Sabzi And Goldfish

Goldfish are one of the symbols of Persian New Year. The decorative table Persians lay out includes goldfish swimming in a fish bowl which is very beautiful. The meaning of the goldfish varies but basically it represents a happy life full of activity and movement. Fortunately I'm not the only one who thinks this is no way to treat the poor little goldfish who is swimming alone in a very small glass bowl and then gets (typically) thrown away. There's a website for people who care about this issue and suggest a kinder way: click here. 

Here's our goldfish! He looks a bit confused but at least he's not suffering.

One of the other things gracing the Persian New Year table is a big plate of sprouted wheat (sabzi.) It's meaning is easy to see: fresh growth and prosperity. I have grown sabzi before and often have some trouble (one year Rainbow ate all the green shoots) but decided to try it again. This year I wrote Saeed's sister, Nahid, for specific directions. She very sweetly wrote a long list of directions which I tried to follow to the letter.

Step 1: soak wheat in water for three days in a warm place. This was challenging as it was snowing outside and we keep the house at 65 degrees, so we put it on the mantle of the fireplace.

I also had to keep Obi from drinking the water.

Step 2: drain the water, spread the sprouted seeds on a plate and cover with a moist cheesecloth. The hardest part of this step was finding the cheesecloth in the store.

Step 3: sprinkle the cloth with water to keep moist and keep checking the sprouts for green shoots and...

... make sure they get plenty of sunlight. It was gray and miserable outside so we put the plates out of harm's way (cats' way) and set up the florescent light.

Step 4: once the green shoots are poking up through the cheesecloth remove it.

There's always a show off in every group!

Step 5: keep warm and exposed to light and sprinkle with water, but not too much.

A week later : WOOT!

Some mothers just won't let go of their kids.

Uh oh, is that mold?

A few days later and I couldn't deny it any more. Waaaaa... this has happened before. Sigh..... need to use less water next year. Sorry Nahid; you did say not too much water.

Once the weather got sunny and warm I put them out to try to encourage the growth of the shoot and discourage the mold, but mold is a tenacious beast. The plate on the left isn't looking so good.

Step 6: tie a pretty red ribbon around the sabzi.

Cats are also tenacious beasts. Hey Frosty! Quit untying my ribbon!

Hey Chappu! Quit eating the sabzi!

So even gray weather, cold weather, mold, and cats still couldn't completely thwart my project. We'll be taking the winning sabzi to Shirin and Gabriel's house where Tita will be joining us to celebrate new year. Thanks Nahid and...

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

Hangin Out With Cyrus

A few weeks ago Cyrus came to visit and we had the best time together. He forces me to slow down and appreciate every rock, leaf, and sweet gum ball right along with him.

Obi, on the other hand, found a spot between two chairs to hide. You can see him alert and listening to Cyrus who's on the other side of the chair.

While Shirin and Gabriel were gone Cyrus and I just hung out together outside. He discovered something very interesting between the bricks in the stairs by our front door. (Yes, that's a little pile of leftover snow.)

No honey, you shouldn't pick the red berries off the bush. (Somehow a few accidentally got picked off anyway.)

That curved step behind him used to be his arch nemesis, but now he walks over it like it's not even there.

The best thing ever, a pile of stones. (Grandma yawns a bit here.)

Last summer Saeed carefully pulled Cyrus around in this garden cart. Now he can crawl into it himself in order to throw out each little sweet gum ball...

... and crawl out...

... by himself.

He found the bag of bird seeds Saeed left out from when he filled the feeders. It becomes Cyrus' duty to carry it to the feeders to do the same.

He is so fascinated by those sunflower seeds.

Cyrus, what are...

... you doing? And this chair was JUUUUST right.

When Shirin and Gabriel came home they caught us sitting in the leaves in the sun doing absolutely nothing other than sitting in the leaves in the sun. It felt so good.

The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout.

When your arms aren't long enough you have to just go right in after it.

Got it!

I hope Cyrus has inherited some of his mommy's genes for art.

Oh Yeah! Looks like he's got it.

