Patience, Poopy Diapers and Trips to the Beach

So I took the kids to the beach today. I know it sounds ridiculous but it's too freaking hot to go to the beach. Yeah, that does sound kind of retarded. But that's because you guys probably DRIVE to the beach and get to lie around on a clean sand and NOT have to decide whether to plop down in the sand near the tracks of the rented 4-wheelers that these idiot tourists rent for their NINE YEAR OLDS to drive up and down the coastline or next to the family on vacation from Cairo who whip their baby's poopy diaper off and toss absently over their shoulder landing with a splat on your germophobic son's flip-flop! (And yeah, I know that the date on the photo above is wrong but that's because I couldn't get any good shots today with all the tourists in the way. But those are my kids last month at the same beach.)

I'm not a patient person by nature. Being a parent has sort of forced patience upon me. I have learned to ignore the disrespectful stares and rude remarks of people who don't know or care to understand dealing with an autistic child who has had too much change or sensory overload in public. I can hold my tongue and keep my hands to myself when dealing with multiple levels of stupid even though it is taking every fiber of my being to not stab repeatedly with whatever object is handy. And I've yet to act upon my fantasies of driving my kids out to the desert and dumping them there with a 2-liter bottle of water and a road map when they are fighting and tattling to the point that my blood pressure is within the optimal range for a full blown stroke. I've come a long way.

But the heat and humidity of Alexandria mixed with the morons that visit it in the summer and trash our beaches and then have the audacity to criticize how filthy they are, is sometimes more than I can handle.

But I finally gave in after five days of whining, crying, deal-making and cajoling by my kids. Ismail, Randa, Samiya and Aiman swam and played and watched an old man get rescued from drowning in 4 feet of water(?) while Mohamed drew new stories in his comic book and I talked to him with both eyes staring out at the sea counting to four repeatedly. After an hour and a half, I noticed the sun starting to set and I called them in, handed out sweatshirts, dumped out baby powder to rub on their feet to get the sand off and then we packed it up and headed home. I'm just excited that I've got two of the five knocked out asleep on the couch!

Maybe we'll bring a large trash bag next time and be good citizens and hope that the Cairenes learn from our example. 

The Memory of Scent

I was just going to close up on here and let my kids have a turn on the computer. But then suddenly I smelled the night jasmine coming in from the balcony door on the other side of the house. The doorman has a night jasmine tree planted just under our balcony. It's LOVELY when the wind blows in off the Mediterranean Sea (which is about 12 blocks away) and hits that tree. We get to reap the benefits. It reminds me of walking in Amman, Jordan in the evenings on my way home from work.

Scents always trigger memory quicker than any word or song or  picture. The smell of Old Spice cologne makes me think of my dad. And whenever we walk past the pastry wholesale shop on our way to the butcher, I smell the aroma of cooking sugar and butter and immediately I'm back in Nikaia, Greece in KAIROS bakery where my husband worked when we first started dating. The smell of rain makes me think of shopping in Germany with my sister. And the smell of freshly cut grass can take me to any number of softball fields where I played on various teams growing up.  The smell of "Sweet Honesty" perfume by Avon makes me think of my mom in the summertime when I was only 8 and the smell of tangerines takes me back to St. Nicklaus' Tag in Germany and putting my boots outside the door for treats.

The smell of peppermint candy makes me think of my paternal grandfather, Buddy Nicholas. And the smell of  pine trees, Frito's, or pecan pie is an instantaneous trip to Mobile, Alabama. The smell of iced tea makes me think of my Aunt Ginger.  The smell of Baby Magic lotion makes me think of my firstborn son and how he loved to take a bath in the kitchen sink.

The smell of lemon Carpet Fresh makes me laugh, because my cousin, Jim, empty an entire box of it on the rug in the den one time and even after we vacuumed it all up, no one could walk into the den without their eyes tearing up for about three weeks. The smell of Poison perfume makes me want to vomit. (Someone bathed in it at work when I was pregnant with my first baby.)  And the smell of popcorn makes me think of sitting around our living room watching movies together.

The jasmine is filling up my head and reminding me that it's not my turn on the computer anymore. It's lovely. I'm going to go sit closer to the balcony door to enjoy it and the other scents of Summer.

