update, noor walking, cats etc

Apologies for yet again not updating my blog as regularly as I had anticipated when I started it. Unfortunately living in Egypt, I have discovered, can be a bit like living in the back of beyond. The electric goes off most days, sometimes for an hour and sometimes for 4 or 5 hours! Then when that's working and I go online, I find that the ****** server isn't working. Or the other day both were working but for some reason the yahoo site was down! Talk about frustrating! So it's good to finally have it all working and be able to post on here again.

I must confess I do feel a bit superstitious now about telling people anything we have planned to do, as whenever I do things seem to go pear shaped, but for our latest venture which I just said on email that I hope to have some good news for you, it went pear shaped anyway!!! It's a very long story and I am not going to bore you with all the details, but let's just say that we went into the 'minibus' business with my husband's brother-in-law, but unfortunately we learnt the hard way that Reda's brother-in-law is at best an idiot and at worst not to be trusted, and we ended up losing quite a lot of money and clearly we are no longer in the minibus business. In hindsight, we too were very naïve and too trusting, so it has taught us a lesson too. We have sold the minibus now, but of course although it was bought brand new it is now of course second hand, so the price we got for it was well short of what we paid for it. Still it could have been worse and we could have lost the lot, so in some respects we are counting our blessings.

To make matters worse, while all this was going on, my Father-in-Law was taken ill. He has had a bad cough for a long time, but now he was coughing up blood! He was taken into hospital and they did a lot of tests, because of course it could have been something very serious. However, in the end they just said it was the result of a very bad chest infection as all the other tests have come back negative, and they have given him the all clear and he has come back home. I am glad to say that he has given up smoking – at least for the time being – and I hope he is able to stay off it, as his chest really is in a very bad way, though I know that it is very, very difficult to give up and stay off the ciggies. Though I am concerned that in fact he does have something more serious, and either they didn’t find it, or he has decided he wants to keep it a secret from us, I just have this bad feeling about it all; though of course I hope that I am wrong.

Noor is Walking !

I am very happy to report that Noor has started to walk unaided. He really is a clever little soul, too clever by half in fact J !!

Reda has a cousin who has a little girl (Melek) who is 3 months older than Noor (Noor is now one year and one month) and he was quite upset to find that Noor had started to walk before his little girl. In fact I was quite surprised, as I was sure that Melek would be the first, as she is able to stand very well, unsupported, and even dances a little when music is played, but so far she can at best managed 2 or 3 little steps before falling down, or purposely getting down, so I think for some reason she doesn't have the confidence to walk further. Noor started with just a few steps of course, but he can now walk quite a bit on his own, his favourite situation is when there are several people around him and he can walk from one to the other, i.e. then hold on to the person he is with before setting off for the next person. His balance is still a little off, but he doesn't let that stop him and he has plopping down onto his bum when he's tired/off balance etc down to a fine art! (smiley)

Cats

We have a lot of cats around here which are domestic cats, but who are live 'feral' though they do come around for food and we feed them bits and pieces. One female cat that is a real darling has had a little of 6 kittens, the kittens have been kept on a nearby roof, but we discovered yesterday that she had moved them all into my mother-in-law's 'hen house'! Unfortunately my M-in-Law isn't the cat lover that I am, and she moved them all out – she says that if she left them in there, all the other female cats would start bringing their litters onto our roof too, as they would see it as a safe place to leave their kittens while they go out in search of food. She also insists that the kittens eat the chickens' food. Frankly I doubt it, though it is true that the cats here eat things that the cats back home wouldn't touch, like bread and pasta. I'm not sure if the cat will bring them back to our roof or not, will just have to wait and see I guess. I managed to hold one of the little darlings for a short while, they are much less trusting of humans than kittens are back home, but she was quite well behaved with me and I only put her down because everyone kept saying that she will bite me or scratch me and that as a 'wild' cat they carry diseases etc, and of course I wouldn't want to catch anything that I could pass onto Noor.

Hot, Hot, Hot

No surprises, but boy is it flippin' hot here or what ?? The temperature indoors even with the fans on at full blast is up to 32.4 C and the temps out in the sun I don't even like to contemplate – in fact I popped the thermometer out there on a chair (fabric covered chair so should be a reasonably accurate reading) and it was just over 46 C !!! Phew!!!!!!! Most evenings it starts to cool down, around about 6:30 ish or so I go up onto the roof and make the most of the coolish breeze that usually starts up around that time of day. Mind you, some days it doesn't, which can be a bit disappointing, but that's what you get for living in Egypt I guess!!! (smiley)