One Last Time

While we were looking for a house to move into, this is one of the things that Doug inspects. How much amperage does the house hold and what is the condition of the electrical box?

The one in this picture is a fairly new setup; however, the city is going around to houses and blocking the amount of amps they can run at a time, which greatly reduces the amount of cool and heat you can use when you need it.

Oh well, looking for a house will have to wait.

Kylie needed one last hurrah around town.

Kylie, Karis, and Doug went downtown and had fun acting like tourists for one day just taking pictures, buying last minute things from here that Kylie wanted to take with her, and generally, just enjoying the city one last time.

We hated to leave when it looked like it was going to be such a mild summer. 

These are the actual summers you WANT to be here for, but alas...

The Party's Over...Literally

I don't know why I can't find time to blog, but it doesn't seem to come first in my list of "to do" items each week. So, since I mainly blog to have a record of our time here, I can't just skip to present day. That means you'll have to bear with me for who knows how long until the timelines of my blog and my real life match up. 

For now, I'm back at the morning after Kylie's graduation party, which is ironic, because we are currently getting ready to start KARIS' senior year.  Crazy!

The morning after, the decorations were were taken down, and we pulled out all the boxes we had been hiding in the basement while the party was going on.

Time to pack.

Before and After.

(If you don't remember, our landlord had asked us to leave so he could try and sell the house.  

Present day (2021), we are 14 months from our move out, and he actually did sell it last month.

Doug told me a doctor bought it and gutted it, so I went to see for myself. 

Sad day.

December 4, 2018                                                                                                                                                                                                        August 10, 2021

They have taken out every tree on the outside and inside of the gate, and torn up the garden that was there. It was also sad for me to see my laundry room tile on the street.

August 10, 2021

Back to 2020, even though we were packing, Doug still made time to cut Karis' and Caleb's hair! This wasn't just a "quarantine cutting." This is something he does all year long for any of us that needs it.

Caleb got a LOT cut.

At this point, we still hadn't found another home to move into, so while we were still looking, we also had a plan put in place to store our belongings in an unused house of a friend if we never found another rental.

Because we were trying to get to America to get Kylie ready to go to college, we decided to get our rugs washed, dried, rolled up and bagged for the months we would be gone.

We took them to a big, open cemented area, and some men rolled them out, told us how much it would cost, and then they were dragged away to be hosed down.

And even though summer 2020 was a relatively mild summer here, it was still warm.

And as you can see, it was almost as hot inside as it was outside.

June 6, 2020

So, Doug, Keira, and I decided to camp in the yard for a couple of nights, and it was actually not bad. The temperatures dropped a night, and it was a lot better than being in our bedrooms.

It was quite the pressure situation.  

Packing. 

Not having a new house to move into. 

Needing to get to America, and at the moment, no way to get there (see picture below).

So, we kept working and kept praying.

Summertime '18

While we were traveling this summer, we turned off all fans and swamp coolers in our house, so it was just a huge cinder block structure soaking up heat.

Let's not talk about the cucumbers I accidentally left in our fridge 😬 (thankfully, no pictures were taken of that), but I did photograph this sweet potato that was left in our hot box known as a house.  Remember the pictures of candles I sent you from last summer.

It's quite a shame, too, because sweet potatoes can rarely be found here.  In fact, since we came back, I haven't been able to find any.

 Summer sunset in the dessert.

It was so hot in August that this Mercedes Benz business put umbrellas over all of their small bushes.  I have NEVER seen anything like this.

Doug and I went on a double date with our teammates, and they took us to the 21st floor of a fancy hotel in town, because they had been to the lookout platform before, and they wanted to share it with us.  

It was stinkin' hot, which you can't tell from the picture, but there was a hot breeze blowing.  And I remembered something about perspective...a different perspective is often helpful.

The city looked so beautiful and clean from up here.  

Unfortunately, I know what it looks like at ground-level.

 At the end of the summer, we had a guest come from America.  The weekend before the girls were supposed to start online school, we took everyone, including our guest, to a lake two hours from here for a kayaking/swimming adventure.

Only our guide had a camera, so I have no pictures from the day.  However, our guide (the groom in this post) sent us these two of Caleb.

It was Keira's and my first time to go, and we loved it.

Everyone did a lot of swimming.
Doug, Caleb, and Keira let little fish eat on their feet while they laughed.
Doug, the older kids, and even our guest, jumped off some small cliffs.
We stayed all day, and ate lunch in the cleft of some rocks.

The wind picked up a lot by the end of the day, and it was really windy when we started back.  Instead of the 45 minutes it took to paddle to the site, it took an hour and a half to paddle back!

It was a good, cool end to the summer.

New Tactics for Keepin' Cool

Trying to get cool and stay cool in the summer is quite challenging.  

Last summer, we bought new swamp coolers, hoping to get some more air circulating in the house.

I wrote about getting them on the roof here.

The first summer, Doug had set up the ones on the left (covered in a lighter blue tarp), and then covered them with canopies to keep some of the sun off.  You can see two of the folded up canopies in the background.  

I think I told you about the canopies because one day one of them got dislodged during a strong wind storm and flipped over onto the roof of our neighbor's house, but I can't find the blog post, so you'll just have to use your imagination.

That silver square with the "X" on it in the picture below is where one of the swamp coolers sits when it's connected to the house.  Air blows down a shaft, which is connected to four vents on the way down.  The only way it can bring coolish air is because there is a continual dripping of water running in front of a fan; however, if that water is hot (which it is), the cooling effect is minimal.  It's not the ideal way to cool a house.

