I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?

The news is always bad, but the last few days have felt overwhelming.

• A gunman (claimed by Hamas) killed 6 at a bus stop in Jerusalem.
• Netanyahu pledged retaliation against Gaza for this because...whatever else has happened in Gaza should not be considered retaliatory enough as it is?? Or because Gaza isn't suppose to retaliate?? Or some other reasoning I don't understand... I mean, they also killed the shooter, so...I dunno.
• Also Israel bombed a residential area in Doha, targeting—and killing—5 Hamas leaders, and 1 security guard (so, like, wasn't that retaliation?...I guess I don't understand the word very well).
• Russia continues to bomb Ukraine, the bullies.
• Russia also has sent drones into Polish airspace, setting a large portion of Europe on edge. 
• NEPAL, friends. What? They overthrew their government, burnt down their parliament building. Props—you do you, boo. But then they also, like, burned the ex-first lady alive and did a bunch of super violent stuff? Less cool—exceedingly uncool.
• There was a school shooting in Colorado. Nice. Neat. Great. Seems we can't get enough of those. Hope and prayers. Pop some popcorn. 

Flooding

It was difficult for me to watch the news about High River's big flood back in 2013. 

The flooding in Texas has been absolutely gut-wrenching, with over 100 dead (including 27 children/counselors from a summer camp). To be fair, that flooding has been nothing short of catastrophic...it hurts my heart just to think about it.

Durham is flooding right now as well, and it's eerie to watch the news from there. 

We used to live at the red tag on the following map:

Our neighbourhood was called Eno Trace, and you can kind of see where the river...traces...Lazyriver Drive, the main road in our neighbourhood. We used to hike through the woods to get to River Forest Park (which my kids called the "Purple Slide Park"). There wasn't a great place to cross the river, but Old Farm Road Park is clearly right there as well (we would sometimes have soccer games there), just off Rippling Stream Road. Because of the river, though, we'd have to take Infinity down to Roxboro Road and then enter that neighbourhood. 

Burning...Burnaby...Bertram...

On Saturday night the girls had (almost) all the young women in the ward over to play games. It was a little difficult for Benjamin to be excluded (but if he wants to plan a games night with the young men, he's more than welcome to do that). Rachel and Miriam have just felt like the younger young women were in need of some...fellowshipping...so that guided their invite list. 

We had a big storm that evening. 

Phoebe woke up when most of the girls were leaving (and so many other times—she hardly slept that whole night, I feel like, so the night's events were even more of a surprise to Andrew and I, the guardians of the night, who took turns putting her back to bed and putting her back to bed and putting her back to bed).

Anyway, Phoebe woke up when the girls came up to the entry way to put on their shoes. 

"Goodness gracious!" she whispered to me from her bed. "They are going outside right now?! In a thunderstorm!!"

"Well," I explained. "Yes, but only because they're going home. Their moms and dads have come to pick them up so they're just...running from our house to their cars really quick. They're not going out to play."

"Okay, good!" Phoebe said. "Because that would not be safe. 

It was very thundery on Saturday night. And Phoebe, as I mentioned, had an awful time sleeping. 

Getting up for church on Sunday morning was a real drag, especially because I woke up earlier than my alarm when I heard the power shut off. I checked the area to see if there was a power outage, but nothing was mentioned, and soon enough the power came back on. 

We got ready for church and headed out the door. 

Our neighbour texted me just before I went in to primary to tell me that Filthy (Fil) the Clown's house had burned down! She had driven past on her way to mass. 

Evidently, Andrew and his phase of church-goers (the prelude players) had seen firetrucks and things. 

My phase of church-goers (the stragglers) really didn't. Or at least I didn't. My passengers report seeing a few vehicles. 

We drove home that way on our way home from church and were shocked—shocked, shocked, shocked! It was so much worse than I imagined. There's just...nothing left inside. 

Ambiguous headlines

The other day there was a news story with the headline "Rafter is briefly ‘swallowed’ by whale in Chile, as his father films" and...I don't know if my brain has simply been doing too much lately, but I could not parse these words. I had questions, but I didn't quite have time to delve into the story so I simply said, "Huh," and moved on. 

First of all, I couldn't really understand what a whale was doing swallowing a rafter, or what the rafter was doing in the ocean in the first place. Perhaps—and hear me out—some debris left over from a hurricane. Like, a house got swept out to sea, dashed to bits, and...there are rafters just floating around like well-milled logs.

