… but at least it ended in a fun relaxed manner.

** A warning - this is a totally girlie shopping entry. I’m truly not this vapid. There was research involved, as well as a certain appreciation for artistry and color!

I drove into work in an attempt to get there early and catch up for not being there yesterday. Of course, this plan was thwarted - not by bad highway traffic, but by the public works department of Hoboken, NJ. They blocked off any and all streets I needed to get to work or to the parking deck across the street from work. I circled (squared?) around the blocks surrounding work trying to find a one-way street that would get me where I needed to go.

There wasn’t any, but there WAS a police officer who took a momentary break from flirting with a youngish woman walking her bulldog to direct me the wrong way onto a one-way street which was closed off at the other end and could safely be driven on the “wrong” way. This allowed me to park and get into work. It still took me a full half hour to get from the highway exit for Hoboken to my desk. Pathetic. Infuriating.

I had a lot to catch up on and a LOT to do. That was at least good because I felt extremely productive and had a nice little dose of positive stress. I work well under pressure, so it wasn’t a bad thing. The pressure and stress of driving home was the negative kind, though, so I wasn’t in the best of moods when I got home… but my friend Theresa was waiting for me since she was going to accompany me on a trip to buy foodstuff for Saturday’s BBQ.

We went out for Indian food beforehand and by the time I finished, I had decided that I just wanted to take it easy and not deal with long lines and tons of people at the crazy warehouse superstore. Instead, I wanted a nice relaxing trip to … the mall. I hadn’t been there in many many moons (as was quickly evidenced by the plethora of new stores I’d never seen before) but Sephora was where I’d left it.

I went in looking for a shade of Nars lipstick called “Dolce Vita”. It was listed as a good color for people with very fair skin (me) by a makeup artist in a little magazine blurb in InStyle magazine. Since the same makeup artist recommended Nars “Orgasm” blush - which I use and find very flattering to my skintone - I decided to give it a shot and indulge. Sephora - incredibly - was out of stock on the shade. I bought a palette of Urban Decay eyeshadow instead.

I love their eyeshadows because they are so richly pigmented and their glittery or shimmery shades retain their glitteriness and shimmeriness. I also love Nars eyeshadows, but they’re a good deal more expensive… but also much more highly pigmented and they pack a punch of color. They have an incredibly diverse and expansive color palette, too, with shades for women of all ages, skin tones and styles. Urban Decay is a little more limited to young women with a certain degree of funk in their style. I am a young woman with a certain degree of funk in my style. Not a bad nasty funk. A fairly cool funk.

My mother and my sister are watching “Brokeback Mountain.” My brother is sitting in his room asserting his heterosexuality. I’m going to watch some MST3K - “Hercules Against the Moon Men.”

These are the moments that still let me feel like a Renaissance woman… buying girlie makeup, coming home to play with makeup and watch MST3K, and then read a memoir of mental illness (”Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature” by Jan Lars Jensen).

This morning at 7 am, I took my mother to the emergency room. She’s had a fever and body aches for several days now and when she called the doctor, she said to bring her to the ER if her fever continued to spike or worsen because it might be meningitis. Her fever spiked, so we went.

We were in the ER from 7:30 am until 4 pm. They took blood tests, chest x-rays and a whole host of other fun things, but basically they wanted to see if they could find out what it was since the only things they could do to definitively rule out meningitis were a CAT scan and a spinal tap. They gave her an IV of sodium chloride and pumped her full of 3 liters of the stuff to rehydrate her since the fever ended up depleting her fluids quite a bit.

It was a long long day sitting there in the room (we got a room, thankfully. The early bird gets the room, I guess), waiting, hearing a crazy old woman in bed 4 screaming, “Get me the hell outta here!!!” over and over again between doses of sedative. My mom slept a little, but I was unable to. So I played Tetris on my cell phone, tried to read a little, and otherwise just zoned out and lost myself in my thoughts.

When the blood tests came back, the only elevated “levels” were her white blood cells. With that information and her symptoms, the doctor determined that it was a severe version of a viral illness - the flu - and not meningitis. The treatment? Bed rest, plenty of fluids and Motrin for the pain. He asked my mom if she wanted the spinal tap, but she declined… after asking the doctor if he thought it was necessary. He said, “Would I recommend it for a family member in this case? No. I think this is definitely viral and NOT meningitis.” No spinal tap for mom, which is good since that’s a painful procedure.

