Exciting Events

Well, exciting is subjective.
No rooftop chase scenes for instance.
Rooftops though. No further details can be given.

I also got an 82 on a chemistry exam. Very exciting. Except...not. Funny how chemistry and exciting only go together when things explode.

Anyways, life is looking up again. For a while there I was a bit depressed as a result of various irritations, but even though those irritations continue to exist I *think* I have learned to live with them. I probably should have tried prayer. Might've saved me a bit of trouble. Oh well, seeing as how I specifically asked God to bring me to my knees in humility, I'm hoping my troubles will get worse. We'll see though...

Life is good.

Mukullah

Well, I think I just might barely have enough interesting things happening in my life to warrant another post so here goes. This will be rather long, as it is as much for me as anyone else-I want a written record of exactly how these events unfolded, before my memories begin to fade.

On the morning of the 15th of December, having finished my school (well, some of it), I packed my rather large backpack and ran off to the Bab Al-Yemen bus stop to meet up with Josh and Andy. The bus was (to everyone's astonishment) late. So while we waited, Josh and Andy picked up lunch (I had had one last American meal before leaving) and we introduced Andy to Abu-Walads. Josh and I were shocked that Andy had never heard of them, and of course Andy decided to blame me for not having introduced him to them earlier. Getting on the bus was fairly amusing, as apparently the bus company was trying this concept of actually putting everyone on numbered seats. Some problems with this plan: every seat had two numbers on it, and no one was entirely sure which was the correct. Another problem: There were more people then seats. Ironic, since the whole numbered seat thing was devised to do away with possibility. The problem seemed to be that one guy had brought his family along and planned to share a seat with one of his kids, but decided not to at the last minute and instead sat on the floor. After that though, the bus ride was fairly uneventful: except for one amusing occurrence. Before leaving Sana'a, Andy had planned to purchase tickets back from Socotra (later events will prove this to be quite unnecessary, but at that time we considered it quite vital), but had forgotten. Fortunately, this proved but a minor difficulty, as we were able to purchase them in Aden. In order to pass the time on the bus, Andy had brought his mp3 player, which, much to my surprise, contained only sermons. So Andy and I listened to a sermon about Manliness, which seemed surprisingly appropriate considering our plans. The preacher was actually quite amusing, and while I disagreed with him on quite a few points, I thought his main point that the American church was mostly feminized to be a quite accurate one. However, since I am not in America, and since the men who dominate the church here are not the sort of men that preacher was criticizing, I'm not sure if it was actually very useful to me.

Anyways, we made it to Aden perfectly ok, though our sleeping arrangements sort of didn't work out. But we prayed, and after meeting up with an Ozzie friend of Josh's, met an Adeni who offered to take us in for the night. Being poor hitchhikers, we gladly accepted his offer, and spent a pleasant, mosquito free night on the floor under a fan. During the night, Josh's Ozzie friend (have I mentioned he was a bit odd yet?) sent us a text message wherein he warned us that at the place we were staying at people were regularly "touched", and also to watch out for "crusty jugglers." Sage advice, from a good man. (He also had a good story which recounted to us about a time when Yassir apparently said that he didn't want to die before he had kissed a girl-Josh denied it of course, but Andy and I weren't very impressed).

Early the next morning (Yassir and his crazy jetlag-waking us up at ungodly hours of the morning like 7) we went off to the beach, played some soccer in the sand (a most unusual experience, more fun than you'd think-also a lot more exhausting) and then sat down to a nice breakfast before the breakers (notice my amazingly awesome alliteration there), which was kindly delivered to us by a nearby restaraunt. Afterwards, we went and bought the tickets whose uselessness would soon be made known, and tried to hitch a ride to Mukullah. Initial attempts were met with failure, as we did not actually know the word for hitchhiking (later, when we did learn it, we were met with priceless looks which I cannot even begin to describe: "You're what?! Hitchhiking? Perhaps you haven't noticed just how white you are...") so everyone assumed we were trying to find the bus stop. Eventually, after much walking in the wrong directions and jumping on pick-up trucks (which were also headed in the wrong direction) we finally managed to find the road. There we met up with some Yemeni's going the same way, and caught a ride to a town about 80 kilos away for the comparatively good price of 150 riyals (75 cents). Our goal was to keep the cost of hitchhiking under 10 bucks apiece, as that was the price for the bus. From Abyan we joined up with another bus to the next town, where we stopped and had lunch (we were feeling a bit cheap, and while the yemeni's right next to us were eating lamb, we had some sort of weird bread-based stuff, eaten with bread-some mushakal (mixed vegetables) too, so it wasn't all bread...) Anyways, we encountered a bit of a problem from there. You see, apparently the police don't really appreciate foreigners hitchhiking around the country. We had stopped in one place for just a little too long, and the local police felt that they should check with their mudeer (director) before letting us continue. However, the mudeer's cellphone apparently had a dead battery-and he was quite a ways away. First we were told that a tuckum (gun truck) would come and get us. Several hours later (and a lot of missed rides) we were told that we had to go to him, and go in a bus and actually pay real money, which irritated us greatly. So we went off to him, said that hitchhiking was really rather unaceptable and made us get on a bus for the rest of the journey. So we caught one for five hundred riyals apiece to mukullah (an astonishingly good price, considering the distance-we reckon the military probably forced the guy into it) and, regrettably, they forced us to take a police guy with us. So we rode in relative comfort the rest of the way to Mukullah, decided to pay the driver an extra thousand riyals, figuring we'd still be well under the 6000 riyal goal for the journey, and were about to wander off to supper, when, get this, the police guy demands money for having sat on his butt all day chewing Qat. Naturally, we argued about it (he originally wanted 3000 riyals-more than we paid the driver!) but eventually got sick of it and paid him about 700 hundred. Sooo, we ended up under the 6000 limit (by like 200-woohoo) and there's a slight possibility we saved time too, because the buses don't actually leave terribly often.