Summer Schedules

It's hot. (Yeah, Africa hot because it's only June. I expect it'll be Dallas-hot by August.) So I'm not a big fan of the heat because it's so doggone humid here and we don't have air conditioning. I can live with just ceiling fans and open windows. Probably, it's healthier this way. (And if it's not, just can it! I don't want to hear how I'm doing it wrong mainly because I can't afford an air conditioner right now nor the additional 100 Pounds per month on the electric bill.)

Every summer I have these huge plans involving how much I'm going to get accomplished. I usually plan to complete my novel, teach my kids how to type without hunting and pecking, teach them to swim and we'll spend every other day at the beach, and I'll make awesome desserts that I saved from the internet and maybe I'll go back to freelance translation of articles online to make some extra money. And every year I'm lucky enough to get my butt out of bed before noon because it's too hot to sleep at night and too hot to do anything during the day.

However, this year is different. Today I got up at 11 o'clock. (That's EARLY in Egypt.) I managed to wash and hang a load of laundry, shower, have a cup of coffee, and complete five more pages on Chapter 7 of my novel! YEAH! I then got up and went to pay the internet bill (only three days late) and managed to keep my service from being interrupted. YEAH! And I brought Randa with me...she NEVER wants to go anywhere anymore. And we went to the vegetable market and bought fresh green and red grapes and apples and okra (YUM) and meat and rice and most importantly, a new remote control for the satellite receiver. Our old one bit the dust when it fell on the floor during a fight about which ridiculous cartoon we were going to watch. (I'm seriously considering grounding them from watching any cartoons with the exception of Warner Brothers cartoons. At least then they'd learn about classical music and how to cross dress in order to prevent hunters with speech impediments from blowing their brains out.

I got home and made a light lunch of fava beans with cumin and peppers and cheese and tomatoes with Arabic bread. And then I attempted to "catch my husband" on Skype. No joy. Oh well. He's  probably doing laundry or fixing his car...it IS the weekend.

It's been an incredibly weird week for me. I finally looked at myself in the mirror and decided that blonde is NOT a good look for me.  So last night I went back to red. I feel like I've got my own skin on again. It's still in the beginning days so any water on my hair drips off red and my t-shirt that I'm wearing now has red stains around the collar because it's so EFFIN' hot that I was sweating and my sweat dripped red onto my shirt. Oh well. And it's still pretty bright. (LOVE the Koleston Intense Cherry Red by WELLA.) I kind of look like I'm wearing a Fasching wig . Except that after bleaching the crap out of my hair a month ago and then dying it blonde and now red....all of my natural curl is just gone. I've never had such limp straight hair in my life. I don't know what to do with it. Perhaps it will curl back up again in a few weeks. I sure hope so. I love my curls.

Also, my kids have decided to get into classic rock recently. I went through my son's favorites  playlist on YouTube and he's got nothing but AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Metallica and Queen saved on it with a couple of Bob Schneider songs thrown in for good measure. Also, Randa was walking around singing "Immigrant Song" by Led Zeppelin yesterday. That was weird. This is my autistic kid who still soothes herself by listening to Barney songs. Aiman has always had a thing for anything he can play air guitar to. But Samiya prefers only Michael Jackson and Ismail, my rhythm-less wanna-be rapper, is still a sucker for anything remotely gangsta.  (I'm trying to gently push the old hip hop because I don't want him walking around calling women bitches and hoes all the time. I think "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five can provide him with more intelligent lyrics and still give him that funky bass line that he admires so much.)

Anyway, I'm hoping to continue with some semblance of a schedule this summer that starts with me writing each morning. If I can just get a few pages or even paragraphs written daily, I may make this novel a reality instead of just a dream.

Next dream to make a reality:  Killing this blankety-blank-blank mosquitoes that have taken up residence under this desk!

You know how much you hate it when your sinuses are all clogged up due to allergies and even when you cook a really awesome meal like baked chicken in lemon juice with potatoes, you can't enjoy the smell or taste of it because your stupid nose is not working?!

Mine cleared up. About 14.6 seconds before my son decided to have a fart-fest in the living room and attempt to kill us all. My sinuses cleared out about the time the green cloud wafted across the room and bitch-slapped me. Of course, this left four of us pinching our noses closed and yelling and the responsible party in a fit of giggles. (Thankfully, Randa was asleep in another room and didn't have to suffer like the rest of us.) Could that have been the end of the night?

Of course, not. This is MY life.