(As a side note, we didn't even use a water heater this summer.  The sun heats up the water in our tank on the roof, we save electricity, and we get warm showers every day (if someone wants one).  Most of my family prefers cooler showers in the summer.)

This summer, Doug tried a new tactic for keeping our house cool, and he bought these indoor swamp coolers (below).

They don't bring in dust from the outside, you can fill them with water (or blocks of ice) and it blows much cooler air, you can just run it like a fan without the water, and it provides good circulation, and you can move it around to where you need it (like the kitchen when the oven is on).  We bought 4, and along with fans in each room, it was a great solution for keeping the house cooler.


I know I write often about the heat here, but it's been a learning curve as we try to figure out the best way to get cool and stay cool.  It's basically on our minds daily from May until September.

But we're learning.

While You Were Sleeping

There was a "need" at our house four days after Ramadan ended, so I went to see if I could go buy said "need" in our neighborhood.

Nope.  Nope.  Nope.  I tried three little stores, and I came up empty.

So I kept walking.  I decided to go to a grocery store that's a little larger, about a mile from our house.

However, I was feeling strange, and I couldn't put my finger on the problem.

And then it hit me.

There were no people.

Anywhere.

It was about 112 degrees.

When Ramadan began, temperatures during the day hadn't reached 100 degrees yet.

But while they were sleeping through their days, they missed this rising heat.

It seemed to me that even though their lives were supposed to start again during the day after Ramadan, they couldn't bring themselves to face this new reality of heat.

Of course, we hadn't been sleeping through our days, so this was nothing new, but all of a sudden, I felt hotter and more tired than usual because I was alone.

My thoughts were saying, "I'm the only idiot out here.  It's really hot.  I deserve a reward."

So, along with said "need," I bought myself ice cream on a stick and brought home 5 others for my family, which didn't even melt - scary to think what products are in it to keep it from melting 😟

AND I got a blister on my foot because I didn't know I'd be walking over two miles when I put on my flip flops.

Summer is not looking too promising.

Maybe I'll hunker down during the daylight hours, too.

I don't like what happened to the temperatures while they were sleeping.

Celebrating Outward

On Christmas Eve, we took cookies and homemade hot chocolate mix (with instructions written in their language) to all the neighbors we have relationships with.

In our limited language, we told them we were celebrating the birthday of Jesus the Messiah, and we wanted to share something with them.

 

Part of that sharing, included a notecard with Luke 2:10-11 written on it.

I'm so grateful for Kylie and Karis for doing all of those for me.

 

One bonus was that I had two dishes to return to a lady as well, so I stacked them inside each other, filled them up with "puppy chow," fudge, and cookies, and called it done.

During the last week of school, during exams, the kids also took their teachers homemade hot chocolate mix in zip lock bags they had decorated.  The ones below must have been for the neighbors though, because they are not written in English.

I'm "real" smart, huh?

And these are the instructions telling them how to mix it with hot water or add it to a cup of coffee.

I must say that when I moved here, I thought I would NEVER learn the alphabet or how to read, but I'm surprising myself every day.  I'm not as good as my kids, but I can read/recognize 90% of the alphabet now.

Older minds can still do a few things....

First Day of Summer

For Father's Day, back in June, we took Doug out for lunch.  We had to wait until 2pm for the restaurant to open, because...Ramazan.

He ordered a Mongolian steak but was given the Mongolian hamburger by mistake.

No mistake here.

That thing was at least 6 inches high between the buns!!!  It had what looked like three chicken-fried steaks stacked up with fried mozzarella cheese between them, and some kind of sauce oozing out the sides.

In case you were wondering, he did NOT pick it up and eat it.

A knife and fork were involved.

I split a Hawaiian burger with Kylie, and it was just the right thing to lead into a nap.

I hardly ever take naps, but on this day, it was glorious!

At 5pm, my friend and I took our maxi material to a tailor to have her alter the bought ones and make the un-made ones, but she told us we needed to soak our material first.

So, I went back home, and we had a mini-TV marathon.  We were all exhausted and hot.  We didn't want to move too much.  Again, I understand why the locals are sleeping during the day.

The next day was officially the "First Day of Summer."

Although, I feel like we've been experiencing "summer" for a while now.


When the sun was high in the sky, and the temperature was 104 degrees, Doug, the girls and I walked to Stationary Street.  I've mentioned this place before.

Again, it was quiet, and the streets were empty.  I guess the reason the office supply stores remain open during the day is because offices still have to work and need supplies during this crazy time.

And again, I was so excited about being in my favorite kind of store that I forgot to take pictures!!  I did however, buy three new journals for different language uses (lesson plans, language practice, and new language journal).

And I did take one picture on the way there.

This pitiful looking wedding dress just sits outside of its shop 24 hours a day, covered in dust, as an advertisement to come inside and shop.

Does this dirty gown beckon you at all?


Things you don't think about unless you're here, but all the notebooks open from the back (remember, they read back to front, right to left).

I really do need a notebook to practice language.

I sent a text the other day that took me 30 minutes to write.  I wanted to show you a picture of it, but just in case some people could read it, I would be very embarrassed.  I couldn't find the "sh" key, so I just used "s" (my friend showed me later that if I hit the shift key, I get a whole new group of letters), and I'm sure I spelled all the words wrong.


But here's an example of my yahoo page that pulls up on my computer.

And here's our six names that I wrote in my language notebook.

Betcha can't tell which letter makes the "K" sound...

(remember to read right to left)