And, I mean, if I were a whale trying to swallow a rafter, I'd probably only attempt that briefly as well. 

Surely a rafter is a choking hazard. 

Like swallowing a toothpick....or a stick-stick.

Anyway, what I really couldn't figure out was how the father was filming this. 

Wednesday things

This morning Phoebe spilled a cup of water on a laptop and completely fried it. 

Zoë was doing math on the couch, lying on her stomach, with the laptop resting in front of her. And Phoebe walked up with a cup—and open water bottle, actually—and just...there goes that laptop.

She has been a challenging child lately (I mean—are open containers of water even allowed in the living room? They are not so...).

Fortunately she's very cute.

*****

We had our first day of co-op today. I'm teaching ukulele to...some group of kids. Are they grades 4 and 5? Who is to say? Zoë is in my class, which she's excited about. 

I was nervous about saying yes to co-op because I'm afraid I'm a little bit busy, but the moms really wanted me to come back to teach ukulele. So I said that I could as long as I didn't have to be a co-teacher for any other classes. So I'm teaching 8 hours, but my kids will end up with 32 hours of instruction (24 of which I'll be able to be somewhat alone to get some work done—I could be all the way alone if Phoebe would go to the preschool class, but...she won't go alone, so...Rachel went with her for the first hour today (while I was teaching), but Phoebe wouldn't go back alone and Rachel wanted to get some math work done, so Phoebe just hung out with me). 

I taught the kids outside because apparently there were some complaints about me wearing a mask while I was teaching last year. But, honestly, my kids have been sick since the middle of June so everyone should be grateful we're masking up and not sharing these germs we have (because they are brutal).

I checked for various hazards before spreading out blankets for the kids to sit on—anthills and goose poop, mostly—and the area I chose seemed to be mostly clear of those things. A couple of kids noticed some stray ants wandering across the picnic blanket, but nothing too concerning.

After class, a boy in the class wanted to show me some things that his brother had taught him already (his brother took ukulele with me last year) so I stopped to listen to him, and he's really quite good already (so I know I can bring in some more challenging stuff for some of the kids to work on while other kids are mastering the basics). And then I started stinging all over because...

I'd stopped to listen to him right on an anthill!

I took my kids to the pool yesterday

 I took my kids to the pool yesterday. 

They were all surprisingly cooperative as I ran stroke clinics and made them swim laps and tread water and things like that. We also worked on our stride entry, a method of entering the pool from the side while keeping your head above water so you can keep your eyes on the victim.

"Wait...there's a victim?!" Rachel gasped.

"Yeah, like....a drowning victim."

"Well, that really raises the stakes!"

I suppose it does. 

We practiced entering the water with a stride entry and a pool noodle (which isn't really a life-saving device, but we didn't want to get out the pool's rescue rings since they're only for true emergencies) to rescue each other while we took turns pretending to drown. We practiced our surface dives. 

We practiced a lot of things. And then Phoebe woke up from her poolside nap and began commanding my attention.

Mute

Along with the many other global tragedies so often on my mind (wildfires, starving children, refugees, that sort of thing), I'm feeling rather distressed by what's going on at our very own border today.

I have no words. None. 

Poetry without borders

Yesterday the church announced that they'll be releasing new versions of the hymn book and children's songbook. They have a survey up for people to take so members can share things they like about the books as well as things they don't. And they've asked for submissions of new works and so forth.

Poetry swirls in my brain constantly, though I don't write much of it down, but I thought it would be fun to try to write some song lyrics to submit. I think my chances of creating anything noteworthy is slim, not because I don't think I'm capable of writing well but because I think I'm incapable of escaping the slightly silly, slightly sarcastic tone my poetry is wont to take.

It's a family curse, I swear.

As proof, I offer first to you poem Andrew's ancestor, Joseph Stacey Murdock, wrote:

Come, listen to a prophet’s voice,
And hear the word of God,
And in the way of truth rejoice,
And sing for joy aloud.
We’ve found the way the prophets went
Who lived in days of yore.
Another prophet now is sent
This knowledge to restore.

No good can come from bad

I have a million other things to write about but I feel like today would be a good day for Flashback Friday to end its hiatus (it's Monday, though, so perhaps we'll call today Memory Monday) because I've been searching through the archives and though I referenced this story in passing I never really told the story.

