Meteorological madness!

I flipped my Dashboard on this morning out of habit. My weather widget for Cairo had a rain symbol.

Stupid useless thing, I thought.

I graded exams all day today. It still astonishes me that no matter how many times we talk about how heliocentrism isn't true, and I've defined positive and negative controls, the students still have crazy ideas.

Around 2:30 all hell broke loose. My doors and windows started slamming around and a hot wind spread sand all through the house. I ran through the apartment, shouting at J.F. to close everything down. Something bad was coming, and fast.


We darted out onto the porch to move the furniture against the walls to avoid an embarassing trip to the Indonesian Embassy later. Birds were being blown around the sky, garbage was swirling higher and higher, and the trees were thrashing like mobile animals.

The sky started darkening from the east, and the rain started falling. For a little while we were treated to the stunning sight of an enormous double rainbow arching over the city. Eventually the big fat drops took over, and we cracked the windows again to be able to smell the rain.

Now the air is crystal-clear and cool. It's absolutely lovely.

A teeny Grendel

God in heaven, what a night I've had.

Yesterday I took India to the vet to have her front claws removed.

I hadn't really wanted to do this. For about a year I'd put off doing this, because I'd convinced myself that it was cruel to pull out an animal's fingernails. She's a cat, I reasoned - if she claws me, or the furniture, or the occasional houseguest (that's you, M.E.) by accident, well, that's what she's supposed to be doing, right? She's a cat!

About a month ago, though, we had a Final Incident. I was getting dressed for work, and India was in the closet, playing with my clothes. She managed to get her claws hooked into one of my suit skirts, and she freaked out. Fast forward to rapid escalation, with India swinging from my suit skirt, howling her head off, thrashing around. I'm yelling my head off, I grab her to disentagle her - and she bites me. And that, as they say, was that.

After consultation with some trusted friends here, I got the appointment and dropped India off at my way to work yesterday. I picked her up in the evening. She was still messed up from the anaesthesia, and when I got her home she lurched around the apartment in her casts, scrabbling on the wooden floor and keeling over because her back legs didn't work either.

I felt dreadful - and horribly guilty for putting her through this. I kept her with me last night. She didn't let me sleep much, thrashing around and shaking her paws to rid herself of the casts - frequently catching me right smack in the face because she misjudged the length of her legs. I locked her in the bedroom all day today so she could only crash around so many places.

Tonight I got home and sat on the bed, grading papers with her beside me. After a few hours she jumped on to the floor, and I glanced onto the bed where she'd been sitting.

Her leg was lying on the bed next to me.

At least, that's what I thought. She'd ripped the cast off one leg, leaving huge clumps of fur caught in the top. I frantically called a friend who offered to swing by the pharmacy on her way home to pick up bandaging materials. She then came by to help me rebandage India.

In the end it took three of us to hold India down and get fresh, bulky, clumsy dressings back on her legs - because after the first aborted attempt, India had managed to strip off the second cast as well.

J.F. and B.C. took turns sitting on top of India while I rebandanged her legs. She screeched, and thrashed, and bit, and scratched, finally breaking open one of her paws again and bleeding through my sheets, undercover, and mattress. Thank God J.F. had had the presence of mind to strip my brand new woven blanket from the bed before the bleeding started.

Now poor India is locked in my second bathroom, the smallest room in the house with the least potential of her hurting herself or other things in her misery. She's huddled up on a towel next to her food and litterbox and water. When I went to sit with her a few minutes ago, she clumsily crawled into my lap and started purring.

I'm a horrible, horrible person.

Mobile photo diary

I finally got around to moving some pictures off my mobile phone onto my laptop. For some dumb reason my motorola phone takes pictures that are too big to send in SMS.

This first selection I like to call "Things in the supermarket."


"Pet thing"? I think it's a leash.

I laughed my head off when I saw this stupid elephant hood for a cat. Can you imagine trying to actually put this on a cat?




Snake oil? At least they're honest. I have a feeling this is an English colloqualism that just doesn't translate.

I know I've put the horniness cream on here before - but it's still funny.


Here's a picture of our favorite sign in Cairo. KC noticed it first, and I totally didn't get it because I kept trying to read the Arabic (which is the title of a popular song).


I went to a very chic salon in Dokki with some friends a few months ago. It's in a Victoria's- Secret-pink villa and the owner is French. You do the math - although the math came out to cost less than in Princeton for a haircut. The haircut was fine, but here's the horror of letting the Egyptian guy style your hair without understanding what he's offered. I looked like a '50s pinup. My friends were first taken aback, then amused. This picture is after I spent half an hour smushing down the top with my palms. Yikes.


Something I saw at a party, but didn't try (double-weird in a Muslim country):


And finally, not from my cell phone, but here's India's baby picture. She's the one on the right.

The Valley of the Whales

A few weeks ago I received a kind invitation to join in a trip to Wadi El Hitan, the Valley of the Whales. Who knew that Egypt had something older than pyramids?

Turns out Egypt's got fossils - lots of fossils. While mucking about in the desert just west of Cairo, I've found some nice examples that have appeared in other posts on this blog. Mostly I've found marine fossils - nummulites, bivalves, coral. In Wadi El Hitan, I saw the mother of all marine fossils - fossilized whales.

