Here's a little something.

Big mama #3
I got the car washed again yesterday - even though I was taking it to get painted, I went for the wash since they clean the inside as well. The guy started by filling up two four liter bottles and put one at the front and the other behind the car. He wet the car down with his hose. Then, he picks up the bottle at the back, takes a couple steps back, and pours the bottle of soapy water into the jet of water. Instantly, the car was covered in a blizzard of suds. It turned white. He repeated the process from the front before getting out his cloth to scrub it down. It was one of those moments when you take pleasure in the creativity people show in doing ordinary things.

It's time for another picture! Karla has been feeling better this week. Her stomach hasn't felt upset for a while and her back is even feeling better. Whether it's that she's getting used to climbing the stairs and being on her feel, or she has time to do a bit more exercise. We even did prenatal yoga together.

The adventure in Kuwait this week has been the car registration. All car over three years old need to go in for a safety inspection. The inspection consists of revving your engine - they check for smoke out the tailpipe, and showing your brake and signal lights. I passed all of those, but the car need a new paint job before it can be deemed roadworthy for another year. So today, I have to take the car in to get painted.

It's the start of the first long weekend of the year. Last night we went to our usual salsa lesson, which was followed by the rueda, a version of the salsa that is done in a circle. It's a little like square dancing (but not that much!). It was good fun. It uses the moves from salsa, but just modifies them slightly so that at the end of the move you pass your partner off and pick up another.

We are thinking about a trip to Egypt in November during our school holiday. Martine, who we travelled in Oman with, is interested in coming too. Her boyfriend will be too busy to get away. It will be good to have another person along. Martine and I have never been, but Karla spent a week in Egypt when we were in Turkey. She can take it easy, picking and choosing what she wants to see and when she wants to relax. There aren't any tickets available right now, but lots of people book several trips and cancel later. So there's still hope. We don't have to commit right away, so we can see how Karla is feeling later on too.

It's Thursday morning again. It's the first real weekend. Last weekend we spent both days at the school getting our classes ready for the beginning of school. Unfortunately, Karla has rejected the idea of a weekly photo. There won't be much difference between them. I think I have got her to accept a photo every second week.

Karla has been feeling better lately. She was sick last weekend, but has felt better since then. Work has been tiring. After the first day, she came home and lay down for a nap at 5. I tried to wake her up at 7:30, but she refused and ended up sleeping through until 5 the next morning. There's no tutoring yet, so she's getting her rest. I hope that she will try to find students to tutor who are willing to come to our apartment for their lessons. Unfortunately, since she started work, her back has been sore. But last night, we went to our usual salsa lesson, and she felt better afterwards. I think that a little activity will help her to keep limber.

I went for my first hour of tutoring this week with Faisal - my favourite student from last year. His assignment was to practice measuring things for science. So I have a few dimensions to give you an idea of the scale of a Kuwaiti house. His living room is 14.5m by 7.5m. The dining room table is 7.5m long. He was telling me about the new house his family is building, "bigger than this one". The new plan is to have a soccer field, basketball court and tennis court around the house. Then, as the three boys grow up and get married, the sports fields will be taken out and their houses can be put up beside the parents' house. Kuwait is so small that anywhere you might work in the country is close enough to get to.

It will be a quiet weekend. We've both got a couple details of the school opening to set up still, but mostly , we'll be just taking it easy after the last two weeks of being pretty constantly busy setting up house and work. Last night we watched Connie and Karla with our friend Jamie from Vancouver.

Karla is doing her Kathy Smith pre-natal exercise video for the first time right now. She is wearing her exercise outfit, which is also her pregnancy development photo uniform. She has just promised to pose for the photo after her workout. Right now, her hair is not up to standard. I think she may have unrealistic expectations about how much the video is going to do for her.

Mission accomplished. She had a change of heart and volunteered to have the photo taken before the work out. Here is the beautiful mama-to be.

It's our first weekend in Kuwait. We're headed to see the doctor today for a checkup for Karla. Then a little trip into school to get everything ready for the kids who start on Sunday. We'll pick up our plants from their summer babysitter and head off to a little salsa party this evening.

