December 2011 – Page 5 – robinchartier

Kargeens

One of Art and Barbara’s last nights here we went to Kargeen’s, a local restaurant with great outdoor seating Since it’s in the 70s at night it’s the perfect place to eat this time of year.

It’s not the greatest place to take pictures though, since it’s lit by twinkle lights.

I took 3 or 4 photos of Caleb and he had his eyes closed (or the photo came out blurry) in each one. This is the best of them.

There are several cats that roam around under the tables and Camille was fascinated by “our” cat as long as she was looking down on him. When they were eye to eye she couldn’t get away fast enough.

Startled by the cat = banged head on the corner of the table.

We finally got to try their chicken byriani. Last time we were here I ordered the byriani and the waiter said I couldn’t have rice “because of the shisha.” There are two sides of the restaurant and you can smoke shisha in one section of the restaurant. We were in the shisha section, but not smoking it ourselves so we couldn’t figure out why shisha and rice were a “no-no.” We asked him to explain and all he said was, “you know, the rice and the shisha,” and waved his hand around like swirling smoke.

I even went home and googled “smoking shisha no rice” and couldn’t come up with any explanation, but more than one friend has been met with the same rice ban in that part of the restaurant, so this time we sat across the way and had our fill of rice. The best part of the meal was the bread — huge, hot, puffy pieces of flatbread that we dipped in hummus and moutabel (which is like hummus, but made with eggplant instead of garbanzo beans). I also had a really fantastic salad with avocado and pomegranate seeds.

Making friends everywhere she goes.

Calendar share

Since all grandparents have received their calendars, I wanted to share it with the rest of you. Especially my sisters since I was debating sending you each one, but I didn’t want to be all, “Merry Christmas, enjoy pictures of ME!” You’ll have to let me know if you’re interested in getting on the list for future editions . . .

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The theme for this calendar is, “Oh, the places we’ve been!” and each month’s photos are from different cities we’ve visited this year.

And because I LOVE the photo on the cover of Carter and Caleb on the camel, I ordered that one as a canvas for our house. I’m thinking I might try and take the layouts from our old calendars (I’ve done one for the past 5 years) and try and put them into one photo book.

ETA: A link to last year’s calendar. The earlier designs have been discontinued so I can’t share them.
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coffee please

Girly has a strange love of coffee. Not so strange when you’re a grownup, but since when do babies like black coffee with just a splash of cream? This one does. I guess it goes along with her love of salsa, spicy curries, lemons, and salad dressing that is heavy on the vinegar.

*** A heads-up: she does the same thing over and over again, so unless you’re family, you probably won’t want to stick it out for the entire 2 1/2 minutes.

*** no need to call CPS, it’s decaf

baby face

Some pictures from today when she was being funny over lunch. She was very proud to be feeding herself.

Loving Lucy’s eggplant salad.

All done! She loves throwing things in the trash. Lucy is always finding magnets off the fridge or silverware that she “helpfully” finds and tosses when we’re not looking.

TASIM ball

Kristy asked why I finally got a Mac when all these years I have claimed that the PC version was fine for me and Mac wasn’t worth paying the extra money for. The biggest reason is because I can never figure out how to do things easily on a PC. 15 years later and I still can’t find where things are saved on my hard drive so I end up saving everything to the desktop. I finally decided to see if the Mac phenomenon was all hype or if it really was better for me. My experience has been that it’s 1000 times more intuitive for me and I spend much less time trying to figure out how to do something so everything is easier and faster.

A perfect example of my PC frustration: I have a picture from the TAISM ball and I can not figure out how scan the stupid thing onto our desktop computer. I could have done it with our “old” one that got fried by the AC water, but this new one doesn’t play nice with our printers. So after spending 30 minutes trying unsuccessfully to scan it to the computer or scan and save it to a memory card (who knew our printer did that? Except it doesn’t because it would say it was saving it to the card, but then there wouldn’t be anything on the card. :sigh:) I resorted to taking a picture of it with my camera — the old school way of scanning.

The photo didn’t have great contrast before, and having to take a photo of it didn’t help. The theme was 1920s/30s jazz which hopefully explains the feathers that I’m wearing.

This is the only photo that we took with our camera, but there are others that people tagged us in on facebok. If I see one of Josh and I together, I’ll grab it and move it over here. We had a fantastic time with the other TAISM parents and teachers. It felt strange and very high-class to be going to our sons’ private school fundraiser event. What a strange life we lead. One year I’m a mom homeschooling in my pajamas, the next I’m partying with the ambassador.

We danced a bunch and it confirmed our desire to someday take dance lessons. You know, the ones we’ve been meaning to take since our first Marine Corps ball 14 years ago. We were finally signed up for salsa in Egypt and the night of our first class was the first night they called for a 6pm curfew and that was the beginning of the end. I guess the universe doesn’t intend for us to dance like we know what we’re doing.

Oh well, we managed — except I’m a bad follower and I like to watch other people who have obviously had the benefit of lessons (especially because they were playing old jazz standards and some of the couples had skills) and when I’m busy watching people, I’m a really bad follower. And then I laugh about it. I have a long way to go before I’ll be ready for Dancing with the Stars.

The food was amazing. Seared tuna (that was still properly raw on the inside) with fennel, lemon mint sorbet between courses, beef tenderloin, and desserts galore. As you can see from the above photo, we had a great time and I obviously found something hysterically funny right before they snapped this photo.