My Turn To Ask A Favour

At various times in the past, people reading my blog have suggested that I should try to publish in book form. One of those people was working in the industry and has given me some information on organising a book proposal. A prospective publisher would like to know who might be interested in buying my book, so to that end I would love it if some of you who read my blog would send me either a private email or write a comment to say a bit about who you are. (I have to admit to some curiosity myself actually.) Some of you have done that, but many post comments anonymously.You'll find my email address in my profile.

This project of writing about my life here is terrifying at one extreme and absolutely as exhilarating as a gallop in the desert at the other. I worked as a staff writer and editor for a few years on a monthly English-language magazine here in Cairo. It was really my first job as a writer and I was a bit amazed at how easy it was for me. I had a ball with The Egyptian Reporter, which is now unfortunately no longer publishing, as I had something new every month to explore and write about. I talked to scientists, rose breeders, horse breeders, biologists, businessmen and students about everything from bugs to gun control. When my husband died I was still working with them and in fact we'd started a children's magazine as well, but the demands of his life as taken up by me were too severe and I had to quit.

I stopped writing anything at all for about two years as I struggled through the morass that is Egyptian banking and business until one day I sat down and wrote a poem. It was quite naturally about grief and anger and dealing with a loss, but somehow it popped the cork on the bottle and the genie was out. For another year writing poetry kept me sane in endless board meetings where I was there only because I was the widow. Poetry let me open a window for a short look out and close it again when it got too scary or the psychic winds became too strong. Many of the things that I could write in that format, I don't know if I could ever write in prose. I discovered blogs in 2003, but it took a while for me to become comfortable with the form and habit of frequent posting. Now I'm something of an addict and my housework has been known to go to hell in a handbasket when I start writing.

Writing a book is going to be a new challenge. The blog helps me to remember what was going on in my life at various times, but I can't just publish the blog, so it is a total rewrite with a lot more organisation and information to sort out. Big job but I'm looking forward to it. And thank you for the emails in advance.

A Day In The Life

SharmAirport.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

I'm in Sharm right now, a three day weekend that is full of work. Today, Friday, I had a general assembly planned for our airline. A group of six men were coming to my house in Sharm to conduct this meeting that would set up a new management company to handle the affairs of the airline. Part of the new regime was a booth for Orca at the AVEX airshow in Sharm el Sheikh airport. This let the industry know that Orca was back in business. Yesterday I took a tour of the airshow with the general assembly scheduled for today.

I woke up about 9:30 this morning. There are real advantages to not sleeping next to the bird cages. No way can I sleep that late at home. I checked the living room for damage since my son and some friends of his who were going to help me with the meeting had been up late the night before. The living room looked like an explosion in a junk food factory, but there was nothing that a good vacuum couldn't fix, and I started in on the task.

Deciding to take some garden cushions into the storage room next to the laundry room, I wandered back there only to squeak in dismay as I waded into a pool of water. For reasons yet to be determined, my washing machine had decided to fill and then overfill with cold water, flooding the laundry room and part of the storage room. Having no mercy, I roused the younger generation and set them to work with mops and towels to get rid of the water while I finished cleaning up the living room.

As we embarked on this flurry of flood control and cleaning, I got a phone call from a friend of my daughter who was staying at my home in Abu Sir and babysitting the dogs and parrots. My oldest dog is a neutered female, Stella, who was adopted from a stable and been with us for about 15 years. She's getting very old and a bit weak and pack mentality is pretty merciless. Today one of the younger dogs attacked her and Pat broke up the battle incurring an accidental bite in the process. She's getting some stitches in her ears right now and there is a hole in her leg that has to be stitched up as well. But the phone call was definitely less than welcome. I had to take a break from the frantic clean up to call a neighbour to check on Pat (he administered a tetanus shot as well) and a vet friend of mine to come to check Stella as soon as possible.

Once I'd marshalled my veterinary and medical forces, it was back to work on the flood, work that was almost done when the visitors arrived for the meeting. Chairs were dragged into the garden and business commenced over coffee and tea. Three hours later, we'd finished our meeting and business will continue with the management company pushing my airline's renewal. Now I'm waiting for Karim to report on the dog. It's been a long day.