Certain current events, however, have made this story seem even more harrowing than I think it felt at the time. I was terrified and angry at the time, yet also felt this sense of control because what was happening felt too ludicrous to be allowed. Surely the border control officer was joking. The very idea was laughable; no one in their right mind would allow it. So of course it couldn't happen, wouldn't happen.

And it didn't happen. Not to me.

But apparently it is happening!

And perhaps I'll talk about that a little bit, but first, the story:

In 2009 we were living in Egypt—a full-blown dictatorship at the time—and my friend Jaehee (a Korean citizen) had to exit the country in order to renew her visa. Since her husband and my husband were both in the middle of their master's degree programs and couldn't take time off of school right then (and, as American citizens, had the option to renew their visas without leaving the country), I told Jaehee that I would be happy to go on a trip out of the country with her. Though I didn't have to leave Egypt to renew my visa, either, I'm always up for an adventure!

We researched the safest/easiest/cheapest place for two women—and one toddler, because 21 month-old Rachel would also be joining us—to fly to and settled on Greece. So we booked our tickets, arranged some hotels, and jetted off across the Mediterranean Sea for a wonderful Hellenic holiday.

Koshari, Chéri

Andrew made a lovely Lebanese dinner tonight: hummus, mana'eesh (topped with za'atar), and falafel. He's already planning on making zeit wa za'atar for dinner on Monday, but if he can find fava beans so he can make ful to go with it, "otherwise I'm making koshari," he said.

So while I was loading the dishes I started singing, "Koshari-shari! Whatever will be, will be! The future's not ours to see. Koshari-shari!"

Because I'm a nerd.

The more I sang it—because I consider children shrieking with laughter and saying, "Mom, what are you singing!?" to be calls for an encore (and thus sang it several times because I don't actually know much more of the song...Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?)—the more it started sounding like koshari, chéri.

I guess French—France—Paris—has been on my mind. But not just France.

My mind has been very busy lately.

In December 1980, President Spencer W. Kimball published an article in The Ensign about keeping a journal. In January 1981 my grandpa opened a notebook and at the very top of the very first page he wrote, "Our prophet Spencer W. Kimball asked each of us to keep a daily journal." He kept a record for the next several years—not a daily record but a record nonetheless. This simple action expressed his testimony of the gospel quite clearly to me.

Recently my facebook feed has been ablaze with chatter about the change in church policy regarding the baptism of children living with parents in a same-gender relationship (ie. it shouldn't happen). Based on the clarification of the policy, the original wording wasn't really well-written. Still, it wasn't exactly intended for public consumption—at least, not right away—it was leaked.

(Side note: This afternoon Benjamin came into the house crying, "Miriam leaked my secret!" and I was quite puzzled about his choice of words because he's three and he's talking about "leaked" secrets. What?! But now I'm thinking that perhaps we discussed the word leaked at the dinner table some point in the past two weeks, so maybe it makes sense. The secret, in case you're wondering, is that she's a witch. Not in real life. Just in the game. But she said, "I know I'm a witch!" and now everybody knows and it was Benjamin's secret and the world is over. Clearly.)

Bleeding heart

Trading Tables is next week and I've already got five garbage bags full of stuff to get rid of. Five!

That's what living in a house for three full years will do for you. I'm going through cupboards and closets and drawers and saying to myself, "Self, we haven't used this ever in this house. It's been sitting here for three years taking up space." And into the giveaway bag it goes.

I saw a post on Facebook last night about a charity accepting baby slings and carriers to send to Greece to help outfit Syrian refugees. I'd put two baby carriers in the giveaway bag. I love wearing my babies, but after eight years of baby wearing I've certainly developed "favourite" carriers so I decided to ditch the ones I never use anymore. They're in the Trading Tables bag but I thought I'd dig them out to send to Greece (actually to Colorado where another person would send them to Greece (international shipping is quite expensive)).

But then a friend—who I met in Egypt but who now lives in Jordan—hopped on and said, "Just send them to me and I'll take them directly to the Syrian refugee camps here!"

So that's what I'm going to do (since I can ship to her without paying international shipping prices).

And, frankly, Jordan's dear to my heart and they've taken in so many refugees (1 in 13 people in Jordan is a Syrian refugee (when we were living there I feel like there were more Iraqi refugees)); they could use the help.

We won't speak about how Israel is building a fence to keep refugees out, but I will say that I just finished reading Rose Under Fire and, wow. It was no Hogan's Heroes, I'll tell you that much. Of course, Hogan's Heroes was about life in a POW camp (and was a comedy) and Rose Under Fire is about life in a concentration camp (and was anything but a comedy).

