Thanksgiving Family Edition!!

This will be my longest blog yet - tons of fun with Kyle, Maureen, Lauren, Dad and the cats in Alaska for Thanksgiving.

Kyle and Maureen live in a beautiful high-ceilinged house near Palmer and Wasilla, Alaska. Lauren spends her weekends there, often doing homework - she's an amazing smart young woman and working hard to fill up her brain with useful stuff. I was pretty shocked to hear her reciting Spanish poetry - wow!

 We saw this Mama Moose on the road near Kyle's house. The baby had apparently already crossed the road so we didn't see him or her.

The whole area is gloriously beautiful. It's about an hour and a half from Anchorage, and there are mountains in nearly every direction. The sun is up for about 6 hours a day right now, but we had plenty of snow so some days we didn't see the sun at all.






Kyle's place backs up on a tiny air strip, shown in the picture below. There's a sign that says "Yield to Aircraft" and a windsock. We saw planes circling over it, as if to land, but never did see one actually come down. It's covered with snow but the snow is regularly tamped down by a neighbor, who drags a hunk of chainlink fence across it.

These two are shots from Lazy Mountain, where I drove with Maureen and her daughter Estelle. It was an incredibly cold and windy day. The reason we are both screaming is probably because we are freezing our butts off and want to get back in the car.

Kyle's cat, Bart, is happiest when touching Kyle in some way, like this shot of him at the computer. I think he should watch out for carpal tunnel, but at least he has not bothered the cat.

Bart has the run of the house, including up this ladder to the loft. Bart's got one blue and one gold one, making him look a bit ethereal, especially with all that white fur.

Here, Bart is licking Kyle's head. I think that is really funny, especially because Kyle does not seem to mind or find it strange.










Even funnier is this video of Bart gettin' jiggy with some catnip. Dad is worried about the legality of this video, but I assured him that medical catnip is approved in Alaska.

What follows is a series of pictures of Kyle, Lauren and I cleaning snow off the roof. This seems to be something Kyle has to do a lot - he's got a whole process, tying the rope to a string and hucking it over the house using a tennis ball, knotting the rope on the railing on the other side of the house, then walking up the steep angle while holding the rope. Then he slides down on his butt till the snow breaks off, and rides the snow to the edge of the roof. Then he launches himself off to the ground, hopefully landing in soft snow.

With the quantity of snow I saw while I was there, I'm not surprised this is necessary. But Lauren and I couldn't let him have all that fun by himself. Lauren follows him up first, then I had to try. Maybe if you scroll through the pictures rapidly, it'll look like a movie.

Thanksgiving was a complete feast. Not only is Maureen an amazing, fun person whose company I loved while I was there, she cooks like a maniac. Actually, no, that's not right - she's the calmest, most contented chef I've ever seen. She makes cooking look easy and relaxing and fun. She made all the Thanksgiving specialties, plus homemade bread and a pecan-pumpkin pie that, as Dad would say, should be illegal. De-lish!

Here are Kyle and Maureen at the head of the table. Kyle, being such an eater, thinks pretty highly of Maureen. He is swoony around her, and I don't think it's just the food! Maureen - welcome to the family! Hope we didn't scare you off!!! :>

This is a pic Dad took of Maureen and Kyle in front of their wood stove. It's a pretty amazing stove, does the job of heating the house and looks nice too. Most of the time it smells great - a light woodsy smell, making it feel like you're "really" in Alaska.

Only once did this smell get tarnished. Maureen's cat Piper found a hot spot with her bottle-brush tail and burned the crap out of her long fur. As Piper is a bit... reclusive, we never saw the extent of the damage, but we smelled it the rest of the day - yuck!

Now, on to the most marvelous kid in the world. She's my niece, so it's possible I'm not entirely unbiased. But I think I can speak with a certain amount of objectivity when I say, "Lauren is stupendous." She is smart, athletic, capable, gorgeous, funny. She can hold her own in any snark-fest. She loves animals, the outdoors, joking, sarcasm... in short, she is a perfect Culver. I am so glad she's my niece.

