cultural aversion toward aging. Of course I'm not thrilled that my body is getting older and necessarily moving toward reduced functionality, however miniscule or far-off that prospect is. After all, whatever age-related challenges are ahead, they are closer now than they were last year.

But another part of me is mourning the passage of my twenties for more than just the "haha, groan, I'm another year older and this time, for the first time, my age starts with a three" reason. Pretty much every major event of my adult life happened in my twenties, so I am sad to see the end of that decade.

(Also, the disconnect between my real age and my self-perceived age is undeniable now. I suspect I will feel like I'm a twenty-something for a few years yet, especially seeing that I've only recently accepted that I'm no longer in my early twenties.)

What's to come is still unsure. Even though my twenties were jam-packed with adventure and change and growth and challenges, I bet my thirties will come up with something to entertain me.

So hooray, I'll be thirty tomorrow, and proud of it. Bring it on.

Working

2011-10-03T15:15:00.004+04:00

I've been dying to blog about my new job. I'm teaching two sections of a class at AUS this semester - a study skills class for brand-new students. I didn't know I got the job until the day before classes started, and then I got right into teaching, and then I wasn't sure what I would allow myself to say publicly on this blog about it, and now two weeks have gone by and I haven't written a thing. I've already realized that I can't be so cavalier about blogging a real-life job involving real-life people who could conceivably stumble upon this someday. Luckily, I don't have any complaints. The stuff I want to blog about is mostly how adorable my students are, and what it's like to teach Emiratis, and how I feel about having a "real" job now, and how I'm still figuring out how to juggle all my life roles.

Let's see what I can tell you.

1. My students are adorable. They really are. Most of them are fresh out of high school so they aren't jaded by the college experience yet. The class material gives me a chance to ask them lots of questions about their lives and I love finding out about their histories and families and hopes and dreams. In some ways, it's like I'm teaching the same kids I had in Damascus six/seven years ago, and they've grown up. For the very youngest students I had back in 2004/05, that is technically possible. The ones who were already teenagers in 2004/05 - well, it's like they've come back to be in my class anyway. It's so good to be teaching impressionable young people again. I just love influencing their view of the world for the better.

2. What it's like to teach Emiratis. I don't know how much you know about Emiratis - have you heard that they have almost infinite wealth and live in large villas and drive fabulously expensive cars and employ extensive staff to cater to their every need? Well, while there are exceptions to the above, for the most part, it's all true, especially when the Emirati is from Abu Dhabi or (to a lesser extent) Dubai. Imagine having a prince or princess from a fairy tale in your class - or half a dozen, more like (dressed in kandura or abaya) - and that's how it is for me as their teacher.

There is no goal that is unattainable for them, no success out of reach. They are confident and self-assured and while these traits can (and do) drive you crazy in a social or public space sense, they are great in the classroom. Their lives are so very different from mine - from anything I could imagine, really - and yet they do bring interesting ideas to the classroom. The other day we were discussing time management and I asked the students to volunteer ways they could make better use of their time. One Emirati girl raised her hand and suggested in all seriousness (but with a smile) that maybe she could take a one-hour bubble bath instead of a three-hour bubble bath. There was also the time just recently when a non-Emirati (but Arab) student was talking about setting financial goals for those times when "you see something in the store and then look at the price tag and you know you can't afford it." One Emirati girl very visibly got a puzzled look on her face, as if she could not even fathom the possibility of such a thing happening in her life.

Anyway, there is more I could say about classroom dynamics and who comes from where and why it matters and what a big deal it is for them to be in a co-ed environment now, but it will have to wait.

3. How I feel about having a "real" job now. I've had a legitimate work-at-home job for nearly two years now, but this is my first outing into the regular work force since...2007, when I worked at Amideast in Jordan over the summer. And I confess that literally the first thing I did upon hearing I got this job was to head straight to H&M to buy some clothes that weren't the two pairs of jeans I currently own, as well as some shoes with heels on them. I think I've been able to fool everyone so far that I am a real person who doesn't look like she has the responsibility to wipe any tiny bums, at least not when I'm at work.

4. I'm still figuring out how to juggle all my life roles. The other day I did some work for my online job, taught my classes, did some reading/writing for my master's classes, took care of my children, and cooked and cleaned. I was all over the place, mentally. We had a few dinner FAILs last week, but everything got done, at least. The slight wrinkle is that I haven't even started my graduate assistantship yet, which is an additional five hours a week of research/serfdom to a professor. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to work it in somewhere and still manage to be a decent wife and mom. Decent.

I'm glad we got that over with. Now when I think of some funny classroom anecdotes to share, I won't have to get through all this background first!