Operation Celebration

This is the wearisome corset spread out.  Now I know how   
Victorian women felt after a big meal!

I suppose that I should write something about my back operation August 5th,  since it has preoccupied me for the better part of two months.  For nearly three years, I have had a pinched nerve in my lower back that has caused quite a bit of pain in my hip joints and legs when I walked.  This summer I decided to bite the bullet and have an operation on my third and fourth lumbar vertebra. During to operation, the space in the vertebra around the nerve was enlarged, allowing the nerve to expand.  I had asked my doctor how long I would be out of commission, and how long it would be until I could drive.  He was a bit vague on this issue. 


Therefore, I was somewhat surprised to discover that I needed to wear a corset for six (groan!) weeks.

  I knew I wouldn't be able to bend or pick up heavy objects, but I also had to be very careful getting in and out of bed.  I was instructed by physical therapists as to how I should 'log roll' into and out of bed, but how to position myself so I could turn from one side and to the other and relax at night was another problem.  I  grab the edges of the bed and pull myself around until I am comfortable, but I don't think that is particularly good for my back. 



 An invaluable tool at this time has been the grab stick.  I managed to break the first one trying to get my shampoo bottle out of the bottom of the tub.  Now I have a new stick, and here are the many things I can do without bending:  pick up dirty socks, an empty cat dish, clumps of cat hair on the rug, clothes out of the dryer, tissues on the floor,  and nearly anything else that falls in the course of the day.

Our cousin with husband circa 2010

Our cousin, who came to stay with us twice in the month and a half of recuperation, was an invaluable help to both my husband and myself.  She drove both of us to doctors' appointments and on shopping trips.  She even saw to it that I had a pedicure.  She cooked and she vacuumed.  Thank you dear woman. 

I started driving three weeks after the operation, and can stop wearing my corset on the weekend as the six weeks convalescence is over.  Nevertheless, I think I'll continue to wear it until I see my doctor next week. It actually makes me stand up straighter, but I also look thicker around the middle.

 I am thankful for the help and thoughtfulness of friends.  Between our cousin's and our friends' cooking, I am now carrying around about five extra pounds.

Thirteen Year Cicadas

Early summer saw the invasion of the Thirteen Year Cicadas in and around Columbia. I am remembering them now, because they left their calling cards all around the town.  I didn't bother to take a picture of one then,   but on the right we have a poor unfortunate insect that expired in the rear windshield of the car. (Click to enlarge any picture.)

They sang in the afternoons in a community chorus, their song  rising and falling in one mighty wave of noise.  I noticed that the squirrels and raccoons were not bothering the bird feeder and realized that they were happily filling up on cicadas. Then one day the cicadas' song was gone; the afternoon air was eerily quiet. 

 

 They left their calling cards, however.  I began to notice dried leaves on broken twigs hanging among the luxuriant green of the trees. At first I thought it was the result of dry weather or maybe the twigs had been broken in one of our wind storms.  Later I read (online) that the female cicada splits the twig with a sharp appendage and there lays her eggs.  Later the twig may break.  This is called 'flagging.'

Here the many leaves can be seen on the lawn.
(Click to enlarge.)

 Soon the ground was littered  with these twigs and leaves. Every time the wind blows more twigs and leaves dot the lawn.  More 'flags' remain on the trees ready to fall. 
The cicada nymphs tunnel into the ground and feed on the sap of tree roots for another 13 years.

One lonely cicada shell still clings to the underside of our deck step.

Mother of Millions - Revisited

Click on photo to get a good view of the
dead and dying leaves, especially on the
lower part of the plant.

It's my sad duty to announce that my stupendous Mother of Millions plant (see January 2011 blog) has come under attack and appears ready to give up the ghost.  Some sort of mold (?) is creeping over its fleshy leaves and causing them to dry up, curl up and fall off. 
(Click on photos for up close examinations.)



Note the white mold, mildew, - or you
tell me what it is.



And then it gets uglier.

Never-the-less, take heart.  All is not lost.  I have salvaged three healthy looking little shoots that I intend to re-pot.  Maybe one or all three will grow into  humongous 'Floppers' - if they take after their mother.

Cats, Again (Meet Chiaco)





As I have mentioned before, last year actually, we have two cats.  My husband and I brought our two cats back with us from Egypt in 2001.  They both died of natural causes within a few years, and I enjoyed a cat free, fur free house for about 6 months.  Then my husband decided he had to have another cat...a Humane Society cat, and not only that, but a cat that nobody wanted.  (Code for the  ugliest cat at the adoption center.)  The cat he selected was an Angoria pastel calico that had been at the Humane Society for about 5 months. As an antidote for all that fluff, I chose a sleek, black, tuxedo (or clergy) cat.  Both cats were between six months and nine months old.  The black cat was named Inky, and the Angoria cat was named Chiaco.  I think I called her Chiaco, because her grayish, pinkish coat looked alittle bit like a Japanese kimona.

