Month: October 2015

Fall fun

This weekend Josh and I went to the Navy Ball. A first for us since we’ve never been stationed on a Navy Base before moving to Bahrain and since we always go to the Marine Corps ball, I thought it might be redundant. But a group of friends were going and asked if we wanted to join their table so we thought we’d give it a go, especially since it might be our last chance to go to one. 

I took this photo because I was trying to check my hair in the car on the way. I went from the shower to the car and was trying to dry my hair with the air blowing in from my open car window. Making sure it hadn’t blown all over the place. 

I decided the Navy Ball is super fun because it doesn’t matter to us. It’s not a work event so Josh doesn’t have to make the rounds to say “Happy Birthday” to all the VIPs and no one is there from his office to get him sucked into the latest work drama. Much less stress and lots more fun. 

We made the rounds and said “Hi” to the people we knew that weren’t at our table and Josh got lots of compliments on his new uniform (because it stood out from the sea of Navy ones). He better get all sorts of compliments for how much it cost. He was promoted 8 years ago and avoided having to buy it until now. I was hoping he could get through 2 more balls without the purchase, but he said it was time. Don’t make me calculate the cost per wearing or I’ll sign us up for every ball that comes along over the next two years to get maximum usage out of it.

The ball was held at the newest hotel on the island, the Art Rotana. In addition to the beautiful ballroom and lobby they had a toasted marshmallow station as part of the cocktail hour with a guy who would hand out toasted marshmallows for us to dip in chocolate. 

Nice job not getting any chocolate on the uniform!

My dress is one that I had made when we lived in Oman. My mom picked out the fabric on one of our shopping trips to the souk. 

The Navy ceremony is similar to the Marine ball, but less serious/formal. And there’s a section of toasting to the President, the King of Bahrain, the head of the Navy, the Army, the Marines, the Coast Guard, basically to everyone and their mother. Surprisingly the Marines don’t have this at their ball, since they seem to find drinking to excess almost a badge of honor, but Josh said they save that for their Marine-only formal dinners. I guess to keep it respectable in front of the general public.
Let’s do this again in a month! (November: Marine Corps Birthday Ball)

The food was excellent. Best ball food in a while. Filet with sautéed mushrooms and asparagus, salad with feta, watermelon, and basil, and desert of creme brûlée and salted caramel chocolate. 
And then we danced until the end. Josh and I have been watching The Voice with the kids for the past 18 months or so and thankfully the show has kept us current with pop music. 95% of the music played has been featured on the show so we were right in the middle of it, singing along. And laughing every time the next song started playing and we were able to identify it: Pharrell! Adam Levine/Maroon 5!   
The next day Josh had a holiday, but the kids were in school so after we went to CrossFit together (yes, I’m still making myself go every day) I took him to this hole in the wall restaurant that I had been to with friends the week before. 
The draw is that they serve an amazingly cheap Arabic breakfast that is eaten sitting on the floor and you can leave your mark on the walls if you want. They repaint every month or so and the fun begins all over again.
From our feast last week: fresh flatbread (hot and chewy), eggs with tomato, dal (lentils), eggs with sweet cardamom noodles (my favorite!), grilled flatbread with cheese and honey, and fried donut holes with date syrup and sesame. 
Josh was happy with my menu choices. I need to find a reason to go back for more donuts, eggs with sweet noodles, and the cheese/honey quesadilla thing. Maybe I can take the kids when they have a day off from school. 

Sleeping beauty

When Camille was a baby and wouldn’t sleep I used to tell people that she would go from 100 miles per hour to zero in a single second. She never drifted off — she’d go from screaming to out cold. 

I guess she hasn’t changed too much. I went to check on her last night and found her snoring under a book. 

And two nights earlier she was yelling for me to help her put on her pajamas, but when I came upstairs, I couldn’t find her. I looked all over and under the beds (because we’ve found her sleeping there before too) and right before I woke up the boys to help look for her I discovered her passed out by my closet. 
It’s exhausting going to a full week of school after the EID holiday. Good thing the next 2 weeks also have holidays in them. Yay for Optional School October. That’s not a real thing, it’s my joke because of where the Islamic calendar holidays fall this year — last year was No School November. I was trying to think of one for next year to go with September, but I just realized we may not be here then and my reflex emotion was sadness. We are almost at our 5 year anniversary of life in the Middle East. Completely not what we expected, but better than we could have planned for ourselves. 
I don’t know if I’ve said this here, but it looks like we have 3 likely options for next year (Josh’s last year before he is eligible to retire): move to Abu Dhabi for 2 years and retire at 21 years of service, extend here for one more year, Calvin would graduate from High School and Josh would retire, or be sent back to the US somewhere and Josh would retire at the end of the year (summer/Sept 2017).
That’s the “plan,” but we also only “planned” to be in Egypt for one year. Josh’s goal in retirement is to be hired by a company in this region that will utilize his Arabic language and experience, so he would like to retire from here or UAE to make the job search easier. We shall see what the next few years bring …

Unsocial me(dia)

About a week ago I decided to cut back on Facebook. And since I don’t moderate certain things very well that means I had to almost entirely cut it out. Oh gosh, I just realized how much that sounded like my mom! (Love you mom! Shall we recite the Serenity Prayer together?)

