• Tag Archives Mark

  • Visa, Visa. Where Art Thou?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                          Waxing Harvest Moon

    Oh.  Visas.  I think I shall never see a visa lovely as a tree.  Or something like that.  Anyhow, the Saudi visa saga took an unexpected and unpleasant turn this morning.  Turns out there are two steps to the process for teachers, certification of the degree and qualifications, then, the visa process itself.  This introduces more days, perhaps as much as a week more.

    We’ll find out tomorrow how the school takes this news.  I’m not sure why the school didn’t alert us to this fix since the Saudi visa process is the same the world over, but they provided no help at all.  In fact, we’re still down one vital piece of paper, something from the Saudi Foreign Ministry inviting Mark to Saudi, a piece of paper the school was responsible to produce.

    Dispiriting.  Mark and I had a heated conversation about the appropriateness of my way of addressing the school’s administrator in an e-mail.  Mark felt my wording was rude, boorish.  American.  To my ear the e-mail had nothing unpleasant or confrontational in it at all.  Mark says I don’t understand and he can’t explain it to me.

    Well, maybe.  He and Mary both have a keen sensitivity to Asian cultures and their ways are not our ways.  I’ve only visited and studied Asia, not immersed myself in it as they have over the last 20+ years.  Of course, their knowledge is better than mine.

    Even so, I believe Saudi culture different from Southeast Asian and enough so that whatever slight Mark felt I might have delivered will not be felt there.  We’ll see tomorrow.

    He certainly has a broader and more direct experience of world cultures than I do.  If he turns out more right, I’ll have learned yet another lesson from life.  If I turn out more right, he will have learned one.


    📂This entry was posted in Asia Humanities Travel World History 📎and tagged

  • Plans and Further Foolishness

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                                Waxing Harvest Moon

    We moved Gertie (the German wire hair, formerly of Denver) and Kona (our oldest dog now, a whippet) downstairs.  Gertie had slept in our bedroom but consistently got Kate up between 6 am and 6:30 am.

    Their crates downstairs, right under the heating ducts, carry sound well, however, and Kate said she heard Gertie cry at 6:30 this morning.  Due to my deaf ear and sound sleeping those noises don’t filter through to me.

    No plan is perfect.

    Further example.  We paid extra to get Mark’s visa on the desks of the Travisa folk by 8:30 am.  At 9:30 Washington, DC, time it was still not there.  Gonna get that extra money back.

    First Sierra Club legislative committee meeting for the 2012 session of the Minnesota legislature starts tonight at 6:30 pm.  We’ll be gone during most of October and November so my participation for the early work has to get done in the next six weeks.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Politics Sierra Club Travel 📎and tagged

  • Growing Up

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                        Waxing Harvest Moon

    Mark’s (my brother) days here will end on September 16th provided the Saudi visa process works and it’s on track, though a track with a terminus very near his flight date.  He flies from Minneapolis to Chicago, Chicago to Amman, Jordan and onto Riyadh.

    He will spend a few days in Riyadh in an orientation program for new teachers at the English Gate Academy after which he reports to his teaching post.  He asked for Hal’in, but his assignment is not yet certain.

    We sat on the couch tonight, after having watched some TV, and did a favorite family thing, trading memories of when we were young, especially memories we did not share.

    I told him of climbing up on a chair to find, to my dismay, a door knob above a shelf I could not see over at age 3 or 4.  It looked like a big eye looking back at me.

    In the basement of the same place, an apartment building where I lived with Mom and Dad, there was a coal chute. (“Coal?” Mark asked, a bit wide eyed at this ancient heat source.) The coal room connected to the big pot-bellied furnace through an augur that would turn on whenever the thermostat called for more heat.  In other words unpredictably.

    When I was down there with Mom while she did the laundry, I would play.  Until the coal augur came to life.  It was loud and came on with surprising swiftness.  The furnace would hiss as the new coal fed the fire.  Made me think of a dragon.

    Mark remembered sleeping in Mom and Dad’s bedroom until he was 5 or so, then moving upstairs in our house on Canal Street.  When I went off to college, he took my corner room, the one with a window facing west and another facing south.  Out that west facing window, at midnight, a Nickle Plate train would rumble down the tracks, and sound its warning signal for the crossing on Monroe Street only two and a half blocks from our house.  Mark remembered the train, too.

