Author Archives: birdhousebirdy
Hug an Arizonan
This post is not about books but I need to use books to illustrate a point today.
Here is a photo of about half of our books.
Because we are in the middle of an international move, we had to go from living with this number of books (above) down to living for about five months with the bare essentials of this number of books (below).
Now before you report me to Child Protective Services for this kind of cruel treatment, please let me explain that we are about 1km from four brilliant libraries. So we do have access to more books than just this little short stack.
The question is, what books would you put in your short stack of essentials?
In answering which books are in mine, I have to explain that I am from Arizona. I know I’ve mentioned that before, but the contents of my short stack cannot be understood unless you really understand what that means when someone tells you that they are from Arizona.
For your future reference, Arizona produces outliers. Not just physical outliers or statistical outliers but we are bred to be emotional outliers, which leads us to being social outliers, and basically that just means that we trust no one. Not the pilot, the captain, the president, the doctor, the bank, or, I’ll be honest with you here, anyone. We trust no one. Just accept that without taking it personally. There is nothing that can be done about it so let’s just all move along. Nothing unusual to see here.
Now I know what you are thinking. You are thinking of that friend you have from Arizona that is social, fun, normal, and gives standard-type Christmas presents. But I’m here today to tell you that that friend is either not really from Arizona, as in generationally raised by a long line of Arizonans, OR that friend is faking normal. Because a generational Arizonan is never truly normal. We are outliers. In this case, statistical outliers on the normalcy bell curve.
With that little glimpse, you should not be surprised that one book that made it into my essential short stack of books is this one on studying to take the amateur radio license exam.
Or this book on becoming an expert using the map and compass.
Look. I live in a large city and have an iPhone on me 24/7. I’m not out exploring or anything. But if some day we are all out on some old container ship and I’m the only person left conscious and I need to be able to 1) get the ship in a certain direction AND 2) be able to use the radio on board, I’m ready. In fact, I would probably save all your lives after receiving critical coordinates over the radio and then using the map and compass to thread the needle between Scylla and Charybdis. With that kind of pressure and all you nice people relying on me, I simply could not pack up these books in good conscience.
It’s a bit of a curse. We don’t sleep well at night unless we gave our friends this book for Christmas last year, which I did, and bought an extra one for myself.
And this book, same deal. Christmas present for friends and an extra one for myself.
And another one. Exact same. Christmas gift plus one.
The answer is yes. I could in fact save us all from a pandemic and perform the emergency wilderness tracheotomy on you after you choked on the steaks that I properly cut from some critter. And so could my friends, IF they read the books that I gave them.
So the next time you see an Arizonan awkwardly sitting in a corner at a party, just know that we are probably mentally preparing how to safely evacuate everyone from that party should a meteor smash into the neighborhood.
Hug an Arizonan. We work really hard in our imaginations for you.
Love is Sweeping.
I have lived in the Eastern Hemisphere for about ten years and have traveled to sixteen countries in this region. After careful observation and contemplation, I’m willing to go out on a limb and state that the people in this region sweep…a lot.
On my morning commute, even if I arrive very early while it is still pitch black outside (well, as pitch black as a big city like Singapore gets anyway), I will have passed 500 sweepers.
Here is one happy Singapore sweeper from this morning. 
And a lovely sweeper in New Delhi.
Here’s a good one. Here is a sweeper in Cambodia. Do you recognize this sweeper? He’s pretty famous as far as sweepers go. Probably would make the sweeper Hall of Fame or Sweeper Pin-up Calendar. Any guesses?
NBD. Just the sweeper on the front of the Lonely Planet Cambodia book.
And we’ll go rapid fire with China sweeping carts, 
Burma/Myanmar sweeping carts.
Temple sweepers, also Burma/Myanmar.
A sweeper in Jaipur.
And… I have more and more and even more photos of sweepers from…..oh my…..
“Hello. My name is Birdy.”
“Hi Birdy.”
“I cannot not take photos of sweepers.”
…and counting.
istockphoto
So we’re in Hamburg (flashing back, telling a story with a point, even though it feels like I’m wandering, this is Part 2 of Singapore and counting). We just booked it across Germany in a hurry to get to Finland where we are meeting up (and staying with) friends. In Hamburg we buy ferry tickets to get us and our little French-plated Peugeot across Denmark. The first ferry was from Fehmarn to Rodby. We get to the port early and are the first car to load into the car transport bay on the boat.
Ferry launches and we’re cool with this. Checking out the masses of jellyfish in the Fehmarn Belt. Finding a sandwich. Washing up in the washrooms. You know the drill. You’ve probably done this sort of things successfully a hundred times. The ferry is about to arrive and we continue resting and enjoying the ride. Announcements started a while back and continue to get a bit more frantic but the announcements are in French and with all the languages between the three of us, unfortunately French was not one of them. We finish up our lounging, not in a race. Sure wish those frantic, maybe a little angry, French announcements would stop. We are the last of the passengers on the boat, starting to make our way to the car bay…wait, are they yelling “Peugeot” in that announcement.
