Swiss Family Robinson

I’ve found my happy place in the middle of the Ugandan wilder– what is it called? Bush, grasslands . . . ? Whatever the topography, it’s a lodge in the middle of nowhere, like 40 minutes over bumpy dirt roads after turning off a bumpy highway with nothing on it but a few shacks scattered here and there, about 2 and a half hours from the equator. 
We were there less than a day and I’m already trying to figure out how to go back. 

All the rooms are open air, thatched roof cabins. Only 12 in all and each one is completely private. No other cabins or people in sight.  
Inside our room — with a huge private porch overlooking the valley. 

A round bathroom with an open shower 
The view while showering or brushing your teeth. Can I live here please? 

Overlooking the salt lick and watering hole where zebras, warthogs, buffalo, and other animals regularly gather. An hour after this photo we were up at breakfast and saw a herd of 30 zebra trot out of the underbrush to come drink and roll in the mud. Then they were joined by birds, a stray buffalo that has been kicked out of his herd, and some mule deer (they look like big fuzzy deer with mule-shaped faces). It was a scene from The Lion King. 

The sides are tented with mosquito netting. It feels like sleeping outside without actually having to be outside. The night sounded alive with the language of bugs, monkeys, birds and other wildlife woven together. Silent and loud at the same time. 
The screens are outfitted with a monkey lock because the monkeys will come in and make a mess of things if you don’t lock them out. We were just finishing breakfast in the dining room when one of them leaped onto the middle of the table, grabbed a piece of toast, and took off before he could be chased away. 

Good morning, sunshine! 

I may not be a morning person, but when pots of coffee and milk are brought to my front door in a basket so I can watch the wildlife and sip while waking up? I can manage that. 
Hiking up the hill to breakfast. It was probably 8 minutes from our cabin up to the lounge and dining room. 

I can’t even begin to tell you about the food. This was not hotel food, but gourmet, chef quality meals.  Homemade bread, jams, and fresh honey. Eggs made to order including eggs benedict with perfectly crispy bacon and buttery smooth hollandaise sauce, sweet crepes, fresh juice and Ugandan coffee, of course. 
I could have eaten the aubergine (eggplant) stack appetizer from dinner and the Moroccan spiced kebab all week long. The carrot, raisin, and lemon salad and the savory/spicy watermelon salad were both combinations I had never imagined, but they worked. Wasabi flavored green beans that had all the flavor with none of the burn (though Camille and Caleb both thought they were too spicy). Josh and I were both in awe of the inventiveness and execution at each of the 3 meals that we ate there. And to eat beautiful food, with this beautiful view . . . I think it’s my favorite hotel of all that we’ve ever stayed in. It’s right up there with the cave hotel from Goreme, Turkey as far as uniqueness, for sure. 

After too few hours we were back on the bumpy roads again. Farewell, paradise. Inshallah, I will come again (and stay for days). 

Wild Kingdom

Advice for the rookie contact wearer: when swimming, don’t open your eyes. If you do, you will dislodge your contact and it will get twisted up in under your eyelid and then when you take it out and try to reinsert it, the Ugandan breezes will keep blowing it off the tip of your finger and you’ll finally have to put it in your mouth to carry it back to the hotel room where you can try again with good lighting, a mirror, and eyedrops. And you’ll waste 10 valuable minutes of peace and quiet by the hotel pool while everyone else is away looking for lions.

No, I’m not out looking for lions. I am basking in the glorious warmth of the setting sun, overlooking a body of water named after King Edward or Prince George or maybe it’s King George (in Queen Elizabeth park) completely by myself. I have reliable wifi for the first time since leaving Abu Dhabi and after spending 16+ hours over the past 2 days in a safari vehicle on very bumpy roads, the last thing I wanted to do after arriving was get back in the car to search for lions for 2 more hours. Even if I were promised a view of lions chasing down an antelope and dragging the kill back to the cutest pack of baby lion cubs ever created, I still would have taken a pass. Stretching out on the deck by the pool is on my list of trip highlights. I’ll check out some Animal Planet when I get home to fill in the gaps.

Has our trip been wonderful so far? Yes, absolutely. Have I seen enough animals to make me happy? Yes, absolutely. More than enough. And we still have another game drive tomorrow morning, a boat trip to look for animals tomorrow afternoon, and the more game drives after that. (A game drive is when you put the top up on the safari van and bounce along dirt roads or across brushy plains and stop whenever you see animals.) I’ve preferred the animals we’ve seen en route to the hotel or as we are headed to the lake for a boat excursion than just the extra driving around looking for animals. Multitasking at its best. I must not be a safari-er at heart. I know this is sacrilegious, but when I’ve had enough of riding in the van (such as when we hit hour 8 yesterday) I start playing solitaire on my phone because there’s only so much of dirt roads and grass and villages that I can bear to take in. #solitaireisfuntoo

Carter on the other hand, got up early this morning because he “didn’t come to Africa to sleep in” and went on an extra 2 hour long game drive, before the 6 hour drive to our next hotel, and then hopped right back in the car for 2 hours with the lions in the late afternoon. God bless him. I slept in, had coffee delivered to my treehouse style tent, ate breakfast overlooking an animal watering hole, and thoroughly enjoyed my 2 hours of relaxation before bracing myself to go bumping down the Ugandan clay roads. I think you’ll agree that I’ve seen plenty of animals:

some kind of antelope/impala
Big old cow things

Elephants! Right up close!

