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an ethical dilemma of the two-wheeled variety

I have a bicycle in this non-bike-friendly city and I ride it (defiantly) to work, and along the waterfront bike path, and I’m gearing up (no pun intended) to ride around and explore the city. A bike is a great thing – you can cover more ground than if you’re just walking, but you’re connected to the cityscape much more intimately than if you were in a car.

And, I have to say, as a person who was raised in the northern midwest, and then went to Boston, and then to New York, the fact that I’m riding my bike around in November, without freezing my ass off – well, that’s just remarkable. I love it.

But. (There’s always a catch, isn’t there? No catch, no story.)

But. I don’t have a basket on my bike. The original owner of the bike (hi Lisa)  said I should get panniers for the back instead of a basket, because I can carry more stuff and they’re less bulky (you can buy collapsible pannier baskets).

Lisa is probably right (she usually is, about most stuff) except I love to ride no-handed, as I pedal along the flat paving of the Corniche, and having the panniers on the back will disrupt my balance, especially if one is holding a water bottle and the other side is holding a camera. I’d wobble, I’d fall, it would hurt, I’d cry. I don’t want to cry in public on the Corniche.

I want a basket for the front of my bike. You’d think it’s not that big a request, right? I’ve been to three bike shops and nope, nope, nope. I’ve been to some sporting goods stores. Unh-unh.  It’s like my great search for a waffle iron, which Husband finally had to buy when he was in London a few weeks ago.  Couldn’t find a waffle iron here for love nor money (although another friend has a bead on a possible source, so stay tuned).

A basket. Such a simple thing.

Enter the ethical dilemma. Downstairs, in the basement of the building, there are bike racks. Next to where I park my bikes are two bikes that look as if they’ve been abandoned: flat tires, dust, untouched. Even the things in the bike basket–a bike pump, a lock (which is in the basket, closed, and with the key attached), some crumpled pieces of paper – are untouched, and I’m talking months, not days or weeks. Months.

What? Why yes, I did mention a basket.

One of the bikes, which is about the right size for a twelve-year old child, has the perfect basket on its front handlebars. Perfect.

Here’s my question: would it be wrong for me to detach the basket from that bike and put it on my bike? I mean, I’d leave a note with my contact information, and I’d offer either to pay for the basket or return it, if the owner wants it back.

Otherwise the basket is just sitting there, collecting dust. Shouldn’t I liberate it, let it out in the Gulf sunshine to be its best basket-self?

My children, feral beasts that they are, said TAKE IT. They weren’t even sure I should leave a note.

What do you think I should do?

 

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Read full story · Comments { 4 } on November 28, 2012 in Abu Dhabi, Children, exercise, NaBloPoMo

a visual metaphor…and a really bad phishing algorithm

Last year, I put up this photo on New Year’s Eve Day. A tad cliched, sure, but still – appropriate. Leaping, caught in the space between two points.  Nice, right?

So explain to me the algorithm that would somehow connect this picture with this comment:

By means of probiotics and different some other products, you’re able to become successful jointly with your yeast infection eating habits. The chief good results for weight loss certainly is the adequate vitamins and minerals. If you’re acquiring excellent diet regime, that can provide possibility to an individual’s gastrointestinal tract to make sure you crush bacterias which is certainly deadly and also it has an possible opportunity to deny your body food all the eradicate so that you can maintain and also build a common weight loss. Aim to go for the procedure the spot where you contain a healthful particular weight loss. So as to commence with all your yeast diet, you will need to move through when using the technique of detoxify the body. First you certainly will experience much worse after that primarily as time passes you will definitely begin to feel much better. This approach is different from referrals. This approach with detox it has the name die-off that the harmful toxins are released quite simply together with conclusion in to flu-like signs and symptoms.

So I don’t know about you, but I really do not want to become successful jointly with my yeast infection.

Why are metaphors, or leaping children, or playgrounds somehow subject to yeast-related spam? I guess the detox is maybe related to New Year’s Eve?

