Jenyfer Matthews

My son went on a play date over the weekend, during which the hosting parent decided to direct some charitable activities. It’s Ramadan, a month-long Muslim holiday during which they fast in daylight hours, and this parent decided to put together some bags of groceries to distribute to poor families.

My son came home with three bags of groceries to assemble his give-away bags. Each bag ended up having 500g dry lentils, 500g red lentils, a bag of pasta, a 1kg bag of sugar, a package of dried apricot sheets, a 1kg bag of rice, and a small pack of biscuits. We assembled the two bags and my son was very excited about the idea of finding someone to give them to.

There is no shame in begging in Islam. In fact, from my limited understanding of things, it’s part of a Muslim’s religious duty to care for those less fortunate. Part of the reason for fasting during Ramadan is so that they can experience the deprivation that poor people suffer on a daily basis.

There is always a catch of course, this one being strictly cultural. One is that being on foot, I don’t often give money to beggars unless I can make a speedy getaway. I’ve been in situations where you give some money to one person and suddenly ten more come out of the woodwork. A friend of mine said she gave some money to a woman with a baby one day and found herself being followed home by a small posse of beggars. There are so many poor people in Egypt, you could stand on the street corner and give out money steadily until you yourself were impoverished and still there would be more people with their hands out.

The other thing is that I myself feel very awkward about going up to people on the street and offering them charity. I don’t want to make any faulty assumptions about a person’s income level or offend anyone’s pride. I would prefer for someone to approach me, thereby removing all doubt. However, I live in a rather affluent suburb of Cairo so there aren’t so very many beggars on the street here anyway. I know of a couple of families who live in tumble-down shacks on vacant lots, but again I feel strange going up to their door and offering them charity they may or may not want.

I also wonder about how best to include my son in this activity, or whether to include him at all. Surely, it’s not a bad thing for him to know that not everyone is as fortunate in their circumstances as he is and to teach him compassion, but how does including him in the equation change things? Would people be more willing to accept an offering from a well intentioned (and adorable) little boy? Or might they think that I’m using them as some sort of object lesson? I don’t want to humiliate anyone in the process.

It is, of course, entirely possible that I think too much.

Still, I have these two bags to give away so I took one bag with me on Saturday, to look for a likely candidate while we walked to our club to take our children to their tennis lessons (just the contrast in those two very different activities makes me squirm) The bag was ridiculously heavy and of course I did not see anyone who might have really needed such a bag. I did not want to carry it home again so a friend and I took it to a family who lives around the corner from our club, in a vacant lot. They were extremely gracious and seemed pleased enough to have it. I was extremely pleased not to have to carry it home. Win win.

I took the other bag with me when I went out to grocery shop the next morning. Lately there have been a least a couple of ladies who have been begging on my route to the shops, and failing that I figured I would be able to find a street sweeper. Where are the all beggars when you need them? There was no one out either going to or returning from the store. I’d leave it outside a poor family’s house if I didn’t worry that they would be suspicious of who left it there and reject it for that reason. I ended up carrying the damn bag home again where I weighed it (once I got the strength back in my arm). It weighs nine pounds. I feel like I’m doing my own sort of Ramadan penance, just carrying the thing around.

I’ll give it a couple more tries. Surely I can find someone, somewhere who would appreciate it before Ramadan ends…

I’m very happy to say that the children started school yesterday – yeah hooray! You might think that after having spent all day, every day with them for the entire summer I might have done something fun with myself like go and have a pedicure or a coffee morning with the other moms. Nope. I know how to really have fun.

I came home and changed no less than seven light bulbs, a few of which required me to stand tip-toe at the top of a six foot ladder. In my stairwell. If that’s not an adrenalin rush, I don’t know what is.

One of the first things I did upon returning home from vacation was to change all the bedding, including quilts. I washed and stowed the Broken Star quilt for another year and put on what I think of as my late summer quilt.