We put on tattoos from my National Novel Writing Month kit. I'm bookish. She's a mugger.


 She is also adept at braiding hair. After this photo was taken, I looked mahvelous.

And it must be said, we played a lot of ping pong while I was there. At first we hooked it up on the kitchen counter, but it didn't give us enough room to swing. So Kyle brought in a piece of plywood (of COURSE he had one!) and we set it up as a post-prandial digestif.

Here's me playing Dad, in a video taken from the loft. I, ahem, beat him.

I also BEAT KYLE!!!! But Kyle, unable to handle publicity of his loss (first of any kind to me), pulled the film out of the camera. Luckily I have family members who can attest to it. I. Kicked. Kyle's. Butt.

NaNoWriMo!

I finished my novel!

I wrote over 50,000 words in the month of November, on a novel I haven't named yet. Here's the (as yet unpublished) jacket blurb:

The terrorists who blew up superspy Nathalie Jahangir's city have crawled out from underneath their rock and have returned to wreak havoc on London's financial infrastructure. Nathalie's got to use every trick in the book, and a few new ones she's invented, to stop the mayhem, save the Queen, and get a date for the Royal Wedding. Fortunately, she's up to the challenge.

Great Circle Map

These are my flights so far this year.

The Internet is very cool!

More soon from Alaska...

Back to Africa

The road from the airport was so familiar, as was the taxi driver, Elias. Everywhere I turned, a familiar face. Zambia holds so many fun memories - it disguises how hard I worked there last year. Somehow I found time to have a big impression made on me, and to make many small impressions around Lusaka. The barista at Ababa House, my coffee and internet haunt, made this for me when I arrived:

It was jacaranda season - purple everywhere. These trees are especially stark because of their dark black trunks, against which those purple flowers seem to color the sky around them.

Last year at the same time, I was in Lusaka watching these mammoths bloom and, then, a couple weeks later, yield those blossoms to the wind.

I went to Mumbwa in Central District for the project we're evaluating, and learned how Land O'Lakes and World Vision distributed food to families and how they knew what price to pay for their local maize, beans and oil.


Somehow I made time for a lot of catching up with friends here, too. There was ping pong at the Milennium, fajitas and margaritas at Revolucion, G&Ts with Michael on his back porch with (now) three cats(!), the (in)famous Keri Shandy drink (2/3 red wine, 1/3 coca cola) at the Taj Pamodzi Hotel lounge, a trip through the finally completed Manda Hill Mall (and subsequent Zambian dress purchase), multiple coffees at Arcades, pickup volleyball against some uppity teenagers at the American International School, dinner with John and family including beans purchased at Soweto Market while doing research on bean price trends, and to close it all out, a trip back to Ababa House for one more coffee:

Dubai Bai Night

A night in Dubai. I had a layover between Afghanistan and Zambia at DXB, and I had read that there were some FlyerTalkers celebrating a birthday there. I took a cab downtown and had dinner with them, and looking out over the balcony of the restaurant I could see the Creek full of boats all lit up like Christmas. There were lots of cargo ships as well, heading to Iran according to my cabbie.

The cabbie drove me around to see the World's Tallest Building, at least before it gets superceded by another that's under construction. We also drove past the World's Largest Shopping Mall, the World's Most Under Construction Rich People Zone, and the World's Most Superfluous Expenses part of town. Dubai must be a weird place to live, like Vail gone global.

First night in Kabul

I've arrived without a hitch, after that long wait in the Dubai airport. I feel much better, having slept on the flight to Kabul. The guest house and compound where I'm staying is extremely nice, and seems well "fortified." There are armed guards who have worked for the company for years, and inside it's a very comfortable home on one side, very modern with all the conveniences, and offices on the other side. There's a gym and a snooker table (Dad? A little help there? How do I play snooker?) I brought my ping pong kit too.

