Sunday

Not much going on this week. You wouldn’t say so, with a government gone, indictments coming up  and 50,000 tons of – not yet grown – potatoes exported to the EU.  I kind of liked that last bit of news. We (as in us, Lebanese) are going to actually export potatoes to Europe? I can’t quite put my fingers on it why I find this so amusing, but it has a hint of amateurism. Why not oranges? Or bananas? Seems like we produce a lot more of those.

Fruit & Vegetable Cart

All is quiet on the surface, and boiling underneath, but it’s been like that for the past 5 years or so, so I’d say there’s just not enough pressure on the magma chamber to make it explode (I’m working with my son on his Earth Science, as you may have inferred).

Neigborhood 'Dikanne' (shop)

Which leads me to another issue, the generation gap. My son makes fun of the fact that when I text friends, I spell out entire words, and use capitalization and punctuation. That particular statement suddenly solved a mystery. Some years ago, I was working at my son’s computer, when out of the blue I heard a ‘ding dong’. A screen popped up, with lots of weird looking squiggles, and very long intricately looking names and aliases. It turned out someone was sending him an SMS, or an MS, or an SM, or whatever you call these things. He wasn’t home, so I replied for him. But within one sentence, an alert appeared on the screen. ‘dnt answr its a parent’, and the conversation went dead. I never knew how they figured it out that fast. Now I know. I used standard English.

Laundry day

And so I will entertain you with some still life pictures of Beirut. It’s a sunny day, but they say the weather will change in the afternoon. Maybe I should attend to some household activities. I noticed yesterday I have 4 (four !) entire cupboards filled with Tupperware and otherwise plastic boxes and lids. That seems like overdoing it a bit.