I assure you that my grandson is anatomically correct (as opposed to Barbie) but I have photo-shopped in some extra thick water in these bath scenes to camouflage the proof of that. It seems kind of ridiculous, but I heard about some grandparents who got arrested for photographs they took of their little toddler granddaughters in the bath tub. The store who developed the pictures called the police. So, Cyrus has been photo-neutered.

Cyrus has learned to wash himself...

... and to 'wash his face' while the water comes rinsing down so it doesn't get in his eyes.

I love bathtub baby pictures. They just look so....    clean!

Kissing the turtle.

All done!

Cyrus loves to watch himself so this video was nothing more than an attempt to record him so he could 'watch the baby'.


I was watching Cyrus and Saeed for quite a while from the kitchen window. When I decided to record them, Saeed, unaware of my presence, decided he'd had enough. Cyrus, at first, doesn't want to come in and goes back out to the feeder. But soon you hear him say "In, in, in, in" and in he comes.


Following the little man around.


Did I also enjoy stones when I was little? Must have, but I only remember enjoying biology.



Cyrus notices Obi sunning himself by the door.


I love the determined little boy who wants to bring the seeds to the birds. It sounds like he keeps saying "Wadee" which is the way he pronounces "Frosty"... so I'm a little confused by what he was repeating.


Cyrus is in heaven with his seeds and bird feeder:

I Love Maz

Ali put this video up on FaceBook and you may remember that I love Maz Jobrani. A comedian and actor, I first saw Jobrani on "The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour" - he was the Persian in the group of otherwise Arab comedians. This video is funny regardless of your level of knowledge of Persians, but if you know Persians a little more intimately there will be lots of extra laughs for you. Enjoy:

The Alchemist

Sorry about not blogging recently. I'm actually still coughing up whatever is still hanging out in my lungs but I'm definitely better. One of the things I was able to do very nicely while warming up the couch with Calvin and Tippy was read. I read two of my book club books back to back but I only want to talk about The Alchemist since that's the book we discussed last night at book club.

The Alchemist is an international best seller, originally written in Portuguese by the Brazilian Paulo Coelho, later translated into 67 languages, appearing in the Guiness Book of Records as the most translated book by a living author. Apparently The Alchemist is often assigned reading in high school or college (I bet my sister has read it) but none of us remembered ever having read it... strange, since this group of ladies reads voraciously.

From Powell's Books I stole this snippet of a summary: "... is about an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago who travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of a treasure buried in the Pyramids. Along the way he meets a Gypsy woman, a man who calls himself king, and an alchemist, all of whom point Santiago in the direction of his quest. No one knows what the treasure is, or if Santiago will be able to surmount the obstacles along the way ... the story of Santiago is an eternal testament to the transforming power of our dreams and the importance of listening to our hearts."

I really liked the book  in the beginning. It's all about not getting stuck doing what others expect of you and feeling free to pursue what makes you happy. As you accompany Santiago on his journey you begin to get the bug.... yeah man, maybe I should just chuck it all and seek out the true meaning of life... But as the story continues things get kind of weird and I began to wonder if I had been sold an empty dream. In the end Santiago actually gets real treasure, as in a chest full of gold coins, and I was so disappointed. I wanted the treasure to be a golden nugget of wisdom, to provide me with insight into the true pathway to happiness, to be a realization of profound proportion. A freaking chest of money? What an appalling ending - how did it become so popular?

Who Wants To Be A Na'vi?

I haven't blogged lately due to illness and I still have photos from Cyrus' last visit, but I've been busy around the house and that will still have to wait. I have to prioritize how I spend my time, so you wouldn't think I'd spend my time on this except that it took about 5 minutes to do.

Now if I could only avatarize my body I'd be happy. When your avatar is completed it actually turns its head and blinks - cool. If you want to do yours here's the link: avatarize yourself

Empathy Quotient

Although I worked all week, I am sick with a bad cold and cough. Each day I came home, scooped kitty litter, and went straight to bed. So here I am on Friday night still feeling like crap, sitting on the couch with my laptop, going through all the emails I ignored all week. One item I stumbled upon was a quiz to determine one's empathy quotient. I'm glad I didn't end up in the Aspberger's Syndrome category! Happily I got a 59, above average empathy........ Achooo!