These aren't just any whales. These fossils are evidence of "transitional" whales, whales that were in the process of moving from the land back into the sea. The existence of transitional fossils is one of the strongest bits of evidence in support of evolutionary theory - you can bet my Scientific Thinking students are going to hear about this trip.

It's a four-hour drive out to Wadi El Hitan, through the Fayoum, an agricultural region just outside Cairo. We were a group of slightly more than 10, masquerading as an Australian church group (makes military checkpoints easier). To my surprise, nearly everyone in the van was an Egyptologist. To my even greater surprise, I was the only person who knew anything about fossils.

I'm not a geologist or a paleontologist by any means, but my field rotations out in Utah and the far North have given me some practical training - I've never formally studied either discipline. I was amused and gratified to see how people segregated themselves during our hike - and the people who were interested in learning ended up coming with me for the few hours we spent in the blazing sun, out in the desert.


I saw fossilized mangroves for the first time. They were super cool - I couldn't figure out what I was looking at at first, but once I got it, everything fell into place. I was standing in the remains of a mangrove marsh, where marine animals like whales, sea cows, crustaceans, and turtles came to feed and, apparently, die. I saw examples of all these fossils - even a fossilized turtle!

I could see how much effort has gone into making the park accessible to guests. In fact, it was almost too accessible - I don't know how they're going to keep the fossils safe from prospectors. At least the 35 km spur from the main "road" in Wadi El Riyan is dreadful, which might help keep out the tour buses.

In the end, for me it was a trip out to the desert, the desert, the harsh desolate sweeping furnace blinding desert that shaped all life around here. And to journey into the desert, just to find the sea - magical.


Ahem. Couldn't resist.

Moment of truth

I'm sitting at my desk with my pen poised over my absentee ballot, literally right this minute.

What am I going to do? I thought I knew.

Am I really going to vote for Obama, the man who has made ostentatious overtures to religious groups in the US? The man who is willing to support faith-based initiatives?

Or am I going to make good my threat to write my own name on my ballot?

Of course, it doesn't really matter what I do. New Jersey always votes blue. Even before 2000, I actually understood the electoral system. I've still voted in every election that I could, but mostly out of residual stars-and-bugles syndrome.

American blog-reading citizens, I'd like to take this opportunity to ask for your vote in November's election. I'm calling my one-woman party the No Bullshit Party. My first act in office will be to fire everyone. My second act will be to advise everyone to pull their heads out of their asses.

Reckon I'll be in office long?

Here goes ... democracy ....

To veil or not to veil?

I actually managed to find 2 minutes today to read a New York Times article. I've been sick, and frantic over work, and actually trying to have something resembling a social life. Hah hah. Last night I went to a lecture celebrating Naguib Mahfouz's Nobel Prize 20 years ago, and would you believe it? I met a princess. A real, honest-to-God princess, who for some reason seemed to think I was about 8 years old.

Anyway, it occurs to me that this article shows yet another example of people not minding their own business. Wearing the veil is a big debate in Turkey, to the point where young women in headscarves are not permitted to attend university.

Would I ever veil for religious reasons? No way. Passing over the religious bit, I view mandatory veiling as an impingement on the right of the individual to express themselves as they wish. But the flip side is this - I don't think anyone has the right to refuse the woman her choice to wear the headscarf.

As I understand it from my students, wearing the veil is supposed to be a choice. The moderate Muslims I've spoken to all agree on this, that expression of religion is supposed to be a thoughtful, deliberate choice made in fealty to God. According to these people, forcing young girls to wear the veil is as un-Muslim as prohibiting them from doing so.

What makes me nervous, though, is the much touted notion that these girls have chosen to do this. Pictures like this one (from NYT) make me uneasy, wondering about the depth of double-speak on this issue:


How can a child make an informed decision? Legally, ethically, or morally? This reminds me of a documentary I saw last year called Jesus Camp, following an upswelling of evangelical children's movements in the US. How can a child choose God? I guess I'm viewing this as an informed consent issue - which might be stretching a point.

I suppose I'm also reacting to Palin's recent anti-choice comments. It all comes down, I think, to the right of the individual to choose their own trajectory. I'm not advocating chaos, or mass murder, but I think I'd choose less interference every time.

Want to wear a head scarf? Fine, knock yourself out. As long as it's your choice, I couldn't care less what you do with your body. And I expect the same consideration in return.

Not that anyone's listening. Maybe if they could see the ridiculous head scarf arrangements I come up with, my choice would seem clearer. It was only recently that I figured out these women all use pins - which is how they manage to look so glamorous.

To my eyes, anyway. Most of the time.

Guilty as charged

This blog has totally languished, through my fault, my fault, my own grevious fault.

I've been spending all my time at work fighting stupid battles constantly. My greatest foe is the technology - or lack thereof - on the new campus. And when I'm not at work, I'm at home, feeling sorry for myself thinking about work.

Pathetic.

But things have been going on besides work, and maybe if I try little bloglets, I'll get around to writing about my trip to Wadi El Hitan and to Lebanon.

Yes! I was in Beirut earlier this week and it was great! I've finally managed to get my pictures uploaded, so now I have no excuse.

Mea culpa.