Yes, I watched the royal wedding. I said I didn’t care, but it turns out that the American actress turned princess is a compelling story, especially when we’ve watched her on Suits and the whole divorcee/non royal/Rachel Zane marrying a prince! felt like another episode of a tv show, rather than real life.
It also helps that we live in the Middle East so the wedding aired at 3 in the afternoon. I definitely wouldn’t have woken up in the middle of the night in the US to watch it or anything. That’s what E News is for.
We were in the lounge at Atlantis having afternoon tea (and yes, I had my scones with clotted cream while Josh deconstructed all of the finger sandwiches, eating the middles and leaving the bread [brain poison] behind) and of course they had the pre-wedding festivities playing on the tv. But since I couldn’t hear what was going on and was starting to get a crick in my neck from craning to see if the bride had arrived yet, I gave up any pretense of being uninterested and pulled out my phone to watch the live stream. And then the rest of the family got into it and we had 3 different phones going as we ate our British tea with American manners and laughed at how very non-British the wedding was.
It was the perfect entertainment to end our Atlantis weekend. (and yes, I loved her dress!)
The month of Ramadan began yesterday. This is our 8th Ramadan in the Middle East and after being here this long I assumed that I had talked about it so many times in the past that I would bore people by talking about it again. But someone who has been reading all along asked why the kids had shorter school days, and I realized that it is still a foreign idea/experience for most people. There are even some people who have lived in the Middle East for 10 years that have never experienced Ramadan because it has always fallen during the summer months when they are back at home. But from now on it will affect everyone living here — at least for the next 30 years or so until it works its way back around to the summer months again (it moves 10 days earlier each year).
So, Ramadan and fasting: in Islam, during the month of Ramadan, Muslims are expected to abstain from food, water, and smoking (and sex) during daylight hours. Certain countries deal with this by making it illegal for anyone to participate in those activities in public, Muslim or not. So for the next 29 or 30 days (based on the moon sighting) restaurants shut down during the day, school hours are shortened to 8:30-1:30 and there’s no lunchtime, only a snack break where kids who are fasting can go to a resting room and those who are not go to designated classrooms to get a drink of water or eat a snack they brought from home. Some kids practice fasting in elementary school so even the youngest grades are limited in their eating and drinking times and don’t have a normal lunch period.
In Camille’s class of 22, she said 6 kids are fasting. To accommodate them the teacher turned a classroom closet into a drinking room. If the non-fasting kids need a drink of water, they can go in the closet where their water bottles are and take a sip. Instead of lunch they have a mid-morning “snack break” and the fasting kids go to a different room for 20 minutes while the rest of the kids are eating.
Yes, I know it sounds a bit crazy/difficult. It’s the no water thing that I can’t get behind. Some people, in an attempt to fast as completely as possible, won’t even swallow their own saliva or take medicine by mouth during the day. There are exceptions made for sick people, the elderly, etc, but there is a lot of self-imposed pressure to perform as best as possible so some may decide it’s more holy to adhere to the fast and not take their medicine as that is an even bigger sacrifice. As I heard one person put it, “May Allah accept all our deeds and forgive our sins.”
What we’ve noticed over time is as the holiday moves closer to the school year and has a greater impact on expats and tourism, certain standards have been relaxed. More restaurants are opening during the day (but the windows have to be covered so no one can see people eating from outside), Starbucks is open, but you can only buy coffee to take away and you have to carry it out hidden in a bag. It’s a step up from when Starbucks didn’t open until 6:30 pm, but I don’t love the coffee to go option because the only way to enjoy it is to slip into the bathroom and drink it in a stall or go out to the car and lean over to drink below the level of the windows. That is a feat of acrobatics that usually involves coffee spilling along with consumption.
It’s like I’m walking the red carpet, Mom!
So we started this Ramadan by escaping — we are currently spending 2 days at Atlantis as part of our annual pilgrimage to meet up with our friends from Oman. Since it’s a resort it’s not quite a public space so there is food and drink flowing freely in the water park and hotel restaurants are open all day.
I’m estimating that 2 Ramadans from now I’ll be able to drink coffee inside Starbucks. Josh thinks that barrier will be broken next year. 2 days down, 27 or 28 more to go.
That phrase has me smiling this morning. Josh has been in contact with his future employer to ask about the delay in the paperwork and the reply was that it’s in progress and “keep the faith.” That’s all I needed to hear. I was starting to mildly second guess that maybe they were having a problem adding a person to the department or that there was some other bigger blockade, but I’m happy to wait knowing that it’s being worked out behind the scenes.