We got home, ordered some Chinese food since we were both ravenous, and then I napped for an hour before getting up to drive to the airport to pick up my sister. I waited for a nice long time while she was getting through customs and finally saw her walking down the international arrivals hallway… and then I woke up a little. This was a good thing since I also had to drive home at that point and it was after 10:00. I sped, though not dangerously… and we got home around 10:25. She wanted to show us some things and tell us some stories, so I stayed awake for a bit, but bowed out when I saw the clock turn over to 11:00.

It’s time for me to get to bed. I have work tomorrow, after all.

One of my not-so-secret delights is cheesy action/sci-fi/based on comic books movies. They’re just a good time and allow me to escape into a little world of fantasy for a few hours.

Tonight, I saw “X-Men: The Last Stand” with Theresa. She’d seen it already, but liked it enough to see it again. I also liked it. There were some moments where my jaw dropped at the sheer stupidity of the plot “solution” or deus ex machina, but I always try to remember what movie I am seeing. I was disappointed that some of my favorite mutants were killed off/cured early in the film, while other mutants who I consider a complete waste of screen-time and flesh were allowed to torture us with their insipidness for the entire film.

All in all, though, a good time was had by all.

On the drive home from the theatre, we were trying to come up with some crap mutant powers. We were making fun of Storm and her powers (”Oooooh! Her eyes are turning white… wonder what she’s going to do NOW… maybe throw snowballs at us???”) and decided that you could have far worse powers. For example, the power to turn everything to yeast or to give everyone a yeast infection (mutant name: Candida) or the power to accelerate the growth of body hair (mutant name: Follicula).

If we’re going to follow in the footsteps of Pyro and Iceman with the generation of “the elements” or forms thereof (water = ice, fire), there’s earth, wind, fire, water and wood. Fire and water are sort of covered. For earth - the power to spontaneously generate and throw dirt at people? For wind - this could be handier, but probably harder to control… and Storm’s got it incorporated into her powers. Then wood - the power to grow trees? Power to control anything wooden? It would be a great hippie power since you could grow a completely renewable forest and then build houses for everyone with a minimum of physical effort.

Still - in terms of world domination or salvation, those are some crap powers.

My mother has a fever and aches. She went to the doctor and they took some blood tests - results back Friday. She called the doctor around 7:00 (after hours) to let her know that her fever went up to 102. The answering service said they’d page the doctor. Now she tells me that the doctor called her back and said if she continues to feel crappier, to admit herself to the hospital since it could be meningitis. That’s a scary thing to tell someone who’s already a mild hypochondriac, but I won’t take my sleeping pills tonight just in case I am roused from slumber at 3 in the morning and asked to drive her to the ER.

And I have to turn on the AC - if for no other reason than air cleansing. It’s hot and stuffy up here… 86 degrees and horribly “close.”

The last thing I wrote about was the coliseum at El Jem. That was pretty impressive. You could even walk underneath in the passageways where they kept the slaves prior to their being fed to the lions. The lions themselves were kept on the same level as the main field of the coliseum, in little pens around the circumference. The slaves were brought up to that level on manual lifts - powered by humans and systems of pulleys. The rest of the levels were for spectator seating.

After El Jem, we went to the Bardo museum where we saw lots of gorgeous original mosaics from the Roman era, as well as sculptures, statues and busts of gods. There tons of Aphrodite and Jove depictions, but not a one of Athena. I was a li
ttle upset by that. But maybe they used to be around, but were ruined by time, the elements or careless people. Also at the Bardo, we ran into a pack of eastern European teenage models. Seriously. They were all ridiculously tall, ridiculously thin, had long hair, short skirts and heels that were really impractically tall for walking around anywhere, much less a museum. They were photographing each other striking poses all over the place and seemed trained - in a Pavlovian way - to respond to the sound of a clicking/beeping camera. My father was taking a picture of a staircase while a model was walking in it and she turned around and struck a pose for him when she heard the camera going. Here is the result:

After that, we drove further off towards the desert and stopped at a restaurant in Sfax for lunch. That food was OK - not great, not horrible. Chicken cutlet, rice, veggies, olives, bread, and some fruit for dessert. The next stop was more along the lines of the desert.

Basically, the Tunisian landscape I observed could be broken down as such. Where we stayed in Hammamet, you had a “typical” Mediterranean beachside resort community. Tons of hotels and souvenir shops and palm trees and landscaping. If you drive 10 minutes away from there, you were in what you might consider to be a Northern African city: lots of little shops - bakeries, butcher shops, tailors, greengrocers, and places called “fast food” which served sandwiches and pita bread. Nothing was higher than one story and these little shops were interspersed with residences, complete with backyards and grazing goats. On the streets, there were lots of people on bikes, women walking wearing traditional head coverings and lots of women walking around in modern Western dress, head uncovered and chatting with men and women both.

