robinchartier

I’m calling this year the 1/2 way mark, give or take, with a bunch of inshallahs thrown in for good measure. 45 years. I don’t think it sounds that old unless you’re a teen who thinks 25 sounds old. I remember those days. And other than my stupid eyeballs and my dependency on reading glasses, I don’t feel any older at 45 than I did at 35.

What did I do to celebrate my birthday this year? Well Josh was traveling (bless him, he’s been gone a lot this past month), but he flew in around 8pm and took me to my favorite restaurant for dinner.

Then we spent the next 2 days in Dubai watching some of the fittest people in the world compete for a spot at the summer CrossFit games. 40 men, 40 women and 10 teams. It’s not what I would necessarily choose to do for my birthday, but it was an opportunity that we couldn’t miss. A 2-day pass only cost $13 each and we got our money’s worth. Front row seats for 7 events because the stadium was half empty and we had our choice of where to sit. (Nothing is advertised here — we only knew about it because we read an announcement for it from the US).

We were so close I could have hopped onto the floor and started working out next to them, not that I would have wanted to — way too hard! #life goals to be able to handstand walk and do a muscle up (a pull up where you get your hips onto the bar), but I need to be able to do a handstand and several solid pull-ups first. I’ve got a l o n g way to go. Maybe by 50?

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Day 2 was more of the same, but with more money on the line and even harder workouts. 

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By the end they had given away around 700,000 USD and the reigning Fittest Man in the World had won 7 out of 10 events. You can see his trophies lined up in the photo below. The top woman finisher is 36 years old, beating a field of 20-somethings, which gives this mid-life lady inspiration.
We’re going to watch to see if we show up in any of the highlight footage since we were right there during all the filming. We’ve already spotted Camille’s legs on Instagram. 🙂 

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And then my final birthday present arrived via airmail: 

I got it. I finally figured out how to upload photos to my blog. It still won’t work the normal way (I get an empty file message) or the alternate way, but in my million and 1st attempt at trying anything, I figured out that I can get around the broken system by dragging images from my Photos file and dropping them into my blog’s media library. 

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Which is why you can now see this fantastic view of the airshow that flies right past our house as part of the National Day celebration (the 1st weekend in December). And the fireworks that are in full view from our rooftop. 

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Since I only figured this out at 11pm (of course), I’m getting this quick post up and heading to bed. Josh is traveling for work again this week — I think it’s the 4th week in a row?! But we are looking forward to a good Christmas break starting next week when Calvin comes to visit. 

I’m online with my webhost help and they still can’t fix my photo upload problem. They have brought in the “specialists” who will hopefully figure out what is wrong with it. 

They did update WordPress to 5.0 and I figure it has something to do with that. I’m testing by trying to upload random photos. Some go through and others fail. My desert camping photos all fail. 

I’m annoyed that I spent over an hour with tech support and it’s still not working the way it used to. I can upload from my desktop, but not from my photos folder that syncs with icloud. Better than nothing though. I’ll have to try again tomorrow since I’ve used up all of my mental energy for today. 

Ironically, I finished my annual calendar, it has already arrived at my parent’s house, and I still haven’t figure out the blog bug. 😛 

Since I don’t know if I’ll ever get these photos to upload, at least you can see from my calendar layout what we did for National Day weekend. We went out on a boat with friends and watched the air show over the city skyline. 

I know I owe you a story about desert camping, but due to technical issues (and an abundance of Christmas movie watching with Camille) it hasn’t happened. Every time I try to upload photos to my blog it gives me an error message and I don’t have the patience to troubleshoot it this week. I think I might need to update my computer OS, but my hard drive is full …. ackkk! So you’ll have to settle for my musings temporarily.

I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced a feeling that something is not quite right in a relationship. They claim things are the same, but you can feel that something has changed and you can’t pin down exactly what it is. There’s a distance . . . but maybe I’m imagining things? I have been known to be an overthinker. So I continue on until I get that faint nudge, a whisper, to check something and there it is. The source of the conflict. I’m not crazy! (Not in that way at least.)

I had one of those situations this past week (Josh is traveling for work, so don’t worry, it’s not related to him) and once I was able to figure out what was going on, I was free. Free to stop worrying about it, free to stop investing energy on it, free to move on without regret.

I know it’s annoying that I’m being vague, but trust me, it’s something that has divided my attention lately and taken away from my writing. I’m hoping that I can stop picking it up and mulling it over, trying to figure out where I went wrong — especially since I’ve seen in black and white that this problem is not my fault and it has nothing to do with me. It’s like a spotlight switched on and I could finally see all the pieces that had been hidden before — what a relief!

Josh is in Egypt for work this week: 8 years to the day that we originally moved there. We’ve traveled such an unexpected path and I’m eternally grateful for all the experiences we’ve had as a result of that first plane flight way back when.

The boys are on a school trip to one of the other Emirates for a week of hiking, rock climbing, camping and kayaking (another of those amazing experiences) so Camille and I are solo this week. We’ve been filling the time with cookie baking, knitting, and watching all of the Christmas movies we can find on Netflix. We’ve hit all 3 of the Santa Clause, Elf, a few Christmas princess ones and Christmas Vacation (skipping the inappropriate bits).

Hoping my attempt at a photo works from my phone. Cookie time!! (Note the camel apron.)

I want to be writing, but I just realized that I’m late in making my calendar for next year. I try to start thinking about it in October, so that when the 50% off sale comes, I’m ready to hit purchase. But I’ve been out of touch this fall and Cyber Monday caught me by surprise. So for the past 24 hours I’ve been trying to find the right photos to sum up our year — really, an impossible task. Here’s a peek at December with photos from our recent desert camping weekend. I’m sure I’ll change it 3 more times before I’m finally satisfied with it. The gray background looks drab when paired with all the sand.Better, but it still needs something . . .

I realized I don’t have a single photo of the 6 of us together from this past year (fine, I do have one group selfie taken in the lobby of CircusTrix on New Year’s with really bad lighting that is washing out half of the group. Ugh). How did that happen? Because we weren’t ever all together at the same time. We were with Calvin up north, without Josh. Then we were at the beach in Southern CA with Josh, but without Calvin. I am looking forward to fixing that during our Christmas holiday when Calvin gets to come visit for 3 weeks and we will all be in the same place at the same time for a change.

Hopefully I can finish my calendar in the next 24 hours and then write about camping. I know you want to hear the story of how I ended up in a pickup truck with a Pakistani camel herder . . .