If Nate Silver ever wants out of politically related statistics, perhaps he could go to work for a phishing phirm and write algorithms that send out spam more based in reality.  This spam seems more like spam from Fox: utterly unrelated to what’s actually going on in the picture.

**

the original post:  Leaping between two points, just lifting off from where he’d been, not quite touched down on where he’s going. Not a bad metaphor for the year that’s been and the year that’s to come.

What else does this snapshot show me? That I need to learn how to use my new camera so that the kid is in focus, not the house in the background.

Happy New Year, to friends and loved ones in all hemispheres.

 

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Read full story · Comments { 3 } on November 9, 2012 in Abu Dhabi, Children, expat, NYC

The Color of Money – Redux

Full disclosure: I published this post two years ago almost exactly to the day. On that day in November, Liam was still in 5th grade at our neighborhood school; Caleb was adjusting to kindergarten; we were going to “visit” Abu Dhabi for the first time about two weeks after this conversation. The boys thought of it as a “visit,” but Husband & I knew that a move out here was within the realm of possibility.

Now? Liam is in Year Seven at an outpost of a British school that requires kids to wear blazers and ties; the boys take a bus to school–there is no more morning walk, hand-in-hand.  Until I’d gone back to read this post, I’d not realized that Liam has been saying that a lot of money is key to happiness; I thought that was an idea he’d gotten from living here.

He still loves bacon, this son of mine, but his palate has developed: now he likes babyback ribs, too. Of course, if you give him a ham sandwich, he’ll curl his lip in disgust. And as for anything fresh–nah. Money seems to be the only “green” that Liam is interested in, I guess. 


When I walked to school with Liam this morning, we talked about money.  Or rather, he talked about money and I wondered where he gets his information.

“It’s better to have a million dollars than just a thousand dollars,” he said. “Because then you don’t have to make any choices. You can do whatever you want. We could go to France and China and Japan…”

We’ve been talking about a family trip to France this summer for my mom’s 70th birthday. Going to France might mean not renting a house at the beach this summer, mostly because of time constraints, but has Liam been listening to our conversations and determined for himself that a bigger checkbook would make it all possible?

“You need a lot of money to be happy, you know. Then we could have a bigger apartment because you and Daddy say that Caleb and I wouldn’t fight so much if we each had our own room…”

Well, seems to me that you and your brother would fight even if you lived in the Taj freakin Mahal…but how can I explain to him that by NYC standards we’ve got a pretty good gig: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a laundry room (okay, a ten year old can’t appreciate the joy of having laundry in the apartment rather than in the basement of the building, but still…) Sure, three bedrooms would be nice–but does saying that in front of him make him think that what we’ve got is insufficient?

I suggest that Daddy and I think it’s more important to do something you love and not necessarily something that makes lots of money.

“No, mommy, you’re wrong. Because you can just do the job you don’t like until you have a lot of money and then you can get a better job that makes you happy.”

I find myself humming Harry Chapin.

“Plus think of all the soccer players who have these really big charities so they can help people and do stuff for their families, and they couldn’t do that if they didn’t make a lot of money.”

Kid’s got a point.

“And besides, you could learn to love whatever job it is. Even if you don’t at first.  It’s just if you start learning something early then you might learn to love it. Like me and BLTs. I mean, I don’t like them now but I could learn to like them.”

YOU? Like a sandwich with tomatoes and lettuce? Never gonna happen.

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Read full story · Comments { 7 } on November 8, 2012 in Children, family, growing up, Parenting

Petra Perfecta

I want to write something Sensitive and Important about the post-Sandy recovery, but all I can say is: donate to the Red Cross or your favorite relief organization; make sandwiches and buy supplies to bring to a donation center (for a list of donation centers click here).  I have nothing more to say other than to suggest that I think the props Chris Christie has been tossing towards Obama have just as much to do with hoping that now Springsteen will return his calls as they do with anything Sandy related.