Basically I’m a reader, information gatherer, someone who likes to be in the know, a snoop . . . and Facebook makes all those things possible. I used to read those Choose Your Own Adventures books with my fingers tucked into various pages throughout the book trying to read all the options, for each of the paths, because it bothered me if I missed any of them. And of course because I was trying to find the best way to go. Facebook is kind of my grownup Choose Your Own Adventure. I get to follow other people’s lives, like reading a story, but I don’t have to talk to anyone or go anywhere or even get out of bed if I don’t want to.

My problem became that I couldn’t just read some of the stories. I’d need to make sure I got down to the bottom where I had read before and then a few beyond that because Facebook has an irritating habit of putting things out of order. And did I read all the replies to the posts? And then I’d refresh a few minutes later and there’d be new stories and wait, I didn’t see that one before! What else am I missing? And there I would go, falling down the rabbit hole.

I loved that it made me feel like a social person without actually having to be social. A writer’s paradise. I can type a few words here and there and make a personal connection with someone who is literally thousands of miles away. But on the flip side it was repetitive — the same “news” articles posted over and over again by different people. Yes, I get that you are passionate about vaccinating/not vaccinating, Donald Trump/Bernie Sanders, Kim Davis the hero/Kim Davis the devil . . . on the bright side, it showed that I have a very wide expanse of friends from both ends of the spectrum (and a few from various corners of the universe). Add in 5 gazillion memes about the topic du jour, and it became a lot less about following the lives of people I know and more about what the people I know had been reading. (Or not reading — hello, people! Meet Google and Snopes. They are your friends. Use them. Posting that you give no one the right to your photos does nothing. Oops, gotta get off my soapbox . . .) The real answer to what am I missing? Nothing.

So we’re on a break. Ish. I moderate a page so I sign in as the admin and check that page and then see if I have any personal notifications. I might see the top post or two when I sign in, but then I’m out. I happened to see these amazing photos of my niece going to homecoming and looking like a grownup (oh my gosh, how old am I now?!) and missing that stuff makes me sad, but in truth Facebook is 1% that and 99% stuff that really doesn’t matter. So I’ll continue this trial run and see how much more time and space it frees up in my real life. So far I’ve been able to catch up with my old friends from Call the Midwife, so I guess that’s . . . nope, that wasn’t the goal. Baby steps, right?

Another day

I turned the calendar page the other day and sighed. A year ago we spent two glorious weeks in Crete and I wish we could go back. 
We were trying to return this year over Eid vacation, but Josh had to work and if I went by myself with the kids I’d spend the entire trip saying, “It was more fun last year with your dad here.” So we stayed home. And I’ll continue to dream of pink beaches and green coastlines. 
Camille isn’t actually reading yet, but she pretends. She picks out the sight words she has learned and tells the cat what is happening in the pictures on the pages. 

Waiting for the bus. These days there are usually only 2 kids sitting on the front steps because Carter and Calvin head out at 5:15 with their driver, but once a week they all catch the bus together at 7am. The dog likes to come out and wait with the kids, but he’s really just waiting for someone to stop paying attention so he can run off and go dumpster diving. On Thurs he opened the gate himself (he jumps up and pulls it open with his paws) and didn’t come back before I had to leave the house. I spent about 20 minutes driving up and down our neighborhood’s narrow streets looking for him and getting more annoyed by the minute. Since he always comes back I left the gate cracked and then had to lock up the cat. When he comes home he can open the door to the house by pushing on it with his paws, but if we aren’t there to catch it, he lets the cat out and then we have another lost pet drama on our hands. It feels like I spend half my life tracking down pets who don’t want to live with us.

Sure enough, when I got home from volunteering at the kids’ school Micah ran outside to the driveway and started howling at me — I knew coming home to an empty house would freak him out. He probably filled his stomach with trash and thought I’d be there with open arms, welcoming the prodigal home. I wish I had a nanny cam to see what he did while I was away. Probably curled up in a ball and panted until he heard my car in the driveway. Crazy dog.

This week I finished Camille’s skirt. The one with all the colors. She paired it with a striped shirt and her favorite Pony socks and high tops. She’s also very particular about her hair. Today the request was for a single ponytail, but sometimes she wants a braid. Poor girl hasn’t figured out that I can’t do hair — my skills will impress a 5 year old, but that’s about it. Woe to her the day she wants something fancy like an Elsa braid.