I made this quilt at least five years ago using a variety of bali / batiks and marble fabrics. It’s a fairly simple pattern that really lets the gorgeous fabric sing. My original plan was to use black sashing between the blocks but once I had all the blocks done, black seemed too harsh so I opted for navy blue.

It’s a bit difficult to see, but I hand quilted swirly suns using rainbow variegated thread in the center of the blocks.

I backed this quilt with a large scale bamboo and hibiscus print that is all in shades of blue. It was a print I fell in love with at first sight while fabric shopping in Dubai one day and bought acres of, figuring that one day I would use it as for backing. This quilt was just the perfect candidate.

I was sort of thinking of making each of the children a Halloween quilt this year, but somehow I think that’s a project I should have started in May if I was going to finish this year!

My trip back to Egypt went smoothly enough, in spite of a surprise re-route through Paris. I was worried about that – can you blame me after the trouble I had on the first part of my trip?? – but it all went well enough. I am almost positive two of my bags were over the weight limit but with the distraction of re-routing me and the children either the gate agent didn’t notice or chose to let it slide. Phew.

I arrived in Cairo three hours later than originally scheduled, just before iftar (the sunset breaking of the fast during Ramadan) and was a little concerned about that timing because typically nothing happens for about two hours after that. It was in fact the most efficient arrival I’ve ever experienced. I was through passport control in about five minutes and all of my bags came through one after another, bam bam bam. I was through customs and driving away in half an hour. Unheard of. The call to prayer (and the signal to eat) came as I was waiting for my driver to bring the car around. The timing worked out in another way as well: the roads were nearly empty so we cruised home in no time.

I can almost hear you thinking what’s the catch. Well, let’s just say I would advise you never to assume an airline with have the sense to throw a tarp over your luggage, even if it is raining steadily for a five hour layover. All of my bags were damp and the contents of two were actually wet. One quilting magazine and some other assorted paperwork were soaked. It could have been worse I suppose – at least all my new books were well protected (I tend to pack with lots of plastic bags, against interior explosions of shampoo, etc)

I’ve been back a day and my bags are unpacked and put away, until next time. I am however still settling in. After being in the quiet of the north woods for six weeks, things here seem really loud. Air conditioners perpetually blowing, two toilets running, traffic noise – not to mention the children. It will take me a little while to tune it all out again.

It’s quiet in other ways though. Two of my closest friends moved away at the end of June. No more girly chats, no more wine nights. No more silly text messages throughout the day. I’m sure I’ll find ways to fill in the gaps and distract myself but for right now it all feels a little hollow.

School starts on Sunday. I’ve been ALONE for more than half an hour since the end of June and I’m looking forward it. I haven’t been able to write since two nights before I left Minnesota and I’m itching to pick up the story again…

I’m in my usual stressed out, pre-travel packing mode at the moment. You might think that I’d be an expert at packing by now…yes and no. Stop by friend and author Shelley Munro’s blog to find out what special packing challenges I’m facing this year. Leave a comment and you’ll have a chance to win a PDF copy of SEPARATION ANXIETY.

I’ll be back with you, live from Egypt next week. Have a great weekend and send me positive thoughts for a smooth trip back!

Summer started so early in Northern Minnesota this year that most of the berry season was finished before I even arrived. I’ve had many fewer raspberries this year than usual and even the blueberries we picked a few weeks back were nearly a month earlier than the typical season.

As warm and sticky as it was last week, it seems that summer is ending a bit early too. The wind started howling a few days ago, whipping up the water on Lake Superior to nearly surfer sized waves. With the wind came cooler temperatures. Much cooler temperatures. Cool enough that many more deer are beginning to show up in the yard in the mornings and evenings, looking for corn. Cool enough that I’m wearing socks to bed and pulling on a thick quilt at night. Cool enough that I wouldn’t be surprised to see the leaves changing color next week.

Too bad I won’t be here to see it.

