Jenyfer Matthews

I’ve been making a bit of a spectacle of myself around the neighborhood recently because I have had it up to here with nearly being run down in the street every time I step outside these days. Since I’ve lived in the same neighborhood for the last four years and the driving / traffic hasn’t really changed much, I can only surmise that the difference is me.

I really need a change of scene.

Since the children have tennis lessons five days a week, I spend a lot of time walking them back and forth to our club. It’s not really that far, and most of the time it isn’t that big a deal. But there is one large, often problematic intersection that we need to cross in order to get to the club.

Picture it: first there is a busy traffic circle with six spokes coming in and out of it. Traffic in Egypt flows counterclockwise, as it would in the US, and were I to walk around that way, I would end up on the closer side to get to our club. However, one of the spokes in that direction is a particularly busy two-way street and the entrance off the circle is a bit blind for the cars so all in all it is worth the extra time and distance for me to play it safe and go around the other way.

Another spoke out of the traffic circle crosses over a railroad track and becomes a two-way boulevard which is immediately crossed by a large one-way street that runs parallel to the railroad track – this is of course the spoke I need to follow. Most of the time walking around the traffic circle clockwise isn’t a big deal, in spite of the one-way boulevard that feeds two lanes of traffic into the circle which I have to cross before I get to the railroad. The trains run infrequently and the parallel street to the railroad is often blocked by the traffic coming from the perpendicular street in to and out of the circle so crossing there isn’t always so bad either, even at rush hour.

(Traffic signals? Police directing traffic? Pshaw! It’s more of an ebb and flow. There are actually a few zebra crossings painted on the road but I’m sure that drivers are perplexed as to the purpose of such patterns.)

The problem lately has been in crossing the boulevard on the other side of the railroad track. There is an island in the middle of the lanes at the top of the street and I cross there so I only have to attempt half the street at a time. There is also a small snack kiosk on this island as well as a florist and people will pull up and park to get what they want – blocking traffic. The people coming along the street then become frustrated by the large speed bump and also the parked cars and will dart in and around, often at high speeds. And did I mention the side street that feeds in just there at a diagonal? That street is after the speed bump so most of the time cars coming from that direction will just merge as quickly as possible so as to get in front of the cars delayed by all the other obstacles. (You really do have to have eyes in the back of you head around here.)

It’s bad enough when I’m alone and some schmuck comes racing around a corner or around another car and misses me by inches, but it really pisses me off when my kids are with me. It scares them and me too. Most of the year I just mutter obscenities under my breath and keep going.

(My children are always so amazed when we are in another country and people actually yield to pedestrians. How sad is it that that makes such an impression on such young children?)

Lately I’ve been a bit more dramatic. I’ve only let a few colorful phrases fly, but I have been stopping in the middle of the street and ushering cars past with an exaggerated double arm wave and a bow. Occasionally I take a swing at them with a bag as they pass and have seriously contemplated kicking out a few headlights. I’ve yelled in a few open windows too. It hasn’t done much to change anyone’s behavior but it makes me feel a little better and I’m sure it amuses the traffic police who are loitering in the intersections smoking.

Yesterday evening as I was crossing with my daughter, a car came over the railroad at a high speed for a neighborhood street and then accelerated in spite of the fact that we were in the middle of the street and directly in his path. I had my hands full of stuff so wasn’t able to make the gesture I wanted, but I did yell. As we cleared the street and the driver passed me, he said “What?” Stop the car, buddy, and I’ll be happy to tell you what.

Need I say that I am counting down the days until my vacation??

This particular baby quilt was probably the one that took me the longest start to finish, and without someone telling me they wanted to buy it, it probably wouldn’t be finished now. Not too bad, is it?

It’s still not really my favorite color combination, but as Anny pointed out in the comments on a previous post it is wonderfully busy. If this doesn’t provide a child with visual stimulation, nothing will!

It took me a while to decide on how to quilt the alternating blocks of print fabric, but in the end stars seemed to be the obvious choice given the itty-bitty stars on the red border fabric (also the backing fabric)

I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have finally come to the end of my “must-do-before-vacation” list. I have more of the Noah’s Ark fabric set aside for another baby quilt but that one is waiting until after I get back.

