Tag: Muscat

baby face

Some pictures from today when she was being funny over lunch. She was very proud to be feeding herself.

Loving Lucy’s eggplant salad.

All done! She loves throwing things in the trash. Lucy is always finding magnets off the fridge or silverware that she “helpfully” finds and tosses when we’re not looking.

TASIM ball

Kristy asked why I finally got a Mac when all these years I have claimed that the PC version was fine for me and Mac wasn’t worth paying the extra money for. The biggest reason is because I can never figure out how to do things easily on a PC. 15 years later and I still can’t find where things are saved on my hard drive so I end up saving everything to the desktop. I finally decided to see if the Mac phenomenon was all hype or if it really was better for me. My experience has been that it’s 1000 times more intuitive for me and I spend much less time trying to figure out how to do something so everything is easier and faster.

A perfect example of my PC frustration: I have a picture from the TAISM ball and I can not figure out how scan the stupid thing onto our desktop computer. I could have done it with our “old” one that got fried by the AC water, but this new one doesn’t play nice with our printers. So after spending 30 minutes trying unsuccessfully to scan it to the computer or scan and save it to a memory card (who knew our printer did that? Except it doesn’t because it would say it was saving it to the card, but then there wouldn’t be anything on the card. :sigh:) I resorted to taking a picture of it with my camera — the old school way of scanning.

The photo didn’t have great contrast before, and having to take a photo of it didn’t help. The theme was 1920s/30s jazz which hopefully explains the feathers that I’m wearing. 

This is the only photo that we took with our camera, but there are others that people tagged us in on facebok. If I see one of Josh and I together, I’ll grab it and move it over here. We had a fantastic time with the other TAISM parents and teachers. It felt strange and very high-class to be going to our sons’ private school fundraiser event. What a strange life we lead. One year I’m a mom homeschooling in my pajamas, the next I’m partying with the ambassador.

We danced a bunch and it confirmed our desire to someday take dance lessons. You know, the ones we’ve been meaning to take since our first Marine Corps ball 14 years ago. We were finally signed up for salsa in Egypt and the night of our first class was the first night they called for a 6pm curfew and that was the beginning of the end. I guess the universe doesn’t intend for us to dance like we know what we’re doing. 
Oh well, we managed — except I’m a bad follower and I like to watch other people who have obviously had the benefit of lessons (especially because they were playing old jazz standards and some of the couples had skills) and when I’m busy watching people, I’m a really bad follower. And then I laugh about it. I have a long way to go before I’ll be ready for Dancing with the Stars.
The food was amazing. Seared tuna (that was still properly raw on the inside) with fennel, lemon mint sorbet between courses, beef tenderloin, and desserts galore. As you can see from the above photo, we had a great time and I obviously found something hysterically funny right before they snapped this photo.

Breakfast with Santa

This morning we walked over to the MEA (American club) to have breakfast with Santa. The biggest draw for us wasn’t Santa, but bacon. It’s the only place in town I know of where we can have real bacon with our eggs. Everywhere else serves either turkey bacon (eh) or beef bacon (which tastes strangely like beef jerky).

Another storm is on the way. Last year Muscat got almost no rain, but this year we’ve been hit by the edges of a few tropical storms. 

Camille was excited to be out and walking on her own instead of up in the Ergo or in the stroller.

We arrived, ate awesome pancakes (blueberry, chocolate chip, and apple in addition to regular ones), eggs, potatoes, and bacon and waited for Santa to arrive. When Calvin and Carter were little we didn’t do the whole Santa thing (made easier by the fact that Calvin was deathly afraid of Santa for several years), but in my old age I have lightened up. They still don’t believe in Santa, but if they want to go sit on Santa’s lap and tell him that they want Harry Potter Legos (Caleb), then rock on. 
Who’s this strange guy in the red suit, coming up the ramp? 

not a fan

It’s much safer up here in Dad’s lap . . .

If I don’t look at Santa, maybe he won’t look at me.

Caleb was sure to tell Santa that he wanted the movie Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2. The other boys just got in the photo to humor me. 

Then the kids played with all their friends for the rest of the morning. Ho! Ho! Ho!