Baboons: an entire clan crossed the road in front of us

This guy was gearing up to jump into our car — our driver said they will get very aggressive if they think you have food. 

No snacks for you today!
Zebras, hippos, alligators, buffalo, and more (my internet is failing so no more photos tonight). 
I think I made a good trade. 

Like sands though the hourglass . . .

if you’ve been following The Days of My Eyes saga, you’ll remember when we last saw our hero, I had been up to my eyeballs in drama, trying to get my brain to work with these pesky little films that are supposed to sit on my eyes and make everything clear.

Lucky for our viewers that Josh has been away for two weeks, so the latest episode of our drama was captured in real time. The case of the kidnapped contact:

Oh my white knight! What a hero. Just as Bo rescued Hope and John saved Marlena, Josh was there to save the day . . . or just make my day worse.
I start freaking out that my contact has actually migrated inside my skull, even though my knowledge of anatomy and physiology knows that shouldn’t be possible. My real life experience has shown me that these contacts are wily little buggers that will take every chance possible to cause trouble, so I can’t be sure that it hasn’t taken up residence inside my head.  
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Thankfully Josh returned to talk me off the ledge before I started jamming my thumb under my eyelid searching for nothing.

All’s well that ends well, right? Except for the fact that I’m flying through sets of contacts like they’re changes of clothing. So far I’ve managed to make each pair last a week instead of a month. That is not great for my budget, but my eyes are always happier when I put in a new pair. They’re fancy like that. 
So is there a resolution to the Missing Contact Mystery? Did our hero really go all day and not realize she was missing a contact? Did she lose it when crying over tangled computer chargers and headphones at work? How bad is her vision? Don’t worry, there’s no cliffhanger today . . .  
Ah yes, there she is. Hiding inside the lid of the lens solution bottle. I can’t even. 

I’m seriously considering switching over to a monocle. 

A random collection . . .

1) My coffee has tasted salty the past 3 days. Salty enough that I’ve tossed it after a few sips. If I were in America (and making my own coffee) I might worry that odd tasting coffee means I’m pregnant, but here I figure Nanny must be making it differently. It’s either the new brand of coffee that we bought or the water. Last night I filled the coffee maker with filtered water from the cooler and ta dah! No salty coffee this morning. Nanny must have started using tap water. Now to try and explain and pantomime my request so she goes back to using the good water. The tap water doesn’t normally taste salty (it’s all desalinated water), but it must be reacting with the coffee in a strange way. Ick.

2) I woke Camille up this morning and told her to get dressed and then she could come to my bed to snuggle (as she does every day). I went downstairs to let the dog outside and come back in to find her stomping around and kicking a shoe left on the floor in the entry way. “What are you doing?”

“You said we could snuggle!” she shot back at me, accusingly. Oh, Lord. What am I going to do with this girl? I guess Princess Camille came into my room to find that I wasn’t underneath the sheets and had a morning meltdown. I pointed out that she didn’t want the dog to poop all over her stuff and I’d be happy to snuggle with her if she stopped being nasty. The morning was redeemed, and I gently helped my little stick of dynamite off to school (after snuggles, of course).

3) My house looks like the house at the end of ET — taped up floor to ceiling, carpets rolled and wrapped and hoses and men in jumpsuits all over the place.

Practically the same . . .
They spent all day yesterday cleaning the air conditioning ducts upstairs and will come back today to tackle the downstairs. I’m not kidding about the comparison to ET — a friend drove by yesterday and texted me, “What is going on at your house?!” They didn’t tent the outside, but the plastic sheeting, compressors, and other equipment are spilling out onto the sidewalk. I’m a little surprised it wasn’t done before we moved in, but things don’t always make sense here. I’m happy we’ll be breathing cleaner air afterward and that I don’t have to supervise any of it because I’m at work all day (someone from the housing office is here instead). 

4) Josh is in CA, snowshoeing with the Emiratis. They are doing cold-weather training and he is checking in on them. In case you were wondering (like I was) if they are doing cold weather training because we plan on invading Russia, the answer is NO. It turns out that the purpose of cold-weather training is to build mental toughness, which made sense to me as soon as Josh said it. 

