Airline Woes

Some of you may remember our (relatively) outlandish disaster surrounding USAir 2 years ago, on an attempted flight to Puerto Rico. James Paternoster sent us this link to a story by Michael Totten, a fantastic Middle East travel blogger. His story about Alitalia is simply shocking. A bit long, but very worth the read, and it'll make you thankful for even the worst of your travels, and put an end to this notion that every European airline is automatically superior to every US airline.

First Time For Everything

I've read a lot of books in my life, but I have never gotten to the very last page only to realize that the very last page had been previously removed and is now missing. Until just now. Alas.

Thankfully, despite being a Agatha Christie murder mystery, she didn't save the "Whodunnit" revelation to the very end. If you know a place online where the entire text might be, please let me know.

Michigan Visitors

It's been a long, cold, lonely winter up here in Michigan, but the end is in sight. I think most people are waiting to come visit us until our long anticipated daughter makes her entry into this world, but that combined with a postponement of vacation until maternity leave in April/May has made for a very long winter. So we were especially excited when Eric's cousin Alex Blanski and his fiancee Tabitha came to visit us this past weekend. We visited them in Chicago last August and had made plans for a followup visit...so seven months later, here we were.

I can't say Ann Arbor is quite as exciting as Chicago, but we tried our best with a little Knights and Cities action, Ticket to Ride, stimulating conversation on all manner of topics, and ethnic cuisine. We taught Alex and Tab how to make naan and chicken tikka masala. Yummy! We also toured the undergrad campus, U of M's new "green" business school, and some other campus sights. Thanks for coming, guys!

The End

Given that I'm 28 on my birthday in June, this news is just too bad.

Parenting, Part 2

My imagination on the subject hasn't been exhaustive, but I have often pondered some of the changes that parenting will bring. I expect cooking meals will be different. I expect sleep will become more like my intern year experiences. I expect that there will be more noise in my house, but also more laughter. However, I would never expect that my baby girl would be freakishly precocious in her gross motor skills and learn how to get out of her crib by doing a headstand. But then again, our friends Tim and Julie never expected that from Jessica. And they already had two kids.

Parenting Do's and Don'ts

As we prepare for parenting, we're trying to read all the right books, and get all the right advice. After all, giving advice to parents in the clinic is not the same thing as taking the kiddo home with you. In the spirit of this quest, we have found the following easy-to-understand diagrams to be particularly wise. For more of the same ilk, go here.

Own Your Wealth

At the risk of adding to the never-ending cacophony of thoughts on the state of our economy, I would mention the following overheard comments:

“With this recession, I can’t get my kids what they want for Christmas.”
“When I can’t buy a new pair of shoes, something is really wrong.”
“What? I can’t even buy my dog a Christmas present!”

A wise man (named Bob Lynn) made the observation that Christians in wealthy circles have had the tendency to reinterpret the Bible’s injunctions to care for ‘the poor’ as those who are ‘poor’ spiritually or emotionally. In other words, interpret in such a way that the wealthy can include themselves among the poor. It is a necessary thing for the rich to understand their own poverty in non-material ways, but the effect of the above reinterpretation once again leaves the poor ignored.

Current economic talk involves a large amount of class rhetoric, but I fear that this is accomplishing something of the same thing, in a different way. The American poor (who are still the wealthy of the world) can point to the American rich and decide that they are the poor, relatively. The American rich can look to the American ultra-rich, and say the same thing.

I fear that we will continue to wander in half-truths until we put aside these characterizations, which are only true relatively, and start dealing with absolutes. Who are we, in reality? We in America are the wealthy, and this is not just another comparison, but the absolute scale of the population of mankind. An understanding of how much material wealth we have in relation to the rest of the world is not just a useful mental exercise to remind us of all we have. It is an uncovering of reality, and should permanently replace the relative constructs we use within domestic circles.

What is the cost of this paradigm shift? We become the wealthy, and the responsibility that we apportion to the rich falls on us. Who should fund this? Who should care for the poor? Us. All of us. Before we set out on proper discussion of money and economy, we must first own our wealth. This acknowledgement will cost us, but it is true.

Happy Birthday!

Today is my wife's 30th birthday, and thus my chance to say, unreservedly and unabashedly, to all the wide web, that I am so thankful for her, and that I love her very much. Happiest birthday to you, Rachel. Thank you for sharing your life with me.

Sourdough

This past week, we made sourdough. Well, the first four days, we made the starter, and then we baked it on Thursday. The result: Not so sour, but very tasty. I think we finally have figured out how to make a nice crispy crust (i.e. spray the bread with water prior and at 5 and 10 minutes). But we put our replenished starter out again to see if we can further sour it. Perhaps if it was summer...

The Little Things

Someone left a comment on an old post of ours, and it made me smile. Thank you, whoever you are, and I hope you find your friend. (Click Roach Wars and scroll to last comment.)

Haircuts

A number of years ago, Eric sat down in a chair and his mom taught Rachel the art of the haircut, thus passing the glorious torch that she had held on to the next generation. Over the past 3-4 years, she has gotten quite adept.

And apparently more trusting, since she was willing to go for a role reversal. Letting your husband cut your hair is daring. When your husband hasn't so much as brushed his own hair is well near a decade, it is especially laudable. But thus is Rachel. And so, she carefully held up a mirror, and guided Eric step by step through his first hair-cutting experiment. The result: not too bad (I hope).