That night, feeling rich, we spent the night at a hotel that actually had a shower (only showers we had until the end of the trip-but you probably didn't want to know that). Very posh. We paid almost 9 bucks for the room. The following morning, we headed out to look for a boat. Our efforts were met with little success, as everyone kept telling us that the last boat had left the day before. So after a couple hours wandering around, we decided to meet up with Tim Poole and spend the day with him. So we headed over to his house, had a good talk with him, expended a lot of energy playing with his kids, and then decided to head to Qsair, a secondary port where it was thought me might catch a boat. Thinking that hitchhiking might be a bad plan at 10 at night, we decided to go by a more regular mode of transportation. The only car headed that way was a pickup, and rather than try and squeeze four people into the back seat, we instead determined to ride in the back, and stick our bags on the seat. All well and good-but for an interesting development that occurred while we were off drinking some tea. It being Eid al-Adha, many people were taking goats with them wherever they went. One of our fellow passengers was apparently headed back to his village, taking a goat with him. And so our band of three had a fourth member added to it-a sleepy goat. The goat had heard of the concept of staying in one place for more than five minutes at a time, but decided to have no truck with. So we were stuck in the back of a pickup truck for about an hour and a half with a fidgety goat. Fortunately, it did not bother me much...but poor Josh was stepped on multiple times. Good times. We got to Qsair, watched as a rather odd procession went through the streets (it would be hard to describe it...just look at the pictures instead, the ones of a bunch of people dancing through the streets), found a good spot on the beach, and decided to wake up at 5 in hopes of catching a boat to Socotra.

The following morning, we woke up (it was around dawn-a terrible time), and headed to a nearby town where people thought there might conceivably be boats to Socotra. We got there, and the repeated chant was "ba9d al-eid" (after the eid). This was probably the definitive phrase of the trip (we must have heard it at least fifty times from dozens of people). Anyways, we had heard that the Barbos were planning to hit turtle beach in a couple days, so we decided to head there and go snorkeling and whatnot.

Like much of our trip, we did not give a whole lot of thought to planning for this. We headed to the nearest town, and stopped at the only shop in town to get some supplies. They were completely out of dhabas (dhabas are water containers), and the only alternative was...bagged water. Bagged water is actually quite interesting, although for some reason it had a plasticy taste. Anyways we picked up thirty half-liters bags(figuring that that would last 3 days or so...oh wait...we were there 5 days), several tins of tuna, a couple bags of bread, and some macarona. Once we got to the turtle beach, we settled down in a nearby army barracks.

This part of our trip was probably the best fun: beautiful surroundings, terrible food, bagged water, regular spearfishing forays, long walks on the beach in the moonlight (well, on the last night we felt like exploring...so we walked all the way down to the end of one of the 4 beaches), and early morning fly problems. The first night, after setting our stuff down, we went out looking for turtles. We were too early for the large turtles, but we soon struck paydirt: a multitude of baby turtles crawling out of the sand. After scaring the vile dogs away from the evil past-time of massacring defenseless turtles, we took a video of a few coming out of the sand. We then decided to follow a few on their historic trek to the ocean. Some of the turtles (presumable the dumbest of the group) started heading inland. We did not follow those, allow we turned a couple in the right direction. Others however headed directly for the beach-only to encounter many crabholes along the way. It was actually quite funny when one of the turtle fell into a hole. For a minute or so it would do nothing, as if unable to comprehend the situation. Then, slowly but surely, it would dig its way out and continue its journey to the ocean. Even with some help from us, only a small number of the turtles survive-out of the 30 or 40 we saw come out of the hole survived the journey to the sea. It was very sad...but I suppose if all of them were to survive one year, than there would be waaaay too many turtles and most of them would die anyways....

We turned in fairly early that night, and the next morning were woken up by the dozens of irritating flies which had discovered our outpost in the night. After taking stock of our food situation, and eating a couple pieces of bread and a large part of a jar of peanut butter, we decided to go spear fishing. Early attempts were met with little luck, although Josh ended up catching two decent sized fish-while Andy and I caught all of nothing. Later on, we went out searching for drift wood, and found a fairly large log which we decided would make good firewood. After lugging it to camp (we rolled it partway, as it was very, very heavy) we discovered that it would not light. Period. Very...disappointing. Anyways, starting the fire was an interesting endeavor. The perpetual wind kept blowing it out before it properly got started. So we decided to go all in, and use the flamethrower method. So we got out Andy's deo, and lit the fire with it. Very effective, though perhaps a wee bit on the expensive side. We decided that fish on its own would not make a terribly good meal, although with tomato paste and soup mix (that soup mix saved us-we used in on almost everything) it was actually pretty good. So we got out Andy's broken teakettle, filled it up with water, got it boiling and then cooked the macarona in it. However, we had absolutely no eating utensils to eat it with. So we poured it into a plastic bag which was handy, stuck some tomato paste in it, shook it around a bit, and then used inverted water bags stuck over our hands to eat it with. Didn't it work out so well. So on the second batch of it (the kettle couldn't fit much at a time) we used a sawed off water bottle, stirred in the tomato paste with a stripped down qat stick that happened to be handy, and ate it that way. Very satisfying. After that, feeling very proud of our amazing survival skills, we turned in.

