Ms. Marley

Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for." -Bob Marley

Bill Warner is the director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam. This is a very good article about Islam and the annihilation of civilizations that is still going on today!

The Annihilation of Civilizations

I love this woman.  She speaks the truth. She speaks from experience. The video is in English subtitled in French.

A whole crew of neighbor boys came over to the house yesterday to eat some fresh homemade chocolate chip cookie I was making.  While the boys were waiting for the cookies, they picked up my single squirt gun and started playing with it.  Then they started fighting about who gets the squirt gun.  Plus they kept asking to come in the house to fill it up.   So I filled a bucket with water and brought it outside so they could fill the squirt gun without asking to come in the house and bother me.  And I told them to take turns with the gun.

A few minutes later I heard the boys laughing and having a good old time.  What was going on, were they being nice to each other for once?  They were playing with a rubber snake that Carlyle had found and they came up with a new game: Bob for the Snake.  They put the rubber snake into the bucket of water and then they took turns sticking their head into the bucket and grabbing the snake with their teeth.  They thought it was great fun, even more fun than bobbing for apples.  It entertained them for a good hour.

If you have kids that tell you they are bored, maybe you can suggest they go out and play Bob for the Snake!

This morning we had an idyllic walk along the Mississippi River and then we stopped to dangle our feet in the water on the dock and enjoy the perfect weather.  After a few minutes minnows started nibbling on our feet.  It didn’t hurt, it just surprised us with the first peck. They spent considerable time nibbling between Carlyle’s toes.  We decided it was because his feet were dirty and the fish were operating like a cleaning station.  Look it up in wikipedia. Little wrassle and crabs climb right into the mouth and gills of large fish eating off the parasites.  The big fish will wait in line for their turn to get cleaned.

We’ve been watching the ducks all spring.  They had their young and now they’ve molted their feathers.  They can’t fly until their feathers regrow.  One duck stretched out its wing and flapped it wing stub.  It looked funny.  We sat on one side of the dock and the ducks sat on the other.  They didn’t even seem bothered by Andy dog.

Anyone that reads my blog for long knows how much I like to find stuff outdoors. My favorite is bones, but I also like scat and tracks, pellets, feathers, or spotting live critters. My lastest discovery, while being a fabulous addition to my bone collection, was a tragedy. In the last two weeks, we have found three dead dogs in the Mississippi River. Two of them, a beagle and a lap dog, were floating in the river. The third dog was rotting along the shore. It’s head was almost completely skeletonized, but it’s body was intact and filled with millions of baby maggots. Sometimes nature can be harsh.

Being the good naturalist that I am, and being fortunate to have a plastic bag with me, Carlyle and I detached the skull from the rest of the body and brought it home to cure. Kevin didn’t think much of my discovery because it stunk. No problem, we put our treasure in a bucket of bleach water and let it sit outside for a couple days. The result is a clean, skull that doesn’t stink. It’s particularly nice to have a predator and a prey skull for comparison. I looked online for dog skulls and found out they sell for $75-$119 dollars for a plastic model.  Ours is the real thing.

But I prefer the real dog.

Yesterday I got a letter from a young man in prison. He write to me at least once a week, sometimes more often than that. A few weeks ago, he told me he was reading the Bible from cover to cover to see if its true. Based on his letter yesterday, I don’t think he’s very impressed.

Here is what he wrote: “In the Bible it says we will be judged when we die. Believe that? Not only do we suffer on earth but also when we die. That’s like double jeopardy! I believe in reincarnation. I believe we move on to a different life. If there is a god why did he come at a time when it couldn’t be properly recorded? Why is it ‘a wicked man’s heart’ to want a sign of his existence? Why is god’s way to answer our prayers mysterious? Because there isn’t no god. Who created space and earth? Maybe nothing did. Maybe life is a big mistake. The spirit and soul isn’t the only thing that dies. So does your brain and heart! If god wanted us to praise him, and only him so bad, he’d show up annually. Why thousands of years ago? Oh yeah and he had personal relationships with a selected few. And talked to people, but that doesn’t happen anymore! It’s because the Bible is a man made creation to help govern society. The ten commandments sound a lot like laws. It’s breaking a commandment to murder someone but the Bible makes it right when it’s done for your country! My opinion is life is pain and struggle and then you die. And then you live another life possible better than the last one. Or worse. Guess we’ll find out. But it would suck if hell is real and I’m like, ‘Shit, I should have been a believer’.”

I have a lot of news about Minneapolis Swims.

We have a new logo.

We are updating our website in a few days with a lot of new content and our new logo: http://www.mplsswims.org

We have a fundraiser with the Wolves Den at the Midtown Festival on July 23, 2011.  Come and say hi.

We have a $2.1 million dollar bonding bill at the state that may be passed soon if the government can pass a budget!!

