I meant to post an hour ago… When I needed a break from my work, I checked on bloglines and, going in a roundabout way through the Freakonomics Blog, ended reading a rather long and fascinating article about Sergej Brin, one of the Google co-founders. So fascinating, in fact, that I was sorry when I reached the end! I might get The Google Story as a direct result of that feature.

As I said, an hour has passed, and it’s time for my intended blog post…

This morning I got my going-abroad-haircut – I’m anxious to look “hip” at our class reunion LOL!! – and afterwards dragged my husband to have a coffee at Pjazza t-Tokk. In the whole square there was just one table which managed to catch a few rays of sunshine, and that was on a corner table almost right in the street. While sitting there, this view of a rather delapidated corner just off the square caught my attention. I must have seen it literally hundreds of times but never took any notice of it…

My first thought was, “this could be inside any Tunisian soukh.” Once I started aiming my camera, I noticed how incongruous the old and new is mixed in a part of Victoria that in my humble opinion should be looked after much better than it is!

A rather sad picture, isn’t it? I wonder who’s responsible for allowing such a mess in the oldest part of the city – and whether it’s the same people who deny relatives of mine decent-sized windows in a newly developed part of Victoria that didn’t exist a few years ago and has absolutely no architectural treasures worth protecting. Bla sens!

Here’s a little story for my pour friend Kathy, who’s anxiously preparing for surgery tomorrow…

One Monday morning, I was about 11 years old, I didn’t want to go to school because of a maths test I hadn’t studied for (I always sucked at maths!). So I invented what all kids do at one time or another to get a day off: a tummy ache. What I hadn’t reckoned with, was that my mum took the matter rather seriously and decided I had to see a doctor, and off we went to our pediatrician. I had to lie down and she pressed my tummy here and there, asking whether it hurt. Although it didn’t hurt at all, at one stage I replied, “yes, a little.” With a rather severe look in her face she advised my mum that I should be seen by some other doctor, and she fixed an appointment for the same day.

As it turned out, that other doc was a surgeon. Before I knew it, I was scheduled for an appendectomy the next morning!! And I, the coward, didn’t have the guts to say, “hey, this is all wrong, I’m totally ok…” – the point in time when that would have been possible had passed so damn quickly, I didn’t even have the chance to realise it!

As a result I spent a week in hospital and another at home – and gosh, how many maths lessons I missed in the process!! :D

The strangest thing was that the surgeon afterwards had the cheek to explain to my mother how the surgery had been done just in the knick of time, before further complications could have resulted!! Obviously I had to keep my mouth shut about that blatant lie; it was only many years later that I plugged up the courage to tell my mother the whole truth…

So Kathy, I’m sure you’ll be just fine. Probably the worst of it all – apart from the waiting – will turn out to be the torturous liquid diet of today!

I’ve had a large number hits on my last Winter Moods post by surfers who had googled for this song’s lyrics, which were not included in that post. Although the lyrics for all songs on their album Ordinary Men can be found on their website, I decided to post Marigold’s beautiful lyrics here, so there won’t be any disappointment for who lands on my blog in search for them! :)

Marigold

Goodbye love, it will be a while
But I`m delighted
Hold my heart, I`ll be back
To reunite dear

You said I will be all right
Heard the sound
When your earring touched the ground

Take my hand, don’t be sad
You`re so fine
You`re beautiful
Don’t look back, don’t say goodbye
Turn around you`re beautiful

In your eyes, I felt the rain
Like a flower
For all this time, I can’t wait
To reunite dear

Cos I felt comfort in your arms
Heard the sound
When your earring touched the ground

Take my hand, don’t be sad
You`re so fine
You`re beautiful
Don’t look back, don’t say goodbye
Turn around you`re beautiful

Yesterday our “little” nephew James had his lucky birthday – all of 24 years young… I remember him as a baby when I visited Gozo for Christmas in 1983 – when I was 24…

That drove home with a shock that in a week’s time I’m going to be exactly twice as old. OMG… This afternoon I spent some time with old photo albums (again!) and fighting bloody nostalgia. At least I had a good laugh with my son when I showed him baby photos of himself. What a great thing to have so many memories captured!

I thought I might share a few photos dating back to those glorious days of my youth. That one on the left is James, barely a year old.

I’ve always been a fanatic with the camera (though far from professional!), and although others sometimes laugh at my habit, I’m really glad that I have it! Unfortunately I end up with very few pics of myself in the process, because it’s always me that’s doing the pointing and clicking… But here’s one from my holiday in October 1983 (yep, I was 24!) with my boyfriend, taken at our usual hangout place Moby Dick in Xlendi. I had no idea that I’d be married to him the following year. :D

And here’s one for the little ones, who aren’t so little any longer – the one in the middle belongs to me…

Oh, to be young again!