Wednesday is the last day of school, then we’ll have a little over a week to hang around and relax before we pack up and start our fun-filled vacation. I’m taking my new netbook with me this year – it will give me a good excuse to sit in the cafe near my dad’s house and have a glass of wine while I take advantage of their wi-fi (you did notice which of those two I listed first, didn’t you?)

I am pleased to announce that SEPARATION ANXIETY is now available at Smashwords.com in a variety of digital formats, including Kindle. You can even sample 20% in the format of your choice for free before you buy.

My primary reason for taking matters into my own hands and publishing SEPARATION ANXIETY independently boils down to pricing. The publishing world is in a state of transition in the moment. It’s a huge enterprise with a lot of built up inertia going in one direction, that being a very traditional model in which the publishers control the market in terms of what gets published, when, and for how much. E-publishing is a leak in the dam that is gaining momentum and big publishers are scrambling to keep up and make as much profit as they can in the process.

I’ve seen my own titles climb in price from $5 to $10 and now to as much as $13 at some places – and that’s just for the digital copy. If you want a paperback of Here to Stay, be prepared to pay as much as $15. I know that smaller presses can’t compete on prices with bigger publishers and ebooks never go out of print but who is going to pay more than $5 for an ebook unless it’s from their favorite big-name author?

By making SEPARATION ANXIETY available at Smashwords.com, I’ve been able to decide what I think is a fair price on my own terms. It’s only been up since Tuesday, but once it passes the various quality control tests it will be eligible for distribution through Amazon Kindle, Apple, Sony, and other bigger outlets. Sure, I’ll be responsible for the bulk of the book’s promotion but what else is new?

All in all, it’s been an incredibly exciting and liberating process.

I am also investigating options for making SEPARATION ANXIETY available in print for those who prefer paperbacks – more details on that coming soon.

SEPARATION ANXIETY

Sometimes running away is the first step toward finding yourself.

Aurora has spent her entire married life transforming herself from a regular, middle class girl into the perfect society wife. Life seems perfect until she is unceremoniously dumped by her philandering cliche’ of a husband just before Christmas – and their tenth wedding anniversary.

Devastated and unable to face the social ostracism or the holiday parties, Aurora and her best friend Kat plan a trip to Amsterdam for a weekend…then decide to keep going. Aurora attempts to drown her sorrows with wine in Amsterdam and Frankfurt, finds her anger in Athens and Cairo, and reclaims her sexuality in Dubai. By the time she and Kat reach Bangkok at the New Year, Aurora is ready and eager to move on with her life.

Planned as a way to escape her pain, Aurora’s travels instead become a journey to a new sense of self and a whole new world – post-divorce.

Read an EXCERPT

BUY THIS BOOK at Smashwords.com

A few weeks ago, at the end of May, I took advantage of a free annual physical that my husband’s employer was offering. I assume it was a way for the insurance company to gather data on the pool of participants so they could set the rates for next year, but whatever. Free check-up!

I did as much as I could that one day – blood work, chest x-rays, ECG, abdominal ultrasound, and an eye exam. I skipped the gynecological exam since I’d had one fairly recently, and was given a referral to another clinic for a bone density check and a mammogram. A week later I came down with a nasty virus and I was spending plenty of time seeing doctors, but I put the mammogram and bone density check out of my mind.

Until this week. I was planning to do the bone density check, which I assumed would be some sort of x-ray, and thought I’d skip the mammogram. I’ve never had one but I can say that every account I’ve ever had from anyone who has was completely off-putting. I tried to let myself off the hook by saying that breast cancer doesn’t run in my family and that my odds were also lower because I breastfed both of my children. In the end I guilted myself into going by saying that there might come a day when I wished I’d been more proactive.

I wouldn’t have procrastinated my appointment for so long if I had known it was going to be so amusing.

The bone density exam was a little more involved than I expected, but still just an elaborate xray. The table was so comfortable I could have taken a nap. Then came the mammogram.

I stepped into the next room with my female technician who instructed me to take off my top while she fiddled with putting x-ray films in the machine. Then came the funny bit: positioning my breast between the sheets of plastic.