The following day was quite similar, although rather than go spear-fishing for such long hours we spent a lot of time reading. Finally, on the fourth day of our awesome foray into the wilderness, the Barbos showed up, bringing gifts of bread, tuna, and onions and tomatoes. That night, we outdid ourselves in the campfire cooking deal. After the usual macarona and fish, Andy decided to make some coffee. After boiling some water in the tea kettle, he poured it into an empty tuna tin. There was funny stuff floating in the water, of unknown origin (alright, it was probably macarona from the kettle) and after Andy put some instant coffee in it, it looked even worse. Apparently it tasted pretty terrible too, because the instant Andy tasted it he spit it out. Josh and I didn't quite get up the courage to try it, so Andy poured the rest out. Terrible waste of coffee. Anyways, the Barbos left early the following morning (without even saying goodbye-how rude!) and we hung around reading and spearfishing for the rest of the day. The following morning, we managed to talk one of the army guys into letting us use his gun to shoot some dogs. Regrettably, we missed (notice I'm not mentioning any names here...but there is a video of a certain someone missing 6 or 7 consecutive times). Afterwards, the guy (can you believe we had the bad luck of having a hadrami lend us his gun) got us to pay for the bullets. We had to pay like nine hundred riyals for the nine bullets we used...we discovered later that it was actually only like sixty riyals a bullet...but the guy went dog hunting the next day (presumably with the bullets we paid for) and since he was a really amazing shot, we figure he was probably a bit more successful than we were, and that it was a most excellent investment. Anyways, that night we ate in style: used the army guys' gas stove to fry the fish and cooked the macarona and then tossed a bunch of fried tomatoes and onions in it. Probably the best meal we had while at the turtle beach...it was really good.

Heading out the following morning was not fun. We loaded up our backbacks around 9 and started walking out to main road. Hot. Very hot. The breeze which had sustained us while we were on the turtle beach deserted us when we entered into the hilly terrain between us and the road. It was also uphill part of the way. All right, it wasn't actually very bad at all, but as the only semi-irritating thing we had to do on the trip, it's worth mentioning. After about half an hour, some pick-up came by, and we hitched a ride to the nearest town. This was pretty cool, as I got to hang on the back the entire way. Anyways, after that, our trip was fairly uneventful...we slipped past a few checkpoints without the army guys noticing us, but then had some police car chase after us when someone realized that foreigners had gone through without being checked. After that, we had an army guy ride in the 3 seat back with us, which was not cool. Once in Aden, we found a hotel, ate some good food, and the following morning I got a bus back to Sana'a.

Short list of things that saved us on the turtle beach:
Andy's broken kettle.
Josh's spearguns.
Andy's deodorant (excellent for starting fires)
My mom's cookies.
Granola Bars.
The Barbos.
Macarona.
The wire which we found and were able to convert into a grill.
The Yemeni guys who allowed us to use their gas stove when we got sick of the fire.
The water the Yemeni guys gave us.
Tuna.
The full list is a lot longer...but I can't remember all the other things. Needless to say, we felt very saved afterwards.

Most commonly used yemeni phrases (mostly by us, but some by other people):
haba haba (bit by bit)
mafish mushkalla (so we're trying to do something impossible and/or stupid-no problems)
ba9d al-Eid (this applied to just about everything)
muta9bareen (we're hitchhiking 'cause we're cheap)
weyn a-tareeq l-[insert place name here] (Please don't tell us where the bus stop is. We want the road. Yes, we're crazy. Now can you *please* just tell us where that road is!)

Josh Power took a lot of pretty sweet pics, they're probably posted somewhere on my facebook profile page...

Woot

I am finally catching up my school! Very exciting...although it is rather slow, and having to actually work is irritating...ah well. I still haven't really learned much from school, except perhaps that having people in a class with you that don't grasp simple points is a bad thing. At least my math is mostly finished with review...finally. Although that means that I might actually have to put more work into it...could be bad. History is going great, staying up till 3 saturday mornings works out well for me (though admittedly mom doesn't appreciate it much...). Not too much has been happening recently, although some lucky people went off to Bab al-Mandab two days ago. Youth group last night was interesting, as the girls outnumbered the boys 2:1...When Justin and I first arrived there were like 3 boys to 12 girls...fortunately the Barbos showed up shortly after that so it wasn't quite as bad. We then played four on the couch afterwards...which was interesting...although the girls were a bit hysterical everytime they got someone on the couch...kinda freaky. And my mind went completely blank during the second round (the first round was really quick as we split it up guys and gals, 10 girls to 6 guys didn't work out so well) and I managed to get two boys off the couch...

Return of the Mother

Scary right? Especially since I was behind on school...fortunately, I managed to escape doom by breaking the news to her in small stages...so she was never overly mad at me. However, since her return life has pretty much gone back to normal. Regular meals. Regular arguments over my being allowed to stay up past midnight (compromise is occasionally reached, but I have yet to win a complete victory). Watching moronic movies every now and then is also compulsory. We just watched Shaka Zulu, which is five hours long. Fortunately, I was listening to my ipod with noise-blocking headphones and reading a Terry Pratchett book (my mother knew about the latter, not the first one though). So it wasn't the end of the world. Still irritating though. Fortunately she hadn't taken it into her head to wake me up before 10 yet, although I rather suspect that that is only a matter of time. At anyrate, my wonderful time of relaxation is officially over, and I'm back to the regular, stressful existence induced by the presence of a perfectionist mother who also happens to be my teacher.

Frisbee and Poker

Yesterday, I managed to do 2 of my favorite activities: Frisbee and Poker. When planning to do them however, I forgot a crucial point: it takes longer than 10 minutes to drive back from SIS, take a shower, and then dabab over to the Lichtentaylors. So I had to leave Frisbee 20 minutes early. With Keith, Mr. Barbo, and, unfortunately Derek and David. Derek and David were up climbing a mountain at the time when we wanted to leave. So we wasted 10 minutes looking for them and waiting for them to come down. We finally left however, and then realized that we had hit pre-maghrib traffic. Not fun. Anyway, we finally got home, I took a shower, and then quickly dababed over to play poker. Surprisingly, I was only half an hour. I then played poker for an hour or too before managing to lose all my chips to Adam. *deep sigh* I did have quite a lot of fun though. Next week hopefully not so many things will go wrong...