We have been back in Kuwait for a few days now. It's been busy unpacking tons of boxes. Karla has been working hard and sleeping lots. We will being the pictures of the growing mama tomorrow. But then there is a debate over how often to update the picture. Should it be weekly, or monthly? Or a compromise at every two weeks?

Our new place is looking more and more like home. It's hard to believe how much junk we have. Somehow, after packing it, carrying it down and up, storing it, and carrying it down and up again motivates me to get rid of anything even mostly unnecessary. Not Karla though. She's still got two boxes of ceramic tile that she bought 2 years ago to use to make a mosaic that she has never even started to plan.

We've got a new phone number. It's (965) 571-3265. Check back tomorrow for a photo of the expanding Karla.

There is less than a week before we leave for the summer again. At school, most everything is done. At home, packing has barely started After packing we have to move all our stuff out to friends' apartments for the summer. It's enough to keep us busy for the rest of our time here. Karla planned a boat trip on the gulf as a surprise party for my birthday. Last year we went on a year end cruise on the same boat. But Karla got everyone (except me) organized this year to meet up on Wednesday night to celebrate. She told me about the party that morning (and about the clues that I had failed to pick up on). It was a good thing too, since at about 4, the boat called to tell us that we would have to leave at 9 instead of 8. So she had to call everyone to let them know. That would have been hard enough to do. But at 6 they called back and said they were ready to go anytime, so we decided to call everyone and meet at 8:30. In the end, a we couldn't geet in touch with a few people and we had to be there at 8 to meet them, and Rose, a co-planner, got caught in traffic and so we couldn't leave until 9!

Last night was a lunar eclipse in this part of the world. Between 9 and 10 the shadow of the earth moved almost halfway across the full moon. We didn't have the energy to stay up and watch the whole process. But one of Karla's students was considerate enough to video tape it. That way they could watch the whole eclipse in a fraction of the time but using the fast forward. I didn't see it so I can't really capture the magnificence of watching the lunar eclipse on video. But frankly, it doesn't sound as good as my fireplace idea in Montreal. I wanted to put our tv in the fireplace and get a video tape of a fire burning to put on when guests came over.

We went out to the mall tonight to do a bit of shopping to get ready for the summer's festivities. We went to Debenham's, a UK department store. I have seen women in all black, even the ones who one see the world through a narrow slit for their eyes, shopping for clothes. Tonight, while waiting for Karla in the change room, I observed the women in black shopping for makeup.

It's feels like it's been ages since I updated the website at all. But we haven't been doing much besides the regular routine. The end of the year is coming up quickly and we're both busy fitting in everything that we need to. Tutoring is starting to pick up as people start to see the light at the end of the tunnel and wish it were a little brighter.

We haven't even really though about the big packing job we will have to start in a couple weeks. Everything we have into box and over to a friend's house for the summer. It will be good to sort through everything - it will encourage us to take some of the stuff that we thought we'd use but haven't home. But I am a little worried about seeing exactly how much we have collected in the two years that we've been here.

Due to the delicacies of car rental, we have adjusted our schedule a wee bit. We are now planning to go to Humboldt and environs the first week of July (before the Winnipeg Folk Festival, instead of on the way home).

In other news, the school has settled out housing for next year. They have offered to let us move into one of the old buildings. We can buy the furniture that is in the apartment right now. For us, as a couple, we will be able to cover the rent and the cost of the furniture with our housing allowance, with even a bit left over. Next year, singles will need to put up a bit of their own money every month for what they get for free this year. The alternative for them is to find their own place and furnish it themselves. At the end of the school year, we will box up all our stuff and store it at a friend's place for the summer. When we get back in September, we'll move
into a freshly painted apartment.

Our plans for the summer are coming together. Somehow the summer always seems too short to do everything we want to. We are coming straight home this year to enjoy as much of Canadian life as we can. Fernie is green, Saskatoon and Humboldt are gold.

June
17 Arrive-Calgary
18 To Fernie
19 To Kooteny Lake
20
21 To Fernie
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29 To Humboldt
30

July
1
2
3
4
5
6
7 To Winnipeg
8 Winnipeg Folk Festival
9
10
11
12
13 To Fernie
14
15
16
17
18
19 To Fernie
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31

August
1
2
3
4 To Edmonton
5 EdmontonFolk Festival
6
7
8
9 To Fernie
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18 To Calgary
19
20 To Humboldt
21 Janice and Craig's Wedding
22
23
24
25 To Calgary
26 Return to Kuwait

Plus in late July or early August, we'll be up around Kooteny Lake for a couple days.

