Khobar, Scooter, Ankle

Yesterday was a busy day for a Thursday (our Saturday). I went shopping in the morning for some parts to fix my scooter. I finally decided the lock assembly was broken and just wasn't going to work, so the solution that came to the top of the list was to bypass the switch and install a simple toggle switch to turn it off and on. So my friend David and I went to find a switch, wire, connectors, etc.

Had a good trip to the Souks in a nearby town called Khobar. Like many U.S. cities with urban sprawl, the primary city here is Dammam, and there are many many suburb areas, like Khobar Dhahran, where I am. The Souks are a series of small shops. I had pictured an open air market, but that's not right. It is street after narrow street of shops, many of them one room, most of them specializing in one thing or another. And they are clustered by specialty. There is a large area of several blocks with hardware and building supplies. Another area is clothing. Another is jewelry - most of it cheap, gaudy, flashy stuff, but a few seem to have the genuine article (yes honey, I'll be back to those). :)

One of the shops we walked past, which neither of us had noticed before, was a locksmith. Good to know.  So we got back to the camp and worked on the scooter to try and bypass the lock. Sadly, we didn't get very far before realizing the wiring was much more complex than we thought and bypassing the switch wasn't going to work. But we were able to remove the lock assembly. And then found that we could remove the actual switch from the bottom of the lock assembly and actuate it by hand. Amazingly, after sitting for 6 months, there was still juice in the battery. And no, it didn't start (that would have been too fantastic!), but the starter works!

So hopefully later this afternoon I will go back the recently found locksmith , whose window had HONDA in big letters, and see if he can get the lock to work! If he can, I'll be able to just reinstall it and put it all back together, and all I have to do is get the engine to fire. David is an engine guy, though, and pretty confident we can get this to work.

So in my room I have a bed, a "lounging" chair by the window, a small desk, a mini-fridge and a simple wooden desk chair. Last night I stayed up working on things until I just couldn't sit in the desk chair any more. I also have a nice flat screen TV in my room. I've had it on a total of maybe 45 minutes since I've been here - there's no TV schedule available, 90% of the channels are in Arabic, and I just have too many things to do to sit and flip through the English language channels in case there is something interesting in. Last night though, I thought I'd turn on the TV for a while to help me stay awake cause I hoped to hear from Dana before going to bed - she'd been out running errands getting ready to go shoot a wedding with Darby this weekend in the Little Rock area.

So I was on the bad with my back against the wall, legs stretched out with the left ankle crossed over the right one. I'd found a very interesting show on BBC about the bronze age. If felt like time to shift foot position, you know, like we've all done 10,000 times this month. As my left leg came up though something went pop on top of my ankle - not really in the ankle though - lower than that but above the foot. Then my ankle wanted to stay right there. It moved fine if I moved it in the direction to point my toes, but if I tried to move it the other way, like to walk and stuff, it objected all the way up to my knee. Crazy.

So I sat for about 45 minutes trying to stretch it, flex it, rub it, relax it, anything I could to move it - no good. Then I had to go to the bathroom and had to slide down to the end of the bed, use the chair back to stand up, and then slide it in front of me like a walker to get the 4 feet to the bathroom and back.They have a fine hospital here in camp, with a reportedly very good emergency room, but this is not something I wanted to test personally, so I took  an advil and about that time Dana called and we got to have a nice talk. (As an aside, God, thank you for the Skype team who have made such wonderful communication with home possible!!)

Now it was very late but it is always worth it to get to talk with my sweetheart, but time for bed and I had to figure out how to get this foot under the covers. And yes, I sleep under sheet and blanket - gotta have the layers because the thermostat is in degrees C, which means there's nearly a 5 degree temperature change before the AC comes on or goes off again, so every night is all off, pull up sheet, then pull up blanket shivering, then reverse the layers by morning because the AC hasn't come on for 4 hours and the room is warm and stuffy again! But I digress. So I took a naprosyn tablet, rubbed and massaged my ankle as best I could, and told it to be good and be better in the morning. Tried sliding the left foot under the covers but it was too painful to push with it, so used my right foot to raise covers up, then gingerly worked left foot down until I could turn on my side and let it rest flat, and fell asleep.