I am a thin person, and not particularly well-endowed. Not quite flat-chested, but age and gravity have taken their toll. Picture this technician with her head scarf trying to hold my tiny breast in place with her hand as she attempts to squash it between two sheets of plastic for the x-ray. She kept getting her hand caught in the the process, then every time she opened the plates to free herself, my breast would slip out of position. I offered to help out but she wouldn’t let me (like I couldn’t see the markings on the plastic plate?)

I wish I’d had my watch on to keep track of how long it took her to get the necessary films, and knew how long it would take to do the same exam on a “perfect” subject. While she was adjusting my position, she asked me if I had children – I could hear the doubt in her voice. I told her yes, and that I had breastfed both of them and that the children were both HUGE. That got a laugh out of her.

The smashing part wasn’t bad – I think she took pity on my tiny orbs because she asked me if I was okay and in fact there was very little pressure at all.

After we finally got the films taken, I had the ultrasound done. These rooms all had at least two doors which could be locked and the doctors and technicians seemed to be pretty careful about how the exited so as to preserve some modesty for the patient. I appreciated that. After the ultrasound, the doctor handed me some tissue to wipe up the gel they used during the procedure and then opened the door to the hall to exit while I was lying there topless. Thanks a lot!

I was just preparing to leave when the first technician came to get me because the film of my left breast wasn’t good and we had to try again. More groping. Maybe I’ll bring some double stick tape with me next time!

A good friend happened to have the appointment just after mine. I never saw her but we were texting each other during little breaks in the procedures. She wrote to me to tell me that the mammogram technician was commenting to her that only small breasted women were coming in that day! (I always knew they talked about patients behind their backs!) My friend isn’t exactly small chested and she said as much. The technician replied that she had patients whose breasts oozed out from the sides of the plates. That was an image I could have lived without!

If only all doctor appointments could be so funny

I often long to have a day free of obligations, chores, and errands – a long expanse of time that is open to all possibility. I dream of hours of open time in which to do anything I like or nothing at all. Hours in which I can choose not to go out, not to do any housework, not to do anything at all.

Those sorts of days are few and far between, and the sad truth of the matter is that when I do actually manage to get a day like that I find that time drags and I am left with a listless, restless, unsatisfied feeling of having done nothing. I really do prefer to be busy than not.

Yesterday was one of those long, dragging days. I started out tired and unmotivated to do much because we’d been out late the night before and it was already hot at 8am. I had already done the weekly shopping over the weekend and I let myself off the hook for cleaning the floor*. I thought instead I might finish up the tiny bit of quilting that is left to be done on the Noah’s Ark quilt and also start the final formatting of Separation Anxiety. I did complete the formatting but never did get to the quilting. Instead I found myself killing time, clicking from here to there on the internet, staring at Facebook willing someone to interact with me.

No wonder I felt depressed.

(*I’m glad I didn’t do the floors however because a sand storm blew started in the evening while we were at tennis practice. Yuck. I have some workmen coming on Thursday to install weatherstripping. Not a moment too soon!)

Today I kicked myself in the butt first thing in the morning and got going. I still didn’t get to the quilting but I did get the floors cleaned and ran out to do a few errands. Not exactly fun but necessary and at least I feel productive. And I now have a definite plan on how to do the quilting which was the main stumbling block to actually getting started. There’s always tomorrow…

Living an expat life means that people come in and out of your life regularly, often in two to three year cycles. Since we arrived in Egypt four years ago (FOUR YEARS!) this just happens to be one of those years where we are staying and several of my closest friends are leaving.

A normal reaction to leaving is to suddenly try to do all the things you’ve been meaning to do for years and have never gotten around to – usually sightseeing and shopping. One of the friends who is leaving arrived the same year we did, but somehow she never bought very much. She’s doing her best to make up for that now, before her shipment goes.

In an effort to be helpful and supportive, I accompanied her to the Tent Maker’s Souk on Monday this week, which is downtown near the Khan al Khalili bazaar.

The last time I visited the Tent Maker’s Souk was in 2004, when I was in Egypt as a tourist. It’s a marvelous place to go, but also very dangerous for me as a total, unrepentant textile whore. Just look at it – you’d have to be totally indifferent to fabric art or have will of steel!

(Click any image to enlarge)

These are essentially applique pieces done on canvas. Originally these were done in large sheets of geometric design and used as the sides of wedding tents and such. Modern tents are usually done with fabric printed to look like the original applique and most of work done in the souk now is for smaller items like wall hangings and cushions.

