Something occurred to me recently (okay, stop laughing. We should celebrate when I have a coherent thought.) when one of my readers, Amy Remus at So Many Reads, mentioned she’d forgotten I lived overseas for several years. In Qatar, specifically. It made me realize most of my readers are probably in the same boat.
However, the five-ish years I lived in the Middle East were completely life-changing for me.
So over the next few months, here on Brain Candy, I’ll be reposting some personal blogs I wrote when we lived in Qatar. I hope you find them as fun to read as I did to write. Okay, fun had little to do with the writing at first. Writing these posts was all about hanging onto my sanity.
BUT, that blog was the reason I began writing again. So if you enjoy my fiction, you can owe it all to those sanity-saving blog posts that started back in 2006.
For today, I’ll just leave you with a short post and a couple of pictures from when Smarty Boy played soccer one spring (I think he was 8). Oh, and a map, in case you can’t immediately picture where the hell in the world Qatar is located. 😉
Qatar is a tiny peninsula off Saudi Arabia.
Qatar’s location in comparison to Africa and Europe
You throw the sand against the wind
And the wind blows it back again.
– William BlakeToday, we took an unexpected trip to the beach…ah…bitch.
Sun? Check
Sand? Check
Water? Ah, not so much.
This kind of thing always happens when I’ve almost convinced myself I could stay here for several more years. I suppose it was inevitable since both cars were washed this morning and the back door was open when we left for Smarty Boy’s (name change to protect the not-always-so-innocent) soccer game. The pictures below show the (I swear to God) two minute progression of the sandstorm that blew through Doha earlier today.
Soccer parents happily socializing
Soccer parents blowing in the wind
Soccer parents watching their children develop lung cancer
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Today is Family Day – A Day to Eat Dinner With Your Kids. I have a confession, my family sometimes eats in front of the TV, but we do it together. If you have kids, see if you can work out a family dinner tonight. If your kids are of the canine or feline (or some other -ine), well, you might want to share a peanut butter dog biscuit or a can of tuna. 😉
