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Lost

I've lost my grandparents. Not them actually, they died many, many years ago, but a pair of ceramic bowls with their names on them.

We moved a couple of months ago, after living in the same house for more than 30 years. I definitely had them. They definitely made it to our new place. But when I went to get them to hang them on the wall, they were no place to be found.

So Mildred and Horace are on the lam.

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My Bad Day

Here's the list:

Train got into the station even before 6 am.

The outside temperature was 25 (at the end of March).

The website for the restaurant at the station said it was open for breakfast at 6:30 am. It didn't actually open until 8:30.

We walked a mile, uphill to leave our bags at the AirBnB.

Succotash, a local breakfast place is closed on Tuesday and Wednesday (today is Wednesday).

We decided to go to the zoo and walked another 3/4 mile to a breakfast place listed on the Internet. We found it. It was take out only and no bathroom.

Finally found a place for coffee and a bathroom.

We decided to go to the zoo and took a bus. After an hour we got to the zoo. It was still cold. Most of the animals were inside. The lorakeet feeding only happens on the weekends. after an hour of walking past empty cages I got a text.

It was from the restaurant that we had stopped in Kansas City to eat at. Their hot water heater was broken so they would be closed. They could move my reservation to tomorrow night.

I thought I was going to cry.

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G'damn Facebook

I just spent half an hour trying to find where to go to turn off the auto play of ads in my facebook feed.

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Joy

October 17, 2023

Last June I took my husband to the emergency room. He had a detached retina that needed immediate surgery (Immediate is somewhat misleading. We spent the day waiting for a time slot on the following day).

At the end of a long day I realized that I had only one earring. This is always a sad thing, since I wear my favorite earrings. Why would you wear them, if you didn't like them?

The unlost earring sat on the dining room table for months just in case it's mate turned up. I finally cleared it away so we could eat on the table.

Yesterday I was using the weed-wacker to clear off the hostas and other vegetation that gets in the way of snow shoveling and I saw a small blue rectangle (1/16" x 1/14") in the dirt. It was the missing earring!

But where was the other one? I looked in my box of single earrings. Not there and my heart sank. I looked in the dish where I put my rings at night and voila!

So exactly 18 weeks later I have a pair of earrings again.

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Life is Unfair

Like many people I harbor the feeling that other people get things that I don’t. And I keep a mental list of the injustices in my life.

I grew up attending a Quaker gathering held in Cape May, NJ. High school students got to stay in a local hotel while us little kids had to stay with our parents. I enviously watched my two older sisters get this privilege. It was finally going to be my turn. They canceled the whole thing. A vocal proponent of the Vietnam War had bought many of the hotels in Cape May and Quakers weren’t comfortable financially supporting him.

In college the 5th year architecture students got the best studio (Please be aware that architecture students spend most of their time in the studio.). After three years in the top floor studio they rearranged the studios and sent 4th year  students to the basement, where we stayed for our last two years. If you left the windows open the wind blew leaves, etc., onto your drawings.

My high school holds  elaborate alumni days. I grew up attending them with my mother. There are many activities - swimming, canoeing, fishing contest, baseball games, hay rides, and more. Both of my older sisters have attended their 50th reunions. Seeing old classmates, canoeing with them, and exchanging news. My 50th has been made virtual due to COVID-19. One more injustice to add to my list.

Sigh.

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Personal Space

Many years ago, I was at a friend’s house while his parents were out of town. Later, his mother asked if I’d been there alone or with others. Apparently I had left a strand of hair behind in the kitchen. I was amazed. I couldn’t fathom anyone noticing such a small thing.

Now, fifty years later, I have 2 virtual strangers in my house. And after having sole control over many of the spaces within it, I see how easy it is to see the stray hair in the shower, the empty carton left on the counter, and the unknown goobers on the inside of the microwave.

I am already tired of this social isolation thing.

March 24, 2020

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snow

Overnight we got a half inch of snow. It was the early spring kind that sticks to every branch and looks beautiful.

The sky was clear and as it got lighter the snow started to fall from the trees in faint sparkling showers. After an hour or so it had melted enough so there were droplets of water on the branches glistening.

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Fabric

More than 12 years ago I saw an exhibition of quilts.

I thought,”“I can do this. What a great way to use bits of leftover fabric”

I was right that I can do it (and I enjoy it, in fact), but I now have more fabric scraps than ever.

I have a 5 year goal to use it all. So we are talking quilts with a mishmash of squares.