Finishing that book and then reading Netanyahu's little blurb about being unable to take in refugees made me smirk and think, "Nice."

Israel's gross domestic product is $36,051 per capita, nearly seven times the GDP of Jordan ($5,214), and yet Jordan can help with refugees and Israel can't?!

Ahem.

Anyway.

Miriam was so sweet today when I was talking about this—the war in Syria, etc—with the kids.

She immediately started ticking off extra sleeping spaces on her fingers.

"We have the single air mattress," she said. "And the double air mattress. That's three. Then I guess someone could sleep on the couch. So we could take three, maybe four, refugees!"

Hand towels in the sink

To say I woke up grumpy this morning would be inaccurate. I was grumpy, sure, but I'm not sure that my waking up qualified as such considering the amount of sleep I'd gotten through the night. Benjamin's been fussy—tossing and turning and whining all night—for the past several nights and it's been torture.

Last night I got him to go to bed at around 9:00 and then went off to book club. I grabbed my purse (and nothing else), hopped into the van, and drove down the street. It was my first time leaving the house without my baby in tow since July. I had a lovely time talking to some of the sisters in my ward about Henry Van Dyke's The Mansion. We talked about service and miracles and faith and gratitude. It was perfect and just what I needed.

We finally called it a night and I slowly, slowly made my way home (in the dark...with fogging windows). I was greeted at the door by my fairly desperate husband and inconsolable little boy.

"Why didn't you text me?! I had my phone on my lap the whole night!" I said over the noise that poor baby was making.

"I assumed you were having a good time and didn't want to interrupt you!" he said loudly back.

I quickly took Benjamin from Andrew and quieted him down. It took a while. He was so upset with life that he was flailing and jerking his little body around; he could hardly settle down to nurse and then once he did he continued to grunt angrily to communicate his displeasure.

I had him asleep and back in his bed by 2 AM when Andrew and I slipped outside to watch for meteors. I saw three. Andrew saw the third one with me and then said, "I saw one—let's go back inside now!"

It suddenly got cold here. Like it frosted last night and everything.

It got up to about 70 degrees by this afternoon but this morning it was frosty outside.

Benjamin had gotten up at 3 AM...and 5 and 6 and 7:30. I was wasted.

After I'd changed his diaper and set him down to play with his toys I went into the girls' bathroom to wash my hands and grab some hair stuff so I could do Rachel's hair for school. And I lost my cool completely.

Here's the thing:

When our girls are finished doing whatever it is they're doing at the sink they put all their tools into the sink instead of where they go.

The Hostess with the mostest

Dear Americans,

Relax—junk food will prevail. Hostess may have gone out of business—you might Wonder where you'll find your next loaf of bread (that was a real Zinger, wasn't it?) or if you'll ever eat another Twinkie but I assure you the world has not ended. How do I know this? Because Hostess has gone out of business before...and the world didn't end then. Why should it end now?

I'm about to tell you some lame facts that I read on Wikipedia so sit right back, grab some munchies and your favourite doll (which is, perhaps, also a munchy) and relax.

'Cuz when you've got the munchies, nothing else will do!

Ding, dong Bin Laden's dead

Andrew, this is for you...since it's 4:00 AM in Ghana...and I just experienced history without you.

(Hahahahaha; it hurts, doesn't it?)

Wake up, sleepy head! Rub your eyes, get out of bed!
Wake up, Bin Laden now is dead! 
He's gone where the terrorists go,
Below, below, below. Yo-ho! 
Let's open up and sing and ring the bells out.
Ding Dong, the merry-oh. Sing it high. Sing it low.
Let them know, Bin Laden now is dead!

As Pres'dent of the States United, in the White House in the land DC,
I say to you, most regally,
And we've even verified it legally, to see...

On Revolutions, success, and failure

I think it's interesting when so many events in my life blur together.

I read the first book in The Hunger Games Trilogy in January and started reading Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea right after. It was amazing to see the similarities in the two books and realize that the world portrayed in The Hunger Games, a world I thought was too fictional to exist, exists. Minus the whole gaming part. But seriously, North Korea is in a bad way.

And while I was plotting in my little mind how to shout out to North Korea: Hey, you guys! There's a whole world out here! (And we have the internet!) You can be free! You all just need to join forces and pull down the regime. That's all...

(That's kind of where my message fizzled because I don't really know how to overthrow a powerful government so could offer North Korea no good advice on the matter.)

