The Holidays - Part 2

The Idaho leg of the trip is usually full and not very restful. It’s okay if you know that going into it – if you know that you are not using your vacation time to relax and recharge your batteries. And even if you did relax more, the travel back to Nairobi, particularly with kids, would undo most of that recharging. It’s just the nature of the beast.

I’m now in Mogadishu. The hot, dusty breeze is blowing in the window. The thoughts of our time in the snow seem to be ages ago. One thing I can say about my life, it’s full of diversity on many levels.

We only had a little over a week for the visit so we had to plan carefully and move frequently. Day one began with a trip to storage to pull out winter gear, then dinner at my sister’s and then we were off to southern Idaho to see my parents.  I also spent time rummaging through tools that that I could borrow for next spring inn finishing the work on our house up north.

skiing!

My dad has been in hospital care for a few weeks due to a broken pelvis. We were able to stop in and see him a couple of times. His spirits were surprisingly good and the physical therapist seemed impressed with his progress towards walking again. It’s going to be a long road, however, understanding that such things take a long time to heal at this age. And the therapist was kind enough to let the girls take over their therapy room given that no one else was in there at the time. Nonetheless, it’s a sobering place to visit. It’s a reminder of the unkindness of aging.

snow skulpture

After a couple days there we headed north to the small town of New Meadows to check in on our new unfinished house. In planning with my sister who had the key, we were to meet at the house directly. Unbeknownst to me, two of my sisters (who have houses in the area), my brothers—in-law and my brother were all waiting inside with champagne to welcome us. Pretty funny, I have to say. We had no idea. They’d even brought a space heater to add to the “housewarming”. So we toasted the new house. I showed them around a bit, explaining the plans, and then we carried on with the initial plan which was to measure and do some much needed thinking about what needs to be done.

steaks and family

Afterwards we headed back to my sister’s log house where we would spend the next two nights. We fit in some skiing, built a snowwoman, had some wonderful steak, enjoyed a nice “campfire”, etc. I love the snow so it was one of my favorite parts of the vacation. But we needed to head south and carry on with the trip.

nice

We headed to Boise for three nights. We had our family holiday party, did some shopping and mostly just enjoyed time with family. Always sad to leave but we were also starting to get anxious to return home and get back to some routine. Travel is all well and good for a while but it seems that most of us do enjoy getting back to our “normal” lives – even back to work.

happy land owner

Travel home went smoothly and we arrived with all our bags. Happy to slip back into our own beds and know that we could stay put for a while – or at least my family could. I would be flying to Somalia the coming Sunday morning. Alas, it’s what I do.

house warming

The Holidays - Part 1

So 2019 has ended. Never to return. Priya and I spent an evening over the holidays recapping the year. Interestingly we both remembered different things. It’s not that we remembered things differently, it’s just that different events popped into mind of our experiences of the past 12 months. Obviously different things made more of a mark on me than her and visa versa. Perfectly normal but it was interesting to note the differences.

I won’t go through the year since a good amount has been recorded in the blog. But it’s been eventful. One thing I realized is that I had a nasty carbon footprint. Though I am much more aware of my actions than I used to be and I have made changes in some of the things I do, I still have some big areas where I am failing and will need to take steps to scale it back. I counted that during 2019 I made 62 international flights, or flight segments (one way)(this doesn’t count probably a dozen or so domestic flights). That means that 62 times I boarded an airplane headed for a different country. That’s insane. It’s about one every 6 days. Granted, most of this was for work but still, I need to see what I can do to ratchet this back. So far this year is not looking good. As I type I have 2 under my belt and 10 are already booked.

snow fight

A quick recap of the holidays. Things started off with a chilly stopover in St. Paul, Minnesota at our friend Cathy’s. Always a nice place to overcome jet lag, we had the opportunity to acclimate to sub-freezing temperatures. And snow. Surprisingly the girls very quickly threw on their winter layers that had been kept in storage in the US and off they went. It was too cold to make a decent snowball so they occupied their time scooping and throwing, sweeping, making snow angels, etc. We even played a robust game of fox and guess – a bit like tag but with the limitation of staying on carved out snow trails.

