Dolph!

Sweet Footgear

Mom's Visit

The laundry situation here is tough, especially when it's cold out. Nobody's got a dryer. What you've got instead is a really wicked spin cycle on your washing machine that kicks out most of the water. Then you line dry. Except that it's raining out, so you set up your little drying rack inside, where it's a balmy 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and wait until next week when you can put your clothes back on. With only two pairs of long underwear to my name, I was forced to choose between warmth and hygiene.

Thankfully, Mom was scheduled for a visit. She lives across the way, in Syria. Stuff is generally a lot cheaper over there owing to a really solid trade policy, or so I've been told. Apparently, the Syrian government has mandated that Syria is not to import any more than it exports. The sum total is no trade deficit with lots of homegrown goods for cheap. Add to that good clean water and abundant natural resources and you've got all the qualifiers for inclusion in the Axis of Evil.

So Mom's on her way and if she hopes to see us alive could she please bring us more long underwear. Al'hamdu'lillah, she did. She also brought lots of yummy treats and socks.

I don't know why, but she brought me socks with pictures of spaceships. Actually, not just spaceships. There's a picture of Saturn and what I take to be a comet streaking over the whole mess. The spaceship is obviously in full throttle, flames shooting out the back and all. I asked Mom about it. She said she hadn't noticed the pictures.

Hadn't noticed!? Good gravy! The whole scene from flame tip to comet tail takes up the palm of my hand! These aren't subtle starscapes, a few dots hinting at the Milky-Way. No sir, this is Buck Freakin' Rogers raising intergalactic Cain on my ankles! This is the Empire Striking Back at my Achilles tendon!

They are comfortable, though.

We had a nice time with Mom. She stayed for two or three weeks, mostly just hanging around town. I was busy with classes, so we couldn't really get out for any sightseeing, but we had our meals together and the kids got to spend time with Nana, and that's really the important thing. Afterward, Mom and I took a cab to Damascus, Syria's capital, and from there we caught a bus back to her home city, Aleppo.

The bus ride to her place was OK. We were sitting right up front which had two serious disadvantages. There was nothing blocking the driver's view of us, so I got busted for trying to put my feet up, twice. Also, there was nothing blocking our view of Dolph Lundgren.

Remember comrade Dolph? He made his debut at the height of the Cold War as Stallone's Soviet nemesis in one of the Rocky movies. In the end, he went down, like Mr.T and Apollo Creed, subdued by Sly's big, honest American Fists. But few of us will ever forget that moment, when, locked eye to eye with the Italian Stallion, Dolph's mouth twisted into a wry, Bolshevik sneer to meet Rocky's palsied pucker, he muttered with thick, rolling Russian inflections:

"I will break you."

He didn't break Rocky, but he sure put my lights out about 3 minutes into his on-board screening en route to Aleppo. He was the star of some post-Apocalyptic B-flick, alternately flexing and blowing things up. I couldn't take the similarities to my own life, so I did my best just to check out.

Ain't It Cute?

Lump Discrimination

A thought occurred to me while preparing my oatmeal this morning. I don't typically eat oatmeal here because it's expensive, but I do eat quite a bit of farina (like Malt-O-Meal or Cream of Wheat) because you get bucketsful for cheap.

Now the thing about farina is that you can really wear yourself out trying to beat out the lumps. We mix and mix because we want our farina smooth.

But oatmeal's different. We don't mind as much if our oatmeal has some "texture." In fact , if someone served me smooth oatmeal I think I'd leave. So what's the fuss over lumpy farina? It seems to me that this is lumpist thinking. Bigotry has no place at the breakfast table.

After all, what are those farina lumps except farina? But, for many people, awareness of this fact is not enough to overcome their lumpism. You may have been raised by lumpist parents. If so, you might try throwing in nuts and raisins and whatever else sounds good to sort of chunk up your cereal. That way the farina lumps won't stand out so much.

The point is that we should be neutral in our initial assessment of lumps. Take the little lump wife recently found in her belly. Given a few months and God's good graces, that little lump'll be a little person. For now, we'll call it lumpy-wumpy in order to distinguish it from farina lumps, or any other mass of congealed material. It is also widely recognized that adding "y" to the end of a word makes you fall in love with it and so a skunk is to be avoided, but you might very well pet a skunky.

