You know life is settling down when...

You know life is settling down when you don't feel like anything is novel enough to write about. That's why I tried to write so much when we first got here: I knew I'd eventually find everything normal and mundane, and the urge to write home about it would diminish. Well, it has happened, hence the last 40 days without a blog post. Not that that's stopped Rachel. Go read her posts first if you haven't.






So it's about time. For those of you who read this blog so that you can learn useful things about Doha, here's a quick paragraph. If you want your car's air conditioner recharged (i.e. it doesn't cool anymore and might be out of freon or whatever gas is in there), one place to get it done relatively quickly and cheaply is in a little hole-in-the-wall auto shop at the corner of Afeef St. and Al Yarmouk St. in the area opposite Al Ahli hospital. Here's a map. Note that there is no parking lot, per se, so you just have to drive over the curb into the dirt in front of the shop. If you have to wait an hour for him to get another gas container like I did, you can find several small corner stores and a barber shop down Al Yarmouk St. to help you pass the time. Next, if you need little fiddly hardware, cheap plastic doohicky, or anything else you might find at an old-style Radio Shack or dollar store, go to the 7-riyal store called Dasio inside Homes-R-Us (incidentally, also the best home furnishing store we've found) at the Hyatt Plaza Mall. The whole mall feels just run-down enough that it sort of feels like your typical mall back home, and it's also just run-down enough that most locals wouldn't deign to set foot in there, so it's not always super crowded. It also has a Claire's and a Carter's, so it might be a good place to shop if you have a little girl between the ages of 0 and 16. Rachel wasn't very impressed with the supermarket they had inside, which might have something to do with the fact that birds were flying around the grocery section, and the drop ceiling was entirely missing above the check-out area so that all the bare pipes and wires were exposed and buzzing above us. But that made it feel almost like I was back in Lorain, Ohio!






The weather has been quite pleasant since the end of November. Cool each morning, and almost never too hot during the day. I hope it lasts through February.






The kids are, of course, growing and changing. Miss A walks a lot and falls a lot, racking up probably an injury per day in the last week. She loves to jabber or hum or sing as she toddles around, and the slap slap slap of her bare feet on the floor always lets us know where she is. She likes to hide and play peekaboo and chase in circles, both with me or Rachel and with Big E. He often shares his food with her and us. I could learn a thing or two about sharing from him. He finished his 100th reading lesson with Rachel last week, and though he'll read books with us, trading off a line at a time or a page at a time, he doesn't seem to want to read books on his own yet. He has really taken to water color painting, though, and our bare living room wall that we'd been saving for a large framed landscape photo or something has been filled instead with his paintings. They all started out blue, but he has really expanded his palette.


Big E and I fly a kite together sometimes on windy days. It's a kite Rachel and I bought for a date before I'd even proposed to her back in Rexburg, Idaho, and we've brought it everywhere with us since then. Nice to finally be able to fly it with him.


And now a photo/video dump:


We took a short trip on a motorized dhow in the harbor one day.
















I took Rachel out for a rare night without the kids, and we saw The Hobbit in 3D at an IMAX theater, followed by food (and food poisoning for Rachel) at a Mongolian grill. The theater was packed!



Not. The next picture needs no comment.



Here is Miss A doing raspberries in slow motion.



Here she's helping unload groceries.



We build forts on the couch, and Miss A follows Big E wherever he goes.



Monkey see monkey do!



Thanks, Grandma Becky!



Miss A always wants to open the curtains and look outside first thing in the morning, and sometimes Big E will join her to watch the bigger kids go to school.



Fun on the street.



Rachel brought the kids to eat lunch with me at work one day and check out some books from the school library. They spent very little time eating, and much preferred exploring my office.






And Miss A is walking!



I started this post more than a week ago, and since then we've had our WEEK OF ADVENTURE bookended by Valentine's Day and Rachel's birthday, and consisting of a whole week off from work free to explore Qatar. So my next few posts (and Rachel's) will be about that.