The kids are helping with publicity and fundraising.  Why?  They want to save the swimming pool so they can learn to swim.

The kids swam in the river at our last Trash Pickup initiative.  I am a Red Cross WSI and have lifeguard training.  I had to go into the water and get one of the kids that got a little too brave.   They need swimming lessons.

The kids made this from an old Dominos car top banner.

Nico is a bad girl. She kills birdies and I don’t like it. Despite our best efforts she manages to get outside too often. Yesterday Carlyle fixed her good with a watchband collar connected to a fishing pole bell. Now if she gets out, the birdies have a fighting chance to get away. She is not happy with this new arrangement.

Hold the presses. Nico just caught a bird even with her new collar on.  She came in the house with a bird in her mouth. I grabbed Nico by the tail and she dropped the bird. The bird flew across the room, hit the dining room window, and fell into the cat’s water dish.

She looks sweet but she is a killer cat.

Back in 2008 I took a trip to Sinai to research the possibility of building an eco-farm community to help orphans and widows.  We toured a community called New Basaisa, founded by Professor Salah Arafa from the American University in Cairo.  Back 30 years ago, Professor Arafa started travelling to Basaisa in the Nile delta to work with the villagers.  After many years, the young college graduates lamented that they had no opportunities for jobs or buying a house.  So the group established New Basaisa.  Each family gets 7.5 acres of land to plant.  When they have saved $6,000, they build their house.  I was excited until I learned the Egyptian government was a huge impediment to progress and that they were charging something like a million Egyptian pounds per acre for land.  We put the project on hold.

Fast forward three years.  The Egyptian government is gone.  The new leaders are begging people to come to Sinai and do exactly what we were planning three years ago.  And get this, the will give the land and help financially with getting started.   They are worried about the unhappy Bedouin in Sinai, the Palestinians on the border, and the crazy idea that Israel wants to reoccupy Sinai.  So they want more people to go and live in Sinai.  Magdi and I started researching and I rediscovered Set El Hossn farm just south of New Basaisa.  I had wanted to visit this farm in 2008, but circumstances prevented me.  We are planning a trip to Sinai later this year to check out Set El Hossn.  This video is wonderful.

Here are photos of our trip to New Basaisa in 2008.  It will be interesting to see how much the place has changed in three years.

Here is half of the model for the community.

Here is a training center being built, paid for by the European Union.

Here is the beginning of one of the two housing clusters.

Here is the library.  It’s pretty small and needs some love and books.

Here is the well with brackish water.  The community grows olive trees and jojoba, both which can thrive in salty water.

We visited a family in the process of building their house.  The women were making bread.  We sat on the floor and made bread with them, and then ate it with honey and homemade cheese.  Wonderful!

On Wednesday I took Ahmed to Moir Park in Bloomington to make a bat house as part of an REI event.  We made a bat house and then went for a walk along 9-mile Creek.  We walked across some rocks into the creek to look inside a drainage pipe.  Ahmed dropped his water bottle and it went floating down the creek.  He tried to catch it but it was moving too fast so we ran to the next creek crossing.  We heard people laughing in the woods so we went to find out what was going on.

A father and his two sons were playing on two large, springy tree branches that had fallen over.  Ahmed quickly joined in the play.  He did a bunch of pull-ups.  Check out the video below.  Walking back, Ahmed commented about how quiet it was in the woods.  He wanted to see a beaver, but we didn’t.  I thought we would see a deer, but we didn’t.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIjnZHiSFVQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player

And here is our bat house.  We are going to hang it in the tree on the boulevard.  The house should be at least ten feet off the ground and facing south, or southwest.  Bats like to cuddle and they like to be warm.

A few days ago I found this iris stuck in my front door.  I put it in a container of water and four days later it’s still beautiful.  It’s on my desk right now supplying me with a happy bit of beauty.  Iris’ have always been one of my favorite flowers.  My mom grew them in our backyard.  They are an extravagant mix of colors combined with an adorable design: purple petals with bright yellow, furry rows of pollen next to a zebra patterned base.

Juxtapose this beautiful flower with the graffiti I found on my windowsill this morning.  The girl who did this is a mixed up mess.  But even considering that, what would motivate her to write on someone’s window sill, and worse, write something so ugly?  Now I have ‘cunt’ permanently engraved into the wood in my front porch.  Hopefully I will be able to remove the ink so it’s not so visible.

This got me thinking.  Yesterday I met with Bart, the pastor of CityLife Church.  Religiously I’m confused.  I see so much ugliness in life, I can’t reconcile that reality with the idea of a perfect, loving God, who made a perfect world.  If He knew we were going to mess up, why didn’t he make us with a less corrupt nature?  Why doesn’t he intervene more?  Why isn’t his existence more obvious?  Does He really exist?  After all, there was plenty of death in nature before God supposedly made the garden of Eden.