Woke up three hours later and it felt the same. Went back to sleep and woke again when the alarm went off, foot still didn't want to move to walking position, so I rolled over and dozed off again (which I almost never do). Woke an hour and a half later and gave my foot an exploratory wiggle and it moved! It was sore, and stiff, but it moved ok. Put feet on ground and it didn't hurt - so far so good. Stood up successfully, and so far doing ok with it. Can walk with short steps, so I won't be going at my normal, aggressive pace, but that's fine. My leg is stiff and sore all the way to my knee, but it's working and that's a win!!

There's a bus to Khobar in two hours, so I'll see how it's doing by then. The locksmith isn't very far from the bus stop, so if I take it slow and easy I should be ok. It just feels like it would be better to use it gently than to put it up, which is where the problem started.  Lesson learned - no TV for me!!

A little summer cold

Hello all. I’d planned to write something else today but just don’t feel mentally up to it after hardly sleeping last night. A couple of days ago my throat felt scratchy dry, and I wondered if I was going to have a summer cold – kind of ironic here, don’t you think?  My sinuses were a little stopped up yesterday but no big deal.

Last night I lay down to go to sleep and the spigot in my head opened. It took me about an hour to cough and hack and blow it clear again.  When I got ready to lay down again, it was like being waterboarded for the next 3 hours. This went on until about 3:30 and everything seemed to dry up, and I thought I might get a few hours of sleep. Sadly, I just couldn’t go back to sleep – tried all the good Jedi mind tricks I know, but finally just settled in rest as comfortably as I could and wait for the alarm at 0615.

When that finally went off (which I knew it would because I’d looked at the clock at 0610, I did something I almost never do – I turned it off and turned over and settled in again and fell fast asleep. Don’t worry, I’m not stupid. The second alarm went off at 0630 and I got up and got dressed and left on time to be at my desk 5 minutes early, eating an apple on my walk to the office. Consultants don’t get paid if they don’t work, and I had work due to be finished today so it can be reviewed tomorrow.

Got to work and learned that everyone goes through this every once in a while, even my new friend Tofig, (to feek’) a Saudi native. Turns out there were four of us who didn’t sleep last night, for one reason or another! I have some decongestant from another consultant and am hoping to get a better rest tonight and feel better tomorrow!

Here is a photo of me with Tofig, taken last week. He retired from Aramco last year and could do pretty much anything he wished. I asked him once why he came back to work, and he said he had gotten so much from the company over his career that he wanted to return and give something back to the new generation coming in.  You used to hear that kind of sentiment in America, but not for a long time. I never thought I’d hear it again, least of all in Saudi Arabia, but I’m glad that mindset lives on somewhere.

More when I feel better! Best to all.

Happy Anniversary, My Love!

Today is a special day - not many of us reach this point anymore. It used to be common, not too big a deal at all, but times have changed, values have shifted, and convenience often outweighs commitment. Today my beautiful partner and I have been married 35 years.

We've been to weddings and photographed couples as the DJ calls out anniversary milestones, and we don't point it out but many times we would have won the contest. And every wedding we shoot I try to catch her eye during the vows, and let her know that I still stand by my vows from 1978, to love and honor and cherish. She is important to me. She is still the special one my heart belongs to.

I married Dana because she was beautiful, brilliant, determined, creative, fiery, exciting, and fun! She challenged me in ways no one else had in my life, and for the first time I was motivated (by a gorgeous A student) to excel in my studies, and I moved past being a C student for the first time (I would never have made it through pilot training academics without her - thank you Sweetie!). She is still all of those things, in addition to being wise, clever, massively talented, highly experienced, kind and generous.

It's been a bumpy road at times, as most roads are. We have fought, played, cried, laughed, argued, shared, and loved. We've been devastated, but we made it through together. We've been overjoyed, and shared it with each other. She gave us three daughters, one who was not intended to be with us but a few months, and two who are so wonderful, beautiful, brilliant and unique that I marvel at my blessings.

There are some things I regret, all of them to do with my behavior. I would do it all over again if I could, but I would tell myself a few things first so that I would know how to be more supportive and helpful and patient in times of hurt and stress. It took me far too long to learn, and I would love the chance to do it again, but better.

