CheetahhhhhhhBlog Mark III

Vanessa and Little Chris spent 2 days in Jeddah getting some passport business done. She ws there with a Filipino friend, a nruse from the RC hospital. We now have visas to Egypt and, incidentally, it’s exactly 1 month to go.

So Little Chris was hanging out with the Filipinos in Jeddah and was apparently quite a star. He was showing them how he can talk in Waray (”A-goo”=”I am”). Van now wants a karaoke machine, apparently they had one in Jeddah.

So #1, all the Filipino nurses at the RC hospital have side businesses, like catering, selling karaoke machines, etc. I am rather surprised to hear about their entrepeneurial endeavors. #2, the RC hospital is the hotbed of the Yanbu singles scene, and the Filipino nurses there have many suitors. This makes sense, actually, considering the hospital is the one place in Yanbu where men and women can mix freely. But I was surprised to learn that even old, unattractive Filipino nurses have many suitors.

 I have an endless list of things to take care of and I don’t like it. I have a new problem, my bank accounts have been frozen because some Saudi law requires that they check my ID once a year. This might seem like no big deal but we only have SAR100 left in cash, for one thing, and to fix it requires me to go to the bank and wait for an hour or two. Not ten minutes. An hour or two. I have two bank accounts so that’s potentially an entire afternoon wasted waiting in a bank.

Little Chris went to the hospital to get circumcized and is very displeased about the whole thing. Thankfully I had to teach at the time because I wouldn’t have been able to watch.

Last time he went to the doctor, Little Chris pee-ed on him. This time, Little Chris had explosive poop.

My new mannerism is to exclaim “yeeeee!” whenever anything happens when Little Chris is present.

I’ve been downloading Lost season 3 and what the HELL is going on on that damn island???????

So, I went to Saudia airlines and bought our tickets to Cairo. We’re leaving a bit earlier than I originally planned, on Dec 25 at 1AM. We’ll be in our hotel next to the pyramids on Christmas day and I’m sure the hotel will be putting on a Christmas shindig.

I also got us tickets for our midterm holiday, Feb 8-15. I was vaguely thinking about skipping this holiday for reasons of economy, but eventually decided hell with that, we’re getting the F outta Dodge. So I bought us tickets to Muscat, Oman. Muscat is very nice by all accounts. I made reservations at the Crowne Plaza on the beach, so we will have a week of relaxing. Also one of my friends from Korea is now working in Muscat, so I imagine he and I will have a few drunken evenings.

Muscat appeals tp the wanderlust in me. I mean, it’s in the middle of frakkin nowhere. Why would you ever go go Muscat? That’s precisely what apeals to me. Same reason why I want to visit Antarctica before I die. Why? Because it’s there.

I have given up trying to contact the Egyptian consulate. Really annoying. I can’t take any more time off work, considering I’m taking off 3 days in December (for Christmas), so I’m going to have to send Van and Little Chris up to Jeddah on a mission.

Little Chris made some friends today. We were walking along in the market and an American couple stopped to admire him. These are our first American friends in Yanbu, indeed, I was beginning to wonder what the hell I was going to do for Thanksgiving. Apparently all the Americans at the oil companies get together at the Radisson, who cook up a turkey dinner. This American couple is a bit older than us. I’d say they’re in their 50s. That’s fine if it can rustle me up some turkey. Also they were quite friendly.

My Egyptian colleague has explained to me that the Egyptian consulate doesn’t answer their phones because they are lazy.

I am trying to get us Egyptian visas for the Hajj holiday. For some reason, I have found about a dozen different phone numbers for the Egyptian consulate, and they’re all disconnected. Perhaps they don’t pay their phone bills. I have been searching and calling for several hours now. I think I may have to take a day off and drive up to Jeddah to do this in person, however, at the moment, the very existence of the Egyptian consulate in Jeddah seems a bit up in the air. Anyway I’m a tad frustrated with this.

Anyway on a lighter note, my back is fine as long as I take my horse pills.

So after I started moving around this morning, my back became unbearably painful. I went to the doctor. He was Syrian I believe, and sassy too. Unfortunately I couldn’t understand his English or Arabic very well, but the gist of it is I have muscle spasms and a whole load of horse pills. I couldn’t find our why or how this happened, but really I can think of no reason. I don’t lift heavy things, I don’t play rugby, etc… it’s a painful mystery. The hospital gave me a shot in the butt so I’m feeling no pain at the moment at least.

In an effort to get more out of the students, the university has regular classes during exam week. My students have simply taken it upon themselves to not show up en masse. Today I wasn’t complaining because I wasn’t sure how I was going to stand for an hour.

Little Chris has a fancy green Filipino passport.

I’m incredibly busy these days which is not my preferred state of being. Van says “that’s being a father”.