No, she's not ugly.  In fact she has a sweet,
handsome,  even regal face.

Right away, Chiaco attached herself to me, following me about the house, including the bathroom and hopping on my legs whenever I sit down. She is undetered when I dump her off my lap, or yell at her when she pushes the bathroom door open.  Both my husband and I blame her for any unwanted deposits we find in the corner. Her fluffy hair sheds everywhere, although my husband tries to mollify me by brushing her coat periodically.  She insists on sleeping at my feet all night.  She's as heavy as a sack of potatoes, and I have to  push her out of the way with my foot when I want to turn over.

Both our cats are house cats. I don't want them outside collecting ticks or fleas, bothering our birds or getting hit by a car.  Chiaco, not withstanding, stands ready to make a dash out the deck door, tumble down the steps and head for the treeline at the back of our property whenever possible.   Her tubby body bobs up and down like a little bear cub's.   Of course, I have to go  get her, because she's more likely to tolerate me picking her up than her benefactor, the man of the house.  Occasionally, she avoids me and sneaks back up to the deck - making a dash for safety when someone slides open the back door.

I have always felt that this is one cat I could do without.  Yet one evening recently, I had a change of heart.  It appears that downstairs in the family room,  Chiaco found a plastic grocery bag on the floor and stuck her head inside to investigate; she's an investigative cat.  When pulling back out of the bag, her foot must have caught the handle loop. Unable to pull her foot out of the loop, she began to run, but the bag, like a white ghost, followed her.  She came running up the stairs and into the livingroom -  the sound of her head knocking against chair legs and bookcase was terrible!  Before I could arrive on the scene, Chiaco came to a stop under a 'pull up' chair and my husband snatched the bag off her leg.  Chiaco remained under the chair seemingly in a state of shock.  Inky kept a sympathetic watch from the couch.  Chiaco was still under the chair when we went to bed, but  we wanted to give her a chance to recover.  In the middle of the night, I woke up and was concerned to find that she hadn't resumed her usual place at my feet.  I got up to see if she was still under the livingroom chair.  On the way to the livingroom, I was fearful of what I might find.  Was she injured?  Was she in pain? Was she still alive?  I confessed to myself that I was going to be pretty upset if she was actually hurt.  Once in the livingroom, I found that she wasn't under the chair.  She had moved to the couch and stared at me reproachfully.  Inky was still watching her near-by.  Relieved, I returned to bed.  In the morning, Chiaco seemed to be her normal self, and that night she returned to her usual place, sleeping at my feet. I now give her alittle more respect, and allow her to rest on my lap a few minutes before putting her gently to one side.

Monet in the Midwest

The Nelson Atkins Art Gallery in Kansas City has united three of Monet's waterlily canvases from the Mid-West.  One panel is from the St. Louis Art Museum, one from the Cleveland Art Museum, plus the one in the Nelson. The exhibit is in new Bloch Building - a new addition funded with an initial grant from H and R Bloch.


 (And why can't Wal-Mart do the same for our university museum in Columbia?  Sam Walton graduated from Hickman High in Columbia.)   

The University Art and Archaeology Museum where I am a docent arranged for a bus to go to Kansas City on Saturday, May 14th.  (Yes, I know, I'm a little late posting, but time slips by.)  It was a cold dreary day as many of the days have been this month in Missouri.  Mary Sue (my sister) went with me.  We met the bus at 7:00 AM at the Alumni Building on campus. We arrived in Kansas City by 10:30 and were met by the Associate Curator, Nicole Myers, who led us through the display.  She was young, but so interesting -  describing how Monet worked and reworked the water lily canvases in his studio.  Using modern X-ray technology and examining minute chips of paint under a microscope, experts are able to see how Monet painted over and over the water of the pond, plants and water lilies,  until the works now seem to shimmer, to be translucent and abstract. Here is a link:   www.nelson-atkins.org/art/Exhibitions/monet/index.cfm

This is the lily pond looking across to a Japanese
bridge.  Is it THE Japanese Bridge? 

Of course I had to tell the group that I had visited Giverny (about 1995).  I explained that it had been raining all week before we arrived as part of a Bristol University garden tour of France.  The roses looked a bit beaten up, and I was disappointed that the garden wasn't as orderly as Monet's paintings.  Non-the-less, when I looked at the photos I had taken of the bridge, the lily pond, etc., they were smashing. Sez me, of course.  I understand that Monet - his workers, that is - tided up his garden every morning before he came out to paint.  The pond at the time of my visit, looked to me alittle overgrown.  Surprisingly, Nicole had lived in Paris a year and a half and had never been to Giverny.