I know I'm not the strong, tall, good-looking young man you married any more. I'm old, gray, round, grizzled, and not nearly as strong, but I love you. I have since I met you, and I always will. Thank you for sharing your life with me. It's hasn't always been what we expected or hoped for, but we're still together, and I'll take that over all the what-ifs in the world!

Happy Anniversary, my Dana!

Dinner and Sunset

I’ve never eaten in the camp dining hall for an evening meal until tonight. This was only my third full, cooked evening meal since I left home almost 5 weeks ago. But a friend told me the other day that on Sunday nights they have a turkey and fixings station, and that it was worth trying. Now, my favorite meal of the year is roast turkey, and I have it whenever I can talk the family into letting me fix it! Other people seem to get tired of it – I just don’t understand.

When I fix it I use our Showtime Rotisserie Grill, which is the best way I’ve ever found to cook a turkey – they always come out moist and tender with a great skin. We have mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, jello salad (for those who haven’t had Dana’s amazing jello salad, it is essentially pecans with just enough fruit cocktail and enough jello to hold it all together – wonderful!), gravy and rolls and maybe a pie or dessert, but there’s not usually room left for that nonsense!

That’s not what I had tonight. I wasn’t expecting it, don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like homemade! Not that it was bad, but some things you have so firmly set in your mind as the way it needs to be that anything less is just never gonna be good enough.  Still, I gave it a fair try, and had turkey (pressed, rolled, and baked – OK, but there was a lot of gristle); mashed potatoes that tasted good enough but far to smooth and creamy, probably flakes; stuffing, which was more or less moistened bread chunks (automatic fail here!); green peas, which are great because they are crisp and not overcooked; and gravy which would have been better to leave it off – can’t really tell you what flavoring went into it!

Overall, it was nice to have it, but won’t make a big effort to go on a regular basis! I’ll stick with what I usually have for dinner, a carrot or apple, several large cherry tomatoes, and some pineapple or watermelon slices.  This actually does me pretty well.

After dinner I went out in time to see the sunset. The weather has been phenomenal in the last few weeks. Mid to upper-90s for highs and very low humidity. Evenings are in the mid-80s and it feels like a nice spring day. Got a nice sunset shot – not much color, though.  It’s still setting into a dusty atmosphere and the blue just doesn’t show up much. Got two quick shots - the top one I think must be titled "Lights." The second just seemed like a nice way to frame the moon!

The last two days the air has been wonderfully clear – it’s usually so hazy the best visibility isn’t more than a mile or two. Today you could see the Arabian Gulf from the top of my building. Yes, I go up there when I want to recharge a bit, clear my head, stretch my legs on the stairs, or just be someplace high! In the two pictures below, the top on is looking east from the camp toward Dammam, a large nearby city – the darker blue line between sky and city is the Gulf. This was shot at extreme magnification with my mini iPad – much better camera than my iPhone 4!!

The next picture is of a set of jabals (pronounced jebel) nearby. This is by far the biggest and tallest jabal around here, which I suppose is why they located the water tank up there, along with several antennae. It’s very difficult to discern, but there is a lower one in front of the tall one, and I’ve climbed to the top of it. These are located about 300 yards from the Prosperity Well, where the oil here first started flowing! This was great day to see this - many days the air has been so dusty or thick you can barely see the antenna over there!

Time for bed! Work hours are 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., so I’m up early. Good night all!

A prosperous day!

I bought a scooter. I hadn’t intended to. I wanted to get a good bicycle to get around on. The camp is actually pretty big, like a good-sized mid-western town with 15,000 residences (I can’t verify that number, but I’ve heard it from several sources so we’ll go with it for now).  There are places I’d like to be able to get to but were too far for a reasonable walk, and a bike seemed like a good idea. Problem is a good bike costs nearly $1000, and I’m not willing to make that investment until I know if my knees will let me put it to use.

One of my coworkers just left for home, and he had two scooters! One is just a top of the line, less than a year old Suzuki. I didn’t buy that one – he’d already sold it to someone else. But he did offer to sell me his old Suzuki, cheap. You see, the reason he had a new scooter is that he lost the only key to the old scooter! And after a month of trying to get it fixed, he gave up and bought a new one.  Well you know me – I love a challenge.