Goodreads

I finally made an effort to rate all the books I've ever read on Goodreads this evening. I'm sure I haven't remembered all of them, but I went from about 75 I'd rated before to around 400 now. I didn't include any of the textbooks I've read, though maybe I should have. I've never had so many forgotten memories come flooding back as I did during that process of trying to remember the books. They weren't just memories of the books, either, but of what was going on in my life when I read them. It was a great experience. In the process, I discovered that you can export your book list to Excel, and it will include all the data they have on each book, including page counts. So I totalled up my page count for those approximately 400 books, and it was 118,558 pages, or about 10.4 pages per day since I was born (incidentally, around Big E's birthday this year, I will have been alive for a billion seconds). Naturally, that doesn't account for books I've read more than once, or for the probably millions of pages of text I've read on websites I've visited. And I'm sure many of you have read far more than that. But that's not the point. I just thought I'd share the fun fact that you can at least get a close estimate of how many book pages you've read using Goodreads and a spreadsheet formula. Go to the My Books page, and click import/export at the left, then export at the top right. Then post your stats in the comments if you like!

Worker housing

Today I drove home one of my friends from church. He works as an electrical contractor, and he's from the Philippines. He lives in a trailer on this compound, which is 40 minutes walking distance from a public bus stop, and about that far from any paved road. The only vehicles that go there are the busses that deliver the workers to and from work. To get a good sense of the isolation of his housing compound, click on that link above, make sure you're on satellite view, and just zoom out one step at a time.

Here's a video of the drive back out from his compound. You might not want to watch it if you get motion sickness. Driving over unpaved, rocky, barren waste with a camera phone in one hand doesn't lend itself to steady camera work.

Qatar National Day

We observed Qatar National Day in our own quiet way yesterday: by hardly leaving the house. Most of the city was closed, so there wasn't much point in going anywhere, and most of the streets were blocked with traffic, so we couldn't have gone much anywhere if we wanted to. So instead we walked to the playground in the next housing compound over, cleaned the house, sang some Christmas carols to my guitar's accompaniment, and had some homemade fried rice for dinner. Rachel and I watched parts of the parade on TV. The parade consisted exclusively of Qatar's military might (most of its hardware comes from the US--but only at a price!) marching and rolling down the corniche road in front of a stand where the Emir and lots of other dignitaries sat. It also involved some precision paratroopers landing right on the median of the corniche road in front of the grandstand, a Qatar flag being raised out of the sea by a navy helicopter, and flyovers by their jets. The fireworks in the evening were all at the corniche, 6.5 miles away as the crow flies, but we could hear them inside our house as we put the kids to bed. When we turned on the TV, we almost wished we'd gone, because... wow. Nothing makes a good fireworks display like billions of dollars of LNG/petroleum money to throw at it! Have a look at the video here.

Singing Sand Dunes

Rachel is posting this same story, but I feel like giving my take on it anyway. We went to the singing sand dunes, to this sand dune specifically, for our ward Christmas party. The drive there was all on paved roads until about the last 600m, which were all off-road on hard packed earth strewn with rocks up to about the size of a loaf of bread or a basketball. I think that accurately describes most of Qatar's terrain.

Fortunately, our van had high enough clearance, so we made it into the lee of the dune and started exploring. There were broken glass and garbage and rusty nails and tiny thorn bushes scattered amongst the rocks, so we headed straight for the sand. Elliott immediately kicked off his shoes and sat down to play with some sand toys another kid had brought.

Meanwhile, I kicked off my shoes and headed up the dune because I've never been on a sand dune before. It was about as tough to climb as I expected, but a lot easier when I skittered up like a crab on my hands and feet rather than standing straight up and down.
And now, Elliott will tell you about the sand dunes: nbnlvdsndvm,cxvnmv≈çµ√ç≈µ≤ç√≈˜˚¬.zvnk;dzbj;
kufrgkuwehguvewbfegwyfewyvgvewt3s1tb1tyvefsieegy43t43 3cdjfyotu3q44eyyyyyy54yh3fwuhrgrsjgkersukfvgggfyiessgersg..e,fe s gfq2tfr365q34ff3r3w76q3tq3tfr3fqrgfewgk3iof vygiv3qgvglgq3vi3qgy3frewgvewkgvjfvkfvbhvewgyewhg
This is what he types when he types the way mommy and daddy do.