They gave me a tour of the home and I'll just be here tonight, no going out or anything. Three meals, daily room cleaning and daily laundry are included in the room for $11 a day. NICE!!!! It's super comfortable. There was one room with a picture window that let in more light, but I took the more "inside" room out of an abundance of caution. Paranoia, probably, but whatever. There's a Salvadoran man working here and we had a nice chat about Latin America. How nice to speak Spanish so far from that side of the world! The big burly security guard named Paul picked me up at the airport with a driver, Jamal. Then there are staff members all over the house - because Saturday is a work day. It's a six day work week (not like that's anything new...) and Friday is the day off. Who knew?

When I was in line for the immigration counter, the other Western women put on scarves - lucky I had thought to bring one. I didn't have a mirror, and had never practiced, but I made it through immigration and out to the waiting car without a hitch. Probably I look like a rookie. But I've never been in a country like this. The closest thing, geographically, was the south of Russia, which is nominally Muslim and the call to prayer rings out each night over the city. But there, it was pretty secular - people didn't stop what they were doing to pray.
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All is well here. We bought a ping pong table for the compound today, after we got done working. Hey, we need to wind down, right? And beer is $112 a case!!!!! Might as well get a ping pong table for not quite double that amount, at least it'll last longer than the beer.

I of course beat everyone in the house except the Crazy Croat, who could probably hit the ping pong ball through the wall if he wanted to. But I did pretty good. Dad would be proud.

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The client asked for a "working dinner." Who ever heard of such crap? Working lunch, sure. Sit around and eat dry chicken and talk about deliverables, we've all done it. But a "working dinner"? C'mon. The security guys heard our conversation about this, looked at each other and smiled: they'll be in Kandahar when the working dinner happens, and will miss it completely.

Note to client: you can be sure you've proposed something stupid when people would rather be in Kandahar than participate.

Being here is weird and close, with working and living together. But it's appealing. I could see living like this, focusing on a project I enjoyed and putting my heart into it. Why not - there's not much else to do with one's time besides ping pong.  I did meet a nice guy:
 

 
Wali's very friendly! And he likes Jack Daniels. I'm sure he and Kyle would get along famously. 

Today it's your birthday!

The canoe

I woke up on my birthday in Harare, Zimbabwe. A quick run, breakfast, and the taxi was ready to take me out to a safari day camp about 40km from the city. We got stopped twice by cops - I think a face like mine looks like "MONEY" as they see us pass, and they want to see what I'm willing to pay for free passage.

The first thing I did when we got to the camp was to take a canoe out to the center of a choppy little lake, with marsh on one side and a very green farm on the other. Returning from the middle of the lake, we were pushing into a headwind - row, row, row, row, and barely go. We made it, but I know of three pairs of arms that seemed to be made of boiled pasta afterward.

Let's see, what's next on the Birthday Bucket List? Riding on an elephant, of course! This big fella is called Patsy. His hide was so thick and the hair so coarse, there would have been no way to do this without that blue blanket. I never knew elephants were like that.

 

He's corkscrewed his whole trunk to get the carrots from her.

This woman's elephant was very frisky

Time to dismount. Or blow us with water.

There were zebras following us. Maybe they thought we would give them the carrots. The guides told us that zebra kicks are among the most menacing dangers in Africa - even lions fear them. Here they just look kind of striped and small. But it's all in the angle - I'm actually quite far from them.






This shot's for Dominique, wherever she is.

The safari camp cares for orphaned or injured animals, like this lion, Bryon. Oddly enough, that's also this guy's name. He's a BBC correspondent in Zimbabwe. They look like they're having a nice little confab about life on safari, and you'd swear that lion was smiling.

One of his fellow lions, in a separate enclosure, was not nearly so sanguine about our visit. This one is not tame, but rather a rescued lion who will live out his days with a lovely female (not quite visible in the photo) which he is protecting at the moment this photo was taken. The guide put his hand and my camera through the enclosure fence, then called Brutus' attention. Brutus obliged, scaring the living crap out of everyone on the tour. He was behind a fence, but he is so big and forceful, no fence really looks strong enough.

Even when we'd left the immediate area of Brutus' enclosure, he continued to warn us of what would happen if we messed with his lady. Makes for interesting audio, though the video's not that exciting...