Shamals and Sunspots

I've learned a new word since we've been here - shamal.  It's pronounced /sha-mall/ and here is its definition:

"A shamal is a northwesterly wind blowing over Iraq and the Persian Gulf states (including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait), often strong during the day, but decreasing at night."  (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

Despite all that precision, it's used around here to just mean "sandstorm."  We've had a lot of shamals since we got here - probably at least half a dozen good, strong ones -  and they are exciting because they mean a change in the weather.  You know, something different from a dry-and-hot day.  A shamal will change things up to something new, like a dry-and-hot-and-dusty day.  Yay for change!

Shamals are not like you imagine.  I always imagined sandstorms being fierce and thick, something like this, only more dense with sand:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_eR0PmDXfs   I imagined people leaning into the wind, covering their faces with cloths that are wrapped around their heads, struggling to see and struggling to breathe.  Here, however, shamals are more like a yellow fog that slowly builds up and when it is gone, you have dust on everything.  They do come with some wind, but the worst one so far boasted only 20 mph sustained winds.  Here are some pictures from various shamals that we've experienced:

See how it's kind of hazy?  This is a big shamal.  People here say that it's looking "shamal-y" if it seems to be getting hazy.

Hazy toward the end of the street. 

Hazy into the desert

All that haze is really dust and sand, and it ends up on all of your outdoor furniture the next day! 

Sometimes, it does rain a little here.  We've had 2 or 3 thunderstorms, actually.  But the rain is not clean water - it is dirty, dusty, sandy water.  Once at a playdate, I watched raindrops fall onto a white tablecloth - they were dark brown raindrops!  They leave behind the same coating of dust. 

Mike says that we should adopt Arabic personalities, kind of like superheroes have their personality dichotomies.  He wants his Arabic name to be Ali Shamaly. 

He also wants to open a shopping mall called ShaMall.  Har Har. 

But the coolest thing about the shamals is that they throw so much dust up into the air that - get this, I think this is amazing - YOU CAN REALLY LOOK AT THE SUN WITH YOUR NAKED EYES!!  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY!!  This is blasphemy - heresy - anathema! - to an astronomer.  How many times did I preach, cajole, insist, or threaten my students to NEVER EVER EVER look at the Sun with their naked eyes?  Too many to count!  I showed them pictures of blind people attempting to walk, talked about how Galileo lost his eyesight at the end of his life, and reminded them that Newton actually went blind for two weeks after he stared at the Sun!  (On purpose.  Oh, Newton.  What a dumb thing to do!  Yes, Newton was brilliant.  But not in this instance.) 

The Sun at 3pm.  WOW!!  Check out that limb darkening!  (That's how the Sun is brighter in the middle than on the edges.)

So I've been looking at the Sun with my naked eyes.  We all have.  It's incredible!  We are really seeing a STAR, UP CLOSE!  You can stare at it, study it, watch it move, all during the light of day, with no special equipment.  So then I did something REALLY REALLY BAD.  Something that I am almost embarrassed about.   I know.  How could I have done it?  But I had to try.  Yes.  I did it. 

I got out my binoculars. 

Binoculars!!  I looked directly at the Sun, during the day, with BINOCULARS!  And I saw a SUNSPOT!!  WITH MY NAKED EYE!  DURING THE DAYTIME!  WOW!!!!  I LOVE SHAMALS!! 

Astronomers have a thing they say at the end of their emails to each other.  Rather than saying "sincerely", they say "clear skies".  As in

"blah blah blah email text, ok, let's talk soon. 
Clear skies,
Elisabeth." 

It means "I hope you have clear skies for your next stargazing time," (as opposed to cloudy skies) rather like a "take care and good luck" kind of message.  But now that I know about shamals, I'm going to start a new trend:  "dusty skies"  - as in "hope you have a shamal soon so you can see the Sun!"  

If I'm this excited about a sunspot, I think I picked the right profession.  :) 

More Baby Pictures

Here are some more pictures of Baby Catherine, from when she was about 4 weeks to about 6 weeks!

Gramama and grandbaby

This was another one of my dresses.

She's ok with the bouncy seat.  For the first 5 minutes. 

Another one of my dresses.

She's holding her head up really well.

 

Snuggly baby!

A new dress from Grandma!  So sweet!

We told Everett that the baby can see red things best.  So he brought her all of his red cars.  Sweet big brother!

All our progeny, watching Super Why.  Can you tell which one is not a Super Reader?  :)

Don't try this at home....

Just FYI, I was trying to make a sauce for some beef we were having the other night, and the following combination is NOT recommended:

Heat 1 can cream of asparagus soup on the stove, because you can't find cream of mushroom
Add 1/2 cup apple juice, because you don't have white wine
Add 1 T dried oregano, because the apple juice made it smell bad
Add 1 cup hazelnut non-dairy creamer, because now it smells REALLY gross, and anything would taste better than cream of asparagus soup with apple juice and dried oregano!  Yuck!

The final result is just disgusting.  I am not one to throw away food easily, but this stuff went down the drain with no qualms at all!  I love to improvise and make stuff up as I go along when I cook, and so far it has only caught up with me twice.  Now it's three times!  Next time I'll just use ketchup. 

AFTER

AFTER!  I wanted to wait until the house was clean before I took these pictures, which is a lot of the reason they are so long in coming.  I waited and waited and waited, and the house never seemed to be all the way clean, no matter how hard I tried.  I finally gave up and just took the pictures of it as it was.  So this is it! 