Happy Trails to You

I realise that not everyone is a horse freak. I am. Always have been. I can't remember a time when I wasn't reading about horses, dreaming about horses, or as a child playing games with horses. I got my first horse at the age of forty while we were living in Alexandria. It was both a dream come true and a nightmare. It had been twenty years since I'd ridden regularly and I had to completely re-learn the skill. I hid endless bruised spots and wrenched joints from my concerned husband in the process. But I persisted and within two years was the happy owner of a second Arab mare. Later I bred both mares and now I have their sons. An accidental breeding of the first mare with the son of the second one gave me a third colt. These horses formed the core of my little herd.

While the horses, my riding and my plans for my horses are an important part of my life in Abu Sir, they aren't all of it. Rather than writing as much as I'd like about the horses and riding in this blog, I decided that the riding deserved a blog of it's own and I've started one at http://haramlik.blogspot.com. First I'll be introducing the members of my herd and talking about riding in Egypt, but soon I hope to have some good traveling stories as we plan to do a multiday ride from Abu Sir to Fayoum and back sometime in March. Any of you who are not nuts about horses can give it a miss, but any of the rest are more than welcome to join me.

Ahlan wa sahlan

Warmth of Spring

frontgarden.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

I had a meeting in Zamalek yesterday. Zamalek is an island between downtown Cairo and Giza, in the middle of the Nile. About 80 years ago it was farms and a couple of palaces, but now the mansions that were built there about 50 years ago are giving way to highrises. It is crowded, busy, cosmopolitan, often the residence of choice for upscale couples without children. Parking is horrific. I arrived half an hour early for my meeting so that I would have time to hunt for a parking place and I had to circle the area twice before I found one two blocks away.

As I walked to the office, I found myself in one of those ageless calms that can be encountered in this ancient city. The bombax trees along the street have just finished blooming and the odd deep crimson waxy flower lay on the sidewalk. After a month or two of freezing (well, for Egypt) temperatures, the clouds suddenly cleared and the sun on my face was warm and sweet. Every time I moved into shadow, the air reminded me that it wasn't summer yet with a chill akin to the first encounter with a ball of ice cream in a cup of expresso. Suddenly beneath the racket of traffic I could feel the stillness of the river flowing past the embassies that line the street. I waited for my meeting on the street bathing my rather weary soul in the river's peace.

This morning I passed up the early neighbourhood ride to have a leisurely time feeding the dogs and parrots and watering the grass in my garden. The days were so short and cold that I didn't do much watering for the winter months and my lawn (as you can see) has gone rather brown. Just a year ago the garden was an expanse of sand about 10 cm deep with nothing in it. This spring the poinciana that I planted by the parrots should give good shade, and the hollyhocks that have sprung up are forming a wall along the brick patio. I scattered sunflower, hollyhock and other seeds in the beds along the fenceline, and they are coming up in wonderful clumps that will ensure flowers all summer. I'm constantly astonished at how plants grow here.

About 1 pm I went over to the paddocks and collected my favourite mare for an amble around the neighbourhood. Dory and I have been partners for almost 16 years now and there is no one in the world that I'd prefer to spend time with on a sunny day. I didn't bother with a saddle but gave her the fuzzy purple bareback pad, and off we toddled. Many of the adults were indoors for a noon meal, leaving the children playing along the canals. They shouted hello's endlessly like a flock of earthbound parrots as we passed. The chickens, ducks and geese barely moved for us, and I wished that I'd brought my camera as I watched a couple of hens arguing with a farm cat over something scattered on the ground. Whatever it was, it held an equal appeal for avians and felines.

The watering continues this afternoon while I have the first time to post for three days. The main canal along the Mansoureya road is being repaired and in typical fashion the phone line was cut in the process. Took them three days to find the break and repair. Part of the leisure this morning was the pleasure of reading emails for the first time since Monday.

And tomorrow we could have cold again, so I'd best enjoy the heat while it's here.

Stumbling over sarcophagi

SleepingDogs.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

Just back from a frigid three hour ride in the desert with my Belgian friends. The horses love this weather, and with their furry coats I would too, but I was bundled in a sweatshirt over a tshirt under a fleece jacket, wearing gloves and a helmet with sunglasses that were more for the cold wind than the sun. When I think of how I used to ski in -5 degrees Celsius for hours on end and now I'm shivering in +12 C, it's embarassing. Living here has turned me into a cold weather weenie.

