Jenyfer Matthews

Last night was the Halloween fair at the children’s school, the last big costume event for the season I hope! It had been unusually cloudy all day and even sprinkled a few times. The sky looked very ominous by late afternoon and I was sure we were all going to be drenched at the fair.

(Click image to enlarge)

In fact it didn’t rain – or if it did, it never reached the ground – and we had a good time at the fair. The children played games and collected their “spooky prize” at the end. My daughter got a jumping rubber bat, but was upset she didn’t get trick chewing gum like her brother. My son kindly traded with her. He got the better end of the deal though since the bat is still jumping but the trick gum has already broken.

When my daughter brought it to me for repair I got a good look at the label:

Not sure which is worse, the outside of the package or the inner warning label:



Don’t joke the sickman indeed. The translator for this was the sick one. I love the image of the tiny lips along with “no entrance”. I am fairly surprised the party organizers didn’t notice the label before distributing it to small children however. The children haven’t caught on but not all parents have a sick sense of humor like mine!

The gum is proving difficult to repair so I may just quietly dispose of it…

From Engrish.com – I often take pictures of amusing signs when I’m traveling – but I rarely see them as funny as this! (Click to enlarge)

One of the funniest signs I’ve seen recently was in the bathroom of a tour bus. On the back of the door there was a sign advising “No Crunching On Toilet”. I interpreted that to mean “No Crouching”, which is what you would do on a non-Western toilet since it is essentially a hole in the ground (What do you call a non-Western toilet? An Eastern toilet?) I regret not having taken a picture of that sign now, but you know – it just didn’t occur to me to bring my camera into the bathroom with me. And just think what the other passengers would have thought if I’d come out, retrieved my camera, and gone back in again!

Happened to have my camera handy when this lady happened by. You should have seen me trying to get up close enough behind her to get a good shot without alerting her!

You can’t see it in the picture but the English writing under the Arabic on the bag she’s carrying says “Step into Fashion”.

Pictures like these are why I should always carry my camera with me!

That’s my girl – dressed as a Tudor boy. The many hours I put into making the hat and robe are almost worth it. Doesn’t she look great?

But what are the odds that the day I send my child to school wearing velvet it rains in Cairo!? Fortunately it was a short, isolated shower but still!

I admit I kind of lost it yesterday afternoon. I had just spent an hour or so fussing with getting the feather on the hat just right when my daughter comes home and announces that I need to make cookies or sandwiches for her to bring in to share with her class for their Tudor banquet. Um, no – I think not! The teachers sent home a note a week ago about the big day but never mentioned that we would need to contribute food. Daughter then had a fit because they told the class that if they didn’t contribute that they would be last in line to choose food as well.

Ok, I get the reason the teacher told the class that, to encourage them all to participate, but come on – they could have given us a bit of notice. A few extra words on the note that came home last week would have sufficed. I felt like sending in a stale loaf of coarse bread and a bit of dried meat. Maybe something from this menu:

FIRST COURSE
Miniature pastries filled either with cod liver or beef marrow
Eels in a thick spicy puree
Loach in a cold green sauce flavored with spices and sage
Saltwater fish

SECOND COURSE
Capon pasties and crisps
Bream and eel pasties
Blang Mange

THIRD COURSE
Frumenty
Venison
Lampreys with hot sauce
Roast bream and darioles
Sturgeon

I think the cod liver stuffed pastries might have expressed my displeasure quite well. Instead her father went out and bought her some chocolate cookies.

I’m not out of the woods with costumes yet since the children have their Halloween fair at the end of the week but I can guarantee you that I will be giving that minimal effort! Especially since the little ingrate didn’t even want to wear the Tudor hat once she got to school!

When we left the US ten years ago and moved to the Middle East, one of the first Arabic phrases I learned to say was “post office” because I spent a fair amount of time going there in taxis to pick up packages. Those experiences were fairly stressful – imagine walking into a hot, loud, crowded bureaucratic office where you don’t know the language and no one stands in line. Though it was a great training ground for learning to be pushy and standing my ground, in the years since I’ve done what I could to avoid going to the post office. I would rather pay inflated courier service prices than try to mail a package regular mail!

Cairo is the first place I’ve lived abroad where they do actually have home mail delivery – though I’ve never figured out exactly what their system is. I’ve had large packages delivered to my doorstep with the carrier only too happy to collect the import duty (and tip!) – sometimes coming back multiple times in one day if I’m not home the first time they try to make delivery. Other times they simply leave a package notice in my box for something small like an envelope containing a CD of photos as they did this week.

I’ve been to the post office here once before – to pick up a different CD of photos. Not sure why they make such a fuss about discs, but they do. The post office is only about a twenty minute walk away, but I might as well have been in a different city, the atmosphere of the street changes so dramatically as you cross over an invisible barrier from expat-land to local Cairo. I was the *only* Westerner on the street and though no one around me made any special fuss, I felt fairly conspicuous in a way that I don’t often feel this close to my neighborhood.

The post office set-up has changed a little since I was last there but I waved my pink notice and found the window where I needed to be – manned by the same woman as was there the last time I visited, three years ago. I showed her my notice and she asked me who I was since my husband’s name was on the notice. She then asked to see my passport. Huh? Once she asked me, I vaguely remembered that nearly every time I have been to the post office I am asked to produce my passport which always strikes me as ridiculous since I didn’t even need my passport to get into the US Embassy when I went to meet my friend for dinner earlier in the week.