About an hour outside of that area, the landscape became a little more Mediterranean and looked like Greece or Italy or even France (though not Mediterranean). There were green and brown fields of grape, fig, and olive trees in rows, extending off into the horizon, and lots of little farm houses and residential buildings off the roadways.

A little past that, the cacti started appearing. You’d see a HUGE growth of agave cactus with some of the orange flowers blossoming. There were still fields, but these tended to be fig trees and almond trees, not grapes or olives. The soil began to look lighter brown and dustier and soon, there were palm trees, agave, and shrubs, but no more fields. Here was where we saw some interesting gas stations. While in the city described above there were some Shell gas stations and others (written in Arabic, so I didn’t know the names), once you got out well into rural/almost desert country, “gas stations” were tables set out by the side of the road by people living along the road. They had big jugs of gasoline stacked up underneath and on top of the tables and had a hose at the ready. You’d pull over and they would siphon the gas into your tank from the stash at their “station.” Here’s one such gas station.

After this area, you get into the real desert terrain. No more little homes, no more fig trees or almond trees. It’s all sand, shrubs and palm trees. It was here that we stopped at a man-made oasis and saw how they climbed palm trees to pick dates.

It was by now late in the afternoon/early evening and we approached a large gate with two open arched at the end of the road. Beyond this gate, it was desert. The gate marks the beginning of the desert and the end of roads and gas stations and creature comforts. We made a right turn and drove to a building stationed off on the right of the gate where there were many camels sitting in the sand. Here, we were going to take a camel ride into the desert - caravan style with other people.

We got dressed in large robes and had our heads wrapped in cotton cloths to protect our heads and necks from the sun. We learned how to get astride the camel (get on, and HOLD ON) and our guide started us off into the desert. My sister’s camel was a girl and mine was a boy. They seem to like to be in pairs… whether for social or mating reasons, I don’t know. I didn’t speak enough French to communicate this question to the guide. It’s a pretty amazing vantage point; camel feet are so incredibly well-adapted to the desert sands and walking upon them. Their feet don’t exactly step on the sand so much as spread out over it. While our feet spread a little bit when we put our weight down on them, camel feet almost look like they’re water balloons that only stretch to a certain point… they gently lay themselves over the sand, covering a great deal of surface area and not pressing deeply into it at all.

They also handle dunes really well - the ups and downs are no problem for the camel, and while I admit to some anxiety before the first big one, it became thoroughly enjoyable after a while… like a really slow rollercoaster. With hair.

Once that fun was done, we went to a hotel not too far from the desert gate. We ate, we slept, we got up at 4 am to get on the bus and see the salt lake at Chott El Jerid. It had rained in the previous weeks, so there was some moisture and some “ponds” had formed in the salt desert. The various minerals in the salt don’t exhibit any color when dry, but when they interact with water, they change color. So, the one little lake was bright pinkish-red, while another was blue and yet another was green… all simply because of the minerals in the salt. Because it’s all salt, there was absolutely NO vegetation… no birds, no insects. Nothing. There were, however, souvenir stalls on the opposite side of the road and those merchants had two really cute puppies who ran around impressing the tourists with their adorableness.

We saw the sun rise over the sahara and that was a pretty cool site. After that, we headed to Matmata. Part of the original Star Wars film was shot at Matmata (though the bulk was shot in Tatouine, Tunisia - named Tatoouine in the movie… nice stretch, Mr. Lucas!). The place looks like some sort of brown-coppery moonscape, or a really shallow Grand Canyon, with no river at the bottom. It made for some lovely views, though. After that, we visited a Berber “troglodyte” home. Troglodyte homes are the homes built underground in shallow caves (natural and manmade) and that have one large open-to-the-sky atrium area which allows in natural light. It was much cooler inside and it was amazing to think this was because it was a few feet underground.

I felt a little uncomfortable there, though, since this was a family’s home and they invited people in to collect “tips” from tourists for letting them view their home. The main “attraction” was a very old woman who was dressed in traditional Berber clothing, had her hands and fingernails stained with henna from preparing a relative for her wedding earlier that week, and had tattoos all over her face also in the Berber tradition. She was beyond ancient. I felt like she was being treated like a sideshow attraction, in a sense. “Look at this woman! She lives underground! Can you believe it??”

