Escaping the Heat

The weather station near my house was reporting 118F at 2pm today. It’s as dry as a damned desert out there with about 5% humidity. The dew point is 32F which means, duh, no dew, because even at 9pm last night it was still 98F. To add even more misery, I think that a shamal is trying to start up this afternoon. That could mean several days of strong, hot winds from the north bringing dust down from Iran. All this and it’s only mid-July.

I usually don’t post about my travel in advance but I am heading out in about 10 days and I am really looking forward to this particular break. I’ve been a bit frustrated at work and taking some time off is often a good solution to that sort of attitude problem.

I regret leaving the pups for so long (I’ll be gone for a month) but this trip will be my repat, an annual trip OOK that I am legally required to make. I am pre-imbursed by Aramco according to a somewhat arcane formula for repat expenses.

I will be out for nearly all of Ramadan (and thus will not participate in the dubious pleasures of the sin room) and the subsequent eid (a thinly veiled excuse for Saudis to expand their overindulgence of eating and buying into daylight hours). Not that I’ll particularly miss either of those events. But last year I was here during Ramadan and got the most amazing amount of work done. No Saudis after noon, lots of expats gone as well, no meetings. I started and completed some big projects during that time. This year, I’ll be one of those expats escaping the heat.

A couple of the places I’ll be traveling to will be much cooler than here but that isn’t the reason I chose those places. It’s simply important to get out of here for a while.

A friend and I went to Bahrain on Friday. It was the most normal day you could imagine: walking around a mall ogling hideous shoes and USD 4,500 purses (that were not too hideous), having lunch, then having a couple of glasses of wine in a nearby hotel. When I called her that morning to remind her that the driver was on his way, she said, do I need my abaya? (She’s new here.) And I said, hell no! And that’s another reason to look forward to trips out. I can act and talk and dress like a fully grown, actual human being when out in public.

My Favorite Chair

I bought some fabulous dog beds from Orvis to replace the tired, musty, peed-on beds that I've been carefully tending for several years. I wash the covers every couple of weeks. I set the internal cushions on my porch to bake in the sun (I have an irrational hope that the extreme heat will kill various nasty things; at a minimum it helps them smell fresher). Still, dog beds don't last forever, thus the need for some spiffy new ones.

However, I can't get rid of the old beds just yet. Like any grumpy old man set in his ways, Harry prefers his lumpy, smelly bed to the new ones!

Ahh! My favorite chair!

I was pulling the second new bed out of its box when I turned to find Harry perched on the OLD bed with a perfectly good new one untouched beside him.

Harry will use the new beds sometimes--if he has no other choice. This time it was Mimi who chose the old bed first.

You might wonder why I get such large beds. Well, they are sized to fit Azza but the terriers do like plenty of leg room.

Kinky was there first and Azza slunk in with her toy after he was asleep.

Here's a gratuitous pic of my boneless non-terrier. She assumes this position fairly often and will fall asleep like this. Weird.

Pretzel dog.

Deductive Reasoning

I like pizza. But good pizza is hard to find here. So I make do with frozen, which on the scale of pizza-ness is already hovering down around 3 or 4 out of 10. And Saudi-made frozen pizzas pretty much fall off the scale. But sometimes one of the grocery stores will get frozen pizzas from some European company or other and those aren't too bad (anyway, you can make them better by slathering them with bacon).

Because I live alone and don't care what people think and because I love my dogs very much, I like to share things with them. This sharing includes pizza crust which is for me the least interesting part of pizza. I carefully pile the crusts up to one side of my plate and divide them equally between the dogs after I finish eating. All three of them love this little treat.

The other night I was in a hurry and had to eat early and quickly so I tossed some frozen veggie egg rolls in the oven. As I was eating them, I noticed Mimi staring at me with laser eyes. I kept looking back over at her and thinking, what is up with that crazy dog? She was perched up on a stool to better keep an eye on me, and wasn't moving a muscle, not even blinking.

Then it hit me. She is far more observant than I thought. Where do pizza crusts come from? The oven, of course. Therefore any food that comes out of the oven has pizza-crust-producing potential and that means treats for alert pups, Q.E.D.

I love my terriers.

On A Roll

Since my first class seat on the train to hell is already reserved, I had no problems laughing my butt off when a friend/co-worker came and showed me two pictures: a pile of 20-foot pieces of lumber stacked in her hallway, jutting out past the stairwell; and her husband laying on a bed in the ER with a cast on his leg from toes to knee. She said she asked and asked him to move the wood but he kept finding excuses not to. So of course Thursday night he tripped over the wood after turning off all the lights and turning to head upstairs, breaking his lower leg/ankle in TWO places. She and I both laughed and laughed, and I had to look at the pictures a couple more times.