After spending some time looking at the Waterlilies, Mary Sue, Pam (another museum docent)  and I strolled up through the Bloch extension enjoying the  modern paintings and sculpture.  I particularly noticed a horse, 3/4 life-sized sculpted out of 'drift wood.' 

These two works of modern art were in the lobby of the Bloch Building.

  





At 1:00 we met a number of fellow Columbians at the Italian Renaissance court yard for lunch.  Most of us had salads, and they were large, delicious and gratifyingly satisfying.

After lunch we took in the Nelson-Atkins

permanent collections, including

I down loaded this from a postcard.

 Monet's Boulevard des Capucines.  Supposedly, one art critic called the painting nothing but flecks of paint, declaring that it only created only an impression, and the term Impressionism was born.  However, the stories of when Impressionism got its name are varied.

About 3:00, we were bushed!  We dragged ourselves back to the court yard restaurant  for refreshment.

Preparing tables in the foyer.

We crossed through the main lobby of the art museum to get to the restaurant, although it was roped off so that employees could prepare tables for a wedding reception.  The woman in charge scolded us, but we were too tired to look for another door.  Once in the restaurant we found very little to revive us.  They were also cleaning up, and decorating tables for the reception.  I was grateful for two cups of very good coffee.  We sat at an out-of- the-way table and rested, watching the reception efforts.  
The restaurant closed at 4:00, and by this time rested,  we visited the American Collection that included Thomas Hart Benton and George Caleb Bingham paintings on the second floor.

Finally around 5:00, we meet our group in the lobby of the Bloch Building - truly exhausted. Here is part of the truly exhausted Columbians.

Waiting for our bus, we had a few minutes to admire the stairway from the lobby of the Bloch Building (below), and watch the bride arrive at the museum.  There was a brisk, chilly wind, but the wedding party went around to the side of the museum to have their group pictures taken.  Who would have guessed when they planned a mid-May wedding that the day would be so dark and  disagreeable?

We arrived back in Columbia by 7:00 PM as planned,  dead tired, but that was all the more reason to sleep well that night.



A bit out of place, this is Pam on the left, Barb, our tour coordinator, and
Mary Sue at lunch.



Eating in Egypt #2

What are memorable meals?  Often they are meals eaten with family or with friends, and I have many such happy memories.  In Egypt certain meals were memorable because of where we were.  I remember eating mussels (called balah el baht or sea-dates in Arabic) at a restaurant called The Seagull  on the Mediterranean coast near Alexandria.  This restaurant was owned by a older German couple.  A few animals such a gazelles were in cages near the entrance.  A monkey was renown for strolling through the restaurant on a lease, amusing the guests, but mercifully he was not in attendance the day we were there.  I remember the eating sea-dates as we gazed over the sunlit Mediterranean, cooled by a slight breeze. I don't remember anything else about the meal. 

Here are 3 teachers from my school
with my husband at the end of the table.

Some meals were memorable because of who we were with.  I remember eating bratwurst and cherry pie at the Christmas Bazaar held in the Cairo American College (prep school K-12) compound in Maadi, a suburb of Cairo, formerly the British colonial enclave.  My husband and I happened upon teachers from my own prep school (American International School) in Heliopolis. 

My husband with our school  art teacher.

 Another happy moment was when my husband and I visited the terrace of the Old Cataract Hotel in Aswan. Aswan is the most southern city of Egypt, the location of the first cataract and the Great Aswan Dam.  Most Nile cruise ships now run between Luxor and Aswan.  The British colonial era Old Cataract Hotel, featured in Agatha Christy's Death on the Nile, had a very popular terrace where one could drink tea (in my case a latte) and eat pastries while looking over the river scene. Once again we stumbled on some other teachers we knew and were all so happy to see each other and exchange stories of our adventures, we made quite a ruckus. The more mannerly British patrons stared at us with some annoyance or maybe just surprise. 

This picture of my husband shows a better view of the fuloukas (sailboats) on the Nile seen from Old Cataract Terrace.  Sadly, last I heard, the terrace is now restricted to OCH residents only.  Sunset was the most popular time to be on the terrace, and then it could be a bit crowded.

The reason it is called the OLD Cataract Hotel (as opposed to calling it the Cataract a la Death on the Nile is because a tall, modern eyesore called the New Cataract Hotel has been built near the old one.