One day when I have more time and less stress I’ll skim the hundreds of photos that I have and scan the best of them. For now, I give you my favourite shot of Xlendi Bay; you won’t manage to take a similar one – because that tree’s been gone for a long, long time!

The magnetic power of my book shelf is inversely proportional to the amount of time I have to read… I guess it’s the need for escape in such taxing times!

Nevertheless, I did finish Koontz’s The Husband within a couple of days, or should I say nights. It was every bit as great as I expected it to be (Carin please note :D )!

I briefly started on The Right Attitude To Rain, and I think I’ll like it. But I have to admit that right now I need more light-weight fodder. I’m only reading at night, maybe half an hour before falling asleep; so it must be simple enough to get into it again the following night without re-reading everything. Otherwise I’ll stick to chapter 1 forever and ever – and that’s what was going to happen with this one. (Sorry Qaminante – but I will let you know whether I really liked it, probably some time in April! )

It turned out that The Devil Wears Prada, which was one of the books I picked up cheaply in London, was exactly the right weight for my tortured brain LOL! And although its story could have been told in much fewer words, I found it immensely amusing. Do you want to know why? OK, I’ll tell ya – but keep it to yourself! Miranda’s personality (not her appearance!) is a spitting image of one of my former employers’ character . Nope, I won’t tell you which one – because, you see, I don’t totally trust you to keep it to yourself, after all!

Seriously, when this boss phoned from abroad (or even only Malta) everyone went ballistic – and I suspect that we were actually expected to react that way… Oh yes, I could write a book about it too, but this being such a tiny country, I’m forced to exercise restraint. Fiction stranger than life? Naaah…

By the way, I also loved the end of this book… I’ll always keep dreaming!

Now that the first e-mail subscriptions trickle in I’d better find something to blog about… It seems with feedburner I opened a little can of worms!

Yesterday being Ash Wednesday I made an effort at delivering a meatless meal to my family. I have to admit that I don’t believe that you’ll go to hell if you eat meat on Ras ir-Randan (first day of Lent), but vegetarian meals are a good thing – and healthy too! As a matter of fact my son declared that he loves Randan – because I usually do some experimenting with ingredients and as a result (most of the time, I’ve had disasters in the past LOL!!) come up with something good to eat. I am aware that that’s not exactly the meaning of Lent…

So I invented a yummy vegetarian pie yesterday. My son asked me what the pie was called – so I obliged and named it Torta Berolina. I’m not sure it didn’t in fact exist before I threw together the ingredients. It does bear some resemblance to pea-cakes (pastizzi tal-piżelli). In any case, it’s an awfully simple affair, but it really was delicious!

All you need is dough for the pie (ready-made from the supermarket ), a packet (450g) each of frozen green peas and spinach, 5 ġbejniet (goat cheeselets – you can use ricotta instead), one large onion, salt, pepper and a little ground nutmeg.

• Simmer the spinach and peas until cooked (once defrosted, that should take about 5 – 10 mins) – it’s ok to overcook the peas a little!
  
  
• Cut the onion into fine rings and sauté with some butter in a deep frying pan (I mean a frying pan that’s deep – not a deep-frying one… )
  
  
• Add the green stuff to the onions, season to taste with salt, pepper and nutmeg. (I’m generous with the salt but use nutmeg sparingly!)
  
  
• Leave to simmer for a couple of more minutes, and finally stir in the cheese.
  
  
• Roll out two circles of dough, line a pie form with one of them, add the filling and cover with the other circle.

Bon appétit!

I don’t know if anyone noticed that my blog was going bananas yesterday afternoon. While upgrading to WordPress 2.1 weird things happened – and none of them wonderful! Ironically, this was the first time that I had had no bad premonitions before the upgrade – having gone through the procedure several times, always painless and ridiculously easy, I anticipated it would be a breeze. Hey, I was wrong! Talk about Murphy’s Law… First my blog was gone entirely, then no posts showed up. Third time lucky (after re-installing twice), and almost everything was in order. Phew!

As I’d already wasted much more time on that stuff than I meant to, I proceeded to finally check out FeedBurner, which had been on my list of geeky stuff to be checked out for quite some time. It promptly held me captive for a further couple of hours… Maybe – probably – it’s a rather boring subject matter for you. But here’s a goodie for my readers as a result, too: you can now subscribe to my blog by e-mail! Just enter your e-mail address into the form in the right panel; you’ll have to verify the e-mail that you receive, and from then on at between 7 and 9 am each day you should get my blog post delivered (well, unless I didn’t blog… )! Say WOW! Sure, I’m very easily impressed with those kinds of toys!!