This was one of the first pieces that caught my eye, however the shopkeeper didn’t want to bargain very much on the price. Since it was one of the first shops that we looked in, we decided to move on and see what else we could find.

This entire street is nothing but shops selling applique and fabric so we had loads of choices!

After looking at many variations on the same design, my friend ended up buying this lovely piece from a seven year old boy who was tending a shop – for about 1/6 of the price of the first piece I admired. When we saw this one initially we thought of it as “small”. Notice how much bigger the items look when you get them alone!

This is a fairly common sight in downtown Cairo – flat bread delivery by bicycle. I was thrilled to finally get my own picture of it, even if the light could have been better.

I really did think I might make it out of the souk with my money safely stowed in my wallet, and then I saw it. A small tree of life (27″x35″)

I was hesitating between this tree of life and another longer one in a shop across the street when the shopkeeper said he had a larger one in his shop around the corner. We followed him to his other shop – a stuffy room in a building down a mostly deserted alley. I am thrilled that we went though because it was there I found this item.

It was love at first sight. This is a design based on an ancient Egyptian motif and was unlike any of the other appliques I had seen that day. I had to borrow a little money from my friend to get both pieces, but how could I resist? The main challenge now is finding a place to hang it. It’s so pretty I want it in a place where I will see it often, but at 38″x49″ it has to have a fairly large space to hang. Since it’s smaller than the first one I admired and was also only half as expensive, I think I made a good choice all the way around.

Got this last shot on our way out. Another hasty shot – a car or person is always walking in front of you – but I still like it.

Editing always makes other jobs seem so much more interesting and imperative. This week it seemed like a good idea to catch up on my recipe resolution.

The first recipe I tried was for baked falafel. I love falafel, but I don’t like to deep fry things – if nothing else, it’s messy. I’ve tried to make it up myself and bake it but never have gotten the mix quite right. So, I finally looked for and found this recipe.

The only thing I did differently was to skip the fresh cilantro and use only parsley – not because I don’t like cilantro, but because I didn’t happen to have any, but I did have a lot of parsley. I also skipped the hot sauce because I didn’t think the children would enjoy it. I was encouraged when I made up the batter – it was moist but not drippy. I scooped it out and put the majority in my cast iron skillet and the overflow on a cookie sheet.

The patties on the cookie sheet actually cooked much better – I suppose because the cookie sheet heated up so much more quickly. I ended up pan frying the ones in the skillet just to crisp them up a bit at the end. Next time I’ll just use a cookie sheet for all. And there will be a next time – these were great and everyone enjoyed them so much I didn’t have any leftovers.

Many of my recipe ideas come from some item hanging around in my kitchen. The parsley inspired the falafel patties. The aging strawberries and leftover spray whipped cream from my daughter’s party inspired me to try my hand at strawberry shortcake.

I’ve only ever had strawberry shortcake on top of sponge / angel food cake and I have to say that served that way, it doesn’t tempt me much. Make a fresh shortbread base for it though and oh-my-goodness-is-it-good. Seriously yummy.

I am also pleased to say that I’m making my way through the final edits for Separation Anxiety bit by bit. Once those are complete, I only need to format it and get it uploaded (hopefully by the end of the month).

ETA: I bought a pastry cutter last summer and finally got to use it when making the shortbread recipe. It’s much easier to clean than my food processor, but I’m not sure that benefit outweighs the speed and efficiency with which my food processor would blend in the butter! Also, I’m already making plans for alternate toppings for the shortbread – like raspberry sauce, plums, peaches, etc. Hard to go wrong with just about any berry or fresh fruit. Kind of like a reverse cobbler!

Now that I’ve completed and delivered the commission quilt (with no particular feedback one way or another, which is frustrating after all the angst I suffered over it), it’s time to turn my attention to the next big project on my list. Getting SEPARATION ANXIETY ready for publication before I leave for summer vacation.

It has not been an easy job.

I know that I always go through extreme highs and lows in the process of writing a book – moments where I think that nothing more brilliant has ever been written before (few and far between) and moments when I wonder why I bother at all. I think all writers go through these ups and downs. Knowing that doesn’t necessarily make them easier to deal with though, and the low moments for me tend to cluster more during the editing period.