Link to the test

Nail

Do you remember when I put up a video of the comedian Anjelah Johnson doing a parody of Vietnamese nail salons? In case you don't remember I will include the video at the end of this post -- the nail salon bit is in the second half of her routine.

Why am I bringing this up again? Because yesterday I was driving home from the Steele Creek office when I passed this sign. I had to turn around and snap a quick picture and then laughed all the way home. In her routine the name of the salon is "Beautiful Nail" (just one nail.) I guess this place doesn't promise how your nails will look when when they're done with them. :-)

Animal Rescue In The Electronic Age

It's gotten so easy (if you own a smart phone) to communicate quickly with many other people. Remember back in June when Neda Aqa-Soltan was shot in Tehran and people recorded the event on their phones? The people who uploaded their footage onto YouTube have been awarded (collectively and anonymously) the 2009 George Polk Award for Videography, an award created in 1949 in honor of a CBS reporter who was killed while covering the civil war in Greece. There is actually some controversy about awarding to non-professional bystanders with cell phones, but the committee felt it was important to encourage brave acts of reporting and brave acts of uploading since in some countries like Iran you can go to jail (or worse) for performing acts that are considered to be against the country or God.

The video below shows how the same process was able to save a dog's life. It is certainly meant to tug the heart strings and I wonder about all the other animals in the shelter, but in the case of the main character it has a happy ending. I love the little tail wag part!

Darn! The video is no longer available. Visualize: a woman was recording her walk through the cages of an animal shelter when she came upon a cowering dog at the back of the cage who would only look down, too fearful to look up at her or anything else. The dog had scars and raw injuries and was undernourished. Nobody was looking at this dog as a potential pet. She used her smart phone to email, twitter, and FaceBook everyone she knew and asked them to spread the word about this dog, seeking donations and/or willing adopters. Time was running out - the dog was scheduled to die the next day if no one spoke for him. By 10:00 am the next day she had received enough financial support to take him to the vet and received the support of a rescue agency that would keep him until they could find him a home. You see her go back to the dog at the shelter, pet him, talk gently to him, give him a treat that he doesn't seem to know he's supposed to eat, and then lead him out to her car. She puts him in the back of a hatchback on a blanket, and gives him more lovin' and another treat. This time he seems to know that something good is happening to him and you see the tip of his tail give the tiniest of wags, the "little tail wag" I mentioned above.

It would've been much better if you could have seen the video yourself, but my point is not lost by its absence. Immediacy of communication saved that dog's life, that and the efforts of one very kind lady.

Oh YAY! I was able to find another copy of it. Let's see how accurate my memory is of the story:


Well, I got some of the little details wrong, but I did watch this over a month ago and saved it so I could blog about it later. Not bad.

Reading Four Books At A Time...

...well sort of. I love to read the way George Bush loves to use good 'ole southern sayings to get out of tight situations (snort, har har har.) This can lead to a crazy balancing act sometimes.

I had already begun reading We Are Iran when my friend Priya lent me her copy of Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, a book I've wanted to read since it was released. The day I brought it home my book club book, Half Broke Horses, arrived in the mail and I had only two weeks to get that read before our meeting. And as I do mundane chores I listen to audiobooks on my iPod; I was listening to The Host while holding We Are Iran, Unaccustomed Earth, and Half Broke Horses in my hands. What to do?