Guess it’s time for zzz’s now. And tomorrow I’ll probably keep the web off limits to my laptop (which means, no blog e-mail Thursday morning ). Good night!

A word of caution… if you hate rants, don’t read this post. Because a rant it’s going to be – and one with a paranoid touch to boot. I really wish my blood didn’t start boiling every time I feel treated in an unjust manner, but boy, is that difficult in this country!

Last year my husband got not one, but two parking tickets in the street where we live. On each of those occasions he had only minutes to grab a quick lunch, and parked as close to home as possible. He did not cause obstruction to anybody, although he did intrude onto those infamous yellow lines by about half a metre.

Now if anyone else disrespects yellow lines, that’s different. Last night – on the height of local carnival celebrations – my son needed to leave home but couldn’t get out of the alley where our garage is located.

Note how the yellow lines continue through the alley’s access – because many a hardheaded motorist doesn’t give a flying shit about alleys (but none about yellow lines either)… Minutes before I took the photos, a pick-up truck was parked in the exact same spot, only it was also obstructing the pavement. We phoned the police station in Victoria (the one in Gharb was closed ) and were told there were no officers present in Gharb (rather strange, during an activity like carnival!). They promised to get in touch with the pick-up’s owner to make him/her move it out of the way. Whether s/he did because of police intervention or just because s/he was done celebrating, I don’t know. To the credit of the lady who was on phone duty in Victoria, she phoned us back and asked whether the truck had moved. Only by then, of course, that had been replaced by the other.

Every time there’s some function going on near or in the Church square, we are deprived of using our car to get into or out of our garage. More often than not we can’t even get into our street at all if we happen to come home during the activity, but have to park a kilometre away. And ever since a supermarket opened exactly opposite my home – which I admit is convenient enough in a way! – my heart beat goes up every time I come home by car at any time of the day, because there’s a good chance, I’d say about 70:30, that I have to literally fight my way into my garage. On the other hand the supermarket’s owner gets annoyed if we leave a car in front of his shop overnight!!

Some time last year I had asked a police officer on duty in Gharb, to make someone move a car parked on the same yellow lines because it I could not get into my garage. The answer? “Oh, how long is he gonna be, he’s probably just shopping and will be back in a minute!” On another occasion (oh yes, I can be a pain in the ass!) I asked assistance, for the same reason, of two officers who were comfortably settled at the police station, and they really made it abundantly clear to me that, in fact, they did regard me as a pain in the ass, even if they didn’t say so (they wouldn’t, would they??).

I know how all this makes me sound. I can’t say I like whiners either,  seriously! But I really had to spit it out before it makes me burst. It’s the injustice of it all as well as a feeling of being utterly powerless that nearly freaks me out. I mean, if even police officers discourage me from asking for help… what am I expected to do? Get a gun and fight for my rights??

No, I’m not done yet… here’s another one: We would have loved to add a balcony to our house when we first bought it, but we weren’t allowed because there was no pavement. And a pavement was not possible because the street was too narrow. Now the supermarket has a pavement (remember: it’s exactly on the opposite side… ), and a few metres down the street a pavement was put in front of a newly constructed building just a few weeks ago – the rather obvious reason for that probably the balconies that are being constructed! Am I really paranoid??

Taddaaaah! I’m really glad to say that we were successful this time round, and it was just great. Cool atmosphere, not too crowded, just about enough to leave a breathing space around you. I’m rather happy we didn’t manage to get through on Saturday!!

I’ll let the pics do the talking… :)

…well, I apologize, because you mustn’t expect anything about the carnival in my blog post today. We were pretty blue-eyed I’d say, when we set off to Nadur at 11.30 pm or thereabouts last night. As the rumour made the rounds that our little island’s population grew by as much as three times its normal volume this weekend, how the hell did we not expect what would greet us on arrival at the outskirts of carnival’s capital?? And this is what it looked like:

This blurry snapshot is the only one I took last night, and I did that out of the sheer frustration of it all! It doesn’t do justice to the amount of vehicles crawling up and down the hill – it really was insane! But it wasn’t only the search of parking space that finally put us off and made us turn back home. The thought of how many people would be queueing to get something to drink was just as awful as that of how the term “mingling with people” would be taken to frightening new heights!

But judging from today’s equally out-of-this world ferry queue, a real lot of these cars made their way back to Malta today. So, yes, we’ll actually try again tonight. I’ve been eyeing the sky all afternoon; it looked cheerful enough in the morning, but since then a grey cloud cover seems to get thicker and heavier by the minute. But that shall not prevent us from yet another pilgrimage to Nadur. Let’s see how it will work out this time round… watch this space tomorrow! (Or not… )