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Christmas 2018

We spent the morning going through our files. We have four drawers of stuff. There were many treasures. SAT scores for our younger son (graduated almost 18 years ago). We also still had all the documents from buying our house in Alaska. We moved away from there nearly 30 years ago. Photocopiers are dangerous. We had half a dozen copies of an old survey of our current property.

All in all two bags of trash. One to be shredded and another for recycling.

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postcards

I like to send picture postcards.

On our first day in South Africa we bought postcards to mail. We also found a post office and purchased post card stamps when we were buying new SIM cards for our phones.

We returned to the hotel, wrote our postcards, addressed them, and put stamps on them.

“We’ll just give them to the front desk to mail”, I said.

“Oh no,” said the very helpful woman at th desk. ““You need to take them to the post office.”

“You don’t get letters here?”

“No”

““There isn’t a box or something?”

“No”

She was right. There are no letter boxes in South Africa. 5 days later our guide led us to a post office in a shopping mall. They took the postcards. 

I wonder if anyone will ever get them.

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Young Hawk

I was startled the other day when a hawk swooped just over my head. It landed on the roof of the carzebo and I could see that it was a juvenile red-tailed hawk.

The next day I looked out my kitchen window and saw it sitting on the deck railing. I usually see them in the tops of large trees, so this was interesting. As I watched it tried to catch a squirrel in the yard, sometimes actually running after it. I hope that it learns how to hunt better, and I hope it developers a liking for chipmunks.

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Toad House

Years ago my sister gave me a toad house for Christmas. It looks like an upside down flower pot with a chunk out of the rim. It has been sitting in my garden for at least twenty years. I’ve never seen a toad anywhere near it.

The other day I was looking for signs of spring and I noticed that it was tilting over. When I picked it up to straighten it I saw that it has been serving as a portico for a chipmunk.

They are relentless beasts.

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ANTS

How do they do it? The ants have traveled from the pantry floor, around the corner, up the side of a doorway, across the top of the doorway, gone a few inches to a wall cabinet, up the side of the cabinet to the ceiling. They then travel around the cabinet to the wall and across the wall to another cabinet. They have crawled to the front of the cabinet gotten inside the door and gone down to the bottom shelf. There they found a jar of honey. They can't get into the honey, but they can lick all around it. Seems like a lot of work to find yourself on the outside looking in.

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Rough Morning

I noticed last week that our rain gutters needed to be cleaned out and decided that I'd do them after swimming. Unfortunately, by that time we were in the middle of a thunder storm, so I waited. Cleaning the gutters is always messy, but this time there was mud as well. And with a ladder, mud on your shoes means mud on the ladders which means mud on you hands. As I am almost finished with the gutters I think I hear our smoke detector, but it stops. We have hard wired smoke detectors and they don't ever just stop. We keep a shower cap handy for when we are broiling something or roasting a turkey. I finish with the gutters and the smoke detector goes off again. So I shed my mud encrusted shoes and go inside. I don't see any smoke. I grab the fire extinguisher and check all three floors. No smoke, no fire. I get another ladder (not muddy) and look at the smoke detector. When I take it off the ceiling it seems not to be connected. Ah-ha! It's been running on battery and it wants the battery replaced. I look for a 9v battery and find one at the very back of the closet. 8 install it, the light glows green and I believe I've fixed it. It goes off again.i think maybe the battery at the back of the closet isn't good, so I go buy a new battery. [Did I mention that I got a phone call from a local organization asking me for money in the middle of this?] I install the new battery. The alarm still goes off. I turn to the Internet. They say I should be cleaning it monthly (WTF?), so I get out the vacuum cleaner, but that doesn't help. I am considering just putting it up without connecting it, but that seems stupid. Then I remember that there is an extra smoke detector (maybe the electrician had to buy 4 - I don't know) in our cupboard. I get it and connect it and, damn it, it beeps. I take it down (please realize that the way this thing installs is not easy. You must get all the wires into the hole, line up the flanges, shove it in, and turn it). The battery it comes with isn't attached. I attach it and re-install it and GREEN LIGHT, and SILENCE. Then my sister calls and I'm on the phone for an hour. So it's the afternoon and everything is good now.

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FB

I don't understand many things that are posted on fb. For example, a classmate from college (didn't know him very well nearly 40 years ago, so why is he my "friend"?) "commented on a photo" of a sign that says betcha can't name a city that doesn't have the letter "A" in it. WTF? I can think of several (New York, Sioux City, Troy, Rochester, and so on). I think I'll just unfriend him.

