and feeling rundown. Must be that I’m simply doing too much. On Saturday night I couldn’t sleep because I was running a list of all the things I needed to do in the morning in my head. Sunday was Eid and I was expecting up to a hundred guests. I guess that would freak anyone […]

I saw the moon from one of the upstairs windows last night. It’s waning. Reached full last weekend I think, and now it’s getting smaller and smaller and soon it will disappear for a few nights to be reborn. Kind of like how life goes. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly the month […]

The Arabic word ‘barakat’ is loosely translated as ‘blessing’ in English, but unfortunately the word blessing does not connote all the intricacies of the meaning of barakat. I’m no Arabic scholar, but from my understanding the term barakat has to do with blessings of plenty, abundance, providence. And it comes down to whether or not […]

I took a vacation! A real vacation! No work, no laptop, I didn’t even take my watch! Didn’t want to have to take a look at it–which meant I ended up asking hubby and son every few minutes, “What time is it?” In hind sight, I would have taken my watch, but still…point is I […]

It’s been a little frustrating that now that I’m coming to the end of the week, and I only have about four more days in the U.K., only one of which is a school day (Monday the 28th), that some schools are suddenly scrambling to have me visit. I have some friends to thank for […]

I have to try to update my photo gallery more often! Problem is I do it so infrequently that each time I put together the web album, I have to relearn the process of posting it! Argh! In some ways it would be so much easier to just hand all the website maintenance over to […]

Just when I thought the dreams of Mecca and Mina were over, I had another one last night. Me gathered with millions of others, sending my thoughts and prayers up to our Lord and Creator. Yesterday I took one of my daughters and her children down to visit my parents. It was my first post […]

This is a continuation of the journal I kept while on Hajj from Oct. 30th to Nov. 20th. I’ve tried to keep it as true to what I wrote as possible with only minor editing. Any interjections from the present are in parentheses. Nov. 6th, 2010 Yesterday I did something I’m quite ashamed of. Maybe it […]

Last week my husband ordered the Al Jazeera English channel from our cable provider and I must say wow! This is not a commercial for Al Jazeera, but rather a lament at what CNN has become and a further lament to the lack of depth in most North American media. When CNN is still dithering […]

And so far so good. And yet it troubles me that I can break my fast while others, my own ‘country men’ cannot. They suffer under the disaster of the flooding in Pakistan. May God have mercy on them. My neighbour came back from Pakistan just before Ramadan and said the situation was horrible! He […]