I don’t know if I’d like knowing that my weekends weren’t mine since a tour group could come traipsing in at any time. However, I also felt a little weird since it was obviously no longer as “primitive” a dwelling as our tour guide would have us believe. They had electricity, a television, a washing machine and dryer, etc. The woman’s daughter (a mother herself) sat down in a little enclave in one of the walls and got out a huge stone which was split in half horizontally. She lifted one portion and poured some grain between the two pieces. I realized this was her millstone… and she had a stick she pushed in a hole down the center of the two stone pieces and then another stick which was tied across that stick perpedicularly… which she used as a handle and ground the grain with it to make flour. Pretty cool, but I doubt she still made flour that way daily to bake (since I saw bags of flour in her kitchen.)

We then went and saw some waterfalls in Tunisia… they were terribly small - even when compared to some smaller local falls around my part of NJ - but are considered to be the Niagara Falls of Tunisia. I can understand why, though, so let’s not get all angry at Eva. Where water is rare… blah blah blah.

We had a long drive back to our hotel and so we went back.

I slept incredibly well that night and the next day, I did nothing but sit by the pool or the Mediterranean Sea, reading books, napping and getting some sun (though I did apply and reapply sunscreen.) I even went swimming with my sister… which was nice. I got a little bit of color, which was good. I didn’t want to burn or get melanoma.

I think I’m almost done for today’s entry. My damned wrist hurts a lot again. Ugh. And I have to do laundry.

Allow me to tell a quick New Jersey story. On Saturday, I spent the day with my friend Theresa. We went to the local warehouse shopping place and I showed Theresa the large variety of organic products they now sell - produce, yogurt, milk, eggs, rice, juice, etc. We returned home in the early afternoon and as we were getting out of the car, we heard the sound of shattering glass in my backyard. I ran back there to see what was going on - thinking someone had broken into our home or something else not good.

Instead, I saw a wild turkey running away with as much of a guilty expression as a turkey can have on its face, and saw a huge pile of broken glass on the grass below one of the kitchen windows. My little brother’s girlfriend was in the kitchen at the time of the shattering (thankfully, the window screen was in and no glass got inside or harmed her) and she called to me, asking, “What happened? Who broke the window?” I replied that I didn’t know, but that a wild turkey had just run away. I asked her if wild turkeys could fly, and she informed me that they could for very short spurts. Hrm. A fifty pound bird flying into a window? That might cause some damage.

I called my mother and left her a voicemail, and in the meantime, I worked with Theresa to cover up the window somehow since it looked like it was going to rain. My brother came home and also investigated. He claimed that it looked like a BB gun had hit it, but there was no pellet anywhere, and no clear impact mark. We all checked it out and there is still debate as to whether a BB pellet or a wild turkey caused the damage, but the fact remains that we have a totally broken kitchen window. We’re going to Home Depot in a bit to buy some plywood or something to board it up until the new window arrives. Plastic bags can only get you so far… then it becomes a security issue.

I had leftover Indian food from yesterday’s dinner for dinner just now, but I think I ate too quickly. My shahi panir is coming back to haunt me a little. And my mother just called me to tell me that she thinks there’s a tick in her leg and when she gets home from work, she wants me to check it out.

UGH. There are far better, more enjoyable, less icky and more mother-daughter-bonding ways to spend a Monday evening, but we do what we must.

At least I had a good day at work. And finished a good book (”The Big Over Easy” by Jasper Fforde). And am watching a good movie (”White Heat” with James Cagney”). A glass of lemonade will cap it off nicely.

I’m trying to get my vacation photos up and viewable, but it’s such a pain in the ass if I want to make them easy to share but also not have to spend money… or lots of time resizing, optimizing them and uploading them to my own site. It might be the best way, though.

SNAPFISH - you have to be registered to view the photos. I got around this by sending my username and password to my friends so they wouldn’t have to be annoyed by registering for yet another service. However, I can upload a seemingly unlimited amount of photos AND their editing and “captioning” features are very easy. I can batch caption through a very easy interface.

FLICKR - More popular, but unless I upgrade to their paid service, I can only upload 20 MB of photos per month. PER MONTH. I am at 85% of this month’s limit and have only posted up 80 of my 300+ photos. While I can create groups and have friends and family join for free, I can’t share all the photos, and it’s not as easy to edit, add descriptions and tag the photos. They have an interface to do “batch” edits as well, but it’s not easy or quick.