Conference in Thailand

All right...the conference in Thailand was awesome...I mean, with 30 crazy teens all in the same hotel, all hanging out with each other pretty much all the time...how can you not have fun? Pretty much every morning we all woke up...or most of us woke up, and those that didn't were forcibly got up...headed down to breakfast and then went to the "Cave" (I think it was like a nightclub or something...but the youth did their stuff there) and listened to one of the youth leaders explain a spiritual discipline to us (fairly interesting, though I still haven't read the book I was supposed to...). And then after that was finished we generally meandered around for a while, got lunch, went swimming or some such interesting activity, and then around 2 or so we headed back to the cave for another lesson. This lesson was generally more interesting, not as serious, and didn't last as long. When it finished we headed to supper, and then messed around doing various random things. At around seven we headed to the cave again, had yet another lesson, but fortunately, when that one finished at nine we had 3 hours to play games, make loads of noise, and just generally be crazy. Okay...that was the general overview...now some specifics.
The second night I was there, I got to play Slap-happy. Past midnight. On the 17th floor, where supposedly the German chancellor was staying. Very, very loudly. It was fun. Announcement the following morning: teenagers are forbidden on the 17th floor past 10 at night. A very successful visit I would say... Then on Friday (I have no idea which day of the conference this was) we had a free day where some of us went and rode elephants. Personally, I prefer camels. A much smoother ride. The next we had a ball, which was interesting. Following the ball (which ended around midnight) about 10 of us went off and talked for a couple hours. It got silly, but was fun nevertheless. The following morning one of us failed to get up. The following night a bunch of us went off to the movie theater and watched the Bourne Ultimatum, which was kinda cool, though I was ready to kill the person who filmed it for making it shake so much by the time it ended. The taxi there was very full (there are strange taxis in Chiang-Mia, they are sorta like covered up pick-up trucks with seats in the back), and everyone freaked when I elected to hang onto the back rather than crowd into a space designed for 10 people that had 16 in it. Quite surprising to me, as I assumed most mks would be used to that. Anway, we had fun. The following night was the last night of the conference, so we all headed to Joel's room (one of the leaders...probably the coolest) and stayed up fairly late, intending to pull an all-nighter. I left at around 2:30 because all the people I liked to talk to had already gone to bed. I don't think anyone else bothered to stay up all night either though, most everyone went to bed by 3 or so. Anyway it was fun, I had a great time, and I only wish it had lasted longer.

The Ball

I will post more about the rest my time in Thailand later, but for now I will just concentrate on a single event that occurred: the Thailand Tahiti fun Ball (the name of which changed every time our youth leader said it). In the two days previous two it I must admit I was rather nervous, for two reasons: one, I had no idea how to dance, and two, I had nothing to wear. Fortunately, my older sister was looking out for me and took me shopping and got me a decent shirt to wear, so that turned out okay. And when the ball finally did come round, they taught us all a couple dances, and I think there were only 1 or 2 people there who knew those particular dances, so it was all good. We also did some freestyle dance, and that was fun too because nobody really cared how bad you looked as long as you were willing to try. The music was pretty awesome, except the waltz music, which was kinda blah. The waltz itself was cool though because it involved dancing with girls (much cooler than dancing by yourself). Anyway, the ball was awesome, and I can now claim that I know how to dance.

China

Okay...now to post about my adventures in China. I really should've done this ages ago, but I forgot to set up my blogspot account so I could do it in China. Oh well here goes...

Kunming:
My first week in China was spent in Kunming. This was quite a lot of fun, I got to watch a lot of cool movies and TV shows, and I managed to convince my parents that we didn't need to do a whole lot of sight-seeing. Also the food in Kunming was really good.

Xi'an:
Next I went to Xi'an. Xi'an was pretty boring, the only interesting thing there was the clay soldiers, and it was actually more impressive to read about those in the history book than to actually see them.

Beijing:
Beijing was quite unpleasant, at least the first part of our stay there. After leaving the airport, we tried to catch a taxi. We tried like 15 empty taxis, every single one of the taxi drivers was rude, obnoxious, and wanted an absurd about of money. The sights in Beijing weren't too terribly boring, but I still feel that looking at pictures of them would have been more worthwhile.

Guilin:
At the end of our trip to China, we went to Guelin. This was probably the most interesting portion of our trip, as we got to go spelunking in a really cool cave. This was a ton of fun, even though I had to wear a hard hat and hit my head about 30 times in the cave. Needless to say, I was very thankful for that hard hat.

All in all, the trip to China was quite a lot fun, especially as I got about 30 DVDs out of it. The food was good (though I got a bit tired of KFC by the end of it), the sights were boring, and the movies were cool.

Return to Yemen

I am now back in Yemen. Both flights back here went quite well, though admittedly on the Delta flight to Frankfurt the movie system wasn't working so the only TV I got was a Numb3rs episode on Justin's ipod. Our reentry into Sana'a occured perfectly, we walked into the airport, were third in line for passport control, got all 8 bags while most other people there were struggling to get 2 or 3, walked right past security without them opening any of our bags, and had Faris pick us up and take us home. Probably record time for our family. Security didn't even comment on my laptop bag, which had like 20 cds and movies in it, which was nice. On the way home we stopped at Yamal-El-Sham and picked up shuarmas which was sweet. Then, on the way home, we discovered that one of the streets leading into our house was torn up, and were unsure how to get in. Fortunately, our landlord happened to be walking home at exactly that time, and we picked him and he told us how to our house. Our street was half torn up, the roadwork stopped just before the door of our house. Talk about amazing luck! Apparently they plan to tear it up within a day or two though, we're just hoping that they wait until we are in China for them to do it. When we got home, we ate, unpacked the duffel bags, and went to sleep. I then slept for 15 hours straight (could be a new record for me...). When I woke up I promptly got on the internet, and had fun blogging and checking my email. I think I'll go take a nap now though...