The reeking odor nauseated Samiya, who was already feeling under the weather. She complained to me holding her stomach that Ismail farted and that she literally felt like puking. I directed her to the bathroom. She didn't make it past the door and left an even smellier trail of chicken that hadn't been chewed very well. I got her cleaned up and changed and off to bed.  I cleaned up the big mess and then remembered that she may get ill again during the night and that perhaps I should put a bucket next to her bed. Only the bucket had a really dirty towel in it that I'd decided to wash by hand. It's a bathmat type towel and I use it to mop up spills on the kitchen floor because the 'genius' who built this apartment put very smooth wall tiles on the floor and I slip a lot.

I had put laundry detergent in the bucket filled it with water and threw the towel in around 9 this morning. Well, it's nearly 4 a.m. (Yeah, I don't sleep much.) So, I figured that I'd just rinse the towel very well and then wash it again in the washing machine tomorrow to get it really clean now that all of the sand and salt and stuff that had been all over it had now been soaked out of it. So I tossed the towel into the sink and then spilled the soapy water all over the floor and pushed it down the open drain with my giant squeegee thingy. And then I rinsed it and squeegeed again. Then I yelled at Ismail, "DID YOU FART AGAIN?"

He swore he hadn't.  I did what I NEVER should have done. In fact, as I did it my brain began screaming at me, "NO! You idiot! DON'T DO IT! STOPPPPPPPPPPPP!" But of course, my body was like, "You're not the boss of me! I'll do what I want to!" And it didn't listen. And that's about the time my hand  holding that nasty ass towel reached my nose and I inhaled so deeply to see if that was the source of stink I was smelling that my lungs filled to capacity.

My body immediately apologized to my brain.  My brain gave my body the finger.

So in the last 20 minutes that my nasal passages have decided to drop their strike, I've managed to smell giant teenager farts, barfed up chicken and rotten backwater towel!  Why in the hell couldn't they have started working when I was baking that chicken earlier today???!!!!

Today is Pretty Quiet for Anxiety Thursday

I am having one of those weird days where I actually have all the quiet that I need because all five of my kids are sleeping in today and I have managed to bring in the laundry and get a cup of coffee and turn on the white noise fan (which is kind of cold on my back right now, come to think of it) and I don't have stacks and stacks of dishes from late night refrigerator raids by teenagers and I sat down at the computer and managed to NOT
open Facebook or that evil, evil Pinterest (I'm sorry, Pinterest. I love you!) and I managed to pound out the rest of chapter 6 of my (seemingly perpetual attempt at writing a) novel and I made the mental connection that the HORRIBLE and ROTTEN person who is SPAMMING on Pinterest is ALSO stealing photographs from the Nouveau Raw website and the photographs are copyrighted and belong to Amie Sue Oldfather (who you can find HERE on Facebook) and YES! I certainly am tattle-telling about it right here and right now because I don't dig copyright infringement and while I do post photos that don't belong to me on this blog site from time to time, they are always from free sites that encourage sharing such as the above photograph that I got from Photobucket  or else I use my own photographs because YEAH, I own a digital camera and I figured out how to upload photos so there!  (hold on....need to catch my breath.)

So anyway, I was pinning yesterday and found this really cool-looking photo with the promise of a recipe for "raw peanut butter and chocolate cupcakes" and of course I had to comment by tagging it with my friend's name, because Bonnie and I love to torture one another with really delicious dessert pins.  Only when I tried to follow the links back to where the recipe is I was hoodwinked!  It was a fake "scavenger hunt" pin that leads you to believe that Pinterest itself is giving away these huge prizes to 5 pinners daily that range anywhere from $50 to $1000 give-aways from companies such as Amazon.com, Starbucks, Victoria's Secret, and Apple, etc.

Now I have NO IDEA whether or not these companies are actually sponsoring these giveaways or not....but if I were a betting person (and I'm not because I believe gambling is wrong), I'd put my money on NOT....because when you attempt to "collect your prize" you are then linked to these applications that you need to fill out in order to collect. And there's a whole lot of "required information" such as your home address, telephone numbers, email address, birth date, etc and an agreement to share this information with some giant list of companies such as Fingerhut and cheap airline ticketing agents, etc and basically, you're just providing your own information for telemarketers and spambots.  At any rate there never was a recipe listed or a link back to the Nouveau Raw website, which I'm pretty sure is where the fake pinner got the photo from.  I just happened to notice the copyright tag in the bottom right corner of the photograph and I am already a newsletter recipient from Amie Sue Oldfather because I went through a vegetarian stage last year (that only lasted 45 days but still....don't judge me!) and I still use some of the recipes from that site.

