The Land Without Time

Another weird thing about living here is that it's hard to mark time.  It's hard to get a sense of time passing, and time in general seems off.  This place, in many ways, is like being Alice and living in Wonderland because everything is so odd and backwards, but to have your sense of time be thrown off really makes living here feel surreal.

The biggest part of this feeling, and the reason I'm noticing it more now, is that there are no seasons here.  I guess it's a lot like living in Florida.  We've lived here for nearly six months now, and this place looks exactly like it did six months ago.  The only change is that it got hotter.  The plants all look the same in December as they do in June, and we have seen very little blooming going on in the spring.  (Oddly enough, our banyan tree in the front yard did lose all of its leaves - a la autumn -  in April.)  I think I keep waiting for something to change to mark the seasons, but nothing has or is going to happen.  So it feels like we are stuck in the same place in time forever.

This goes for daylight hours, too.  I suppose we are far enough south that the duration of daylight to stay fairly constant over the calendar year.  And it doesn't help that we are on the wrong time zone.  The entire country is on the same time zone (which I can understand, for convenience purposes), but this country is four times bigger than Texas.  So the time zone for the western part of the country is ok for their daylight, but over here on the east coast, we should be one hour earlier.  The Sun comes up at 4:45 and goes down right at 6:00 pm.  It hardly feels like summer when we are eating dinner and it is dark outside!  Much better would be sunrise at 5:45 and sunset at 7:00 pm.  Or even 6:45 and 8:00.  So it still feels like it did when we got here in December.

Then there's the days of the week.   Over here, the weekend is Thursday and Friday.  Saturday is like Monday and Wednesday is like Friday.  This is MOST CONFOUNDEDLY CONFUSING THING EVER.  People will say "my daughter has piano lessons on Sunday and Tuesday."  ???  Um, ok, let's see, Sunday is like Tuesday, so that means that Tuesday is like Thursday, so that's really like Tuesday and Thursday.  I have to sit there and think about it every time.  I am not a dumb person.  I have an advanced degree in astrophyiscs, for goodness sake!  Why can I not wrap my brain around this??  I think it is because the feeling you get with each day of the week (i.e., when I say "Friday" you think good thoughts about work being nearly over and the approaching weekend, and when I say "Monday" you think "ugh") is SO ingrained that it is hard to change.  Monday is now hump day and Saturday is the "ugh" day and Friday is for church and brunch.  So, let's all sing together:  "It's just another manic Saturday.  I wish it was Friday.  That's my fun day, my I don't have to run day.  It's just another manic Saturday."  or "Saturday, Saturday, ba da, ba da da da, so good to me, Saturday morning, it was all I hoped it would be."  or "Another pleasant valley Friday."  Anybody want to watch Thursday Night Fever with me??

(Aggh!  To be honest, I have just recently quit trying to change.  I just say the day of the week I mean and I leave it for others to figure it out.  I give up.) 

Since the days of the week are different, it makes marking our normal holidays a little off, too.  For example, Easter was (of course) on a Sunday, which is a Tuesday here.   It was not a day off, and Mike really did have to go to work like normal, and of course there are no Easter decorations up around here, no Easter anything on camp, and the day just passed like any other normal work day.  So it makes it hard to think that it really happened.  (Whoops - Easter is over?  I barely remember it.) Same for Mother's Day, Father's Day, and all the weekend holidays - they all happen on weekdays. 

Couple that with no TV or radio for six months, barely any contact with the outside world (it's a lot like college in that respect - Vandy friends will remember the "Vandybubble") and it seems like time stands still here.  Nothing ever happens, nothing ever changes, we just live each day hour by hour and then do it all again the next day. 

So I'm having a hard time believing it's JUNE already.  I hear through the grapevine that CMS is out now - wow.  Hard to believe that that much time has passed while we've been over here.

Coming soon...more pictures of Catherine (2 1/2 months now!  Again, where does the time go?), pictures of Everett's Fourth Birthday Party, and pictures of our attempt to actually fry an egg on the sidewalk (preview: I have broken my own personal record for highest temperature experienced - 119 degrees in Abqaiq the other weekend!  Still loving the heat!)

PS Everett is on a HUGE dinosaur kick these days, so it's like we really are living in the Land Before Time!