The Complete Works of Shakespeare

Last night I went to the Shakespeare tavern and watched "The Complete Works of Shakespeare." It was performed by a total of three actors who managed to complete the show in less than 2 hours. Naturally, the plays were rather condensed and happened quite quickly. They also changed some of the plays rather drastically. For example, in order to "bring the plays into a more contemporary setting" they performed Titus Andronicus as a cooking show and converted another play (which I no longer remember the name of) into a rap song. The rap song was pretty funny, even though they were terrible rappers (hm...three white guys who have probably never rapped before in their entire lives...what a surprise). The funniest play they did was Hamlet. The first time through Hamlet they recruited the audience to help them a bit, and even got one member of the audience to play Ophelia. The rest of the audience then played Ophelia's mind, a very confused mind. After finishing Hamlet once, they then redid it very, very quickly. They then did it again even faster. Then, as a finale, they did the entire thing backwards. The two funniest bits of that were when the ghost appeared and went "oob" and Ophelia undrowned. The whole performance was hilarious, and I am very glad that I decided to go instead of babysitting Anjuli.

A confession

Recently, I committed a heinous crime. I told my dad to download Windows Media Player onto his beautiful new, pure Macbook. And I did all for the sake of a few hours of happiness on the other computer, which he would have taken with him to Houston. Sadly, I knew of no other program that would allow him to play .wmv files on his mac. Oh well. It was worth it. I got in a lot of games of C&C Generals.

Recently, my life has been great. Just about every day, my Grandpa takes me out to eat to some junk food place or another, and when I am not eating, I am playing on the computer, reading a book or watching TV (or occasionally doing all three at once). I have also been sleeping to around 11 or so every morning. Of course since I also go to bed in the morning I'm not entirely sure how much good that is doing me. But it is still fun. The only blight on this otherwise wonderful existence is my mom's insistence on occasionally doing family outings, which are invariably pointless and boring. *sigh* Apparently going to meaningless events together promotes "bonding." Maybe someday I will understand this and I will forgive my mother for wasting hours of my time with pointless exercises.

The Holy Land Experience and The Beach Experience

Two days, my family went to a strange theme park that was based around the Holy Land. Most of it was quite boring, though there was quite an interesting model of Jerusalem. Anjuli wanted to climb on it of course, but that course of action was quite strongly discouraged by the owners. Some guy there gave a presentation thingy about it, and that was boring, though the person himself was quite interesting. He had traveled extensively, spent quite a bit of time as a missionary, and knew 5 or 6 languages (half of them dead languages, but even that is sorta cool). Naturally, my dad stayed an extra 15 minutes talking, though everyone else wandered off in short order. Rather annoying, because that was the last thing we were doing at the park. The day was not a complete loss however, I spent most of my time there listening to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe written and read by Douglas Adams, and that was pretty good. I also listened to it during the three-hour car trip back to my Uncle Fred's.
Yesterday, we got up early and went to the beach. I have now decided that going to the beach without any friends with you is really quite boring, and hope to never do it again. The trip was made worse by the fact that Anjuli was scared of the sound of the waves crashing on the shore, and was terrified by the water itself. Justin and I tried to play some frisbee, but the constant wind blowing in from the sea made that difficult. And to make matters worse, I had forgotten my book, and so was bored in the car on the way back to the house. NOT a good trip.
Today was rather satisfying, however. Though it did not start out very promising (I woke up a bit early, went into a very green pool, and dealt with an unhappy baby in said green pool) by afternoon everything was going well. At one oclock in the afternoon I started reading the Butlerian Jihad, and as I was only 100 pages into it, and still had almost 600 pages, I did not really believe I would finish it before my mom went to the library to return. By 6:30 however, I had finished it and was able to return to the library. Happy day.

Florida

After an 11 hour car trip I have finally arrived in Florida. It is hot and humid, but fortunately there is often air-conditioning to combat the heat. Unfortunately, some buildings rather overcompensate.... Ah well. Such are the dangers of being in America. Yesterday I worked to set up my uncle Fred's internet connection, and due to a mysterious problem with the password, was forced to call tech support. Very embarrassing. The person at tech support was fairly competent, though she went through the individual steps in mind-bogglingly precise detail, which drove me nuts. Oh well, at least it worked afterwards.
My nine year-old cousin came to visit yesterday. She has now grown out of the stage where she feels comfortable jumping on me and doing other similar actions, and instead acted quite "civilized." I was rather bored when she came over, and I found it amusing to treat her to several discourses, on various random subjects, and she eventually labeled me "weird." Ah well, such is life. I rather suspect that most, if not all, of the readers of this blog have termed me weird at one point or another. Another interesting thing that happened yesterday was a trip to the library. After spending about an hour looking through, we finally picked about thirty, and then proceeded to try to check them out. No go. Apparently, my mom's library card had expired. Since they needed some proof that we actually lived in Florida, we were forced to return home. My mom then attempted to borrow my uncle Fred's library card, but his had been suspended. So eventually we just went back to the library, and tried quite hard to get the card renewed, and in the end the librarian took pity on us and gave us a one-month renewal. Very useful, because we intend to be gone well before the month is up. So we went home happy.
Today, I was forced to get up very early to go to church. We had to leave by 7:15. So of course my mom wakes me up at 6:30. Very annoying, as I had hoped to sleep until at least 6:50. I can never quite figure out why she imagines it takes us as long to get ready to go as long as it takes her. So anyway, I get up, eat breakfast, change, and read my book for about 20 minutes until we finally leave, and then I get another hour and a half to read my book as we head to church. When we get there, Justin and I decide to skip the first service and Sunday school, so I get another 2.5 hours to read my book. Though the service wasn't too bad, I can't really say it was worth the wait. Oh well. After the service, we got lunch at a fairly nice restaurant, and then headed home. My dad had planned to drag us to the evening service, but thankfully there was enough time between lunch and it that he managed to drop Justin and I off. Very fortunate, as the idea of staying out till 9 didn't really appeal to me. A very packed two days.

