Church in Oman

This morning wasn’t great.  I woke up with an overwhelming feeling that we should have rented a house in a different part of town.  I got up and started researching that part of town to try to prove to myself that the grass wasn’t greener over there.  It failed.  That community has garden areas, beach access, restaurants, shops, a grocery store, a hair salon, a doctor’s office, a dentist, a gym, pools, and so much more.  But, it is rather far from the boys’ school, which is the real reason we didn’t look there too much.  I could have put them on a bus to school, but I didn’t want to force a new school and bus ride on my kids.  I opted for school convenience over living convenience for me.

Things will get better.  Eventually I will meet people.  Eventually I will have a car and can get to more than just the school, a grocery store, a handful of American fast food restaurants, and coffee shops.  Bad days happen. 

"Some days are like that.  Even in Australia."

Throwback Thursday: Anastasia

Yesterday, I finally convinced the boys to watch Anastasia with me.  It was probably my favorite non-Disney movie growing up.  I loved it!  But my boys saw it as a girl movie, so they wouldn’t watch it with me.  That is, until we were down to the last few animated movies the boys hadn’t watched recently.  Ha!

The film is a fanciful adaptation of what happened to the Grand Duchess Anastasia.  It features a young Anya who has forgotten her past and a couple of con-men who are trying to pass off a fake Anastasia as the real thing to the Dowager Empress who lives in Paris.

What is That Smell?

This is a question I ask myself almost constantly (and, no, it's not because I'm the only female in a house of boys).  There really is an aroma to the air.  I think it has something to do with the heat.  I say that because there is a stronger smell in rooms when the air conditioning has been turned off.  And I don’t mean always bad smells, but some of them are overwhelming, which isn’t pleasant for people like me that are sensitive to smells (thanks, Mom!).

Let’s start with the perfume shops or stands in the mall.  Really no different from the perfume sections in US department stores.  But, I hold my breath as I pass those, too.  This dates back to the time I had an allergic reaction in the men’s cologne section of a store.  We must have stopped on the edge of it for some reason, and I began to sneeze uncontrollably.  My mom saw what was happening and moved me to a different part of the store presumably while my dad kept browsing.  The sneezing subsided and all was fine.  But ever since then, I’m overly cautious.  Back to the present, I’ve learned where some of the perfume shops are in the local malls and I try to take routes that don’t go past them.