We are stuck in another limbo until we know those numbers because they will determine our housing and we can’t look for a place until we know how it’s going to be broken down. It could be that they will pay $65,000 for rent per year and it’s a use it or lose it allowance. All rentals are done annually, paid up front, and that cost is not an exaggeration. Remember, I said in a previous post that housing costs were obscene? Or it could be a $55,000 housing allowance and if we can find something that costs less we can apply the excess to utilities, school, taxes, etc. Anything less than 55k is going to tough to find, but my goal is to find a house as close as possible to school, with a wall that keeps the dog from jumping out of the yard, that is under whatever we’re allowed. Either way, can you imagine throwing away over 50k per year in rent? Nope, me neither. But that’s what we’ve been doing every year that we live overseas, the difference is that it doesn’t ever show up in our bank account so it technically hasn’t been our money to throw away.
I’d love to find a place before we go home for the summer so I can actually collect some things that we’ll need to furnish our next house. We’ll need a washer/dryer, fridge, stove, beds, couch — basically everything that goes in a house because we’ve had all that provided until now. And as everyone is leaving in June/July, those things are being sold right and left. But I can’t snag any bargains until we have a place to land . . .
Camille woke me up at 4 this morning with frantic tapping on my shoulder: Mom! I’m going to throw up! Thankfully it turned out to be a false alarm. (After she gets sick she’s anxious for the next week that she might throw up again.)
Then this morning, which came way too soon, Caleb crawled in my bed complaining of a headache and sore throat. Thanks sandstorm! So he’s back in bed, sleeping it off.
About 5 minutes after the bus left this morning I open the fridge to see the hamburger meat that Carter had prepared the night before for health class. (I think they’re doing a unit on cooking and healthy eating.) Sigh. I called him and yes, it is something he needs for class today so in exchange for me bringing it to him he promised to cook dinner tonight and clean the kitchen. I also negotiated that later this week when we have lamb burgers, he has to eat them without complaining and tell me how much he likes them. (He has a stubborn hatred of lamb and every time it shows up on our menu it causes problems).
What is the magic thread linking these three scenarios together? It’s that Josh left for Bahrain yesterday so naturally all 3 kids would have a breakdown of some sort in the first 24 hours. In the grand scheme of breakdowns this is nothing, but I’m keeping a close eye on my car, the washing machine and the AC, all typical candidates for trouble when Josh is out of the country.
Meanwhile we are waiting for approval to fly to Jordan next weekend. Oh, you didn’t know about that little side trip? It’s been on the calendar since fall with the contingency that Josh had a job. The job came through, but as an active duty military member, he has to have all of his travel approved by various officials. Usually it’s not big deal, but we are in limbo because of the moving of the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. As long as things stay peaceful in Jordan, we should have our approval in a few days. And a few months from now, Josh will be able to travel wherever he wants (as long as we can get a visit visa). #retirementperks
***and now my car has started stalling when I’m stopped at red lights. It did it for the first time yesterday and today it died several times on the way to school. Hilarious. The streak continues.
No, they haven’t arrived yet. I’m just like those Lost people, waiting with my future tied to a string of mysterious numbers. But I’m not actually stressed about it. It’s been a week since Josh was “offered” the job, and I did think that we would have a paper offer by now, but in the grand scheme of things, the numbers either work out for us to stay or they don’t. Either way, we’ll be fine.
One of the reasons that this transition to retirement isn’t stressing me out is because we’ve been preparing for it for years. I’m no math wiz, but I’m a money/numbers nerd and I listen to financial podcasts for fun. About 10 years ago we became debt free by following Dave Ramsey’s plan (Total Money Makeover). We cancelled all of our credit cards and slashed all of our expenses to make it happen. We even dropped a home phone before it was cool and suffered through the early days of VoIP that made everyone sound like they were talking underwater. That might not seem worth it to save $30 a month, but all the little things we did combined added up over time.
Once we eliminated our debt we set goals for future savings — like buying a house. Someday when we grow up we’ll finally own a home and I want to be prepared when the time comes. We wanted to travel during our time overseas so we started funneling the money that would have gone to college savings for the kids into our family travel fund. That’s not the choice everyone would have made, but I joked that I was giving the kids their education now, through seeing the world, and we’ll do college on the cheap later (as Calvin is doing currently at community college — no regrets). The point is that we have a finite amount of money coming in so we choose some things and sacrifice other things.
Now with retirement coming up, that house fund that has been growing over the years can double as an emergency fund if this job doesn’t end up working out. I figure we can last at least a year by drawing on that money carefully and that will be plenty of time for Josh to figure out what we’re going to do next. And yes, that’s how our partnership works best. I am agreeable to going anywhere in the world and Josh will do the work once we get there. Then I make the money that he earns go further. Win. Win. Win.