America

Well, people have finally convinced me to start blogging again. As everyone who reads this will no doubt be aware, I have recently traveled to America. It was a 24-hour trip, very unpleasant, but fortunately I had no difficult with jet lag. What I did have difficulty with was catching up on sleep, as I was woken up before 8 every morning by a rather loud niece, who has a tendency to run around jumping on people.
Since coming to America, I have done rather a lot of reading, as I have little else to spend my time on. In addition to several Discworld novels, I have also read The Diamond Age a very complex, confusing, but rather interesting book by Neal Stephenson.
On Memorial Day, I went to a rather boring picnic, where everyone managed to forget their frisbees. The day was not a complete loss though, upon returning to Jeremy and Ruth's I played Carcassone with Jeremy, Justin, Dad and Azar.
Another interesting event occurred yesterday, when I went out with my youth group to play whirlyball, which is now probably my second favorite sport, after Ultimate. Since it is difficult to explain exactly what whirlyball is, I will not attempt to, but if you want to find out you can google it.
That pretty much summarizes everything that has been happening to me lately.

Birthday and Internet cut-off

Well, yesterday was my birthday. I am now 16. And as a present from the phone company, our phone line was not working, and so the ADSL was not working either. Which meant I had to use dial-up. SLOW. Normally, I have about 6 pages loading at once, with dial-up, I could have one. And that one page would take 20 seconds to load. Nasty. At anrate, my birthday was fun. For my party (two days before my actual birthday) I had Graham over for the night, and we ate half the cake my mom had made. It was a wonderful cake, chocolate with skittles on top (skittles on cake tastes REALLY good). The following day, we tried to sleep in, but had to get up for church at 9 (parents are cruel), then when Graham left around 4, I got online (this was before the phone line thing) and had good fun for an hour or two. Afterwards, I finished The Light Fantastic, and went to bed. The next day, the internet was cut off. I was saddened. At anyrate, the phone line seems to have randomly fixed itself earlier today, so I'm happy again. I should probably get off the computer now, I have a mountain of school this week and 5 more books to read in the remaining 5 days of the week, and therefore need all the sleep I can get.

Arabic

Recently, I discovered that not all the Arabic that I have learned in the past few years was worthless. The other day, as I was walking home from Medina Street, I saw a bunch of guys on the street playing UNO, and much to my surprise, they asked me to join them. So I did. It was interesting, and not actually very much different than playing UNO with a bunch of American guys (except that everything was in Arabic). This is where my Arabic came in useful. I could actually understand almost all the jokes they made (there were one or two where I understood the words, but not what was funny about them). It was actually quite a bit of fun, and I am considering going out there more often to hang out with them (if I understood correctly, they often meet at that time in that place)

A Day At SIS

My day at SIS was...interesting. During first & second periods I went to Mr. George's writing class, and felt sorry for the students there and, suddenly, it dawned on me how I did better than 92% of the PSAT takers. (Mr. George was incredibly incompetent). After that, I went to math, which was a most excellent class, and I think that having a math teacher like Mr. Erskine would be really useful in preparing me for college. Then we went to Biology, which was quite boring, but that was mostly because people were doing a retest through most of the class period. It was an open book test, so I have no idea how most of the class managed to fail it, but they did. After biology, I watched Keith and Abe practice for the SIS play for a period. Most of it was boring, though it was rather amusing watching Felicity chase after Keith (one would think she could have found someone more interesting to chase after but oh well). Then, while Abe went off to do Arabic, I went with Keith and played soccer for a period or two. That was quite a lot of fun, and Mr. V. was excellent. Oh, I seem to have completely forgotten the bus ride there. It was not as bad as I expected, the bus was very quiet, and i got a fair bit of reading done (54 pages read in 60 minutes-roughly 10% slower than normal). And though the bus ride back was much noisier, it was also quite a lot shorter (I got 15 pages read in 30 minutes-less than half speed).
So far my impression of SIS has been quite good, though Mr. George was a VERY incompetent teacher. The only other major problem is getting up 6. It means I have to be in bed by 10, which is rather unpleasant.,

Pride and Prejudice

A few days ago, I watched Pride and Prejudice (I think it was temporary insanity, not permanent). It was, surprisingly, not that bad. There was one awesome character, Mr. Bennet, who was absolutely hilarious. Unfortunately, most of the other characters were pretty lousy. I do not know if the movie was intended to be funny, but that was the only really good thing about it. Most of the characters kept on doing stupid things (maybe the things they did were only stupid from my rather strange point of view), which Mr. Bennet would often criticize in a most amusing way. I think my favorite part of the movie was when Mrs. Bennet was attempting to get Elizabeth to change her mind about marrying Mr. Collins, and Mr. Bennet said, "You face a hard choice Eliza. If you say no, your mother will never speak to you again, and if you say yes, I will never speak to you again." Upon which Mrs. Bennet gasped and ran off in shock. It was probably worth watching once, but I can't actually say that I ever intend to watch another Jane Austen (is that how you spell it?) movie again.

random stuff...