Needless to say, I didn’t have my passport handy. She asked for another ID. I gave her an old driver’s license I still have from my time in the United Arab Emirates. What? It’s not yet expired and better yet, has some Arabic writing on it. Funnier still, she accepted it immediately. (Note: That is the real reason I never remember to bring my passport – because I can get away with giving them my gym membership card and still get what I came for)

The duty on the CD came to 7 Egyptian pounds, 85 piastres. Three years ago when I went to claim the CD, the duty was 7 pounds and when I gave her a 10 pound note and she claimed she had no change. Right. Lack of change is a national epidemic apparently. This time the duty was slightly higher, but one thing you have to know about Egyptian money is that though the amount for a transaction could be any amount, usually the cashier will either round up or down to the nearest .25 piastre. One Egyptian pound is only worth about US$0.18 so they don’t produce small coinage anymore, the only current notes / coins being quarter and half a pound increments.

I thought I would be clever this time around so I gave her seven pounds and seventy-five piastres in notes and I dug what I thought was an old 10-piastre coin out of my purse. My triumph was short-lived though because it turns out it wasn’t an Egyptian coin afterall! She wasn’t the sort to round down so I ended up giving her eight pounds. No small coins means no change this time either!

I did at least get the package. And an even greater appreciation of the overall efficiency of the US postal system

So I made the hat yesterday. It wasn’t really so difficult, though when the directions say “don’t iron velvet” it’s for a reason and you should just take it on faith! Many thanks to an old friend who once gave me a few yards of forest green velvet and said “you might need to make a costume one day.” How did she know? Then again, she was English

The hat pretty much looks like this. The only thing left is to track down a large plume. I’m going to the mall today to see if I can find something. Otherwise I may have to go to the zoo and mug an ostrich.

Ironically, I’m pretty sure I hat in a very similar style when I was about 20 years old, only it was black. I have no idea what might have become of that hat now, but it’s one of those times when you realize the advantage to not moving around so much and just saving old stuff for a dress-up trunk.

Since I’ve gone this far, I’m going to see about taking the remaining yardage into some sort of flowing robe / vest. It all reminds me a bit of Scarlett O’Hara making those old velvet curtains into a dress. This scrap of velvet has served as a Christmas tree skirt up til now!

Even though I let myself off the hook by not hosting a big “friend” party for my son’s 7th birthday, I still spent a lot of time running around on Saturday and Sunday preparing for his big day. As a compromise for not having a party, I sent cupcakes to his class which meant I spent much of Saturday afternoon baking them and then got up early on Sunday to frost them. Sunday there was more baking to be done.

Every year the little man asks me for a cake “with fruit on top.” One year I did a white cake with whipped cream and slices of kiwi and pomegranate seeds on top which was both lovely and tasty but he didn’t care for it. Turns out he doesn’t like whipped cream (little freak!) Last year I did a pineapple upside down cake – again lovely and tasty but he didn’t even try it! This year I decided to give him what he didn’t know he wanted: a pumpkin “donut” cake with cream cheese frosting. It was a big hit with everyone, and he was over the moon with his presents.

If I thought that this week was going to be calmer, I should have known better. It isn’t enough that in addition to Halloween this month, the school scheduled Victorian dress-up day last week – next week my daughter is doing Tudor dress-up day. I really should have seen this one coming. She has decided to be a boy rather than a girl, which I am totally in favor of because I have many of the basics already: she can wear a long sleeved white shirt with her baggy black soccer shorts (which I’ll gather with elastic bands at the bottom to make them puffy), and she can wear her long white soccer socks for tights. But it all comes down to the vest and the hat again. The cop-out in me who is tired of designing costumes is sort of thinking she can wear the vest I made last week and I’ll stick a long feather in the corduroy “Victorian” hat. But the overachiever in me found a pattern for an authentic Tudor style hat and I happen to have some green velvet in my fabric stash from which I could probably make both a hat AND a drapey vest / robe. I still don’t have a feather, but who would care if she were wearing velvet?

Tuck a pillow in her shirt and add a turkey leg as a prop and she could be Henry VIII for Halloween

It’s hot and dusty and miserable here at the moment and I have no water yet again so what else have I got to do but spend all my time making a hat, right?

Think you know how to jump rope? Really? Then take a look at this :

A truly spectacular performance!

I know it’s only hair and that it will grow back quickly enough – this time next month it will likely be fine – but wouldn’t it just figure that the haircut I would most like to forget my son ever sported would be the one he would get just before a series of photo events occur: his 7th birthday, school calendar photos, and soccer team pictures? It’ll probably show up in the school yearbook as well!

He was totally adorable dressed as a Victorian schoolboy yesterday, but a key costume detail was a floppy flat hat!

It’s an unfortunate fact that I’ve gotten so used to being patronized for being a stay at home mother (SAHM) that now when I meet anyone new and they ask me what I do, I tell them but immediately feel defensive. What is it about a woman deciding to stay home and raise her own children that weirds people out so much? Do they feel somehow that my decision not to work outside the home is an unspoken indictment of their own decisions to go out and have a job? Why else would they care so much about what I do with my time? You wouldn’t believe some of the passive aggressive condescending crap I’ve heard over the years. Now that the kids are in school much of the day, people seem to think I’m spending all my time lunching with the ladies and being groomed at the spa. Because isn’t that what all SAHMs do all day long??

Just because my children are in school all day doesn’t automatically mean I need to go back to work. I’ve been working a few days here and there in addition to everything else I do all day every day and let me tell you – I don’t know how working moms do it. And when the children get older they are going to require more of my attention, not less. Teenagers alone in the house several hours a day? I was a teenager once myself – sounds like a very bad idea to me!

Last week I was at a farewell party for some friends and was introduced to a woman there. She asked me what I did and I immediately felt my defenses rise. She surprised me however by saying how refreshing she found it to find women in the younger generation who were making the decision to stay home with their children while they were young. I was nearly speechless with shock, so rare is it to meet anyone who understands and appreciates what I do all day long. I only wish there were more people out there like her.