Jenyfer Matthews

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

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.

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”.