Recently, I have somehow found time to play computer games again. I am still unsure where exactly I got this time from, and it is starting to seem worthless as my dad took the cd to the only computer I was playing to his office and hasn't bothered to bring it back from...
Even though I somehow found time to play computer games, I cannot seem to find time to finish all my school every week (hmm...could there be a connection?...nah, no way).
I have also been extremely tired recently. I should probably start going to bed earlier, but there always seems to be so much to do...
and now the random post ends and I return to school...

RPG

Today, Graham and I tested our game. We got Hannah, Jason, Keith, Justin and Peter to play it with us. It was quite a lot of fun though some bits of it weren't so good. For the first half of it, we had mostly logic puzzles and whatnot. After that, we tested our battle system. The battle went abysmally bad, probably because we did not add either enough variation to it and not enough enemies. Also, we need to get our mage and cleric to have more options on their turns, because they found it especially boring. I think after we add some traps, strategy, and more enemies, it should work though. At least our logic puzzles worked great, though Hannah was a bit paranoid and only agreed to go onto the next room after sending Peter through to make sure that it wasn't dangerous...Peter was very willing in that respect....Anyways, hopefully Graham and I will get around to making all the other quests and finishing up the rules fairly soon. Hopefully, we will start playing two weeks from now, though it does seem slightly doubtful that Graham and I will work hard enough to finish a sufficient amount to actually start....

The Death Sentence

In my opinion, that fact that the death sentence has been practically abolished in the U.S. shows that females do NOT actually have much say in the lawmaking process. I mean, girls have given me the death sentence more times than I can remember. They do it for the slightest offences too, for example, make a passing remark about their age, and your dead. I think that if women did actually have an equal say in the lawmaking process in the U.S. these would be some of the things that would be punished with death:
Overguessing a woman's age.
Teasing any female.
Telling a woman to put a decoration in a place where no one will ever see it, thereby telling them that they have bad taste in decorations.
I think you can get the picture.

Time

Okay, this post is going to be pretty weird, but bear with me, it just might make sense by the end of the post...

What if there is only now? No future, no past, only present, and everything that is happening (which includes those things which we normally consider to have happened already and those things which have not yet happened) happens in the present tense. To understand this better, consider a sphere. On this sphere, all events happen (similar to the line time is usually described with). As the sphere expands to allow room for more events, the other events continue to happen. However, as the event of the sphere's expanding has already happened, the sphere is already infinitely large and all possible events have already happened.
This idea of time allows for certain apparent inconsistencies in the Bible, such as Christ having lived for eternity, but was also begotten (I have never before heard a good explanation for this). Using this system of time, Christ would have always have been living and would always have been begotten. Also, this provides a good explanation for God's knowledge of the future. As everything happens in the present, if you can see the entire present, you can see everything that is happening (once again, this includes things which we normally define as already having happened or things that are going to happen). Humans, however, are limited to only seeing a part of the present, and so cannot know what is going to happen later in the present (English really isn't a good language to try to define this sort of stuff in, perhaps I should invent an entirely new language to help people understand it...).
This is approximately my current idea on the nature of time. The whole thing is extremely counter-intuitive, and so is very difficult to think through and explain properly. This, added to the aforementioned nature of the English language, has caused my explanation to be completely inadequate...If only I could utilize some form of telepathy and transfer my ideas that way...Anyways, if you see any glaring impossibilities in it, show them to me and I will attempt to explain them away. I don't really expect anyone else to believe this, due to an early conditioning on the nature of time that is almost impossible to undo...Maybe someday in the future I'll be proved right and this idea will be taught in schools...

Ping-Pong

Yesterday, I had my first Ping-Pong lesson with a professional player (and, in all probability, my last). It was quite a lot of fun, though he only taugh us backhand, and what he taught us doesn't mesh with my style, and he didn't teach us enough for me to be able to do a huge amount with it. He is a perfectionist. He kept on wanting my posture and hand position to be exactly right (he wants my posture to be completely different than how it normally is-as I am quite tall he made me bend down really far) and I think I'll be able to implement those changes to improve my game.
After the class, our teacher showed us his favorite move (which was a forehand slam) and it was pretty sweet. Rather than just using his arm for the slam, he jumped up and slammed it with his entire body. I would really hate to have that done to me when I was playing a game. He did another very impressive thing when I was playing him one on one. He was playing quite slowly and pretty high (being kind to me) and I slammed it to his backhand. He appeared to be utterly unprepared for it (he was standing right next to the table not paying too much attention) and it went pretty high before he got it. To get it, he jumped up and backwards while reaching his right hand across his body and as far up as it could go. And, to top it off, he got it back to my side of the table going pretty slow and very easy to get.
I had one other surprise (though not from the coach). After the class all the students were playing each other. Peter and Luke played first. Not surprisingly, Peter beat Luke (came within one point of skunking him actually). I then played Peter, and, to my shock, he was almost as I good as I was. The last time I had played him, he was barely one tenth as good as he is now. I probably would've lost the game merely from the shock of it all, but, fortunately for my reputation, my reflexes came into action and took over almost completely. Unfortunately, my reflexes were confused by my new posture, so I only won 13/11 with Peter having actually forced me to serve on two game points previously. After beating Peter, I played David, who, as usual beat me=( This more understandable though, David has had quite a few lessons with the Ping-Pong Park, so he knows how to play quite well.
On a random note, I am now thinking seriously about getting my own paddle. Mr. Park has offered to put some professional plastic stuff on it (that normally costs $60) so i think it would be worthwhile, as a paddle only costs like 1000 riyals or so. If I did this I would have a chance to learn my paddle, which might make it worthwhile to try to learn a decent amount of spin. And I have written an awful lot aboout ping-pong so I think I should probably get back to work on my paper before I start to bore Jasmine any worse than I already have...