One of the high points of my life (not to be compared to the birth of my two sons) was eating a box breakfast in the Valley of the Queens.  On a trip to Luxor with another group of teachers (living and teaching in Egypt for ten years, I came to know many groups of teachers), four of us took an early morning cab (about 6:00) to the Valley of the Queens to buy tickets to the tomb of Nefertari (Ramses II's favorite wife).  This tomb had recently been restored at great expense with money raised by Western archaeologists mainly for their own research.  However, the Egyptian government couldn't pass up this opportunity to make some money, so they struck an agreement with the archaeologists to let only 100 visitors a day see the tomb.  Tourists would visit the tomb in small groups and stay only 12 minutes at a time, because of the deteriorating effects of human breath on the wall paintings.

The 100 LE Egyptian pound at that time
was about $30 American dollars.

We arrived early to purchase our tickets before they were all sold out.  The tickets to this tomb were $30.00 each, in addition to the $12 or so we paid for the other tombs we visited in the Valley of the Queens.

The goddess Isis leads Nefertari
on her journey through the Underworld.

After we purchased our tickets, we sat on an out-cropping of rock and opened up the breakfast boxes prepared for us by the Sheraton Hotel in Luxor.  It wasn't a feast:  a chocolate-filled croissant, a boiled egg and Laughing Cow wedges of cream cheese are all I can remember of this repast, but the desert morning air was cool, the sky was blue, the desert moonscape bright. My cup seemed to run over with feelings of peace and well-being.  I knew I'd remember this moment for the rest of my life.

It wasn't long before a 'guard' in a galabea came and told us we weren't supposed to be eating there.  We were mostly finished so we discarded our boxes in the trash can, and took our turn in the tomb.  The tomb was cool.  Most tombs are.  After only 8 minutes the guards began to shoo us out.  I was rather annoyed.  We'd been promised 10-12 minutes. I suppose it takes two or so minutes to get one group out and another group in.

Epilogue:  Recently, I talked to a friend who had seen Nefetari's tomb since I returned to the States.  She said her tour of Nefetari's tomb was not at all restricted, either by time or numbers.

Eating in Egypt #1

Eating is one of the greatest pleasures of life.  At least it is for me.  Recent events continue to spark memories of Egypt including memories of food and places where we ate the food.

Double click to see the full effect of
the embroidery

One meal I'll never forget was served to my husband and me as part of a bus trip for ex-pats in the Sinai Desert at a place called Ain Musa (Moses' Spring).  Many springs in the Sinai were called Ain Musa.  If a tribe lived near a spring, I guess that tribe like to think that it was the spring Moses was said to have created by striking a rock.  The Bedouin tribe near this spring was our host.  They were dressed in their best...at least the women were:  long black dresses and scarves lavishly embroidered in varieties of red.  Most of the men wore bright white galabeas or robes. 

I took a close up photo of the needle work on my Bedouin
dress ( bought in Al-Arish) as an example of how beautifully embroidered these dresses are.  . 

Fava beans, called foul in Egypt, served with a generous amount of olive oil and lemon juice, are a favorite breakfast.  These men were heating up their foul over an outdoor fire.

We were invited into their homes.  You can see how proud this father is of his daughters.  Once on a Sinai trip with the Egypt Exploration Society, a woman remarked to me that our Bedouin Land Rover driver was quite good looking. I thought to myself that I'd never seen a Bedouin who wasn't good looking.

This Bedouin woman is kneading flat bread that looks like  pizza dough.  It is baked in a cavity in the ground, lined with stones.  I can't remember how the stones were heated to bake the bread.  They may have been set over hot charcoal at the bottom of the hole.  Our baker is working in an outdoor lean-to made of corn or sugar cane stalks.  Her children (also dressed for company) are eating warm bread. The spots of light in this photo may have been caused by sunbeams coming through the cracks in the wall or roof.




For our afternoon meal our hosts served a dish called 'fet ta.' This is not cheese, as what we call 'feta' is called 'white cheese' or 'gibna ba dah' in Arabic.  Fetta in Egypt is prepared with white flat bread ( shami) cut into little bite-sized pieces, then mixed with rice.  A greasy, but savory broth made from beef neck bones and neck bone meat is poured over the bread pieces.  The meat from neck bones is considered premium beef.  The visitors gathered under a large white tent with the flaps raised.  We were seated on rugs and served on metal plates.  The fetta was warm and satisfying. However, swarms of flies thought it was warm and satisfying, too.  It was the job of one man to fan the flies away as we were given our food.  Of course as we ate, we had to continue to discourage the flies that seemed to feel we should share our meal with them.  At the time of this tour, I had lived in Egypt long enough to be undeterred by thoughts of germs - even though the flies shocked even me.  I noticed that the other ex-pats were good-naturedly waving the flies away, too.  Maybe like me, they had lived in Egypt awhile.  Maybe it was because the food was good, and in the middle of the desert it was eat or go hungry!

Click on any picture for a better view.

If you want the recipe for fetta, which you probably don't, just ask me and I'll email it to you.