We were making a tour of various antiquities surroundings today. You don't have to actually approach pyramids to be in the midst of ruins here. There is mile after mile of rubble piles, some of which are left overs from other excavations, while others may hide things yet to be excavated. Today we were counting sarcophaguses/sarcophagi?. There are at least 6 or 7 of them lying rather randomly out in the desert. It's hard to imagine how or why they ended up there. After all this time, it could be that they were taken from other resting places or it could be that they never made it there. At the sarcophagus by the railroad track, fourteen year old Pauline remarked that the area was rather spooky with the overturned sarcophagus and the surrounding hills covered by large almost liquid looking boulders. A surrealistic sculpture garden of sorts. Another sarcophagus that we encountered at the top of another hill had the expected body and head shape cut out of the stone. A perfect Hollywood mummy movie artifact.

On the way back we took a shortcut through an area where the antiquities department has been dumping rubble in the desert, mostly the remains of the old guesthouse that was torn down when they discovered that leaky pipes were releasing water into the ground near the Serapeum. The Serapeum was first excavated in the 1800's by the French archaeologist Mariette, who found an underground complex of rooms filled with enormous (think dumptruck-sized) sarcophagi (http://www.touregypt.net/serapeum.htm). Earthquakes in recent years and problems with rising groundwater have forced the closure of the Serapeum recently, but I was fortunate to see it a number of times before it was closed. There is even still one enormous sarcophagus still resting in a passage on its way to its final resting place. These basalt sarcophagi were for the sacred Apis bulls. As we were picking our way through the piles of rock and sand, I noticed a round white object that proved to be a human skull. I have no idea how old it was but it didn't seem to be that old. When I returned to the paddocks and dropped by one of my neighbours to whom I mentioned the skull, he said that it was possibly some unfortunate who found a hasty burial out there.

Amazing what you find in the desert.

The dogs are actually a puzzle. Figure out how many you see. On a cold rainy day, this is the only way to do it.

Cloudy Days

TracyDonkey.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

The photo accompanying this post was put there expressly to remind me that not everyday is like today..and yesterday...and the day before. The last few days would definitely not qualify for the high point in my life. The weather has turned cold again and the ambient temperature in my house and my refrigerator are pretty much the same. I must admit to being rather tired of wearing an old Eddie Bauer fleece jacket indoors to fend off the chill. Cold is one thing when you can go into a warm room and relax a bit, but when it is unrelenting, your whole body becomes tired with the effort of warming. At night I lay a heavy nightgown of cotton fleece on the oil radiator that pitifully works on the glaciers in the living room so that at least that is warm when I go to bed. A small battalion of rat terriers helps to warm up the snowfield that passes for my bed, but we aren't really comfy until nearly morning, when it's time to brave the chill again to get going for the new day. I keep tellling myself that I will look back longingly sometime in June, but that doesn't do much for feet that go numb on my tile floors.

An assortment of my mechanical friends have decided that this is the time to remind me that they have minds/mechanisms of their own. My laptop and iPod both seem to have some memory problems and may have to take a trip to Dubai for rehab. This is not happy news even though they both are under warranty. I'm supposed to go into the Apple doctors this morning to refine the diagnosis, but unfortunately my Jeep is at the mechanic. I noticed that it wasn't running smoothly and thought that there might be a problem with the fuel filter. We changed that (along with the pump since Jeep in its infinite wisdom decided that the two should be one, thereby increasing the sales value of the spare parts), but that wasn't the problem. Now they are changing the oil and filter in the transmission and hopefully that will fix it. If it doesn't, I'm looking at rather more hefty repairs. But that Jeep is my lifeline and I can't afford for it to fall apart. Right now I'm having to rely on the kindness of friends to get things done.

As if the electronics and the car weren't enough, I also had to go into the centre of town yesterday with Mona to buy myself a new stove. My previous cooker was an antique that had been in our villa when we bought the place and it finally announced its retirement the other night while I was baking bread for my parrots. I heard a loud pop and went into the kitch to find the floor covered in small chunks of the mirrored glass that had once been the outside of the oven door. So right now I'm sitting in my fleece jacket typing on my unhappy laptop and staring at a large carton in the middle of my living room floor. The carton contains my new stove and I'm waiting for the workmen who have to dismantle one of my kitchen cupboards to get the old one out and the new one in. Unfortunately, I had the fridge and stove in place before the cupboards were installed in the world's smallest kitchen. The workmen had best show up soon since I still have to go to the Apple guys downtown, be back in time for riding with clients, and bake more bird bread tonight. With this weather, the parrots are consuming food like elephants.