We're very happy about this. Babies are fun and they go over real big here in Jordan. I've talked to lots of cab drivers, not a few of which claim having 5, 10, or even 15 kids- and they all want more. "A house without a baby is a problem," says one cabbie. When wife was real little, she was a bridesmaid or flower-girl or some such at her aunt's wedding. Now this same aunt has tons of kids, the youngest of which is younger than our kids. They love babies here.

This has it's downside. God have mercy on the woman who doesn't have a baby to show nine months after her wedding night. The idea that a couple might want to wait a bit before having kids is totally foreign, and will only sound like a really sad attempt to mask the fact that in reality the new bride is barren and sterile, her uterus having been flipped inside-out from riding too many ponies in her youth. If she goes so far as to defend her reproductive capabilities, she will only succeed in shifting attention to her husband who will be advised to move to Italy where he might sing with the rest of the castrati.

Already potential names are being discussed. Wife, when not vomiting, will ask, "What should we name it?"

"I don't know."

"You don't love our baby [vomit]!"

5y has taken to calling her pending sibling Kissy-Bear. This is nicer than lumpy-wumpy, and it has the requisite "y," so Kissy-Bear it will be until further notice. While we aren't certain what we'll call it after it's born, we have ruled out the following two names:

Skyler Chase

Kaitlyn Mackenzie

Besides those, pretty much anything goes. What do you think we should call it?

Ice, Ice Baby

All thanks and praise are for God alone. So we thank Him for bringing an end to our first Jordanian winter.

We'd heard the horror stories. We brought our coats. We froze.

Here's the real deal on winter in Jordan. The weather is not the problem. A couple of days of snow, some rain, a chilly wind, really not too terrible outside. The problem is inside. There is no cost effective way of properly heating a cinder block apartment. It's like living in a cave- damp, weeping walls and an inescapable chill that'll have you bundled so tight that you can't really do much except sit in front of your little portable heater for hours on end ruminating about how you'll never take sunshine for granted again and how stupid you were for ever complaining that the weather was ever too hot, and how when you get back to Southern California you'll have to try super hard not to hit people who live in the suburbs with central heating and a constant supply of hot running water who still find something to grumble about come winter.

There are places here that have what they call "central heating." It isn't really. What they are are diesel-fueled radiators installed along many, if not most of the walls in an apartment. These are actually extremely effective, both at warming your home and completely draining your wallet. We have heard stories of people paying upward of $400 a month to keep their diesel tanks full through the very long winter. That's the other thing. It starts cooling off late October into November, and now, a week or so shy of April, we're just starting to come out of it. We still need to wear our jackets inside.

We brought a little travel clock here, one with a built in thermometer. It broke. I think one of the kids sat on it. But before it broke we were noting the temperature. We were averaging around 50 degrees Fahrenheit inside. I suspect it dropped even lower, but I don't have any numbers to back me up. We could see our breath. My brother will tell you that he's been able to see my breath for years, independent of weather conditions, but this was new for the rest of the family. Watching your children play inside your home with little puffs of steam billowing from their mouths with each chuckle, it's kind of frustrating. The walls were streaked with moisture, rolling drops pooling along the edges of our floor. Here, the mold would grow.

We bought two little electric heaters, and we have two working gas heaters. A third was making really scary noises, so we stopped using it. We kept one electric heater going in the baby's room all night. But the rest of us would have to tough it out under blankets and lots of clothes.

I spoke to my father in the States at one point during the winter. I mentioned that we were cold. He told me,"That which does not kill you will only make you stronger."

We aren't dead.

The Cookie Crumbles

It seems a little silly mentioning it now, so long after the collapse of her sugary empire, but for a span of about two months, wife had a job. She was our muffin making bread winner. She baked and sold treats. I had a sugar-mama.

Every morning I'd take her fresh-baked goods with me to school. It got so that some of the students would be there waiting for me, cup of tea in hand, "Whatcha' got today?" Was it some of her delectable muffins, zucchini, pumpkin chocolate-chip, orange-spice, or apple-strudel? Or perhaps some of her scrumptious cookies, chocolate-chip, chocolate chocolate-chip, peanut-butter, or M&M? Or could it be some of her warm, crispy, homemade biscotti, dipped in chocolate, with just a hint of almond?