Anyway, while I was plotting in my little mind about how to overthrow North Korea, Egypt started its revolution. And I thought to myself, "If only North Korea could do this, too!" It seems that almost anyone who saw anything about the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, and who were fed up with being oppressed by tyrants, decided that overthrowing the government was the thing to do in 2011. If only North Korea knew about it; I'm sure they would have hopped on the band wagon, too.

A letter from Egypt

For some reason the internet is back on in Egypt. No one quite knows why—things are getting rather violent today! Still, at least it is something. I was able to hear from several friends still inside Egypt, whether by their own choice or because they have no means of leaving. Here's an [edited] letter from a friend who is married to an Egyptian:

Hello Nancy!!!

YOU got out in a good time. LUCKY YOU!!!

It is so great to have Internet back again. Thanks for your concern about us here in Cairo. We are just staying home as much as possible and staying off the street. Most of the families in our already small branch have been evacuated and so we are down to 4 ladies and the husbands of many of the families that left. ( me, ———, ——— and ——— ). It is quite sad really. I think that if things calm down then in a month maybe some of those families will come back to Cairo. I hope and pray that happens.

As for school we have not been evacuated and it didn’t seem like the administrators were planning to do so. Even if they did, I was not hired from abroad so I would not be included in those that could get evacuated. I will just hang tight with my family here and keep a low profile and out of harms way as much as possible! We do have small protests happening in my neighborhood and they have caught several thieves or men that were trying to break into places. We have a neighborhood watch out every single night, which consists of the men in the neighborhood armed with long sticks, baseball bats, kitchen knives and poles. They have the streets blocked off with anything that they can find to make a roadblock. Mostly fallen trees, old pieces of wood and piles of bricks. Between the men guarding the streets and the blocked streets, we feel pretty protected.

Evacuations

There have been some questions floating around about the LDS community in Egypt. Not all my friends left in Egypt are LDS but naturally many of them are. With the recent evacuations, I think most of them will be leaving Egypt this week, but perhaps I'll share a few anonymous-like stories.

The LDS humanitarian (not proselytizing) missionary couple are leaving Egypt this week. The mission office has decided that this will mark the end of their mission, instead of sending them back when things stabilize over there.

I'm terribly funny

"You're a tortfeaser," Andrew told me last night.

"Um, what?" I asked.

"I'm just practicing my vocabulary. A tortfeaser is someone who commits a tort. A tort is some sort of injustice done to someone, either deliberately or through negligence. So that," he explained, lightly punching my arm, "would be a tort."

"And would this be a retort?" I asked, punching him back.

Sometimes I can be really funny.

"I wonder if tort shares the same root as torture," I said (it does).

That got us on the topic of torture which eventually led us to discuss terrorism, which is something we've been discussing at length recently, trying to determine whether the recent attempted-assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and massacre of onlookers could be classified as terrorism or not.

Terrorism as it stands is a fairly new concept. Its usage skyrocketed after 9/11 but it's still a rather shaky, ambiguous term so it's hard to say if any "isolated incident" should be considered terrorism or not.

"I wonder if terrorism is really a word of mixed origin," I mused, "Perhaps it is most commonly used to describe acts of terror perpetrated by Muslims because it uses the Latin root terror and the Arabic root ism. That gives you terrorism: something done in the name of terror."

Andrew thought that was clever.

Sometimes I can be terribly funny.

We regret to inform you…we’ve run out of ice cream

Plan A has been squashed like a bug—there will be no PhD for us, at least not this year. We were rejected by every school we applied to and, frankly, it feels awful. Andrew feels even worse than I do, I’m sure, since he’s the addressee of the letters of regret. What more could we have done?

He has a 3.933 GPA. He was awarded a research grant. One of his translations is being published in the upcoming Literary Atlas of Cairo. His GRE scores are competitive. I’m positive he had excellent letters of recommendation. And it isn’t like AUC is unprestigious.

As far as we can tell it’s this darn recession we’re in.

Signs today was awesome

1) At 9:00 PM Rachel asked if she could go to bed.

2) We got our jogging stroller fixed. It runs as smooth as silk now.

3) We spent the afternoon at the Maadi House. Rachel ran in the grass and played at the playground and I chatted.

4) Rachel, Miriam, and I all had an early afternoon nap. That hasn’t happened in forever.

5) We spent the morning in the pool at the Maadi House. Even though the pool heater is broken it was still warm-ish (ie. not frigid).