Here was my first go down the dune. I'd been told before that it doesn't hurt a bit, no matter how you fling yourself down, and I was eager to test that.

Next Rachel and Elliott climbed up and scooted down. They got the dune singing -- or more accurately humming like a large propeller-driven plane off in the distance.

Then we all went up and had our family photo taken, as well as some nice shots of scenery to remember it by.

Of course, they don't really do it justice, but it was pretty spectacular. We played some more, up and down the dunes, then talked with friends, ate a potluck dinner after dark, and enjoyed feeling chilly for the first time since we got here. It was great to warm up around the bonfire, too. Once the marshmallows came out for roasting, we finally started singing some carols. About that time, Elliott decided he wanted to climb the dune and see the stars (another first in Doha), so he and I climbed up and sat on the dune and sang carols together along with the ward members far below. The Spanish-speakers among us sang Feliz Navidad first, then the Nigerians in our ward sang one of their songs for us. Next we moved into some of the bouncier Christmas songs, and finished off with Silent Night. We all went home worn out and happy. 

Qatar National Day (Observed)

According to the official website of Qatar National Day, "Every December 18th, we celebrate our National Day in commemoration of the historic day in 1878 when Shaikh Jasim, the founder of the State of Qatar, succeeded his father, Shaikh Muhammad Bin Thani, as the ruler and led the country toward unity." Since we don't have school on that day, we celebrated it a few days early, on the 13th (yesterday). The students put on a dramatic production depicting (as far as I could tell -- it was entirely in Arabic) some important historical events, some cultural performances, and some military might in the form of 6-year-olds marching around on stage dressed in combat fatigues. Then we all went outside to the football pitch and stood around for the rest of the day (about 5 hours) while the little kids rode ponies from Al Shaqab, a lady did henna decorations on women's hands and arms, a traditional music group sang, and the students performed traditional sword dances with flat-edged swords. Oh, and there was lunch, too.

We were vaguely encouraged to wear typical Qatari male daywear, which for the men meant a thobe and a gutra. I wasn't sure I wanted to drop several hundred QR on a nice one quite yet, but when I mentioned that to one of my coworkers, she decided I should just borrow one from our male PE teacher. The only problem with that idea is that he's about six inches shorter than I am, and about eight inches smaller than me around the shoulders. Needless to say, it didn't fit when I tried it on. But the female PE teacher, when she heard this, said she'd have her maid send her son's extra outfit for me, and it fit fine... mostly. It was still about four inches too short. But no matter! I wore it for the rest of the day and enjoyed the chance to wear it. I could have passed for Lebanese, maybe. At least six different people stopped me to adjust my headwear, though, each insisting that their way of doing it was the right way--despite my having had it arranged by a Qatari in the first place.

I also enjoyed holding several falcons, which students brought with them. Just because. No, they didn't ask permission, but then no one does for anything here, so... FALCONS!

Christmas preparations picture and movie dump!

First: yes, we have Christmas decorations here, and we had a very nice time decorating together.

 Elliott is making good progress learning to read with Rachel, who diligently teaches him another reading lesson every day (except Fridays) when Amelia is napping.

 Rachel made an advent calendar from scratch, and one of the fun things to do on it was making snowflakes. Goodness knows we won't be seeing any snow unless we take the matter into our own hands!

Elliott wanted to take pictures of me just like I took pictures of him. He was a bit more shutter-happy than I was.

Amelia likes to have a nice drink of warm milk before bed each night.

Elliott enjoying our felt nativity set, the only one we thought we could get through customs (turns out we could have brought pretty much anything we wanted).

Another night, we made snowmen ornaments out of cottonballs and scotch tape, and decorated them with markers. Hardly worthy of Etsy or Pintrest, but they add some cheer to the tree!

Rachel posted a more thorough account of our visit to the horseraces, but here are the photos again, anyway.

 Elliott's first cotton candy

 Elliott's first pony ride.

 Amelia's first pony ride (not as excited about it as Elliott was).

"The horses sound like thunder!" Elliott said at one point.

 We enjoyed the First Presidency Christmas Devotional a week late.

 And Amelia took her first steps on Dec. 7! This is actually an encore performance just moments after the first.

Merry Christmas, everyone!