I somehow threw my back out yesterday. I don’t know how it happened. I was sitting at my desk in my office and then couldn’t stand up without horrible back pain. It’s Sunday morning now and I seem to be OK though SWEET MOTHER MARY that was a horrible experience.

This whole buying Van’s uncle’s house in Capoocan is going to put a real burden on our budget. The house itself is cheap enough but combine that with tax and the cost of furnishing and modernizing it (ie plumbing, etc), and it’s going to consume a good portion of my money. I don’t know if we’ll be able to afford to go on vacation for the midwinter break in February, for example, which would be a pity. Also I can’t buy new gadgets for myself such as the Sony Reader. Also I am even holding off getting a fancy Beretta Sahariana safari shirt. So anyway with all this trouble, I sure hope I like Leyte island and Capoocan. Van is already planning what colors to paint the place.

So I have taken Wednesday off. Tuesday night we’re heading on up to Jeddah. We’ll be staying at our home-away-from-home, the Sheraton on the Red Sea. Van and I are looking forward to the buffet English breakfast… mmm, what a luxury. Wednesday is also our 1 year anniversary. God bless. A whole year together and guess what? Best decision I ever made. Vanessa got a JVC camcorder for her anniversary gift. She wants to film everything with Little Chris. I had bought her one earlier but it was a piece of crap. This one was rather expensive and it’s performing to expectations. It’s fancy though I must confess, I’m actually not too keen on taking videos. They’re OK but I prefer photography I suppose. So this gadget is exclusively for Vanessa and I told her I wasn’t going to read the manual.

We actually have an objective in Jeddah… getting Little Chris a Filipino passport. It is a bit simpler to rustle up a Filipino passport so we’re getting that one first. Later he’ll get his fancy blue American passport.

We have another objective in Jeddah… Van is going to the beauty parlor. I’m not sure why not, but she didn’t want to go during her pregnancy, so it’s been quite a while. She’ll be getting the works. Little Chris and I are excited.

I got a shipment of clothes from my mommy and received many nice comments on my fancy new floral Ralph Lauren shirt.

It’s midterms and next week I will ne totally swamped. I am teaching writing this term, so I will have 60 essays to correct, and it’s going to be a royal pain in the arse.

There has been a lot of action this week. Most noteworthy was a whole day of rain. Not just a drop or two, but real rain. I’m told this was the first time in 10 years that the town experienced real rain. It caused a bit of mayhem because here, a house doesn’t have a roof with shingles. There’s no need. Also streets don’t have drainage. Buildings don’t have drainage. So everyone’s house flooded including mine, which is really the last thing you’d expect out here. The kids all skipped school because they thought the rain was so beautiful and amazing. Most businesses shut down because they were flooded.

Little Chris is growing like a weed. His umbilical cord fell off today. I am still generally sleeping in the spare bedroom. This is because Van insists on Little Chris sleeping with us in our bed. I talked about this in the office. The Arabs and the Englishmen all thought this was crazy–put him in another room so you can sleep! This is what I think. However the Filipinos and Malaysians all have the Asian tradition of sleeping with your entire family. Anyway Van is lucky she’s my little princess, I suppose, because sleeping with a baby goes against my inclinations. Indeed Americans generally start forcing independence on a baby from the start. Little Chris is a hybrid, so he’ll get his independence forced on him later… But in sum, I have to sleep in the spare bedroom if I want a decent night’s sleep. The problem here is I’m an insomniac. I have a lot of trouble getting a good sleep under perfect conditions. So I’m going to have to wait until Little Chris learns to shut his yap before I can return to my own bed.

I’m pretty unemotional about my work. This is one of my secrets to success. I am a good prof of English because I am completely indifferent to the task at hand. This means I don’t get emotionally involved and don’t make mistakes. Next year, perhaps we will have a linguistics department and I can actually teach something interesting, and this may change. Anyway the college is short of English teachers. This is actually a worldwide phenomenon. There are not enough English teachers worldwide, especially for the higher-level positions. There are plenty of 20-year-olds who want to take a year off and work in a kindergarden in Japan teaching English. But at the university level, people with real training and experience are worth their weight in gold. So in sum, the college is short of teachers and there is rather slim prospect of getting enough. This means I have ended up working overtime for the third semester in a row, and I don’t like it. I started this paragraph by saying I’m unemotional about work. I’m a team player. I do what needs to be done. However working overtime pisses me off. Really. And yesterday there was an English department meeting and I got a bit heated. I said, “At my Korean university (Woosong) I taught 13 hours a week. Here I’m doing 25!” and I expressed my deep displeasure. Well, we all agreed, we’re all in the same boat. I said we should take personnel matters in our own hands. Rather than relying on the RC personnel department, we should do our own recruiting so that we have a chance of being at full staff next term.

Now for those of you not in academe, I know, you’re working 40 hours per week or more. 20 hours per week is full-time for a teacher. This is a universal standard. This is because for every one hour of teaching, you also have to do prep work and correcting papers.