Where exactly is heaven?  Where is hell and why do we need a hell?  I don’t like the idea of hell even for the most egregious offenses.  I think ceasing to exist is plenty enough punishment if punishment is necessary.   Plus I think fear-based motivation for religious belief is ridiculous and ineffective.  ”Believe in x,y, and z or you are going to burn in hell for eternity.”

Why aren’t religious people more wonderful?  If believing in God is powerful and truly transforms a person, why isn’t there more evidence of it in people’s lives?  There is plenty of ugliness all around me and considering my own flawed character, I understand why.  It’s life, it’s what we are.

But why the flower?

Recently our dryer quit working.  That provided the final motivation for Kevin to make me a balcony clothesline.  In Egypt everyone dries their clothes on balcony clotheslines.  It’s perfect.  It doesn’t take up any space in the yard.  I hang clothes at waist level rather than having my arms extended overhead.  I can have a lot of laundry drying in a small space.  It’s easily accessible.  And I have a nice view of the neighborhood as I hang clothes.  Plus, it’s environmentally friendly.

This is the fourth week we have organized the neighbor kids to do volunteer work to earn a picnic, s’mores, and kickball in the park.  I believe kids benefit when they earn rewards  – work builds character, helps develop self-esteem and keeps them from developing an attitude of entitlement.

Yesterday we took a group of kids for the second time to a piece of land that is used as a homeless encampment.  It was full of trash.  Two weeks ago we picked up 20 bags of garbage.  Yesterday we finished the job by picking up twelve more bags.  Then we came home to a barbecue and s’mores compliments of Mr. Lieder and the CityLife crew.  After a fine dinner we headed to the park to kickball and basketball.

After years of wishing, I finally got a bidet for the upstairs toilet.  Oh boy, is it wonderful.  Thank you Kevin!  The installation was not without its challenges though.  Our toilet has the toilet and tank integrated together.  Kevin had to cut the plastic flanges off the toilet seat and replace them with hollow screw gaskets.  But now that it’s installed, it works perfectly.  Bidets are common in Europe and the Middle East.  Once you’ve used one, you’ll want one for yourself.  But I don’t think Kevin and Matt are convinced yet.

For those of you who don’t know, a bidet is a butt shower.  Rather than use toilet paper, you spray your private parts with water.  It’s cleaner and healthier, and it’s cheaper and more environmentally friendly to use (less toilet paper).  Here is the Bidematic brand bidet attachment.  The sprayer is snug against the side of the toilet until you use it.  Then you move the lever to put the sprayer wand in the proper position.

Then you turn the knob with the blue dot to spray the water.

This one was too big for Andy dog.  He tried to get this stick to carry on our walk at Minnehaha Fall.  It took a bit of convincing to get him to give up and find another stick.

Yesterday Carlyle, Andy and I went to Banning State Park hiking.  This is the beautiful Snake River.

Check out this website.  I met Sarah in the sauna at the YWCA along with a Somali woman, Naleye, dressed in a full hijab.  She had been in the whirlpool and was now in the sauna trying to dry her hijab.  The three of us had a lovely chat and decided to exchange contact information.  Naleye is a student at MCTC.  She said she has to rush home after school because she has a lot of kids.  I asked how many.  She said more than six.  Well, seven?  Eight?  No, nine kids!!

Sarah is an artist who creates botanically inspired fashion.  I love her work.  Check it out at: http://www.rectangledesign.com

Me, I’m sick again.  I think its from trying to teach the little children how to blow bubbles in the water during swimming lessons and they do me the favor of coughing right in my face.  Matt’s been sick too so I might have gotten it from him.  I don’t remember the last time I got two chest colds in one month.  Dumb!

We had a busy week.  First, fun with iphone photo apps.

Fatboy

Oldboy

Carlyle’s owie from falling down the stairs.  Put a dent in his income too because he can’t donate blood until the owie turns yellow.

An amazing dinner made by Little.   It was the best porkchops I’ve ever eaten.

Pyro Ken stoking the fire at Castle Awesome on Friday night.

The fire.  At times it was 10 feet tall.  What a great fun party.  Thanks Ken!

We went to Wisconsin to my parents for Christmas.  They think they’ve got a lot of snow.  Minneapolis has more.

If you look at the mound of snow at the base of the stop sign that is the top of the garbage container.

Picasso dog.

My Nepali friend Govinda came over a couple weeks ago.  He told me my rugs were arranged wrong.  The had space between them.  In Bhutan they lap the rugs over each other to cover the ground.  He kept telling me they were wrong.  So I told him to rearrange them.   Here is our new rug arrangement.

Aryn, do you remember this?