AbezAbez Is... 50% White, 50 % Pakistani, Muslim Hijab-wearing type female, Daughter of Momma, Sister of Owlie Wife of HF, Momma of Khalid, a special little boy with Autism, and Iman, a special little girl with especially big hair, Writer, Graphic Designer, Editor, Freelancer, Blogger, Inhaler of Chocolate
Right Brain Left Brain Islam poetry
Mortal Wounds BebeFiles Husbandfiles

 
My sister, De Owl

My Husband, who never updates!

Mona, who I don't visit enough

Hemlock, who I don't hug enough

Baji, the orginal robot monkey pirate

Prometheus, who buts brains to blog about Autism

Socrates, a blogger with Asperger's

Jo, a funnier Autism mom with a great blog

Autism Watch-  for logic-based information

ASAT- Assosciation for Science in Autism Treatments

Quack Watch- for current news and info on all sort of medical treatments

Expat Women Blog Directory

My Cousin- really, he's my cousin.  Wish he would update more.

 
 
 
 

Monday, March 31, 2003

You know, sometimes I outdo even myself. Based on today’s experience, I present: How to Detonate Your Pressure Cooker.

See, you wouldn’t normally consider a pressure cooker to be an explosive device, but with a little skill, some hungry impatience and instruction from yours truly, you too can endanger your very life. Simply ignore everything you know about safety and common sense, and twist the lid off the cooker after it’s been hissing for over twenty minutes. As soon as you have twisted the seal open, the lid will fly vertically off the pot and beef stew will explode all over the freshly scrubbed stove, go flying into the pot of milk you‘ve just boiled, and arrange itself artfully in your hair. Fortunately, the droplets of scalding broth that land on your feet will be adequately cooled by their descent to not prove lethal. What will kill you, however, are the hungry people who preferred their stew for dinner, not decoration. (I know not how much longer I shall tarry in this mortal sphere...)

But since I’m still alive and there’s still exactly 23 minutes and 40 seconds until the bread is out of the oven, I’m free-bloggin, just typing whatever comes to mind. I would like people to think that I put alot of time and mental effort into my blog, but the truth is I go for quantity instead of quality, and I try to blog every day even if it’s just rubbish. tee hee

Sixteen minutes till the bread’s out. Now what? I’ve already typed a paragraph of nonsense and then deleted it. It’s not that I can’t think on an empty stomach, it’s just that the bread smells so good that it’s very distracting. What's left of my stew isn’t half-way bad either.

Ten minutes left on the bread. The weather here is turning warm again, which means it’s time to put away my winter-weight jilbs. The summer temps in Islamabad are around 40 C, 110F, (sometimes higher, the highest last year was 46 C, that’s too much in Fahrenheit to count anymore without feeling woozy). After a few weeks of it you feel like you’ve been stewing in your own juices. We cope by drinking gallons of ice water, wearing frozen bandanas and wet scarves. Rats, now I’ve given away my summer secret. Yes, I dunk my scarf in cold water, give it a good squeeze and then pin it on. Keeps you mercifully cool for about half an hour before it dries out completely. Plus then I don’t have to iron it if it looks wrinkly. I must confess, I religiously avoid ironing anything from about May to October till the fall rains come.

Four minutes on the bread! Monsoon season comes towards the end of summer. Boy I thought it rained hard in Chicago, but it was nothing compared to the tropical storms we get here, and they blow up out of nowhere sometimes, too. Last year my sister and I were standing on the balcony watching the lightening in the sky, and I asked her, “You think it’s gonna rain?” As soon as I had said that, suddenly a vertical sheet of water and wind hit us both in the face and pushed us backwards. Yes it rained, tons and tons of water like someone opened floodgates in the sky, and then closed them just as abruptly half an hour later.

Bread’s done! Soup’s on!