Wow. Did I ever go off on a tangent. Let me get back on the rails...if I can remember where they were. Yeah, I got nothing.....

So the next topic I wanted to discuss in my ADD-forum of thinking, was hair.  Yeah, I'm usually a big time ponytail-but-only-comb-it-while-it's-wet kinda girl....but I got this wise idea that when my husband left to work overseas again that I should hack it all off and attempt to go platinum blonde....only at my age, twenty-twenty-three, it just REALLY  looks stupid.......(or 'fucktacular' as my friend, Buffy, described it) and so I decided to darken it up a bit to an ash blonde....which is okay but still kinda looks weird on me. Maybe I'm still not used to seeing anything other than a deep red on me. I've been dying my hair red for more than 20 years and it does look much better.  If it were just a matter of color (and apparently texture because after bleaching the crap out of my hair four times and then dying it to a darker blonde version my hair is the same texture as those rectangular hard bristle brush brooms that they sweep public streets with) I could deal with it.  But NOOOOOOO!  I also had to have it cut. And since my trusted hair dresser (20 miles away from here) quit doing hair because she had a baby three years ago and is now a SAHM, I had to trust a stranger to cut my hair. OH! The humanity. I look ridiculous. You know that "in-between-stage" that you have to go through a few weeks after you get your hair cut?  Well, this woman managed to cut my hair into an "in-between-stage" cut.......so I got to skip the whole "ohmigosh how cute" cut in the beginning. I hate her.  I'm grateful that my husband isn't here to criticize it. (Although he did see if over Skype and laughed while he was saying how it looks good.  Nope. They still don't offer that Skype-app of chisel-punch to the kidneys. I looked for it.)

So, I am waiting patiently for my hair follicles to rest and repair with lots of conditioning treatments until next month when I go back to red. While I wait, I'm going to try to catch up on my mending that's about to break the sewing table it's stacked so high and then perhaps I'll try out at least 10 of those hundreds of DIY crafts and sewing projects and recipes I've madly pinned to my Pinterest boards. (Oh, Pinterest you ARE the devil.)

I think I need to have more coffee....my feet are beginning to touch the floor again.

Endogenous Morphine....I Dig It

I've been a scale yo-yo most of my adult life. I've never been able to wear "skinny jeans" or super short skirts that require you to shave to your belly button. I was always very active and fit because I was a jockette all through school and continued playing in softball leagues and bowling and biking and running. I have always enjoyed working out. And anyone can tell you that muscle weighs more than fat, so when I was 140 pounds on the scale at 5'3 and a 1/2" (because that 1/2" means something to ME) and wearing a size 9/10, I was extremely thin. I have curves. I like them.

Enter married life and having 5 children in 6 years, with each child weighing within 4 ounces of my bowling ball that I'm now far too busy to use. About 6 years after my youngest son was born, I was watching The Biggest Loser with my husband, that guy whose waist is only 2 inches bigger than the day I met him. Anyway, we were talking about weight and getting back into shape and I asked him if I were to lose all this weight I've packed on over the years and managed to keep it off for a year, would he be willing to pay for plastic surgery to get rid of any excess skin and maybe put the girls back up where they belong since I'm wanting to stop tucking them in my pants. He said he would. I challenged him. I bet him that I could lose my 40 lbs quicker than he could put on 20 lbs. He took that bet.................and lost. I lost 44 lbs in 3 mos and kept it off for over two years. And then it started to creep back on.

Then I lost 10 and then I'd gain 20 and back and forth and back and forth until my heaviest (that I am aware of) was 231 lbs. OMG.  So, when I came back to Egypt with the kids, we lived so far in the boonies that I had to walk at least 1.5 miles just to buy milk and 2 to catch a bus. I started walking the 3.5 miles home from dropping the kids off at school and the weight started to come off. Then we moved to a 5th floor apartment where the elevator had not yet been installed (which is fine by me because I'm so claustrophobic and they're smaller than one of those public toilet stalls) and I managed to get down into a 12! It was soooo fantastic.