Attention Span

Recently, I have started to notice that i have a great deal of difficulty paying attention to anything for any length of time. For example, when my parents start talking to me, my mind just kind of fades out their voice, and then, when they desire a response, I have to look back in my memory for the last 15 seconds or so of the conversation (all my short-term memory will hold) and try to figure out a reasonable response for those 15 seconds. This actually works surprisingly well, as most people (including me) actually say most of what they are going to say in the last 30 seconds or so of the conversation. So I only miss roughly half the conversation, which, in my opinion, is not too bad. Sometimes though, they say something where the main gist of the conversation was in the beginning of it, and then I feel totally lost and quite embarassed. Another thing i get easily bored of is eating. Recently I have been getting bored in the middle of meals, and so have left the table quite hungry (by middle of meal I mean after only 1 or 2 helpings of everything). Fortunately, there is a simple remedy for this: late night snacking. Unfortunately, though, my mom does not approve of this practice, so I generally try to do this when she is distracted by something else. I'm weird.

Ultimate

We finally played Ultimate. I was rather afraid that not many people would come, but a bunch did. There were a couple people, however, who were rather annoying. One was my dad (who kept on yelling stuff about throwing the frisbee long) and the other was Abraham (who was criticizing anyone who didn't manage to catch a pass he threw at them). All in all though, I think it went quite well, and hopefully next month it will go better, and people will be in better shape with more skill. Hopefully I will have time to practise, and will be able to throw and catch at least a little better.

Pentominoes

The game pentominoes is a new obsession of mine. Basically, the goal of the game is to make 12 shapes made of 5 cubes each go into a predetermined pattern. It can be done with both 2 and 3 dimensional patterns, and the instruction book I have for it has about 70 different patterns in it. Strangely enough, I find the 3 dimensional patterns easier than the 2 dimensional ones. The 2D patterns are more fun, though I have yet to finish my first one. I must admit that I am actually really bad at these puzzles, I suppose i probably don't have the right mind-set or something.

New Year

It appears for this new school year I may have to actually work seriously for a change. Fortunately, I have no subjects that I really hate (except maybe lit-it is sooooo boring). From a cursory glance of my schedule, it does not appear that this year should be any harder than last year. However, with a new 3 hour class on Mondays, the work really piles up on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Thankfully the class on Mondays is not mentally draining like the Saturday class, it is actually kind of fun(if anyone tells my mom I said this, they are dead). It appears I will have to start reading books only on week-ends, 'cause otherwise I will get even farther behind (well...I can still read school books on week-days-though I am in doubt as to whether that will be any consolation). I am not exactly a model worker. Hopefully this year will go pretty well as soon as I figure out how much time I need to spend doing school every day....

Anyways, Youth Group started last night, and it went fairly well, though the music on some of the songs was a bit sketchy. Ben came in, which was fun (he stills seems young enough as to almost be able to understand us). It was at the Licthen-Taylors (however you spell that) for the first time, and it went rather well. Surprisingly, no one tried to organize any games, so everyone just kind of talked afterwards. I put through my suggestion for playing Ultimate, and to my surprise, pretty much everyone was interested, so I guess we will be doing it sometime soon...hopefully Denise will come up with a date or something. Don't worry Mr. Barbo, the "old farts" will be invited too. LOL.

okay...

All my friends that are coming back to Yemen this year are back. Ruth and Priska and James have left. Life is mostly back to normal. In school, the only semi-interesting person is Hannah (she is quite amusing, I think she is probably just as intelligent as I am and also works twice as hard...she'll probably get better grades...oh well).

Last Thursday, a bunch of people went out to SIS and we played Ultimate Frisbee. It was awesome fun, and I think I'll try to get the Youth Group to make it a monthly thing.

My door now has no lock. It has failed twice. I doubt it will ever have another outside lock. Deep sadness. At least my dad fixed it so it close normally now.

And i am feeling peculiarly unimaginative right now, so I guess that is all I am going to write about.

Scary

School is starting in two days. This is scary, because i will be in a class with both Luke and Hannah. Otherwise I probably wouldn't mind it very much. It is also rather annoying because it means that I got considerably less than 2 months of vacation this summer. But I also got to read quite a few Terry Pratchett books, so I guess everything is cool. I have also recently read a philosophy book, which was very funny. The guy who wrote effectively showed that nobody can know for certain that Santa Claus does not exist, because knowledge of that would require complete knowledge of the entire universe, which only God has. So saying that Santa does not exist is like saying you are god. Very amusing, considering how many people have said Santa does not exist. The guy also gave many extremely convincing arguments that values are objective and not subjective (this is something that pretty much everyone believes underneath, they just don't like to admit it). The book was called "The Best Things In LIfe" and was very good. I recommend it very heartily. The reason I haven't posted in a while is because I have had very little interesting things happen to me recently.

Hajirah

Recently, I went with a huge group of people to Hajirah. It was a lot of fun, especially sleeping on the roof with 6 other boys. There was one problem: I heard just how great boarding school was. I had heard that it was good several times before, but never heard about it in much depth. Stephen, Nate and Daniel were giving advice to Matt, and I was listening. I really, really wish I was going to boarding school. In my opinion, homeschooling in a country where you only have like 5 friends is like the worst of all possible schooling options. It is no fun, and you make like no new friends. I have a suspicion that because I have been homeschooled, I will have problems making friends in college. I just haven't learned any social skills that will help me make friends. Oh well, it is almost impossible that my mom will ever change her mind about homeschooling me all the way through high school. She appears to completely obsessed with it. Apparently, she thinks I will learn more by homeschooling. That may be true, but what good will a little more knowledge do me if I have no knowledge of people?