Front entrance

Dining room.  Louvered doors on the left are in the front entrance, and the other dooway is into the kitchen.  The green mat on the floor is the sliding glass door to the patio. 

Kitchen.  The door at the end goes to the garage.  I painted a window over the sink because it was too depressing to not have a window in the kitchen.  I'll take a fake window over no window any day. 

Living room.  It's big and has a 14 foot ceiling.  It feels a lot like living in a racketball court.  But at least it's roomy!

The rest of the living room.  The dining room is at my back.

The living room from the other side.  Now you can see the other sliding glass door to the patio, and you can get a glimpse into the dining room.

The stairs are by the front door.  They are wider than our old stair and have a nice landing. 

Upstairs hallway - our Saudi rug we got in '09 fits great!  The boys' room is at the end of the hall on the left, the bathroom is in the middle, and the nursery is on the right.

The nursery

The boys' room.

The other side of the boys' room - pay no attention to the (small) man behind the curtain.  (I think he's putting his jammies on after bathtime!)

We brought our wall stickers to make the bathroom seem more fun. 

At the other end of the hallway is the master bedroom.

Our room is big enough that I can have Mike's desk as my sewing table.  I miss you all, sweet girlfriends! I would be monogramming for you all if I could!!

The "study" is our guest room.  It has doors that we never open that go into the living room.  They make an interesting headboard. 

Our patio - smaller than our old porch, but almost anything would be.  We were very spoiled with our huge porch in Charlotte!

Our backyard.  It's just barely bigger than our old porch.  :)

So that's it!  Our house is smaller than our old house, but it's not too bad.  We didn't get to pick it, and we're not eligible for anything else in the housing lottery, so this is where we'll be.  I wish everyone could come visit us - we would have loved having you in our home! 

DURING

Here are some pictures of the arrival of our shipment.  It was a crazy day!  It was a lot like moving out, but in reverse.  :)  No, really, it was a lot like moving out with the stress level, but at least the time constraints were gone.  We could take as much time to unpack as we wanted.  By the end of the day, we were both utterly exhausted.  I am really glad we made it past all this moving part of Our Arabian Adventure.  Moving is no fun. 

All our stuff had been packed in these large wooden crates, called Lift Vans.  They got loaded onto one giant curtain truck in Charlotte, but they came in loads of 2, 3, or 4 on these smaller trucks when they arrived in Arabia. 

The trucks had to make multiple trips to the port to get all our Lift Vans.  I think we had 14 of them. 

They backed the truck up to our garage door to unload.  They took a crowbar to open the Lift Vans, and then they had us check off all the boxes as they were unloaded from the Lift Vans.  We had about 350 boxes. 

An empty Lift Van going away, back to port for another load.

Can you see the enormous pile of discarded boxes in front of our house?!?

Some things were broken.  This was Mike's mom's wedding crystal.  :(

Our own bed!!  Hooray!!

The living room was starting to fill up.  Note the all-important potty seat was one of the first things to come off the truck. 

We got our kitchen magnets back!

More things were broken. 

We made quite the debris pile outside. 

More trucks coming with our Lift Vans.  The yellow helmet in the foreground is on the handlebars of our houseboy's motorbike.  He came to help us that day, but turns out there wasn't too much for him to do until we got everything unloaded.

More broken things.  All the boxes had those yellow stickers on them, which identified which number box it was.  Items without boxes had the stickers directly on them.  It's been two months since the shipment came, and we are STILL finding and picking off yellow stickers from our stuff. 

Master bedroom is also getting full!

The boys' room.

Baby's room now has more stuff. 

Here is Mike checking off box numbers with the movers.  Luckily, it was a gorgeous day - mid 80s and sunny. 

It felt VERY weird to see something so familiar as a Charlotte address in the middle of all this foreign-ness. 

My mixing bowl must have been made of tempered glass. 

Master bedroom starting to come together!

Boys' room with their rug!

Nursery gets organized.

Hard to tell in this picture, but our kitchen was a WRECK.  Trying to absorb all my stuff into a smaller space was really hard. 

Living room is getting full, too. 

Here is the box that had the deep-fryer in it.  Yes, that is the oil that I forgot to take out.  The box did get flipped upside down, and the oil did spill out.  It would have been ok, except that the oil congealed in the warehouse in the cold Charlotte winter, and then re-liquified in the Saudi heat.  This changed its consistency, and made it impossible to get off!  We managed to make the rest of the stuff in the box useable again, but the deep fryer itself is still sitting in a plastic grocery bag in our garage because we can't figure out how to successfully clean it. 

We were all worn out by the end of the day.  The boys were real troopers.  They got farmed out to one person's house in the morning and another person's house in the afternoon.  By dinner we were all testy, but it wasn't anything a quick episode of Wonder Pets couldn't fix: 

They both fell asleep in the bear chair here in front of Linny, Tuck, and MingMing.  Looks like Wonder Pets, Wonder Pets, they found a way to help some baby people and save the day.  (Ha ha, now you have that song stuck in your head, don't you?  :)  )  (And wow, look at all that paper packing material.  It's just from one or two boxes in this room.)

All in all, it was a good day but very tiring.  We were very happy to have our stuff, even if it meant that now living here feels real.  As in, we really do live here now, and there's no going back home because home is an empty house - we couldn't even sleep there if we wanted.  Next up:  AFTER!