Since We Are Iran is a series of blog topics and not really a story line with a plot to keep track of I decided to put it down for the time being. I had to finish my book club book on time so I went ahead and read that first. Half Broke Horses is the story of the author's grandmother in the 1930s and 40s in the untamed scrabble land of west Texas. You may know the author, Jeanette Walls, from her recent well known book Glass Castle which is the story of her own life. I didn't care that much for Glass Castle and had to make myself read Half Broke Horses and I'm glad I did. It was well written, interesting, and provided much needed background information about the author's family that helped me better understand the events in Glass Castle. All but one of my book club members had read Glass Castle and we couldn't help but discuss both books and compare notes about what we thought made her crazy family members do the things they did. We had a great discussion about what elements of a person's education make it better or worse than other forms of education, for example, the value of school education with books, paper and pen versus the learning that results from living the myriad experiences of life. Walls classifies this book as a 'real-life novel' since it was about her grandmother and many of the events were real, but she had to put words in her grandma's mouth and feelings in her heart that may or may not have been there. One of my book club members said she felt 'cheated' by the author's willingness to simply make up what she didn't know, but I didn't agree with her. Even in this day of high tech recording capacities you can't know everything about a person who is no longer here to ask. And unlike some other authors who wrote 'memoirs' that were later shown to be mostly fiction, Walls clearly labels this book as a fictional novel. If you currently have Glass Castle on your shelf I would advise reading this book first.

As soon as I finished Horses I began Unaccustomed Earth by one of my favorite authors, Jhumpa Lahiri. She also wrote Interpreter of Maladies (a collection of nine short stories) and The Namesake, a fantastic story which was made into a movie. Unaccustomed Earth is also a series of short stories, most of which involve characters from India now living in the U.S. Her stories deal with family issues, relationships, personal strivings and failures, and simply put, ordinary life. Lahiri is a gifted story teller and next time one of her books comes out I may not wait so long to read it. Life is too short.

The Host was written by Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight Saga series which I have not read and probably won't. The Twilight series sounds too juvenile for my taste. Shirin and Gabriel like to read books that I normally would never choose, more fantasy and sci fi types, but I end up liking most of them nonetheless; The Host was an audiobook Gabriel put on my iPod. I ended up loving this story despite the fact that I wasn't satisfied with the ending.(*) The story focuses on an alien life form called "souls" that are embedded in the host species of a given planet, using their bodies to live on that planet. Souls are generally very peace-loving, group-oriented beings but because they must insert themselves (in the brain, no sexy business) in the host species they naturally have to take them over. On earth humans are, of course, the host species and as humans are wont to do, they fight like hell to avoid being hosts. The interesting thing is, the reader comes to know one soul in particular and follow her from her "insertion" to where she becomes part of a human outpost, learns to live with the group and ultimately chooses them over her own kind. It's kind of a rinky-dink, done it before idea, but the storyline is gripping and you come to love this soul -- I couldn't put it down, or, pull out my ear buds to be more accurate.

SO! Now I'm back to reading We Are Iran and won't start my next book club book till I'm done with it. That doesn't mean I haven't cranked up my iPod for the next book in line!

(*) The reason I didn't like the ending was because I didn't like Wanda/Wanderer in that tiny, fragile, high-pitch voiced, blonde-ringleted angel woman. I understand the author wanted to give Melanie back her life, and give her back to Jamie and Jared, but to me Wanda/Wanderer was a strong, capable person, though meek in nature. To hear that she began to giggle like a little girl in her new body made me SO MAD!

February 15th Resolutions

Are you a procrastinator? Do you feel ready to make new year's resolutions today?

I'm talking to myself. By mid February I'm ready to eat Twinkies again, so here's a nice pep talk/list written by Dr. Frank Lipman, M.D.:

20 (New Year) Resolutions For February

(I added in the "for February" part)

1. More Real Food, Less “Food-like Substances”
2. More Fruit and Vegetables, Less Sugar, Wheat and Corn
3. More Organic, Less Toxic
4. More Chewing, Less Eating
5. More Water, Less Soda
6. More Recycling, Less Waste
7. More Walking, Less Driving
8. More Exercising, Less Watching TV
9. More Outdoors, Less Indoors
10. More Sleep, Less Worry
11. More Calm, Less Chaos
12. More Being, Less Doing
13. More Consciousness, Less Ignorance
14. More Smiles, Less Anger
15. More Love, Less Hatred
16. More Play, Less Serious
17. More Letting Go, Less Holding On
18. More Forgiving, Less Blaming
19. More Generosity, Less Greed
20. More Ubuntu, Less Me! (Hey! He's heard of ubuntu too! my ubuntu post)