"Well, boys, " I'd say, popping the top off her Tupperware boxes, steam rising from her still-warm goodies, "Feast your eyes on these!"

Oohs and ahhs would reverberate throughout the halls of the language center, followed shortly thereafter by the clink of change in the tin cup we used to collect payment. Life was sweet.

And then, disaster!

It was wife's habit to prep and mix her batter in the evening, and wake early the following day to do her baking. One evening, I could hear her sobbing in the kitchen. Waves of chivalric gallantry lapped at my sandy, pericardial beaches! My chiseled, knightly visage became red with anger and despair! That the mother of my children should shed even a single tear while tucked under the griffonic wings of my matrimonially sanctioned guardianship was a heretofore unanticipated trial, but one, I assure you dear reader, that I would respond to as Hercules at the stables!

I threw open the door of our kitchen, being careful not to rip the hinges out of the wall. There wife stood, her cheeks a doughy mess marred now by tears and flour.

"What is it woman! What manner of evil hath beset you that you should wail thus, your cries kindling within my bosom a fantastic tempest, her gales lusty enough to harrow even the Red Spot of Jupiter? Pray tell me! Do not vex me further!"

She glanced at the far corner of the kitchen. I took the cue and had a look myself. Our laptop was sitting open on the counter. The keyboard was buried in cocoa powder.

Two words:

Oh God.

Two more words:

Buy Mac.

Sure, it was over a month before I had the courage to type on the thing, but after repeated bouts of violently shaking cocoa dust out of our iBook's innards, running all over Amman to track down even a little bit of that canned air gassy stuff (it was like $7.00!), and numerous consultations with the neighborhood cybergeek, I wrote my first email. And everything has been fine since, wal'hamdu'lillah.

Wife's business took a strange turn, though. People were excited about her stuff. They kept right on eating her stuff. But at some point, they stopped paying. We don't know what happened, but there was all kind's of oddness, people paying with Filipino money and such. She got stung pretty hard a few times. So we stopped.

Huzzah!

Our Trip to the Mall

Many months ago, we took our first trip to one of the local malls. Malls here are a pretty big deal, a way to cheat the weather and go broke all at the same time. They are often several stories tall, anywhere from 4 to 9 floors. An amusement park and food court will often occupy the top couple of floors, a supermarket the first floor, and we haven't seen a mall yet that didn't have a dedicated prayer hall.

We've got a mall about 15 minutes walking distance from us. Generally speaking, malls rank somewhere near the 6th or 7th circle of Hell in terms of my desire to spend time in one, but I will say that there are some refreshing differences between the malls here and the malls in the States.

First off, the Jordanians are family people. It really is very sweet to go to a mall and see the place filled with families- mom, dad, the kids, all dressed to the nines. Somehow the experience is a bit less carnal. You've still got your teeny-boppers with all their gum-cracking and gravity defying hairdos, but families are the rule. That's why they build the play-parks.

Ahh, the play-parks. Thoroughly unregulated arenas of kinetic release! Anything goes in these places. We have seen these indoor parks virtually demolished over a course of weeks, without the fun-factor suffering even one little bit. This "creative restructuring" just makes for more exciting play. Why not throw the rocking horse into the ball pit? Who says a slide has to be standing in order to be fun? Tear half the planks out of the rope bridge and now you've got yourself a real challenge!

There were some annoyances, though. The little coin-op carousel brays a particularly annoying version of Jingle Bells. Nice, I suppose, for those who are into co-opted pagan festivities, but we were irked. Also, the bumper cars move way too fast. We watched quite a few kids go to tears with the first slam. One kid came out with a bloody lip.

The other thing we like is the prayer hall. It's really something to be shopping, or eating, or washing the gore from your child's face as he comes out of his bumper car and suddenly the call to prayer is sounded out over the mall's PA system. Helps one keep perspective.

It was during our first trip to the mall that we saw the disturbing consequences of not following Fashion Rule #32:

Do not wear clothing printed with words in a language that you cannot understand.

Since our trip to the mall I have seen three young men wearing jackets emblazoned in HUGE block letters with the words:

Negro Sport

I don't know what they think it means. We can't say we even really know what it means. We hope it's merely a trend that goes the way of jelly sandals.