Miscellaneous ramblings

The weather here has finally cooled to a point where you can go outside without guaranteeing to break a sweat. I'm walking the first leg of my journey into work now and I enjoying the quiet time to reflect before I hit the bus from the city campus to Khalifa campus. It's a little odd commuting from the heart of downtown to the barren yet budding subburbs of Khalifa City A. You might think that it would be a breazy ride going against the traffic. You'd be wrong. There really is no logic to the traffic congestion here. One day it might take 30 minutes to get from the city campus to where I work. Another day it could take an hour or more. And the route we take is completely dependent on the bus driver we have for the day. I, being the odd duck that I am, don't really mind the ride. I just got a Kindle a couple of weeks ago and I've got to say that I may like it even more than my iPad. Obviously it doesn't do as much, but reading on it is incredible (I think I may have to order another one or two to address the contention that's arisen out of its presence). The Kindle makes the drive fly by. 

The location of the campus where I work reminds me a lot of the sprawl we witnessed while living in Arizona only with bigger houses and fewer amenities. Eventually the city will catch up with the sprawl, but right now it feels really remote. I don't mind that much because when I'm not in front of students, I'm at my cubicle until punching out time. The days I work are full and pretty tiring, but it's a good kind of fatigue and I find myself falling into a bit of a routine. The long days are also forcing me to take more care with the time that I'm home, so that even though I'm spending more time away from home than I ever have, I feel like I've never spent better time with my family (the close quarters are also playing a role in all this bonding).

"Just one more ingredient and my plans for world domination
will finally come to fruition. Bwahahahaha!"

Liam, Lucy and Miranda started an on-line home school program a couple of weeks ago. The amount of work and the level of accountability was a bit jarring at first, but now that they've started toget into the swing ofthings, they're really loving it. It's a lot of work for Julie, but she's definitely rising to the challenge. Liam, Lucy and Miranda also started Karate about three weeks ago. There's a dojo in the building next to us and all of them have been enjoying the challenge. It also gives James and I a couple of hours a week to hang out just the two of us which is nice. 

Lucy decimating the competition at a Robot Battles Exposition.

I opened a bank account here, but I still felt like a bit of a tourist. We bought a piano, and still I felt like we were only visiting Abu Dhabi. It wasn't until I bought a 300 dirham drill and mounted a magnetic knife holder from Ikea in the kitchen that I felt like I was really committing to the place. There nothing like a few small holes in concrete to anchor you to a place. After the knife holder, I mounted a small carriage for the Iron and then put up some curtains in the girls' room (us and the boys are still living exposed to the world). We're really beginning to turn the apartment into a home. We got a carpet to match the curtains and sofas in the living room (Julie's got a great story about the carpet that she'll share if she gets enough pressure to do so). It took us five years to put up curtains in Nova Scotia, and those only went up because we didn't think we'd be able to sell the house without them. We're regulars at the little produce place next to our building, the shwarmma place around the corner and at the little grocery store a couple blocks down. We've never been regulars anywhere that we've lived, not even in Moscow, ID. so I guess in some ways we're more rooted to the place than we've ever been. There are still the language and cultural barriers, but those aren't as great as you might think.

You can tell that's the tallest building in the world because it's the only one
you can see!

We've got a bit of a robot theme here.