Given that I can’t tell you about the relief work I’ve been doing for hurricane victims other than clicking the “donate now” button,  I’m going to regale you instead with tales of an ancient city that probably never had to confront hurricanes or floods: Petra.

If you’re a person whose kids, hypothetically speaking, start to gag and quiver at the mention of “museum” or “sight-seeing,” then Petra is the place for you. It’s history, and museums, and sight-seeing, all wrapped up in one climbtastic site.  I mean, not that my kids balk at the thought of cultural enrichment; my kids thrive on museums and on exploring cities; they love trying new foods.  As long as the new food looks exactly like the food they get at home.

For a person used to the way the U.S. does ancient sites (or what passes for ancient in that neck of the woods), Petra is wildly unsupervised: you can climb up to the thresholds of ancient temples; clamber around on stone walls that have been standing for millenia; lean against columns that have been there since Christ was a boy. And, of course, you can fall off any of these places onto the rocky ground, or you could plummet to your death into the crevasse alongside the approximately eightygazillion steps up to the top of the mountain overlooking Petra.

You can see, thus, why this place would bring deep and abiding joy into the hearts of eight & twelve year old boys, right?

But they weren’t the only ones smiling in amazement. I mean, how can you walk along this road and not gasp in delight and awe?

There are horse-drawn carts that clatter along this road–frequently racing with one another through the narrow space–adding yet another frisson: there is a strong chance that one could get mown down by an over-zealous cart-driver.

At the final turn of the wadi, the money shot:

The Treasury Building, which is the first thing you see as you emerge from the wadi road. If you’re an Indiana Jones fan, you’ll remember this building from the final scenes of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (which is only worth watching for the scenes filmed in Petra or if you’ve got a really long plane ride).

The Treasury:

See that little dot at the bottom, just below the doorway? That’s one of my children, but I can’t tell which one. But that gives you a sense of scale, doesn’t it?  The Treasury is the only building that’s firmly roped off to tourists, although even ten years ago, you could camp right up on the Treasury front porch.

But climbing! The boys wanted to climb! Enough with this ancient, awesome, perfect structure, which had once been decorated in those two top rectangular panels, with bas-relief of axe-wielding Amazons.

Found some old columns at the top of one set of steps: 

Found a cave somewhere else:

And that was only the first day.  On Day Two, we trekked up to the monastery (816 steps but who can keep count, what with the panting and wheezing and dodging of nimble-footed donkeys racing up and down; and that’s not counting the part of the climb where there weren’t steps but just rock that had been worn smooth with the ages).

But Day Two will have to wait until tomorrow, because I’ve enrolled myself in NaBloPoMo this month and that means a post a day, every day. The first time I did NaBloARGH was when I visited Abu Dhabi for the first time, two years ago. It seems appropriate that I use a trip to another country as the launch for this year’s effort. I’m linking up with NaBloBlahblahblah through the YeahWrite site: an entire grid of writers feeling the pain of “just writing.”

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Read full story · Comments { 14 } on November 4, 2012 in Abu Dhabi, Children, Kids, NaBloPoMo, Travel

Character Assassin’s Carousel or, why not to EVER give a pig a pancake

Ah, read-aloud time. Those lovely minutes when you bond with your children while reading to them from a favorite story-book. Maybe, before you had kids, you had visions of this time dancing in your head like so many sugarplums: your delectable toddler in fuzzy jammies, curled against your lap, the two of you chuckling at some winsome anthropomorphic creature frolicking in a woodland dell.

And then, like so many parenting visions, reality hits, in the shape of your willful toddler (still in fuzzy jammies, so at least some dreams never die), shaking Thomas the Train at you for the seventh million time, and you think that you’d rather re-live the Bataan Death March than read about The Fat Controller and his proto-fascisti train station.

Enter Ninja Mom, whose Assassins Carousel is giving all of us recovering story-tellers a place to share our battle stories.  This month, I get to join this illustrious company, where last month the Underachieving Domestic Goddess gave Walter the Farting Dog a serious talking-to about his intestinal issues.

