The weight has been gained and regrets and recriminations are slowly making the rounds inside my skull. “If only you’d been less of a glutton! You could have kept the weight  you lost during Ramadan off!” They’re telling me. Having Ramadan in the middle of summer has left me feeling quite disoriented. Feels like I blinked […]

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 […]

Like everyone else, I’ve been watching news about the Aurora, Colorado cinema killings. Of course it’s shocking. Of course it’s apalling that a masked gunman could go into a theatre, lob a cannister of tear gas and then start shooting the people who’d arrived for a midnight screening of the Dark Knight Rises, randomly. But is it surprising? […]

I’ve got less than three hours to go on the fourth fast of Ramadan and my stomach hasn’t even grumbled yet. It’s really amazing how quickly the body gets used to the fasting. Yes, there’s a general feeling of tiredness during the day, but life has already adjusted and there’s a certain sense of rhythm […]

Tonight is the first night of Ramadan and my heart is swelled with joy. Oh it’s going to be hard, I know. The fast starts at dawn, about 4:15 am and ends at sunset about 8:53 pm, that’s 16 hours and 38 minutes without eating or drinking or marital relations in the height of summer. Did it […]

Last Friday night my daughters came over and there was one of those moments–those double take moments–when you feel like your world has changed and it all started with a spilled glass of Cola (not even name-brand Coke)! One of my daughters had left it on the table where one of the grandkids could reach it, […]

I’ve been thinking about hoarders all day. How hoarders never clean their windows, because over the weekend that’s precisely what we did. Anyone who owns a house with older windows knows you have to wash out the sills and repaint them every so often. Hadn’t done it for a while, so just this last weekend […]

I know I didn’t mention July 1st which is Canada Day, our day of ‘independence’ from Great Britain, (which occurred in 1867) but I happened upon a friend’s blog post and thought what better way to honour my American friends but by linking to his blog post. Mark Tiedemann is a science fiction writer from […]