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Crossing Borders

Our Jordanian visas expired on April 21. We decided a visit to a neighboring country would be the easiest way to get a new one. Jordan shares borders with Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Israel, and the West Bank. Travel to Iraq or Syria isn't recommended, the status of women in Saudi Arabia leaves me a little queasy, and you can't get a Jordanian visa if you come in from the West Bank. So Israel is it.

We figured in one trip we could get a valid visa, see Israel, visit the West Bank, experience an Israeli check point, and visit the Ramallah Friends School (a Quaker school).

We opted to use public transportation. The Trust International Transit Co. offers scheduled service from Irbid to Tel Aviv, so I thought it would be simple.

I was wrong. It involves many vehicle changes.

The University driver took us to the Trust office in Irbid without a hitch.

Across the street from Trust International Transit are the offices of the Irbid Governate. When the driver dropped us off the street was clogged with parked taxis and men were standing around outside the government offices. They started chanting and waving illegible, hand written signs. As I was standing in front of the bus station watching a woman came over and started talking to me. This isn't unusual in Jordan, and I tried to answer her questions (me not much Arabic and she not much English). Eventually she announced that she was a police officer which made sense because it was also across the street. We talked some more and then she said she wanted to see into my suitcase. She looked through them and everything was OK. She continued to hang around and she even had her own folding chair.

Half an hour after the scheduled departure a man came and gestured for us to come with him. We learned that if there aren't many people going to Tel Aviv they don't use a bus. We were driven in a taxi until we were within sight of the border between Jordan and Israel. We were then transfered to another taxi who drove us a few hundred feet to the Jordan River Crossing. We then walked to the offices, paid our 8 JD to leave, got passport stamps, and walked back to the bus waiting area.

Our 4th vehicle was a large bus that drove across the Jordan River to Israel. Where we got out, got our passports inspectected, had our luggage x-rayed, explained where we were going and exchanged some JDs into Shekels. Now we're in a large arrivals hall with no idea of where to go. We looked for a taxi and stood around until I noticed a man shouting at us from the other side. So we walked through another passport check and got into another taxi which was to take us to the bus station in Tel Aviv. A short way into our trip the driver announced there was a problem. He drove us into 'Afula and put us on a service which took us to Tel Aviv.

The bus station in Tel Aviv is multi-storied like the Port Authority in NYC only bigger. We caught a bus to Jerusalem without any trouble.

In Jerusalem there are Palestinian buses and Israeli buses and they don't share anything. So we needed to get from the west side of Jerusalem to the east side. It was rush hour and the buses were crowed. The information we'd gotten from the internet told us to take a number 6 bus and get off when we saw the walls of the old city. The driver of the number 6 bus said he didn't go to there, so we took a taxi to the Damascus Gate for way too much money. When we asked him to take us to the buses and he wanted more money. We got out and walked.

We asked a few people and were soon on the number 18 bus to Ramallah. 

So nine different vehicles and ten hours of travel. To get to a city that is only 70 miles from Irbid. 

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Comfort Food

I enjoy food and Jordanian food is no exception. Jordan shares the cuisine of its neighbors - hummus, falafel, tabbouleh, baba ganoush, etc. But the dish that many Jordanians give as their favorite is mansaf.

Mansaf is a Bedouin dish that consists of boiled lamb piled onto a large platter of rice (traditionally this must have been bulgur as their aren't a lot of rice fields in this part of the world), garnished with toasted almonds, and served with yogurt sauce poured over everything. In my experience (I've had it twice so I'm an expert, right?) it's made with little or no spices.

To get the complete picture of being invited to someone's home for mansaf you must understand Jordanian hospitality. People here are amazingly welcoming and they are generous and attentive hosts. You are given a plate with twice as much food on it than you would have taken for yourself. As soon as you clear any part of your plate, more is put on. With a dish as heavy as mansaf this can become painful. 

A few nights ago we were invited to eat with the family of a medical student in the village of Izrit. Although the medical student has 6 younger siblings, we didn't meet any of them. We did meet his grandfather, grandmother, an uncle, an aunt, a random relation, his father and his mother. By the time we sat down to dinner all the women had withdrawn to the kitchen leaving me as the lone female at the table.  

After we had been eating for a while I realized that the chunk of meat in the center was the lambs head. I could tell because it still had its teeth. Shortly after that our host pried its jaws apart and offered us part of the tongue. A good guest would have tried it, but I was already very full and a little grossed out, so I declined as politely as I could.

I have decided that the love of mansaf is not unlike the American love of roasted turkey. It is tasty, but not super amazing. It reminds us of meals shared with our grandparents, cousins, and siblings. It represents the love of our families.