snapshots

*Last week the hose came out again. Outside our building there is a little “green space”…except it’s mostly brown. The hoses came out and they left them on…and on…and on…until we had two small Great Lakes out front. And of course my first thought was, “great…a shot in the arm for our most popular mosquito breeding ground!” And my second thought was, “haven’t they learned that this doesn’t make the grass grow?” Well, I went out and when I came home later in the afternoon I found that a flock of small brown birds was using one of the lakes to play. The birds were drinking, washing, fluttering around, splashing each other, chirping happily. So…no grass, more mosquitoes, and a wonderful birdbath party!

*Jennifer and I have started working at the seminary library. Each day we walk out the gates of RCG and flag down a taxi. We then hand the driver a small pink slip of paper with the address and landmarks and intersection info written on it in Arabic. He nods and we get in the car. Now, I know about two main ways to get to the seminary—one by walking, and one by driving down Ahmed Said street. In the past week we have driven three different ways from RCG to the seminary. Sometimes I wonder if we’re even going to get there. Sometimes we end up lost and I have to give directions to get us out of the industrial neighborhood near the seminary. Sometimes we just go the way I expect. Once we went a totally new way that surprised me with its ease and speed. I am completely intrigued by how taxi drivers take totally different ways to get to the same place at the same time each day. Bizarre. (sometimes, though, they just drive around a long way because they want me to pay them more. It doesn’t work. ha!)

*speaking of the seminary library….Jennifer and I did a shelf-read this week, getting all the books in order before we start the inventory. We learned that sometimes the English alphabet goes in the same order as the Arabic alphabet: a b t th g h kh d dh/z r z s sh S D T Z ay gh f q l m n h w y. And sometimes it goes abcdefrstuvghijklmnop. And sometimes 9 comes before 6 and 7 before 3, etc. It was pretty exciting. We came home one day and joked about playing “library Phase 10.” Phase 10 is a fun card game where you have to complete each phase in order to move on to the next one, and whoever finishes the phases first and has the lowest number of points wins. Each phase has things like “two sets of three” or “a run of 8.” We figure that with this plan, every hand is an automatic winner!

*Yesterday I lost a lot of things. I am really sad about this. In the morning I was supposed to have a meeting with the first-primary teachers so we could say goodbye to one another. Out of 8 teachers, one came. I lost my opportunity to say goodbye to some friends who have been with me all year…and I lost a little of my sense that I’m worth seeing and being around for and important and valued.

At lunch I put a bowl of leftover vegetable risotto (the previous night’s dinner) in the microwave. I was using my loaves-and-fishes mosaic bowl from Tabgha, in Galilee. Well, when I pulled the bowl out of the microwave, it was so incredibly hot that I burned my fingers pretty badly…and dropped the bowl. It broke into a bunch of pieces AND I lost my lunch too. It was my favorite bowl. I am so sad about this, I can’t even tell you. I loved that bowl. I have a matching mug but it is currently missing. I hope to find it tonight, but we’ll see. If I don’t find it, I think I will cry…more.

I was writing in blogger last night and when I tried to save…it had an unscheduled outage. I lost everything I had written. it was the perfect end to the day.

It was a bad day yesterday.