My turn on the carousel! My turn! Oh my friends, I have had a difficult time thinking about what to choose.  I thought about that homage to imperialism and colonialism that masquerades as Babar, in which Babar gets to be King of the Elephants because, you know, he has a car and a nice suit.  Then my mind turned to that damn monkey, George, who is happy – HAPPY – to be kidnapped from his jungle home and come live with the yellow-hat dude…But no. No, no, I had to go with the book that made my heart sink when chubby-fingered Caleb would grab it from the shelf for pre-bed story-time.

That damn pig. That insatiable, home-wrecking, tap-dancing, mofo of a pig from If You Give a Pig a Pancake, by Laura Numeroff and illustrated by Felicia Bond.

First of all, I have to ask why it is that the heroes of picture books have to be such disasters. Why does Max, of Max and Ruby (which, sorry, Middletini, I still sort of love) always win, always get the second chocolate chicken; why is Froggy of the Froggy series never punished for the utter chaos that follows in his wake? It’s a metaphysical question, I realize, but one that I’d like someone to answer for me.

In the meantime, however, on to the pig.

cover image source

First I have to ask: unless it’s Wilbur, would anyone want a pig as a pet? Much less a pig in the house grubbing about for pancakes?  Do not be fooled by this cover image: this pig does not sit still, plate in hand, oh no.  This pig is, literally, a pig: a relentless appetite on the hoof.

Like all seduction stories, this one starts easy: syrup with pancakes. Syrup, you think, sure. Not a problem. But then…then things spiral out of control and we realize we’re reading a book about a pig with an addiction. Fueled initially by sugary syrup, this pig needs ever bigger hits of adrenalin to get that same rush, and the results aren’t pretty.

Who knew pancakes were the gateway drug? From pancakes, syrup, from syrup to big bubblebaths, to bath toys, to tap dancing (on furniture no less), to a narcissistic request for photo-shoots, and some clearly photo-shopped images of excessive pig-strength: image source

Then this damn pig wants to mail all the pictures to friends and family back home (can you imagine the cost of postage?) but in true addict fashion, the pig gets distracted when she’s wheeling her towering pile of letters out to the mailbox.  And that’s when the true nature of the pig comes clear:  not only is the pig an adrenalin addict, my friends, this pig has one of the worst cases of ADD ever seen in childrens’ fiction. The pig finishes nothing (other than the pancakes, a task accomplished by licking the plate. Add bad manners to the list of this pig’s fabulous qualities).

The pig drops her excessive mailing to begin a home-building-and-renovation project involving sharp tools and nails, as well as wallpaper paste.  A renovation project in a tree, no less. I mean please. We all know pigs can’t fly, and thus, no way is a pig building a house in a tree.

Leaving behind a trail of unfinished projects and household destruction, the pig retires to the kitchen, and demurely requests a snack. Of pancakes.  Which means, yep, you guessed it: this story is an endless feedback loop. To read this story once is to risk being commanded by your toddler “READ IT AGAIN!” because, of course, your fuzzy jammied genius of a child has figured out that… the whole cycle will repeat itself, ad infinitum. Ad nauseum.

The pig, you see, has no respect for the exhausted parent friend who has followed her around all day offering up supplies to service the pig’s ugly addictions.  (Add co-dependent enabling to the list of pig-related horrors).

Do you see, my friends, the evidence of the pig’s domestic carnage in this picture? The camera, casually tossed on the ground (is this how we treat expensive equipment?), the litter of letters (oh! the waste of paper), the wallpaper spread across the table, the laundry on the floor…This pig needs some serious behavior modification, I’d say, or else it’s time for the sequel in which that exhausted little girl gets pancakes…

with bacon.

Ride the carousel next month with Kim, from Let Me Start By Saying…

 

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Read full story · Comments { 11 } on October 11, 2012 in Books, Children, Education, Kids