Aaaah...now dinner’s over and the world seems like a happier place :) Alhamdulillahillazi ata’amana, wa saqana, wa ja’alana minal Muslimeen! (All Praise is due to Allah who fed us and gave us drink and made us of among the Muslims).

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T’was the night before Monday
And all through the house
Not a creature was stirring
Except this lazy bum here who can’t think of anything to rhyme with house, excluding mouse, grouse, souse and louse. Hmmmm.

This blog is finally operational and pretty slick lookin if I may say so ;). It’s 3 am, and I’m full of Chinese food and 4 cups of green tea that I didn’t really wanna drink, but I did anyways and now the caffeine is keeping me up. Too much caffeine gives me an irregular heart-beat, so I’m sitting here hearing lub-dub, lub, lub, dub...dub? So now what? I have work in the morn (Eek! Eek! Eek! The beginning of another week!) and as usual, I haven’t done my work, and on top of that, I’m not sure how I’m getting there tomorrow morn. Hmmmm.

The mortal wound on my thumb (incurred earlier this evening) hasn’t killed me yet, but it kept bleeding at dinner. This wouldn’t be a problem except that I was at a Chinese restaurant, and I don’t think they had Band-Aids on the menu, not even for the mortally wounded. So I confess, I used my posh cloth napkin as a posh cloth rag for dabbing at the blood.

It’s ok, it was a terrible napkin, it had more starch in it than the white rice did. I tried to wipe my mouth with it and almost tore the skin right off my lips! Ok, I’m lying...but it was too scratchy and too hard to be of any use in any other way. If I was a smarter man, I might have kept my Band-Aid on, even when I went out for dinner. But you see, I’m not a smart man, or a man of any sort for that matter, so I just bled politely on the napkin, ok?

Dinner was really good, the great thing about being in a Muslim country is that you can order anything you want from the menu and it’s always halal!!! Yay! The bad thing is, then you get all ambitious and eat out WAY too often for your own dietary good. I gotta get to bed, so I’ll just throw this post up and be gone. More tomorrow morn after work I guess. Zing!

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Today we present: How To Mortally Wound Yourself While Doing Laundry

It’s quite simple, really, you just turn your head while throwing clothes into the dryer and consequently rake your hand over the metal latch that makes the dryer close. Having done this, you will have torn a gash across your thumb, cross-wise. You may then proceed to bleed onto the clean laundry and expire after an elaborate death scene of some sort. The End. (gosh, it’s hard to type with a Band-Aid on your thumb)

We forgot to present: How To Mortally Wound Yourself While Putting Oil in Your Car

This is also very simple. Pit all of the strength you can muster against the oil cap in your car. Succeed in twisting it off at a very high velocity, while letting a pokey bit of metal near the cap slice through your knuckle, and then get motor oil in it. This will produce a lovely black scar that will still look gray four years later, IF the wound itself hasn’t already killed you. The End.

Previous real-life episodes include: How to puncture your head on the corner of the microwave, how to skin your thumb using only a plastic measuring cup, how to singe the hair off your arms with a gas grill, how to fall UP the stairs, how to permanently dent your kneecap, and how to get second-degree burns on ten of your fingertips at once.

And if the pain seems unbearable, remember, “Any trouble, any sickness or disease, any worry, any grief, any problem or anything sad or painful, even the prick of a thorn to a Muslim results in the forgiveness of his sins (due to his patience).” -Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him. Hadith on the authority by Bukhari and Muslim. So, endure everything with patience and sabr and you’ll pass the test with extra bonus points!

Many, many thanks to Al-Mansurah who’s tolerated my status as a techno-twit and done my blogger HTML for me. JazakAllah!

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Saturday, March 29, 2003

Okie dokie people, I don't know whether this is going to work or not, but I've moved my blog from xanga to blogger. My previous blogs (which I'm not smart enough to transfer over yet) are here.

I'm still in the process of figuring all this out, which is especially difficult because I speak English, not HTML. So gimme a few days..

 
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