Editing is hard work. It’s very difficult to read your own work for the umpteenth time with a fresh and objective eye. As much as you want to make it as perfect as you can possibly make it before sending it out into the world, the last thing you want to do is read the story yet again. (Snore) And because I feel so bored by it at present – the new, incomplete story calling me to write it instead – I can only worry that my perspective is a bit skewed and that in fact this isn’t just one of my low phases but that the story is boring and will be a complete flop.

So I’m doing the best I can do, taking it in small chunks and then stepping away to put the finishing touches on the Noah’s Ark baby quilt or to make a homemade cheesecake (yum!). I’ll get there bit by bit. And when I do, I’ll have to hope that the feedback I get from those reading purely for entertainment is encouraging enough to get me through the next story.

I’m disappointed because I have fallen behind with my new-recipe-a-month resolution. How hard can it be to do ONE new recipe a month after all? I deliberately set my goal low because I knew one a week was never going to happen, but if I can’t do one a month that’s just sad.

I don’t think this counts, but this week I made something up out of my head. I had some frozen fish fillets in my freezer and I decided to adapt a recipe I’d looked at that called for shrimp. I sauteed an onion and garlic in olive oil, then threw in some chopped tomato, frozen chopped spinach, the remainder of a jar of pizza sauce, oregano, and basil. Once that was cooked, I added the thawed fish and let it cook for a few minutes before I mixed in some crumbled feta and put it in the oven just to warm it all through.

I wish I could say that the result was great, but it was merely meh. It did not have nearly as much flavor as I would have liked. I would have loved to have included some black olives, but you can’t get the sort of black olives I wanted here and I decided against the splash of balsamic vinegar because I was worried it might get too tart. At the end of the day, I probably should have just used shrimp!

So you tell me, does that count as a new recipe since it was 1) not really a recipe and 2) not a huge success?

I have found a few new recipes that looks like they would be very nice: one for baked falafel and a couple more summer salads that include shrimp. I hope to try both in the next couple of weeks, before I leave on vacation. I can pretty much already admit that I do very little cooking while traveling so even if I catch up to my resolution this month, I’ll be behind again by August. Oh well.

That’s why it’s better just to call it a “goal” rather than a “resolution”.

Here is it – I finished the large commission quilt up shortly after I posted about it on Monday.

I always have mixed feelings about commission pieces. On the one hand, it’s always nice to have your skills appreciated and sought after (yeah me!) On the other hand, there is a fair amount of stress that goes into making something for someone else, that may or may not appeal to your own tastes. Did I interpret their request properly? Will the finished product live up to the vision in their heads? For instance, I would have preferred putting a black binding edge on this quilt – in my mind it would have balanced the bolder blocks of color in the center nicely as well as being more dramatic. However, the person who commissioned the quilt was quite specific about wanting me to use the lighter, neutral backing fabric as the binding. They also said that I was free to do as I wished so I went back and forth on the point the entire time I worked on this quilt. At the end of the day it’s not my quilt so I went with the lighter fabric. It doesn’t look as bad as I thought it might.

This is also the cleanest quilt ever now. Ironically, rather than using pencil to mark my quilt lines as I usually do, this time I decided to be cautious and use chalk because it would be less likely to stain. Imagine my alarm when I took it from the washing machine and found blue chalk lines still visible – even after two washings! I ended up having to take stain remover and a tooth brush to all the lines and then wash it again before it came out satisfactorily. (I can still see it in places, but you’d really have to know where to look).

Now I can turn my full attention to finishing the Noah’s Ark baby quilt.

I ordered a dance light for my daughter’s birthday present on Sunday and picked it up today – only to discover that it spins from the bottom post but does not rotate on its top axis as it should. I decided rather than take it back to the shop to make them exchange it, I would take it to my favorite repair place instead. Why? Because they special ordered it for me and I assumed that if I took it back to the shop, they would first argue with me that it was fine as it is (as they did when I took it) and then next would likely try to fix it themselves, further mucking it up and dragging the process out more. Yes, I’m paying to fix a “new” item, but also skipping a step (and a headache) As we say in Egypt mahlaysch (nevermind)!