So last Wednesday, at the end of the workweek, we met in the hallway, and while standing at the elevator came to an agreement and shook on it.  I sent him money via PayPal and we’re squared away.  Later I went for a walk to see the prosperity well. This was the first well in Saudi Arabia that produced oil at commercial levels, and it was completed in 1938. Here is the plaque mounted at the site.

They turned Well 7 off in 1982 although they could turn it back on tomorrow if they ever need to.  This is really a significant historical site, and they’ve made a nice little park around it, but it is locked and you can enjoy the view from an overlook. 

After I visited the well I climbed to the top of a nearby jebel (rocky hill – more on those another day) and enjoyed the breeze for a bit, then started back downhill to the main part of the camp.  After passing my building I was walking past a large parking lot (think Walmart super-center sized lot!). The sun had set half an hour earlier, so it was well into dusk, but as I walked past a light post I just noticed with my peripheral vision that there was something on the post, and I instinctively turned my head to see something tied around it. 

Being the curious sort I stopped to look, and it was a lanyard like you would use to wear an ID badge around your neck. But this one had something else attached to it, and then I realized it was a key.  Hmmm, I thought.  Looking closer and squinting in the dusk and without my glasses, I could just see that the key said “Suzuki.” No way, thought I, but y’know I unwrapped the key anyway. It was crusted with dust, and the lanyard with stiff with mud and dirt baked into it, so I knew it had been there for some time.

So now I’m pretty interested to get back and try this key in my Suzuki, and it went right into the slot, but alas, it didn’t turn. Oh well, it didn’t cost me anything to bring the thing with me, and if the owner hadn’t found it on the light pole by now they probably weren’t going to, right?  I went in intending to throw the key away, but set it down instead with the rest of my stuff and forgot about it.

I woke up the next morning from a vivid dream (and I dream in big screen, full color high definition) where I walked outside, sat down on the scooter, put the key (on the lanyard!) into the ignition, turned the key and started the scooter.  Well, I thought, maybe I should try this key again! Went back out (the scooter is parked with several others and some bikes in a courtyard of the building), put in the key – same result. It just feels like the lock is frozen. But then I realized there is a lock on the seat (which hinges open with some storage underneath) and put the key in that lock and it turned perfectly! This must be the key.

Took the key to work Saturday morning and held it up to show my friend who is leaving. I didn’t even have to ask, and he said “Well I’ll be damned. Where did you find that?” Pretty cool, right?

So now I’m still trying to figure out how to make the key turn in the lock. I’m guessing that 5 months in wind, dust, heat and an occasional rain have just fused it. I’ve tried blasting it and soaking it in WD40 with no success. I will try to get to hardware store and get some penetrating oil and see if that helps. I took the front end covers off to see if there is a part number and just order one and have it shipped to me, but there is not one visible and I don’t have a tool I would need to remove it.

I know it will work. It was put into my hands too perfectly not to work. I just have to keep trying until I figure it out!

It reached 108 degrees day before yesterday – a taste of what is to come. Very low humidity, like 11%, but still very hot. I took a stroll instead of the vigorous walk I usually take – I will be very cautious about the heat. Today was back into the 90s which felt very nice.  Best to all, more soon!

Re-learning to eat

I ate half a chicken for lunch yesterday, with steamed vegetables and some rice, and walked away from the table feeling good about what I’d eaten. Let me explain.

I grew up as an American boy in the Midwest in the 1960s – I know, ancient history for some of you. The country was still learning about nutrition, and one of the recent “discoveries” was the four basic food groups: milk, grain, protein, and fruit. If you had a couple of those every day, you’d be healthy and all-American! The government promoted this concept, and pushed it hard in magazines, books, and in school. So we were good boys and girls and ate what we were given.

In my case, it ate whatever I got (a habit I am still trying to break). And it was good – my mother was a wonderful cook, and I loved everything we had! I didn’t like mushrooms, but that didn’t show up my plate very often so it wasn’t really an issue. In the summer we made sandwiches for lunch – bologna (you know, baloney), peanut butter and jelly (mostly homemade) - with potato chips, and it didn’t get much more exotic than that, but it didn’t need to. 