Sigh. I’m going to take a shower, run to the bank and then come back here to write more about my vacation since I’ve been up since 6 am and don’t know what else to do. I did some cleaning, made my bed, took my bamboo plant and removed it from its container… washed all the stones and sea-glass in which it’s mounted and rinsed the leaves with cool water. It should be happy now. It’s the only plant I haven’t killed - simply because it just needs to live in a puddle and I can handle that.

I’m a much better pet owner.

But now - shower.

Yes, I’m back.
Yes, I’m sitting here watching “Bladerunner” (the director’s cut) in my underwear and a t-shirt because that’s COMFORTABLE.

I was actually back late on Monday night, but the 9-hour flight filled with a chorus of wailing weeping colicky children (it was like they were singing a canon - one would pick up where the other left off… but it wasn’t nearly as calming as Pachelbel’s take) left me more than a little tired.

Thus, I was in a semi-somnolent state on Monday night until about 4:00 in the morning, when I awoke and struggled to get back to sleep until 6… I watched the Weather Channel. Then I fell asleep and got up at 8:30 so I could buy some hair color to correct the effects of chlorinated water + salt water + sun on my hair. It had turned a most unattractive shade of coppery orange. It wasn’t THAT bad, but it was bad enough to merit immediate action.

So I am now a fairly dark brunette, which complements my slightly tanned skin rather well, methinks.

There’s an ass-load of catch-up to do. I will just make this a really long entry to start, and then as things pop up in my mind/memory, I will relate anecdotes in future entries. A blog need not be entirely linear. Heavens no.

If you’ll recall from my last entry on May 25th, I was in Warsaw, dealing with a stomach bug. I now recognize this bug to have been food poisoning from airline food simply by process of elimination. I continued to be sick on the way to Tunisia. It was only a three-hour flight, but it was on a little 737 plane (I think that’s the smaller size) which had ONE restroom for the entire plane. I waited in agony, my stomach playing Twister, while some woman sat in there for 15 minutes. I asked the flight crew if there was another restroom to use and they informed me there was not… and joked, “I hope she didn’t fall asleep in there!” I grimaced and continued to wait.

FINALLY, the fuschia-haired freak emerged, releasing a billowing cloud of cigarette smoke into the plane. THe tall, bald, mean-looking male flight attendant came after her (his stride was full of purpose) and gently but firmly reprimanded her for smoking in the plane. Since she was Polish and he was speaking English, French or Arabic, I doubt she got the whole thing - but body language and tone explain a lot. I hope she felt badly about it. I had the stinky smoke-filled bathroom free and no sooner had I sat down when a frantic knocking started on the door. I replied in 3 languages that it was occupied and the knocking continued. Since I’m not that good of a polyglot, I had no more ammo for responding (nor did I have phrasebooks in the toilet with me) so I got out as soon as I could and received a death stare from a mother with a toddler.

Honestly, her child had the diaper option. I did not. I felt justified and wanted to give her a dirty look - but I was in too much pain to care at that point. I returned to my seat, slept for the remainder of the short flight, then hit the restrooms as my first action in Tunisia. We had a two-hour bus ride to the hotel in Hammamet from the airport in Monastir. I slept. We got to the hotel - I ran back and forth between the bathroom and the bed. I did this for the entire first day and the entire second day we were in Tunisia… my father and sister went out and did things while I ran my little marathon, slept, read, or watched BBC World.

The afternoon of day 2, my father and sister popped down to reception and asked about available drugs. They were advised to pick up a French/Tunisian antibiotic called Ercéfuryl 200. The pharmacy was only open at night (Pharmacie Nuit) and so I had to wait until 8:00 at night to receive this drug.

It is the new miracle drug. I took the first dose at 8:30, and by midnight, I was feeling better. By 6am the next day, I was in perfect working order, though a little weak, a little dehydrated and more than a little tired.

However, time was not going to wait for me and days 3 & 4 were already scheduled for a trip my father signed us up for on day 2… this was a two-day excursion into various parts of Tunisia.

Part 1 was a visit to El Jem, site of the 2nd largest Roman coliseum and amphitheatre in the world, barring the actual Coliseum in Rome. Here’s a little view from the outside.

OK - you know what? More of the story tomorrow. I’m posting up a gallery of photos on Snapfish that interested parties can check out here: My Snapfish Gallery.

Stories to come tomorrow. I’m just tired as hell right now.