city escape

I’m in the middle of writing a post about the roller coaster of emotions I had last week related to living here/vaccination/covid/school closures/etc — and that’s without any social media. I would have been absolutely mental if I had all that extra input from others. I had enough frustration and ill-will without feeding that fire with extra fuel. And when I say roller coaster, it’s more the plunging and dropping and twisting part of the ride, because there wasn’t a whole lot of up. (That was last week and I’ve made my peace with things, but I’m a bit wary of bringing the rage back by hashing through it again. I will, just not today).

But that brings me to #yarnwatch! I know you’re all on the edge of your seats, waiting to find out if my yarn actually made it into my hands. I can confirm that yes, I finally have 900 grams of a gorgeous cotton/cashmere/angora blend in an oatmeal color (which is perfect for dying). I love this yarn because it’s soft and machine washable/dry-able.

But, to get it I had to wait 40 minutes with my eyes glued to the computer screen, waiting for an online chat representative (the chat window didn’t have an alert sound so I couldn’t be on another window at the same time), give the guy the reference numbers to my 3 different complaints and then he said, “Ok someone will call you.” Hmm, that’s the answer I got the last 3 times I filed a request.

But a few days later I did get a phone call and managed to answer it and the woman said, “I am scheduling your delivery for Saturday between 8 and 4pm. You must pay 30aed.” (All delivery is like this and you have to be home to receive packages. No matter that your entire day is shot . . . ) I told her I wouldn’t be home on Saturday and she said, “OK, Sunday. 8 am to 4” and promptly hung up.

Since Josh is working from home all day, that’s not too terrible. But then I got a text on Saturday, when I was still in the middle of the desert, saying that the delivery driver was on his way and I needed to be home to meet him. Sigh. It never fails. I sent him a message saying I wasn’t home, but would be home after 12pm and if he could redeliver at that time that would be great. And miraculously, he did.

And what was I doing this weekend? More camping. The desert is beautiful this time of year and this weekend there was no moon so millions of stars were on display in the sky.

We drove about 90 minutes outside the city, pulled off to the side of the road, deflated our tires so we could drive over the sand, and drove a 1/4 mile up and down the dunes into the desert where no one else was around except the people in our group.

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Our little tents among the giant dunes

We had a great time, with a bit of extra work to pack up in the morning because of the thick fog. It was crystal clear at night (as you can see in the star photo) and then the fog rolled in sometime before 4am. I knew that because at 4am Star began pacing around the tent, jumping on us and panting and she wouldn’t settle. It turns out that she ate too many treats (trying to calm her around the other dogs that were out there) and had intestinal distress requiring a middle of the night walk in the cold thick fog.

I thought the fog would would clear out as the sun came up, but by the time we left camp at 10am visibility was still really low.

We headed home, mentally preparing to go back to school the following day, only to see on Instagram on the way home (not me, someone texted the announcement to me) that we were all being put on 3 more weeks of remote school. With less than 24 hours notice. After all teachers and students had spend hours waiting and getting PCR tests.

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