Jenyfer Matthews

In case I’ve given anyone the impression that I’m the model of organized efficiency, I thought I’d confess: I haven’t unpacked a box in about a week. The children were home sick and frankly, I needed a break. Just take a look at what I have yet to deal with.

My goal this week is to do some more unpacking, and to clean off the dining room table. It is a good thing we have a kitchen table because the dining room? Out of control.

I am not a neat freak by any stretch, but this is ridiculous. When things get to this point, I can’t do anything creative – I can barely even think.

If my whole house looked this way, I’d be depressed. I’ve worked pretty hard to make sure that didn’t happen. Just take a look at the cozy corner I created for myself to write and relax.

Honestly, where would you rather spend your time? Can you blame me for preferring to sit in my red chair and dream rather than deal with all the other stuff?

I started doing yoga about 7 years ago when a friend in the United Arab Emirates volunteered to lead a class, took a couple years off, then got back into it in Cairo when a neighbor of mine adopted a studio and started a cooperative effort with some other instructors. I’ve tried going to gyms and also swimming but with the exception of water aerobics, which I also love once I get over getting into a cold pool (yikes!), yoga is one of the few exercise oriented activities that I will stick with. I despise gyms and swimming is boring.

As much as I love yoga, I rarely do it at home on my own. I need a class to keep me going. When I was in Cairo, I even had an instructor who would send me texts if I missed a class! Going to class is great because 1) there is variety and feedback in a class that you don’t get from a DVD, 2) I work out for longer and do positions that I might avoid if I were working out alone, and 3) I always push myself harder in class.

A lot of people profess they love yoga because it’s so relaxing, and it is. I’ll admit that I go to yoga class and compete with the others in class.

I know it’s not a very yogic attitude, but I want to be the best yogi in the room. I am not always the most flexible because of my lower back issues, but I want to be the strongest, hold my balance the longest, and do the most challenging of the pose options available. My approach does not exactly promote my inner peace and harmony quotient but it does usually end up giving me a heck of a workout.

Just in case you think I’m the only sick puppy comparing myself to others, a couple of times I have had people come up after class and compliment me and ask me how long I’ve been doing yoga because they’ve obviously been checking me out too. One of my proudest moments was when I inspired yoga-envy in a couple of young women in their mid-twenties by holding the plank pose for longer than they could.

I could claim that I was giving them something to aspire to, but in fact I realize that I’m slightly twisted. Slightly twisted and fairly strong.

And very, very competitive…

A year ago today I was putting my children on the bus to school in Cairo. It was a national holiday, Police Day, so most other people had the day off. Even taking that into account, the streets were exceptionally quiet and the bus driver and monitor quite jumpy. They obviously knew more about the situation than I did.

A year ago today, my life began to change course tremendously. If anyone had told me that the scheduled protest that occurred that day and continued into the weekend would topple the president of Egypt and that a year later I’d be living in Michigan waging war on mice (rats!), I’d have thought they were nuts. And yet, here I am.

A friend asked me the other day if it felt like longer than a year, or shorter. It feels like both. It is all so vivid in my mind that it might have happened last week. Yet, this last year was so filled with anxiety and stress and genuine grief over what was happening and how things were changing that how could it not feel longer? It was exhausting and sad. I never dreamed that when we left on that evacuation flight, the children and I wouldn’t be going back – that the walk I took on my last morning in our neighborhood would be the last time I’d see it.

The last views of my street:

Barricades still up so the self-appointed checkpoint groups could see who wanted access to the street.

The intersection I crossed nearly every day with the children on our way to tennis lessons, as quiet as I’ve ever seen it.

An Army commando on guard, a half barrel across the street for a fire at night.

Knowing what we know now about how the army has behaved in Egypt, his presence on the street conveys a different feeling.

A different friend of mine, this one half Egyptian, recently told me that though I’d lived in Egypt, I didn’t really know it because I didn’t get out much. She said it in passing, in a casual way not meant to offend, but I have to say the comment stung. I never claimed to be an expert on the place and no, I didn’t leave our immediate neighborhood much on a day to day basis. I’ll bet I could say the same to her about where she now lives in Maryland. However, when I was working my way through the archives of this blog to back up my more interesting posts, there are many, many posts about the various places I visited. When I read through them now, I see someone who was interested in the country and curious about the culture (though I might not have always interpreted things correctly). I think that should count for something.