Ahh, schadenfreude.

Funnies

These came through my email recently. They are both equally offensive and hilarious.

The Beasts

The only point of this post is to share some new pictures of the beasts.

126F. I don't know how they stand it.

I took this photo just this morning. Azza gets along very well with the terriers. She is still fascinated by Harry since he doesn't want her to get too close.

Azza could kill Kinky with one snap of her jaws but she doesn't. Notice that his claws aren't even extended. It's very dramatic and showy but not much actual contact is made.

Azza will drag Kinky along by his head. The cat shrieks and yowls and flops around but comes right back for more.

Shopping Adventures

There's a new single woman named LW who just joined Aramco's legal finance group. Through mutual connections, I was asked to get in touch with her and show her around a bit. She and I could not be more different in personality, taste, opinions, etc. (I strongly suspect she votes Republican and she has TWO TVs in her 740 sq foot hovel because she leaves them on all the time for background noise; I probably turn my TV on two or three times a month at most) but when you live in the little bubble that is the expat community in Dhahran, you don't have the luxury of not hanging out with someone simply because they are different than you. So we've been out shopping a couple of times and I had her over to the house to meet the beasts for about half an hour.

Yesterday we went into the Dhahran Mall in Khobar with the express purpose of visiting the Pottery Barn store which opened a couple of weekends ago. Sadly, a store that I would never have shopped in at home has become a local tourist attraction for us expats. On our way through the mall, LW nabbed a pair of white flats to wear to work. It was the work of perhaps 10 minutes--she spotted them, dived into the store, tried on two pairs, asked for a less scuffed pair in her size, and paid the guy, all the while negotiating his lack of English. I didn't even know it was possible to buy shoes this quickly. I am not a true size and have to try on multiple pairs in each brand to find the fit.

We also stopped in at Saco World (sort of pale imitation of Home Depot) where we grabbed some 110V multi-plug extension cords (110V appliances are no longer available IK but all Aramco housing is still 110V), I got some paint for my contact training board (bright blue and brighter yellow) and some dog toys, and LW found a package of "real" sponges.

Then it was off to the glorious, glittery home furnishings displays of Pottery Barn. I was on a particular mission to find two new pillows for my couch. Surprisingly, we both gravitated to some lovely muted blue ones with a floral pattern. Pillows purchased, mission accomplished.

Then because it was about 15 minutes to prayer time (LW didn't believe me at first when I told her that we'd be locked out of the stores but locked in the mall during prayer), we skipped over to Chili's restaurant to get nutritionally disastrous but delicious burgers. Chili's is another business that I would never patronize by choice at home but it's about the only place to get a decent burger here. We had a fun time chatting about life experiences and our respective plans for the future.

All in all, it was a very successful day of shopping, one of the best I've had here so far.

I followed that up with an early morning trip to the commissary this morning (it's Friday so my weekend). No Saudis (they never get up that early on Friday morning), just a few bleary eyed expats like me wandering around. I didn't find any baking soda--it is a very irregular product here. But I managed to score some coarse sea salt for my grinder. I've been looking in numerous grocery stores for over two months for coarse salt. I of course purchased two large containers of it (per the usual hoarding).

And I found this over in the veggie section:

Yes, that is a container of locally grown, organic red bell peppers. Three of them for about USD 5. The com also had organic potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplants, and some fruits from the same company. I am not sure I can express what an amazing and dramatic change this represents. First, you have to have consumer demand, then you have to have a Saudi farmer enterprising enough to see the potential and then make the effort to grow these items in some more or less environmentally friendly fashion.

Some other interesting shopping-related changes have been happening here in the Kingdom. Women have not been allowed to work in shops for quite some decades (because it leads to mixing of the sexes, which the mutawahs fear more than anything else). That meant that there were only male clerks in the lingerie shops. Imagine having to buy your bras and underwear from some smarmy, smirking Indian or Saudi clerk. It's bad enough that you can't try anything on (no Saudi clothing shops have dressing rooms) but you couldn't even be measured or fitted.

Enough women from sufficiently powerful families complained (for years) such that at the end of last year, the King decreed that all lingerie shops had to employ only women clerks by June 1 of this year. The sounds of wailing and rending of garments and gnashing of teeth from the conservative religious factions lasted for weeks. But the King didn't budge and it actually became a reality: you can walk past those shops and see women clerks in them. To be sure, these women clerks are veiled head to toe in abaya and niqab, but it is a giant leap for women's rights in this repressive country.