Inshallah

This morning a friend and I were going to meet some other friends at a cafe for coffee, but there were no parking spots anywhere in the area. We drove around the lot, up the street, made a U-turn, circled back around . . . nothing. Not only were all the regular spots taken, but people had resorted to pulling up on the curb, double parking, any available space was fair game. Since nothing was moving, we decided to do as the Omanis were doing.

I pulled up perpendicular to a beautiful black Porsche, took my key out of the ignition and looked around. I was semi-conditioned to the “parking-in” phenomenon during our time in Egypt where double parking was a regular and expected thing. One of our Egyptian friends there told us about a time he came out to his car to find he had been parked in and he had to wait three hours for the guy to come back. When I asked him what he did about it, he said he just sat on the trunk of his car and waited. When the guy came back to his car and drove away, then my friend was able to go about his business. Instead of being upset or angry about it, he just said, “Inshallah.” Roughly translated it means, “if God wills it, it will happen.”  
Well, I wasn’t going to let a tiny thing like a parking spot stand between me and my cappuccino, so when I didn’t see an angry man or woman running toward me as I exited the car, I decided to go for it. Ever the cautious rule-breaker, I strategically positioned my car where I could keep an eye on it while I enjoyed my drink, just in case mystery Porsche owner decided to make an early return. 
So we’re chatting, laughing, and drinking and after a short while I forget about the fact that I am potentially creating a barrier between someone and their very important business. Until I lean over in my chair and see that the front door to the Porsche is now open. Oops! In a flash I grab my keys and run out to the car, ready to make some very sincere apologies to the person I’ve certainly inconvenienced. As I approach the car, the Omani man standing next to the open door says, “Oh, I’m sorry! Did I interrupt your breakfast?” 
Go back and reread that, but this time don’t use a sarcastic voice like you might hear in America. He was seriously apologizing to me, when I was the one who had parked him in. After reassuring him that no, I didn’t need to go back and finish my breakfast before moving my car, he got into his beautiful Porsche and drove away with a wave and a smile and I pulled into his spot. Inshallah at work. 

A Griswold Christmas

If you’ve been following the saga of my christmas tree on Facebook, these will be familiar to you. To sum up, we weren’t supposed to be here at Christmas so all of our Christmas items are in storage. No tree, no decorations, no big deal. Last year I think I stacked a few presents on our coffee table and that was as decorative as we got.

HOWEVER, when our neighbors moved out this summer they had a Christmas tree that they used while they were here and they didn’t need to take it with them (since they’d be getting all their regular Christmas decorations out of storage) so they gifted it to us. It’s been sitting in the storage closet under our stairs — until yesterday.

Thanksgiving came and went and it was time to get in the Christmas spirit, but I wasn’t feeling it. Since the boys didn’t even know we had a tree here, I didn’t need to bother getting it out, right? Um, not according to my Facebook friends. After a long “discussion,” and lots of decorating suggestions, I caved and got out the 7.5 foot naked monstrosity.

The first tier of 3. The stand was a pain to put together (as Charlynn warned), but Carter and I managed to get the tree up with only a little bit of lean for Josh to fix when he got home. Later that night Josh and I went out and after our dinner/coffee date, we picked up a few of the ugliest ornaments we could find.  
This plastic/metal disc is “decoratively” blackened and tarnished. 

This is supposed to be Santa — with a green crown and a green nose . . .
The sparkly plastic mushroom is my favorite. Our friends who lived in the middle east for several years said part of the fun of Christmas overseas is seeing what sort of decorations non-Westerners create in an attempt to copy a western Christmas. I have to say that I’ve never associated fungi with our Lord’s birth before today. 

We also picked up some super obnoxious lights that flash and play christmas songs in a shrill, shrieky tone and intermittently get louder and softer and occasionally even yowls like a dying cat. 

So I’ll say it publicly, you all were right and I was wrong. Less than 24 hours in and the tree has already paid for itself in fun. Today we got out the glitter, glue, and construction paper and made a few ornaments. I have a few other alternative ornament ideas up my sleeve that we may try in the next few days and I’m planning a trip to LuLu’s to see if I can find any other funny ornaments. I’m really hoping for some lost in translation version of “Merry Christmas.”