When my husband was offered his job in Egypt, I wasn’t pleased to go. In the end, I didn’t want to leave. Egypt is the kind of place that gets under your skin.

So, though I am now busy making a life for our family in Michigan, I’m still watching the events in Egypt with interest – and missing the life we had there and the people to whom I never had the opportunity to say a proper goodbye.

I’m not normally a hugely superstitious person, but lately, I’ve been doing everything I can to improve my luck. Can’t hurt, might help, right? In that line of thought, I’m really mad that I missed the fact that it was Chinese New Year yesterday.

There are some things you are supposed to do to prepare for Chinese New Year – one is thoroughly clean your house on Chinese New Year’s Eve. Hmmm… I did a bunch of laundry on Sunday but I didn’t do much else. Then on Chinese New Year’s day you are not supposed to sweep and are in fact supposed to put all brooms away – the idea is that you might sweep away your good luck.

Well, I totally missed out on that one.

It all started when I was shifting things in my kitchen around. I reclaimed a previously forgotten, empty, LARGE drawer, which freed up a good bit of shelf space in a cabinet, which in turn freed up another shelf in another cabinet, which is where I decided to stow my cast iron skillets which had been living on the stove top and were generally in the way when not in use. After I’d moved the skillets, I was wiping off the stove top and saw a drip going over the side. I decided to pull the stove out a bit to wipe the drip up in the interest of being tidy and also because the stove is the last place I saw the mouse last month.

Back in December, I put some trays of poison here and there where I thought a mouse (rat??) might have gotten in and also tossed a few cubes into the garage to keep the buggers out of my car engine. Each tray is about 4″ square and maybe 3/4″ deep. The one in the laundry room looks untouched, as does the one under the sink. I decided to check the one under the oven as long as I had it pulled out.

It was ENTIRELY EMPTY.

OMG OMG OMG. You know how you read historical novels and people just faint? I’ve always wondered about that, but I swear I could feel my blood pressure shoot up. How on earth could that whole tray be empty and yet we’ve seen no dead bodies? Even if it had carried all those pellets away to its nest, surely it would have gotten some in its system if it was carrying them in its cheek? I assume it didn’t have a little backpack!

I’m not a huge fan of poison, but I’m also not a huge fan of the idea of wounding a mouse in a trap – or even cleaning up a “good” kill. (A friend of mine told me a hideous story of setting a trap for a rat in NY and hearing the trap “snap” and then being dragged away!) I truly hope that the mouse / rat took all that poison back to his little rat home outside my house and shared the bounty with his extended family. I contemplated getting some expanding foam and sealing around the outlet for the stove, where I assume they are getting in. Instead I decided to sweep the floor of crumbs from my son and put down a fresh tray of poison in the known hot spot, along with a twist (disposable) trap filled with peanut butter.

So I admit I swept and I took out the trash, both bad luck things to do on Chinese New Year, but neither the dust nor the trash has technically left the house yet. Also, I took a shower but I skipped washing my hair – another bad luck thing to do on Chinese New Year. Maybe I have half a chance of having a decent year after all.

If declaring war on a mouse / rat is considered an auspicious thing to do in the Year of the Dragon, that is…

We had bitter temperatures (to me anyway!) and snow late last week and over the weekend but this morning I woke up to thunder, lightening, and rain. It’s supposed to get up around 40F today, then in a couple of days the temperature will drop again and there will be more snow.

While I suppose I am glad we haven’t had any truly bad, record-breaking, storm-of-the-century blizzards or ice storms (yet) this year, this weather is kind of getting on my nerves.

I grew up in Louisiana and the winters there are fairly mild overall. There were some cold days – and cold down there might only mean 30sF but also humid and raw, the kind of cold that really gets into your bones. But the biggest annoyance was the constant temperature fluctuations. You just never knew what you were going to get from day to day. One day it would be 30F and frost and the next 70F and breezy. You’d get all excited about wearing a new sweater and then it might be shelved for a week or two – or until next winter – when the weather turned warm on you. I can remember being keenly disappointed one Christmas because it was clear blue skies and sunny. It just seemed so wrong.

