When I saw the sunrise this morning, I thought of Jewaira, another blogger who in her own way and in her own head is also here, there and everywhere. She loves silvery sunrises, and oh man, this is one shimmering, silvery sunrise:
It must be the haze that exaggerates the size of the sun so - and makes it appear to throb, even in the photo.
It is 79°F / 26°C at 0630 with dust expected today according to Q8weather.com.
We are a bunch of travel and geography nerds in my family. Nothing makes us happier than jumping in a airplane, reaching an exotic location and driving, getting our feet on new ground, seeing new things, learning new ways. We all have cameras glued to our hands and laptops stuffed in backpacks.
All my married life, people have looked at me with pity and tole me how they can’t believe I live with such uncertainty, never knowing where I will be in the next year - even the next few months. What I tell them is this - the truth is, we ALL never know. We ALL never know when something will happen that will change our lives dramatically, forever. We live day to day, not thinking about all the things that can happen. If we think too much about them, we might go crazy.
I consider myself blessed. I was created with a restless spirit, a spirit for new experiences and new ways of thinking. I was given a life where all those things became my daily bread.
What is fun for me is watching the next generation of young adults discovering their own lives, who they are meant to be.
My nephew, at Google Earth took his love of geography to new heights. He works in a place he loves, doing work he loves. He wrote to me yesterday, to tell me about a new game being played, a grown-up version of the old “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.” (one of the earliest computer games for kids) He has published a really really hard one on the Google team LatLong blog (as he says, he has the home court advantage in this game!) and he refers us to another blog, Where on GoogleEarth? where there are a series of contests to see if you can identify landmarks, special places, from the sky.
Here, for example, is the photo from contest #22 - and people have to write in telling what it is. Can YOU tell what it is? 
I love A.Word.A.Day. You will see it down there at the very top of my blogroll. They send me an e-mail every day with a new word, where it came from and how it is pronounced and used. I’m pretty good with words, and AWAD challenges me to keep growing. Love it. You can subscribe by clicking the blue words above or clicking on A.Word.A.Day in the Blogroll. Today’s word:
karuna (KUH-roo-na) noun
Loving compassion.
[From Sanskrit karuna (compassion).]
“Once we experience and feel this inter-dependence of all living beings,
we will cease to hurt, humiliate, exploit and kill another. We will want
to free all sentient beings from suffering. This is karuna, compassion,
which in turn gives rise to the responsibility to create happiness and
its causes for all.”
Suresh Jindal; Interdependence of All Living Beings; The Times of India
(New Delhi); Nov 13, 2003.
Sitting over a long lunch, a friend asked me if I could remember my earliest impressions of Kuwait, and all I could remember was that the traffic speeds scared the hell out of me. Then, yesterday morning, we were driving on 40 and my memory was jogged; I remember moving here from Qatar and thinking how GREEN Kuwait is.
Qatar is impeccably clean. Street crews are out all the time, insuring that the highways are immaculate. There are beautiful flowers and wide boulevards. But when you leave Qatar, you realize your eyes are starved for green. I remember landing here the first time, and seeing pockets of green, even in very desert-like areas. I love the way the government has planted trees, especially palm trees. Your mind may not always register them, but it makes for a nicer environment.
I noticed recently a new crop of palm tree antennas. I think this is a total hoot. A generation ago, everyone in this area was buying Eiffel tower replicas for their roofs to bring in TV signals; now the communication towers are being disguised - and I love it. I blogged about this a while back but this time, I am going to challenge YOU - take your camera and open your eyes. When you see a disguised communications tower, shoot it.
How do you recognize them? They are taller than any real palm tree you have ever seen. They have no dead leaves and nothing on the trunk. They tend to be near hotels, but I also see them occasionally in a residential district.
You can blog it, or you can send it to me as a JPEG attachment and I will publish them. Be sure to tell us where it is taken. Here is the one I saw at the Hilton:
Here is the previous entry on Palm-Tree-Antennas.
And bravo to whoever came up with this idea - it is clever and it is a great disguise for those communication towers. Gives me a grin whenever I see them.
No sunrise today; the dust is rolling in and the sun can barely be seen. The temperature at 0830 is 66°F/19°C.
Today WordPress announced a huge increase in free upload space: Free Space to Three Gigabytes.
“Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get half that much space (1GB) at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. We’re doing the same thing for free.”
They also announced, important to people like me who like to illustrate heavily with photos, that if you bought a 1GB upgrade, it is now a 5GB upgrade, at no extra charge.
moar funny pictures
I upgraded when I got up to 75% capacity, but never even reached 1% or capacity yet. I feel like the (space) richest woman in the world today!
One of the best things about moving between cultures as often as I have is that I get a chance to learn how much I don’t know. One of the things I have learned living in the Middle Eastern countries was how little I knew about my own religion. Knowing how little I knew sent me into a bible-study program that I look forward to resuming one day when I am living back in the US, or someplace that offers it - Bible Study Fellowship. They do an in-depth study of different books, or sections, of the bible, very serious, and you learn so much.
Apart from that, the church with which I affiliate, the Episcopal Church, has daily readings - I’ve mentioned this before - you can see them yourself by clicking on The Lectionary over in my Blogroll, and then going to the Daily Office Readings and clicking on the right week. Once there, you have to click on the day of the week, and it will take you to the readings for today.
One of the readings for today, the New Testament reading, made me smile:
James 4:13-17,5:7-11
13 Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.’
14 Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.