Many times our neighbor, Mr. Swink, would bring over a batch of tomatoes from his garden, and there was no better treat than to walk around the yard, tomato in one hand and salt shaker in the other, and eat a ripe, fresh-from-the-garden tomato, juice dripping everywhere and you didn’t care at all. Oh my, so good. Most of the store-bought tomatoes now are factory grown, and have been bred to look more attractive, which happened to remove most of the flavor, a terrible loss. Buy tomatoes from the farmer’s market or the truck on the side of the road, and don’t worry if it’s oddly shaped or has some green in it – those are the best!

We rarely ate out when I was a kid. First, there was no need. You ate meals at home, in the evening, together at the table and talked about the day. This was normal and we did it every day. Second, it was expensive to take a family of nine out to eat, so when we did it was an amazing treat. I remember my first store-bought hamburger! There was a grocery store at the other side of town (a small town, it had sides but wasn’t big enough for ends or corners!!). I don’t remember the name of the store, but they had a grill and you could buy 10 hamburgers for $1.  I’d seen commercials on TV for McDonalds, who promoted the “All American Meal” as a hamburger, fries, and Coke, but we didn’t have a McDonalds, so this was an amazing treat the day my dad brought home a bag of burgers, one for each of us and I think he got the extra, as was fair.  My first fast food - oh so good!

Another place we went occasionally was in the neighboring town, Flat River Missouri. On some Sundays after church we would go to a place with a smorgasbord, essentially an all you can eat buffet, which would have been a bargain for our parents and a dream come true for us boys. All the food you could eat – wow! You could get almost anything – roast beef and mashed potatoes and gravy, fried chicken, fruits, salad, french fries, you name it. You left full.

Anyway, we ate well. There was always enough, but I somehow came away from childhood with a terrible food disorder: see it smell it want it disease (SSWD for short). If I could see it or smell it I had to have it. Once I got some, I had to eat all of it and if there was more I just had to have more – you know, just in case. This wasn’t a problem til I was in my early 30s and had my first desk job, which also involved shift work, and I learned I didn’t sleep well during the day after a mid-shift. I was too tired to get out and exercise and be active, and I ate round the clock to stay awake, and gained 30 pounds in a year. My SSWD was very active during that period!

Not only that, but the American diet had changed! Not only have we found out lately that the 4 Basic Food groups was not a very good balance for us, but this new invention came along: convenience and fast foods!  McDonald’s was followed by Burger Chef, Burger King, Dairy Queen, and more. Soon this thing called pizza got to be popular, and there are now nearly as many pizza places as burger joints. As all these fast food outlets were showing up, there were TV dinners – frozen meals you could pop in the OVEN and 45 minutes later you had a hot meal! Wow – innovation! Then the junk food explosion came with 5000 varieties of sweet treats of all kinds, shapes and flavors.

And the bad news? None of this crap has any significant nutritional value. It’s predominantly made of lab chemicals and preservatives. A guy put a McDonald’s hamburger in his pocket and found it 9 years later – looked exactly the same. This stuff should not be classified as food, because nothing will eat if but us (and our dogs because they love anything we love). Bugs won’t eat this stuff because they don’t know what it is. And that’s what I grew up on, thinking I was eating well. But back to my half a chicken!

I ate half a chicken because it was a normal sized chicken. Not one of the artificially grown and bred super-sized, antibiotic-fed chickens you get at home. A chicken breast I buy at Walmart today has more meat on it than this entire half a chicken I had, and that’s the point. A leg/thigh/breast/wing piece used to be a big serving, but now it’s not only still considered normal, but each piece is massive.  If I eat a wing/breast/thigh/leg combination at home (and I have) I’m just killing myself with quantity. 

Since I got to Saudi Arabia I’ve been eating freshly-made food, steamed or grilled or fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, and one meat serving a day, and doing very well on that. I do have a granola bar with fruit in the morning, but it’s natural ingredients, no sugar added. I have a balanced, main meal at lunch, and fruit, vegies and nuts for supper. I’m actually doing pretty well with this. It’s been easy to do – I don’t crave anything, and went past all the sweets and donut shops in the mall yesterday without a twinge of SSWD kicking in!

Sorry this is so long, and thanks if you made it all the way to the end. Good eating!