It was much the same in the Middle East. Winter in Cairo mostly meant 60F/40F, with a handful of rainy days thrown in. Sitting outside in the evenings watching tennis lessons was no joy, but for the most part winter was short-lived and not a big deal. I used to get excited when it rained in winter because it gave me that “winter” feeling – which I supposed harkened back to those Louisiana days.

I expected Michigan to be different. I expected to have clearly defined seasons and that once it got cold it would just be cold, end of story. I didn’t expect this yo-yo-ing temperature – or that it would make so much difference to me if it was 15F or 40F. I think I’m going native because at 40F I feel overdressed wearing a coat.

I suppose that I’m tempting fate by complaining about a mild winter so maybe I ought to shut up now.

The children seem to be on the mend. Both had confirmed cases of strep throat and I took my son back to the doctor this weekend for a cough – turns out that he has a nasty head cold on top of the strep. Regardless, they are going back to school tomorrow. I’ve been rather blah myself the last few days. I haven’t felt sick precisely, just low energy. I took a few days off from the boxes while everyone was home but am hoping to make another big push at it this week. I’ve probably gone through about 2/3 at this point. It’s funny because everyone said that it would be the stuff from our storage unit that we’d want to sell / purge. So far it’s mostly the stuff coming from Cairo!

Right now it’s 8am and still dark outside. I think I’ll curl up next to my fake woodstove and read for a while before I get started…

They say bad things happen in threes. All of mine came in pairs this week.

I’ve had two children home sick from school all week. For once, I followed my instincts and took them to the doctor sooner than later and it was a good thing I did because they both had strep throat. They are both on antibiotics now and have a four day weekend over which to fully recover (and catch up on all their homework).

I myself have spent most of the week washing my hands, washing clothes, fetching snacks and drinks for my patients, and continuing to unpack boxes. I can finally see some progress! In spite of the poor condition of many of the boxes, most of the contents made it just fine – with a few notable exceptions. I found a second pottery piece that broke in transit, this time the lovely mask I made. (Right along the hairline, where a crack had developed in the glaze firing) I found a loose handful of change wrapped up in a wad of paper the size of a softball, but the mask only rated a couple of sheets of paper. Sigh.

However, in the spirit of opening myself to the wisdom and power of the Universe, I’ve decided to look for the positive sides of these situations. With regard to the sick children, at least they were both sick at the same time which (I hope) means they will return to school simultaneously as well. And having them both get sick (a fairly rare occurrence) prompted me to finally find a family doctor who was accepting new patients – not that I was able to get in to see him this time, but I’ll be ready for next time.

As for my pottery, I was whining about mentioned it on Facebook, and a friend of mine from Cairo wrote me a message: his MIL lives in a city about 20 minutes away from me and not only is she a garage sale / thrift store fiend (like me!) but she is also a potter. He gave me her email and said she might be able to help me repair my broken pieces. How is that for the Universe providing a solution to a problem?

So why did I pop awake at 3am this morning, the one morning this week when school is closed and I knew I didn’t have to get up? You could say that the Universe was trying to gift me with some quiet time to get a bit of writing done before the usual distractions of the day begin. Or you could just assume the Universe has a sense of humor…

I’m even posting a day early!

I’m still working on unpacking boxes and so far so good for the most part. It’s amazing how much trash you can manage to stash away in the corners and closets of your home just in case. Having just spent several thousand dollars to ship empty appliance boxes, plastic grocery bags, rag clothes, and expired medications ask me how I know.

I have been working my way through things, box by box. Some things I need to unwrap just to see if they made it okay and am just as quickly putting them back in their boxes for now. Most things made it just fine, however the couple of things I have found that broke so far were very wrenching. One was a large ceramic plate that goes with a beautiful Vietnamese tea set that I bought in the Russian Market in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The other casualty was the large pottery lizard I made myself in Cairo. Why on earth they thought it would be okay to stand it on end on its tail – the most vulnerable part of the entire piece – is a mystery to me. Ironically, another large plate that matched the dishes which were part of our furnished apartment made it just fine, though in fact it ought to have stayed behind. Oh well.