Then my husband came back from working overseas and I stopped walking as much because he didn't want me running all over Hell's half-acre all the time. And then we moved into a 2nd floor apartment that was much closer to all the amenities and schools. I appreciated the cut in time that moving provided me. The only down side was that it cut into my forced exercise program. So over the last year, I've ballooned up again. I don't know how much I weigh exactly, but my size 16s are getting a little tight. I ripped the thigh out of my pants stepping up to get on a bus. (Thank God I wear a long dress over my regular clothes so know one knew.)

I am trying to get back into shape. After the whole heart work up last year because I thought I was having angina attacks and it turned out to be stress and gas (not surprising at all) I have decided to make better food choices and start to exercise again.  Last year, I tried to go vegetarian and ended up gaining 10 lbs. And I really like meat. So that lasted only 45 days.

But now I'm trying to cut most of the non-produce carbohydrates from my diet entirely. I've stopped putting sugar in my coffee and tea. I will sometimes add a tiny bit of cinnamon for flavor. I'm trying to up my water intake and I've been taking Mohamed to his exams all week (approximately 5 kilometers away) and walking all the way back at a very fast pace (to 8-count 80's music, in fact.) I'm sweating like a whore in church by the time I get to the vegetable market and I usually complete it in 25 minutes! Of course, today was his last day of exams and I have no idea how I'm going to do this now....perhaps I'll change course and walk down to the beach and up to the vegetable market and back. That ought to be at least as long a course, if not longer. Whatever.

The main reason I started to blather on here was to say that I don't feel depressed today. I've been sad and angry and miserable most of this week. Fighting my angst-y teenagers is usually the straw that breaks my camel's back and after I scream at them and separate them I end up in the fetal position on my bed crying my eyes out. BUT today, after my shin splints stopped hurting me, I felt my face smiling without meaning to and I noticed  how nice the breeze was and how beautiful a view it was (provided I didn't look down at the garbage on the street.) And I felt better overall. Endorphins are nature's Prozac. I LIKE this feeling. I think I'm gonna keep it up.

I KNOW That It's Wrong, But...

I love my kids. I would do anything for them...and have. No reason to go through all of the sacrifices that I, like millions of other moms across the planet, have made for them. I'm not any better or worse than the rest of them.  Or am I?
Yes, I spend an exorbitant amount of time on the computer. I know this. And I try to rationalize that it's because my husband is working overseas and I try to catch up on email and Facebook and my writing this blog or on my novel while keeping Skype open in case he is trying to call.....(Yes, I had to minimize my browser just now to open Skype. Point of fact, I try to keep my blog posts as close to truth as I possibly can.) But the truth is this:

I have no adult friends to talk to in this country. None that I honestly like to spend time with anymore. So all of my friends are at my disposal via Facebook or email. They are MOSTLY people that I actually know in real life and probably 100-150 of them are related to me by blood. I have friends from childhood, high school in Germany, high school in Maryland, former workmates, former partymates, former cellmates acquaintances from all over the world.  There are also about 30  additional friends that I know only from association through military BRAT pages. However, most of the 440+ people on my friends list are people that I actually know. So, yeah....I'm on the computer for about 10-15 minute increments MANY times over the course of any average day.

And these little obnoxious creatures that I gave birth to are criticizing me for "cutting in line," "taking too long," or "stealing my turn" in the 30-minute turn rotation list that is SUPPOSED to keep me from murdering my own offspring.  So tonight during dinner, they were watching the lamest film that Brendan Fraser ever did on television ("Furry Vengeance") and I felt my IQ points dropping. So I finished and sat at the PC to start catching up on some overdue reading. My son, who hadn't even finished eating yet, marched over to me and demanded that I get off the computer because he had been "waiting all day" for his turn to come around again and I always sat here for HOURS and HOURS at a time.  I reminded him that I just shelled out another 15 Pounds yesterday to replace the fan in the power supply unit without asking anyone to contribute and that I was entitled as QUEEN of the household to sit at the computer without interruption. He continued as to how it is so unfair of me to bump him out of line just so I could "look at FACEBOOK."

I know it's wrong....but sometimes I just wanna tell him to STFU.  But then he'd use the expression freely with his siblings and I would be the one who taught it to him. So I don't tell him. Let him learn his use of the f-bombs in the street like other teenagers.