Well, sure. In hindsight you are all geniuses. First car on would have to be first car off. So we blocked the ENTIRE car transport bay from emptying. Does that somehow justify us being rudely gestured at as we drove across the entire country of Denmark? So when I close my eyes and picture Denmark, all I see are vulgar hand gestures hanging out of every single car that passed us.
Denmark (go ahead, close your eyes, you see it now too), Sweden, and finally to Finland and a chance to sleep in a bed and rest. Then back again from Finland, to Sweden, to Denmark, to Germany, to the Netherlands, to Belgium (where we dropped Migros off at the train station for him to return to his fruit market in Switzerland), back to Calais, and on to England again to close our full circle.
So that’s how we roll. That’s why I have applied for a job at Qatar University College of Law (and I have heard back from them with positive progress so far) and why I am at this moment working to get the American School of Doha apps started for the kiddos.
Singapore…and counting
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In three more months we will be leaving Singapore. Leaving for a grand, new adventure. Destination: unknown. Just time to move along.
In 2010 my two children and I arrived in Singapore. We had been living in Arizona for a year but knowing it was time for an adventure, we turned up here. Three years later, with an ever-rising school tuition bill, it is time to move along.
The kids want to return to Arizona after Singapore, but that’s like going backwards to me. We know life there already. There will be no surprises, little adventure. Oh I know there would be washing machine breaking adventure or car crash adventure, just not adventure adventure. We would buy a house and the kids would graduate from high school and that will be tidy that. It’s just, I don’t like tidy when tidy involves what feels like a cage.
So we need to get this straight, this has little to do with Arizona itself, as I am an Arizonan at heart. I was raised in Arizona and I love it there. I just do not wish to go there to grow old and die. And that is what this feels like. When I look at houses on the market there I think about living there alone and making sure there are not too many stairs or too large a yard for me to care for. BUT, for crying out loud, I am young (enough). So this is ridiculous. I am young (enough), fit (enough), and vigorously immature so I’m looking to not settle, but to further explore.
Exploring is the name of our game, and I must say that we do it with style. Here is how we roll. (Royal “we” because the kiddies have not been on all of these adventures. They enter the scene when they enter the scene, but this is still our story.)
Going back a few years (cough, decades, cough) I made it to age of 21 having only been to two countries. My homeland, the United States, and Mexico, the country five hours away from my hometown. Then around that time, something inside me finally matured past the age of 9 and I felt brave enough to strike out to see the world.
My first exploration was a timid trip across the border to the north. I had a week and a half or so before needing to return to college so I took a drive along the Pacific Coast Highway and eventually made my way to Vancouver. I had no money but my sister had given me a bag of bagels and that was enough. I slept in my little car most nights. Ate only the bagels. Any money I had went into the gas tank.
The experience was exhilarating. I had finally found some legs (figuratively, of course) and I was off. Within six months I was taking a gap year to live in Finland. After that my mother joined me for a quick visit to Sweden and the Soviet Union. (The USSR was about to take a big trip of its own and become Russia, but that’s another story.)
A few years later, after returning to college and finishing my undergraduate degree, I was ready for another expedition. This time I spent a month traveling around Europe with my friend, The Abbess of Kells. We met up in London, took the ferry to Calais, France where we rented a little Peugeot (in which we spent a lot of nights trying to sleep until elderly ladies tapped on our window to wake us in the morning to ask us to move our car from the center of their produce market), and we launched to Normandy, Paris, Dijon. Next we drove to Switzerland to collect another friend, Migros, who after college graduation had moved to Switzerland to sell fruit at the market. After a few days in Interlaken we continued over the Alps to Italy where we again slept in the car and a night or two in a tent at a campground near the beaches of Sestri Levante. Money here went into the gas tank and to every single gelato shop that we spotted. It did not go to the toll booth man on the expressway because we did not have any Italian lira. We begged, maybe The Abbess offered to snog him – no, wait, that was elsewhere – and the toll booth man let us pass without paying, or snogging.
From Italy we continued up across the corner of Slovenia to Salzburg, where we all know how alive those hills can be with the sound of music. Next from Salzburg to Prague where the stadium next to the hostel where we stayed would soon be alive with the sound of Pink Floyd on their last concert tour. We, of course, stood on the street with signs until all three of us had the requisite concert tickets.
The Czech Republic was a trip in those days. It was anxious to step out from its time behind the Iron Curtain but still finding it footing. They had no money so outside of the city the roads were dark with no street signs. In the smaller towns they still had their police who created random rules to bilk money from any non-locals. We were busted and our car impounded for driving on the road. (It’s okay if you have to read that sentence twice.)
From the Czech Republic we drove to Germany, where though we drove through Dresden and Berlin, we actually didn’t stop until Hamburg, except of course to maybe sleep one night in the car on the side of the road.
And here, in Hamburg, is where I will have to leave it for tonight. Those bold and adventurous children of mine will be home from school soon. You remember, the school that is becoming too expensive so we have to leave Singapore. Are you forgetting where this whole story started?
What Do You Fear, My Lady? 