I’ve also had two sick children home this week. When my son told me he didn’t feel well on Monday morning, I was skeptical. He’d been just fine all weekend when it came to birthday parties and a sleepover so it seemed a little convenient that he’d be sick just in time for school. As it turned out, he wasn’t faking. After he had a fever for the second day running and his throat became so sore he found it painful to speak, I took them both to the doctor. The doctor suspects strep throat. I’m hoping that I can nip it in the bud in my daughter’s case, but it looks as if they will be home for the remainder of the week.

While I was at the store waiting for their prescriptions to be filled, I took a spin around and found some raspberries on the discount rack. I love raspberries. I decided to buy these to make a raspberry sauce. Since we still have a few carrot cup-cakes in the freezer from my birthday last week (with frosting in the fridge) I was thinking of sticking the raspberry sauce in the freezer and keeping it for Valentine’s Day when I could make a shortcake to go with it. Having taken a look in my stuffed-to-the-gills freezer I think I’ve gotten way far ahead of myself! Perhaps I should just make some waffles instead.

Anything to get away from boxes for a while…

I spent much of the last year being anxious about not having my “stuff” and wondering when / if it would arrive. Now that I finally have it, I’m feeling fairly overwhelmed and nearly suffocated by the sheer volume.

Why, for instance, do I have so many clothes??? Sure, there are seasons and different occasions, blah blah blah, but even accounting for that, I have way to many. Just because they still fit does not mean I have to keep them all! And I haven’t even gotten to my shoes or purses yet.

(I strive to be one of those super practical European-types with twelve fabulous mix and match pieces that they accessorize with nothing more than a scarf. As if!)

The children have pretty much outgrown all the clothes that were shipped for them so I stashed them in a couple of empty suitcases for a spring garage sale. I’d like to do the same with my own clothes, but the problem with sorting them at present is I barely have space to move in my work room. If I take them out of the boxes, where would I put them anyway?

The children have “helped” unpack their toys by taking everything out of the boxes and spreading everything all over every available inch of floor space that they can find in their “zone”. I know they are happy to see their things after so long a time – which is the only reason I put up with the mess for even a day – but enough is enough. I’m already mentally setting prices on all the plastic animals and dinosaurs, all the magnetic building sticks and balls, all the castle pieces. Why sell them? Because while the children are happy to spread them out, guess who ends up picking everything up again? The children will probably resist selling things – until I offer to let them keep the money from the sales. I’m tricky like that.

I did find my red Circle of Life quilt as well as all the others – one box marked “toys” contained toys and four of my quilts! I’ll be happy to get back to working on finishing up my red quilt as soon as I have restored some order to my home and find my sewing box…

You saw part of the mountain of boxes I have to sort through on the Wednesday post. It is not only the sheer volume of stuff that makes this challenging, but the way the boxes are labeled.

I deny having every sewed any of my quilt patrons!

It’s a good thing I’m fluent in pigeon English! I do believe this includes “purses”.

And this box contains and African DRUM.

I admit – this one had me stumped.

Apparently “KW” means kitchen ware and “flavors” referred to spices!

I think they could have been more accurate in this label…

They could have labeled it “ducks”!

Then there were things that I bought in Egypt and they were very specific and confident in how to label! This is a small padded bench / seat I bought that is fashioned in the manner of a camel saddle.

I was really hoping that this label didn’t mean what I thought it meant.

And yet it did… sigh. I could have lived without seeing all those shopping bags again! (Or the bag of dead tennis balls or the half a dozen flat soccer balls they packed)

Really, I have to find humor in this situation or I’d cry. So much that should have been purged was shipped. And apparently there was one weak link on the packing team who had an aversion to using any sort of packing paper to cushion things. I have found boxes where there is a jumble of things tossed into it, one of which contained my cast iron skillet on top of the rest. A mirror I quite liked was packed in a box of toys for some reason, wrapped in my son’s fleece blanket. It broke. I am putting any associated bad luck on whoever packed it. And why did they box up empty suitcases? Could they not have used them for quilt fabric or clothes??