We got out a few times. Minnesotans seem to be invulnerable to cold temperatures. They just carry on doing whatever it is they do. So we joined the pale throngs in exploring some old and some new things about St. Paul. As I’ve said before, I’m a fan of the Twin Cities. Just need some mountains.

enjoying the balmy holiday weather in Louisville

Then, as is our tradition, it was off to Louisville, Kentucky. One of the first things I need to do, other than finish Christmas shopping, was have a varicose vein operation on my left leg. In fact it was more of a “procedure” than an operation but it was still a doctor doing stuff inside my leg in an operating room for about 45 minutes. I had a local anesthetic but it was not without some pain and discomfort. In fact I was on pain killers for a couple weeks afterwards.

family out for Cuban food

One notable thing about the procedure was when they finished and more or less cleaned up, they all left the room. I was told I could put my clothes on and stop at the desk on the way out. So I sat up on the gurney and awkwardly came to my feet. My left leg was still deeply under the anesthetic so I couldn’t walk properly. I also noticed that there was blood coming out of a hole in my leg up near my groin. I couldn’t feel it but I could see it. I couldn’t run out to the hallway looking for assistance since I was “indecent” so I looked around to see if there was something I could use to stop the bleeding. There were surprisingly few options that I could see in the operating room without going through some drawers. I finally homed in on something that sort of worked like gauze. I held it on the wound for a while and it seemed to do the job. I then decided I would just hold it in place and put my clothes on over the top. I had made quite a mess on the floor but I figured that whoever was coming in to clean up would be accustomed to such things. Still, I think it was a bit odd that such a leak was left behind by the doc or the nurse or whoever was supposed to tidy up my wounds. Also strange was the fact that I was given the okay to drive home. I guess the assumption is that most Americans, unlike other parts of the world, drive automatic vehicles. I’m not sure how well I would have done if I’d needed to do a lot of pushing on a clutch with a leg that had little sensation in it.

Christmas Eve on the deck

Other than soreness and being prevented from working out during the holidays, the leg was sort of a non-issue. I was supposed to walk or elevate it. No extended periods of conventional sitting or crossing my legs. The green light on walking was helpful for my sanity and I ended up doing a lot of it.

Christmas morning would not be the same without the frenzy

The weather in Indiana was chilly in the beginning but soon turned mild. Christmas eve lunch we had outdoors – a striking change from Minnesota.

Christmas angel 1

Christmas angel 2

In addition to the normal Christmastime traditions, we also went to see my mother-in-law perform in a Christmas concert and we also took in a play - “A Christmas Carole”. Very well done and the girls really seemed to enjoy it. Not a lot of opportunities to do things like that in Nairobi.

The days flew by and before long we were boarding the plane for Idaho.

Living by the second hand

From late November, when I posted the last time, a few things happened. I didn’t anticipate such a gap in posting but these things happen. As I often say, life happens to me faster than I record it. I don’t really have the instantaneous social media presence like most people. I don’t do things and immediately share it with the world. It’s a different kind of documentation of one’s existence but one that doesn’t seem to suit me very well. Ben Hecht said something about this long before social media existed:

“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.” -Ben Hecht, screenwriter, playwright, novelist, director, and producer (1894-1964)

Obviously I’m connecting the old daily newspaper with social media today. Interestingly, the pace of the current media is lightyears faster and thus accentuates Hecht’s point. I know people are trying to make sense of all this by extracting data over time and thereby determining patterns and meaning. It’s depicted in all kinds of graphics and gets interpreted in various ways. To be honest, I don’t think we have a handle where the world is going and it sometimes feels like the car has lost its breaks. I think the same can be said of certain peoples’ lives.

I tend to try to reel in some of this, at least in so far as it is something I can control, whether it is in my job, my family or in my own head. I gravitate towards budgeting time for reflection. Periodically taking stock. Not getting to caught up in the moment. Giving time for wisdom to get involved in steering the car. People seem to increasingly steer their lives like a child sitting in a car pretending to drive. The jerky motions left and right would never make for a successful driving experience. It would produce the same nausea I get from tracking news. Information is coming out so fast, the quality of journalism suffers and there’s a tendency to over-dramatize any one thing.

I’ve spoken to some people that have decided to look at their favorite news websites no more than once a week or more to mitigate this phenomenon. I’ve done that myself on occasion (though I’m often too curious to wait that long) and it does sometimes feel like you’ve missed an eternity. But when you step back you realize that in reality you didn’t really miss all that much.

In any case, don’t expect me to spew facts about my life moment by moment. I probably have a much more interesting life than a lot people who do but it’s a level of narcissism I prefer to avoid. And it wouldn’t provide a better picture of how, or even what, I’m doing. In most cases it would just be stuff – noise that people are trying to filter through in their respective feeds.Who knows, maybe the next generation will have a better sense of the folly in all this over-communication and rebel. But I doubt it.