Now he is in 29 Palms waiting for some meetings which will begin as soon as the group can drag themselves away from shopping in Beverly Hills to come join the conference. I’m imagining Pretty Woman, Middle East style. 
5) One of the perks of my job is my fabulous assistant. She comes in a few afternoons a week and assists with scanning returns and wrapping the cords on the chargers. 
She loves doing all of it and begs to help me close up for the day by putting away the equipment and locking all the cabinets. By the end of the year I’ll be able to sit back and read while she works. 
I also got to spend the afternoon with Calvin yesterday while he had several free periods. He sat behind the desk with me and worked on a powerpoint presentation that I needed to create. I joked that I was outsourcing the work, but the person pointed out that in this case it was actually ‘insourcing.” I’m happy to have so much talent on my team. His powerpoint slides were great — way better than I would have created, and he showed me the best places to find free images and icons so I can use them next time. Now if he can teach me how to make a decent infographic that doesn’t look like 5 year old pasted it together, I’ll be set. What am I going to do next year when he isn’t here . . . ?
6) Our family does a big March Madness bracket pool (Hicks Picks/Hix Pix) and Camille was to fill out her bracket so I could submit it for her. She wanted to know which team Steph Curry was on so she could pick them as the winner. When I explained that he plays in a different league (NBA Golden State Warriors) she lost interest and decided to go with a random, computer generated bracket. She’ll probably win. 
7) I went to a school fundraising dinner/auction event where people were bidding (and paying) $6,000 dollars for a reserved parking spot at school (among other things). Since the bidding was happening in AED I had to pull out my currency exchange app as the numbers kept going up and up . . . 

Yeah, I’m not a high roller like that. I can’t imagine having that kind of disposable income. I didn’t get my hair or nails done, I wore a dress that was a hand-me-down that has hung in my closet for over 6 years, and I borrowed Camille’s play purse to use as a clutch. Hey, it worked and it was free. I had a fun night, even if I didn’t get to play with the big dogs. 
I’m confident as I get older that she will make sure I’m still looking good. She’s very serious about makeup and made sure I put on eyeliner and mascara. And she needed some herself, of course. She thinks I should have long hair, because long hair is prettier (don’t even start Dad), but short and easy is the way I roll. She’s also made me promise to take her to Paris before she graduates from High School. I’m living with a 20 year old woman in a 6 year old body . . .

Clear eyes, full heart . . .

I have been pretty sure that I need something a little stronger in my contact lenses — I can read much easier, but sometimes I’m not sure if I’m looking at 11 or 1 or if I typed “living” or “lliving,” which stresses me out. I can’t go through life with uncorrected typos! Besides, I’m not eagle-eyed yet, so there’s certainly room for improvement. 

Josh took me back to the eye doctor over the weekend (same place, different doc) to see what kind of adjustments they could make to my prescription. He gave me a sheet of text in graduated decreasing font and asked me to read what I could. I could comfortably read the 3rd from the bottom, but told him I had to concentrate to read the one below that. I figured that would clearly explain the depths of my deficiency and that he would save me from my obvious blindness, but instead he said, “That’s good!” Wait, what? There’s still 2 whole sections of unexplored text that I am limited in seeing . . . 
I was a bit like a junkie, begging for a fix, “Can’t you give me something a little bit stronger? I know from reading on the internet (thanks, Dr. Google) that if you adjust my distance prescription that it can actually sharpen my reading focus. I want to read the smallest print.” Meanwhile Josh picks up the paper, examines it and says, “Oh yeah. I can totally read the small one.” Thanks love. It’s so great to be married to a younger man. 
The Dr. explained something about me being young and not wanting to overcorrect. He suggested if I wanted to read the smallest print that I could easily use reading glasses. Ick. Seriously? Isn’t that the whole point of stabbing myself in the eye every day? To get away from having to put extra objects on my face to see? 
But he did offer me some advice: give it time. The type of contacts that I have require the brain to learn how to use them optimally. There’s reading power in the middle and then another ring of reading power further out . . . he said those nerve pathways between the eye and the brain can take a while to sort out. And a few days later, I can grudgingly admit that he was right. Once I set my mind to the fact that this is all the help I’m going to get, when I can’t read something as clearly as I’d like, I’ve been focusing more on the center and moving closer and further away to get it to come into focus — putting my eyeballs through vision bootcamp. Suck it up and stop being lazy. It actually has been working. My eyeballs are starting to get with the program.
I’m also getting better at getting my contacts in and out, though I did have to hunt around the bathroom again yesterday when one stuck to my eyelash and got flicked into the air. It feels like hunting for invisible gold coins since each one that I lose is flushing $25 down the toilet. I finally found it stuck to the side of my face wash. Score! Money in my pocket . . . 
For all the hassle and expense, it’s still worth it. When they are in properly, not sticking to my eyes, and focusing well, it’s almost like I’ve got my 35 year old eyes back. Can’t lose.