You know The Lorax? The Dr. Seuss story where the Once-ler comes along and finds a forest of Truffula trees. He turns the trees into Thneeds, which sell like hotcakes. As his business develops, he is visited by the Lorax, who warns him of the effect he is having on the forest and the animals that live there. But in the end, the Once-ler doesn't realize until it is too late and he's chopped the whole forest down. Well, Karla read it to her class. They responded to it with lines like "But my mom says when I wear new clothes and wash them, they don't look as good," and "We'll still have nice places to go - the mall."

One of the reasons that they don't get it, is that Kuwait has always looked like the forest after it has been destroyed - that's as good as it gets. Here, the environment isn't your friend - it's nasty. Getting indoors is a relief from being subject to the outside - fromthe heat, the dust, the bright blandness that's everywhere.

Here are a few of our digital photos from Oman.

Well, it wasn't a big weekend. But it was a weekend. After a week in Oman, we've been back for a week. We went to a charity flea market on Thursday. It was a pretty typical flea market - lots of old junk. Except that Kuwaitis mostly like ugly stuff at the best of times, so there wasn't a lot. It was a good day for other reasons though. First, on the way there I saw a real Lamborghini Countache in a used car lot. It was the first time I had really seen the car of my boyhood dreams other than in a photo. And as we were leaving the flea market, what should be pulling up but a pink Cadillac.

Oman was a beautiful surprise. It is a desert - but is a mix of real sand desert and rocky mountains. Plus the weather is considerably more mild than Kuwait, so people have wanted to live there long enough that it has some history - forts and museums around the country. To top it all off we got to see little baby sea turtles emerging from sand to make their break for the sea. A detailed travelogue with some photos in being put together.

I was poking around the internet last week, when I discovered that Scottish folk festival favorites Shooglenifty have reformed and are planning a summer tour in Canada. It kindled my summer folk festival excitement. I checked the websites to see if they had posted any performer lists. Only the Edmonton festival had posted a few names - Ani Difranco the big one. Karla and I have been discussing which festival(s) to go to. I am supporting Winnipeg, she is in favour of Edmonton.

Karla got me a subscription to the New Internationalist magazine for Christmas. The first edition arrived this week. It's focus is sugar: how people have just been eating more and more of it since it became available and how we've been getting larger. Not to mention all the dastardly economic effects of its production. I've been watching how much sugar I eat all weekend. It didn't stop me from making the brownies we had in the cupboard though.

We signed a contract to stay with Al-Bayan for the next year. Quite a bit of the English departments is staying for various reasons. We like the people we work with. The school agreed to let Karla move up to grade seven next year, after they had said she would need to sign on for two years before she could change grades. We don't know exactly where we will live next year as the school is going to begin giving money in lieu of accommodation, but they have made some noises about letting us know the details soon.

Exams for the first semester ended this week and the new semester begins next week. The week after, we've got a one week break a Muslim holiday. We've decided to go to Oman for the week. The visa application would have taken too long, so Iran wasn't even a possibility in the end. In Oman the desert, parts of it sandy, runs into mountains before turning into the Indian ocean. We're looking forward to seeing some nesting sea turtles, old forts and striking mountains and canyons.

We signed a contract to stay with Al-Bayan for the next year. Quite a bit of the English departments is staying for various reasons. We like the people we work with. The school agreed to let Karla move up to grade seven next year, after they had said she would need to sign on for two years before she could change grades. We don't know exactly where we will live next year as the school is going to begin giving money in lieu of accommodation, but they have made some noises about letting us know the details soon.

Exams for the first semester ended this week and the new semester begins next week. The week after, we've got a one week break a Muslim holiday. We've decided to go to Oman for the week. The visa application would have taken too long, so Iran wasn't even a possibility in the end. In Oman the desert, parts of it sandy, runs into mountains before turning into the Indian ocean. We're looking forward to seeing some nesting sea turtles, old forts and striking mountains and canyons.