15 Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’
16 As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.
17 Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.
7 Be patient, therefore, beloved,* until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.
8 You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.*
9 Beloved,* do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged. See, the Judge is standing at the doors!
10 As an example of suffering and patience, beloved,* take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.
11 Indeed we call blessed those who showed endurance. You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.
In the first section, verse 15 tells us that we should be like good Moslems, never saying we are going to do something without adding “if God wills it,” or (big grin) in Arabic, “Insha’allah.” How often we hear Westerners saying “None of this ‘Insha’allah!’ I want you to DO it, dammit!” I never looked twice at this verse until I had lived in the Middle East.
In the second part, there is a message just meant for me, maybe not for you, in verse 9. It tells me not to grumble against another person, of I will be judged by the same standard. Hmmmm, now there’s a scary thought!
By the time October hits, it is almost too late for many expats to be thinking about Christmas. Packages have to be in the mail in time for a December 25th delivery, and that can mean different things in different countries.
Even travel and delivering the gifts yourself has become more challenging; one of the changes 9/11 made in all our lives is that we can no longer travel with wrapped gifts; baggage inspectors must be able to look at everything we pack, which means a mad scramble on the arriving end to get everything wrapped and labled before delivery.
We all face that universal problem - what to get for the people who already have everything?
So I sent to Find Me a Gift.
Here were some of their suggestions:
Become a Lord or a Lady - Buy Yourself a Title
Name a Star
Neiman Marcus always has outrageous and imaginative gifts for the people who have everything, and this year one of the catalog items is a Top Stars Orchestra concert for only $1,590,000.00
(Their 100 year anniversary catalog is a must-see, even if just for the giggles)
And, of course, here in Kuwait you can make a donation of time, goods or money to Operation Hope - Kuwait to help Sheryll Mairza with her 2007 goal of feeding and providing winter clothing for 7,000 poor laborers here who are unprepared for the cold winter to come.
Yesterday was bizarre. The blog has become a part of my routine - I get up, grab a cup of coffee, pick up my e-mails, take care of any business that needs be taken care of, read my daily Lectionary readings (see blogroll) and then - I get to visit with YOU!
Imagine how I felt when I could see my blog, but couldn’t log on to it. I don’t know what the problem was.
I tried it on my computer. It kept telling me my password was wrong. Since I have worn the letters off many of the keys on my keyboard, it COULD be wrong, but you know your fingers have this kind of mechanical memory, you know how you can type and your fingers know where the letters are and you don’t even think about it, just think about what you want to say?
So I asked for a new password, thinking oh well, I could change it back to something I might be able to remember. The new password didn’t work. Three times I tried with new passwords, and nothing worked.
I went back and used Adventure Man’s computer, and still couldn’t access.
I have a life, so I went on with my life, and later in the day tried again, with the same results.
Paranoia kind of kicked in. I wondered if I was being blocked? If WordPress was being blocked?
This morning, same story, except this time I prayed and tried all the passwords, promising God if he would just help me get on, just once, I would post my problems (in case it happens again) and change my password, (in case someone has messed with me) and do all the admin work I need to get done.
I haven’t backed up the blog for a long time. I don’t really have time to do it today. Aaaarrrrgh.
But my first, paranoid though was wondering if I had annoyed someone and if I was being blocked.
Then common sense kicked in, thank God, and I figure it was just some kind of technical anomaly. . . it’s like medicine, and political “science”, and all this computer wizardry - there are a lot of black holes, information we just don’t have yet, and I am guessing that this was just one of those anomalies.
I thank you all for bearing with me, and continuing to comment and check on me!
And no, I am not blogging from Syria. The visa never came through. 
Most of you know, I do the daily readings from The Lectionary (you can always click on it from my Blogroll, down to the right) as part of my spiritual discipline. I also read the daily meditations on Forward Movement, (also in the blogroll.)
Rarely do I share them with you, but this one is where Christianity and Islam are so closely intertwined that I dance for joy - that much can be forgiven to one who loves, but our tongues get us into a lot of trouble.
I know that backbiting is one of the great sins to be avoided during the upcoming holy season of Ramadan, too.
James 3:1-12 The tongue is a fire…a world of iniquity…a restless evil, full of deadly poison.
I sometimes wonder if the churchfolk who seem obsessed with sexual behavior are reading the same Bible I am. If I said that someone was “living in sin,” I know what parts of the body you’d think I was talking about. Yet if it were James or other New Testament authors talking, they would probably be referring to the tongue.
For every reference in the New Testament to sins involving sex, there must be ten concerning speech. Why? Because while sex is certainly one form of communication, speech is a more potent one in the daily life of a congregation. Words have power.
God creates the world and keeps in touch with it, after all, by his Word; and words are how we keep in touch with each other. But the word that can create can also destroy–a reputation, an institution, a life. Words tell us who and how we are and whether we belong; words bind the community together-or tear it apart. Sexual misconduct is bad–and easy to recognize as bad.
The sniping, backbiting, spite, and deceit that go on in some communities are often hard to see, let alone root out. Yet their effect is more corrosive over the long term. How did our priorities get so mixed up?
PRAY for the Diocese of South Carolina (United States)
Ps 38 * 119:25-48; 1 Kings 9:24-10:13; Mark 15:1-11
Cool palm tree, huh, Sparkle?
But yes, yes, it IS strangely tall.
This is how they disguise communication towers in Kuwait. No! It isn’t really a palm tree, but I knew you would love the whimsey and creativity of it all.