Afghan Accomplishments

During the fall of my third year of medical school, I was on a psychiatry rotation, which we all affectionately referred to as "Psych-ation." Basically meaning that you'd go in to work for a few hours a day and have the rest of the day off. I got rather bored during this time and decided to develop some new hobbies. I read Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series in its entirety (those of you who have read this epic series know it's a significant time investment), and decided to teach myself how to crochet. Not wanting to start a small project (of course not) I jumped right in with deciding to crochet an afghan. Why not? Now remember, this was 5 1/2 years ago. And to my credit, in the interim I've crocheted 2 scarfs and 2 baby blankets. The afghan travelled from California to Michigan with me at the start of residency, and proceeded to sit in two different closets until, the momentous event occured last weekend, and I finished the afghan! If I were to sell it and I billed my current hourly rate as a resident (which is somewhere around $10/hour, so I could probably do better working at McDonalds), I think this afghan would probably go for about $500 or more. Any takers?

Adventures in Dearborn

Sometimes in the Michigan winters, one can get complacent and neglect opportunities that still persist all around you. My first couple years in Michigan, I visited everywhere within a 5-hour radius of Ann Arbor, and now after 7 years, I have to fight the temptation to become one of those people who have never been to some interesting place, even though it's been 30 minutes away all this time.

So this past Sunday, while our house was being shown for the 2nd time (to different people), we decided to head to Dearborn. Dearborn is a Detroit suburb which is the heart of the Ford Motor Company. It is also the center of Middle Eastern culture in the United States. Spillover from this has provided us with many yummy foods and interesting cultural moments in Ann Arbor, but neither of us had ventured into the heart of the city.

Now that we've been there, we sort of understand why, though if a local were showing us around, I'm sure we would have found more places of interest. Our first stop was to the Islamic Center of America, which might be the largest mosque in the US. We have only visited old world mosques in various other countries, and so this was interesting. Big, but not really ornate. And it bore a number of resemblences to modern American megachurches (including coffee shop, gift shop, and fellowship halls). Maybe these similarities are the parts not intrinsic to either religion, just to America.

Our second (though primary) goal was to find a bakery where they served this Lebanese treat that we had tasted in Dubai, while hanging out in a bathroom, trying not to eat in public during Ramadan. We drove down the streets of Arabic shop names, and pulled into Alsultan bakery, where we didn't see the pastry on the shelves, but I explained it to the lady there, and she went to the back where they had some fresh ones. "Zaatar" is a flat bread cooked with lots of yummy thyme and (we think) lemon. They also serve them with cheese. We bought a couple and ate the hot one in the car on the way home, the latter preserved now in our fridge.

Not the craziest outing, but good to stretch our legs and once again feel like we're taking in the world around us.

Happy Valentine's Day

Yes, in general, we are among those who exult in not observing Valentine's Day. Even better is observing it in a tasty yet mocking way. So we made a heart-shaped pizza, and we would have had a home brew to go with it, but the fact that this picture is of two women, and not just one, precluded that.

V Day Blog Tour

It's time for another round of blog tour books! I received four books to review for a "Valentine's Day" blog tour. Let me start by saying, Eric and I don't really celebrate the big V-Day. We make a heart shaped pizza every year and call it good. It's not that we're not romantic, it's just that we try not to cave to secular pressures telling us that we need to spend a lot of money on each other to express our love. This year for V Day, we also played a round of Settlers of Kisumu with the Faders, trying to expand our Swahili vocab. But that's neither here nor there in relation to the blog tour.

The four books I read all center on relationships. The first book, I Do Again, is by Cheryl and Jeff Scruggs. This is a couple who got married, divorced after several years, became Christians, and remarried. It's less an advice on marriages book and more an autobiography of their story. But Cheryl, the primary author, has reflected on where things went wrong, and how things got made right again, and will hopefully offer encouragement to people contemplating divorce, are already divorced, or even someone who's considering marriage (better to fix things before marriage rather than after). It was an interesting story, and maybe a resource to offer to people, but thankfully not needed by me and Eric. :)

The "For Couples Only" series is actually two books together: For Women Only and For Men Only, attempting to bring new insight into how women think (for men) and how men think (for women). I think again this might be good books for people to read before they get married, or if they're having trouble relating to their spouses. There was not much new information that I haven't heard from other sources, but well presented none-the-less. It's a "typical man" and "typical woman" type of viewpoint, meaning that there are obviously generalizations made about the sexes, but generalizations based on surveys taken. I don't feel like Eric is the "typical man" nor am I the "typical woman," so didn't gain as much from the book as some people could. I mean, Eric's the talker in our relationship, and I'm the concrete thinker. Etc, etc.

I didn't get a chance to read the final book, "Love as a Way of Life devotional," although I did read and review its companion book by Dr. Gary Chapman here several months ago. This is a brief description that was given to me: "Each devotional entry showcases biblical truths that guide a life of love, offering fresh insight and practical guidance in how to make love a lasting habit. Over the course of three months, readers will learn to follow God’s lead as they practice the characteristics of a loving person: kindness, patience, forgiveness, courtesy, humility, generosity, and honesty."

Let me know if you're interested in getting a copy of any of these books--I have one of each for the first person who emails.