The children and I will be leaving for Egypt on Sunday, where it most definitely still summer. I’m trying hard to look forward to that – to the fact that in Cairo I still have time to wear the two new sundresses I ordered for myself that only just arrived in the mail here. I’m looking forward to the start of the school year and having a little more time to myself during the day. A change of scene has given me the time to recharge my creative juices and I’m bursting with new ideas for writing and quilts and cooking and…well, lots of things.

But I still wish I could be here in Minnesota to see the change of seasons from summer to autumn and from autumn to winter. I wonder how my husband would feel about commuting…

While you are sitting comfortably reading this, I have likely been jammed into the cargo section of an airbus traveling for hours, smashed between two sleeping children (that last bit is very likely a fantasy). My route this year will take me through the Amsterdam airport where I plan to buy lots of lots of caramel waffle cookies. And possibly some booze. I think I’m going to need it once I finally get off the plane and settled in our hotel.

The benefit of traveling east is that I’ll leave my home in Egypt at 1am Friday (take off at 4am, ugh) and I’ll arrive in Minnesota at noon, on Friday. I’m getting jetlag just thinking about the time change. Do not despair though! I’ll be taking my netbook along and my hotel is supposed to have wifi. You didn’t think you’d get rid of me that easily, did you?

In case you get lonely for me in the meantime (yeah right!), you might want to consider checking out my new book.

SEPARATION ANXIETY is included in a summer sale for the month of July at Smashwords.com, along with many many other titles. Until the end of the month you can get a copy of SEPARATION ANXIETY for 25% off the regular price just by entering the code SWS25 at checkout.

Go on, you know you want to.

I went shopping for a few cleaning supplies to leave for the house cleaner who will come in while I’m away over the summer.

(click image to enlarge)

It wasn’t until I left that I took a look at the sales receipt:

Not only is my bath cleaner over-qualified for the job, I don’t think I’m worthy of my peanut butter either.

My son is a chip off the old block when it comes to his love of harvesting free wild food. I myself have the fondest memories of picking wild blackberries in North Carolina (or at least the product of the picking, between the heat and the thorns the berry-picking itself wasn’t much fun at all) and I have been known to grab big handfuls of basil growing along the curbs in our neighborhood in Cairo. When we are home in the summertime, I can hardly keep my son out of the woods so great is the lure of raspberries, blueberries, thimbleberries, and June berries. He will hike for miles and miles without complaint, munching his way along.

We were at our neighborhood club last week and my son was bored because none of his friends were around. We were planning to stay for a while so rather than listen to him whine, I suggested he go check out the trees at the back of the lawn to see if there were any “limes” growing. I’m calling them limes for lack of a better term – they aren’t really limes as I know them. Perhaps an ornamental version?

It was a good suggestion since it kept him occupied for a very long time, but little did I know what I was letting myself in for: the little man picked 6.2 pounds of limes!

My son was absolutely filthy by the time he was done (the last place you want to stand during a rain storm in Cairo is under a tree – they accumulate a huge amount of dust in between showers!) and he may rethink his enthusiasm next time as I made him carry the bag home.

The next morning he washed all the limes off and demanded we make juice. Since it was my idea in the first place, I could hardly refuse. What else were we going to do with them?

They didn’t look too bad when we cut them open so we got to work. Need I say that in spite of my son’s declaration that he wanted to make juice every day, he quickly grew bored with the whole process? We juiced every lime in that bag and all we got for our efforts were 1 1/4 cups of juice and a sore arm!

I added about 1/2 cup of sugar and 2 cups of water to make the juice. In the end it was…a bit strange. Not bad exactly, but not a roaring success. We did something similar last year and the children liked it more so I suspect I added more sugar last time. They aren’t so enthusiastic this year. I might like it better myself if I added a cup of gin to it.

Does this count as a new recipe for July? Nah…I didn’t think so!

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??

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