I know that I am one of those people whose mental outlook is strongly affected by light. A winter in San Francisco during the rainiest year in California's history was as close to hell as I ever wish to come. In four months we had about four sunny days and I thought that I was never going to have any energy again. Egypt's almost perpetual sunshine is just what my solar batteries need and I feel the drop sharply when the sun just isn't there. We had more rain in Alexandria but the storms would blow through dumping gallons on us interspersed with sunshine. It's the uniform grey that gets to me. But the weather icons on the bottom of my Firefox browser tell me that the temperature is supposed to go up 10 degrees tomorrow and the sun should come back, so life will look up again. Now if I can just get the machines working the way that they should....

Anniversary Stock Taking

PalMette.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

It's almost a year now since I moved to Abu Sir. I moved into my house here mid-February 2004 and immediately had guests. Some female endurance riders in the US heard that one of our mutual friends was going to be visiting me and rather abruptly decided to join her. While here they helped the local endurance group put on a 40 km (25 mile or limited distance in endurance parlance) ride from just north of the Abu Sir pyramids to the lake just south of the Dahshur complex. It was a week of unforgettable fun and laughter for five women sharing a house about the size of a bus shelter with roughly a dozen dogs. I was utterly unbalanced from the move, matching their abrupt immersion in rural Egypt. Throughout the year, my home has been the base for a number of visitors to Egypt, most of them college students.

My garden has gone from being a square of sand to relative lushness, with overabundant morning glory vines along the fence, trees planted to shade the grass, and eager holly hocks springing up from seeds dropped last summer. I've discovered that morning glory is not a good choice when your neighbours are planted fields. Morning glory is an aggressive grower and has to be trimmed regularly to keep it out of the corn, beans, or alfalfa just outside the fence. The horse parking lot of sand that was left just in front of the verandah has almost completely been overgrown by lawn, reducing still more the sand that gets tracked into the house. Thank heaven for small mercies. This spring the poinciana and jacaranda trees should be blooming and the small tecumaya bushes almost block the view of my bedroom wall. The parrots have done much too good a job of pruning the bouganvilleia for them to really flourish, poor things, but the cactus planted all around the flight cages to deter the incursions of prey driven terriers has grown enormously. Unfortunately, the terriers could care less about cactus, but the chickens no longer care about the dogs and the parrots never did.

My house still contains boxes that should have been unpacked during the year and weren't, but it has the lived-in clutter of books, dogs, and odd carvings or clay shapes that all my friends associate with me. I've amassed an impressive collection of candles to handle our frequent power failures. Seems to me that if I have to go by candlelight, it might as well be scented and have an interesting shape. I've accumulated a collection of rag kilims and bedouin pillows that form the basis of my decor in the living room, and a string of visitors has left an even larger collection of odd phrasebooks, guidebooks, and maps in the guest room.

My dog population got up to 22 at one point, but thankfully not for long. It's back down to more reasonble levels, well sort of reasonable. The chickens dropped from the initial four to two and are back up to four again, since a 6 year old friend presented me with a young rooster and a hen named after cartoon characters. The rooster so far has shown little inclination to crow, and what crowing he's done has been done at sensible hours like 8:30 am. My kind of rooster.

The horse population has increased slightly with my taking in the aging gelding that belongs to a friend of mine, being given another young gelding by a friend who was being transferred to the United States, and the purchase of a mare. I'm gradually gaining clients for riding tours and lessons, and I'm content that it isn't too many. The income helps to defray the feed bills even, but my life isn't simple enough to allow me all the time that I need for the horse business.

It's been a good year. Most of my neighbours have gotten to realise that my life is just about as unexciting as theirs. Where the path around my garden used to be a favourite gawking tour, now it's simply used as a normal thoroughfare. Not much to see but a woman feeding her birds, mowing her lawn, reading a book in the garden. The thrill is overwhelming. I'm very comfortable being their boring neighbour.

The year has gone by, the circle has been completed once again. Days will grow longer and warmer. The wheat just rising in the fields will grow golden at the beginning of the summer, and the night will become the best time for riding. I don't know what the next year will bring, but I know that I'm looking forward to it.