While I am busy unpacking household things, I left the books to my husband. It may not sound like much, but just take a look at this.

Having hefted the boxes of books into his cave for him to unpack, I am dropping some not so subtle hints that he needs to think about weeding his collection…

My husband and I have moved eight times in our married life – some of those moves longer distances than others – and this last move from Egypt to Michigan was the first time he had to do all the coordinating himself.

It was extremely difficult for me to not be in control. I gave some thought to going back to Egypt to handle it myself but it didn’t make sense logistically or financially. Would I bring the children back with me? If so, then we would have to pay 3x international airfare (ouch!) and they would miss the start of the school year. Did I go alone? Though I had a very kind offer from a friend in Ohio, I wasn’t totally comfortable leaving the children for as long as it would take me to do the packing, mostly because of the distance we’d be separated. There was no way around it: I had to leave it to my husband and the movers to do the job.

It was a trickier job than you might think.

When we initially moved to Egypt from the United Arab Emirates, we had to create an inventory list of our belongings in order to get duty-free status on our shipment. Doesn’t sound like such a big deal until you read the fine print: it was recommended we list things like rare books, CDs, and DVDs by title and all electronics by serial number. Not only that, but we had to promise to take anything listed on our inventory list back out of Egypt when we left – even broken appliances, old computers, and VHS tapes of The Wiggles, which my children have long outgrown.

That’s not to say that we couldn’t have purged a decent amount – anything that was purchased in Egypt could be left there. I used my toaster oven quite frequently, but given the fact that toaster ovens are pretty easy to come by and the one I had in Cairo was 220v, there was certainly no reason to pack it up and ship it to the US. Same goes for the vacuum cleaner that they did ship. The children have grown quite a bit in a year and most of the shoes and clothes we left behind don’t fit anymore so all of that stuff could have gone.

My husband sold our TV and a few other things, but if I had been there on the spot, I could have had a sale and purged or donated so much more. I could have cleaned things before they were packed so I didn’t have to unroll a large carpet and find it filled with crumbs! Or a water bottle at the bottom of a tennis bag that actually still had some water in it and was leaking. I could have packed things more sensibly. But I wasn’t there and anything that we saved on airfare by my not going, we probably spent on shipping stuff that could have been ditched.

For instance, it was difficult for my husband to get parts for his mountain bike in Cairo so he would bring things like tires and gears back in the summertime. He replaced his tires and tubes one year, but kept the old tires just in case. My husband didn’t purge them in time so the movers packed them up and shipped them. They also shipped half a dozen punctured soccer balls and a step-ladder that belonged to the furnished apartment we lived in. Oops! And that’s only what I’ve found so far.

Those things I can kind of understand – I mean, they don’t want to judge what is and isn’t important to someone – but they also shipped an empty shoebox. Really???

Had I been there, I could also have supervised the packing and made sure it was done efficiently. I found a framed piece of papyrus which wasn’t wrapped at all – sandwiched between two lovely hand-embroidered pictures. Amazingly the glass did not break, but if it had, it would have shredded the papyrus and the embroidery.

The shipment is charged by weight but also by volume. There was no reason for dresser drawers, though heavy, to travel empty. Surely they could have bagged up some stuffed animals or pillows to fill them with and saved us a couple of boxes and that much space. Sigh.

Over the years, people kept telling us it was the items we put storage before we went abroad in 1999 that we would end up throwing away. Ironically, I think there is much more trash in this shipment. After all, I purged and packed all the stuff that ended up in storage!

Oh well, I suppose in the long run it is better that the movers erred on the side of shipping too much rather than making decisions to get rid of things that we might have really missed. It is going to take a long time to sort through all this stuff and find the things I really want among all the junk, however. I’ve already put a bag of outgrown, worn out childrens tennis shoes to the curb along with the bike tires. I can only imagine how much more garbage / donations will be generated. Not sure the Egyptian light bulbs that came over will work here and I know the night lights won’t!

I also see a garage sale and some more furniture projects in my future…