    I’m not sure why I recall this and I don’t know if it was true, but I believe the last steam engine in US pulled its train through our town, sounding its steam whistle every midnight.  Right there on Monroe Street.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Asia Family Memories 📎and tagged

  • Fall-ing

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                  Waxing Harvest Moon

    As August slides away and the sky shifts its colors toward deeper hues, an inner barometer detects higher emotional pressures.  The atmosphere weighs more, cuing those momentary pauses, breaks in attention.  It may signal a storm ahead, but more likely the prediction carries gray skies and mist, perhaps early morning fog.

    Melancholy comes calling this time of year, an acquaintance, maybe a friend, of long standing.  Mom died in October, 1964, 47 years ago, a year longer than she lived.

    Her death came at different moments in life for all of us.  Mark, 5 at her death, has few memories of her; she lingers in his past as a faint spirit, an enigma.  Mary, 12, has more, a young girl heading into adolescence, becoming a woman, missed the guidance a mature woman could give as she made that critical transition.  At 17 my life had already begun to pull away from the family, in my senior year of high school, the last, college plans in the making, I had her longest of all, only a brief time less than Dad.

    When that dark angel comes, and he comes for us all, finality is the hardest lesson to absorb.  No more mom.  No more.  Memories, yes, but memories fade and change as life goes on and here all three of us are, 47 years later.  47 years.  A lifetime.

    Why a friend?  How could melancholy be a friend?  Well, in this way.  As life patters on, this event following the other, we can become accustomed to its rhythms, lost in its small decisions and its casual absorption of our energy.  So lost, in fact, that we forget the Self that carries us forward, the Self into which we live and which lives itself into us.

    Melancholy can turn us away from the day to day and cause us again to walk down the stairs leading to what Ira Progoff calls the Inner Cathedral.  We often forget this quiet place within, our own sanctuary, and melancholy can call us to visit it again.

    So, yes, melancholy can be a friend of the Self, a guide back into the depths and resources of your Self.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Faith and Spirituality Family Memories 📎and tagged

  • All Visas All the Time

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                  Waxing Harvest Moon

    Visas.  All visas all the time.  Got a fluttery batch of e-mails and phone messages, all received after Travisa’s office’s had closed.  OMG.  We won’t get the documents to you in time.  OMG. Solved by reminding them that we sail on Oct. 16th, not Sept. 16th.  Oh.  All better now.

    Mark and Saudi Arabia.  A police clearance popped up as a new piece of paper.  How to get it?  Lots of opinions.  FBI background check?  BCI state level clearance.  Will this torpedo the application?  Looked like it for awhile, then a phone, again, to Travisa in D.C.

    A local police clearance?  Plenty good enough.  Mark now has a Good Neighbor certificate from the Anoka County Sheriff stating that he has committed no crime since he got here.  Good to know.

    In in the interim Mark had discovered that the Saudi Embassy closed this week to celebrate Eid, the end of Ramadan.  But. Travisa again.  Nope.  We can get it done in time.  Send us the material by Friday and we’ll get it done.

    A series of this’s and that’s, frustrating, but not impossible.

    International travel, all fun, all the time.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Travel 📎and tagged

  • Just Like Canada

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                                                             Waning Honey Extraction Moon

    The nights have grown cooler.  The August moon has begun to fade away, and the September moon will not come for a bit.  Dark nights approach, a time for the occult.

    Minnesota, Mark says, feels like Canada and the Twin Cities feel like Canadian cities.  The bright blue August sky, the changed slant of the sun’s rays, the occasional cottony fluff high above us all combine, with cool nights and the gradually decreasing highs to put us in the same northern space as Ontario, our nearest Canadian neighbor.

    At our best, we are like Canada.  We believe in health care for all people, a good education and jobs that require education.  Winter helps define us and, hey, hockey is big.  We have an openness to our governance that seems to be true in Canada, too.

    We share some totem animals, too:  moose, raven, lynx, wolf.

    If Minnesota could be the next province, it would fit right in.


    📂This entry was posted in Minnesota Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Pulling Hair

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                                 Waning Honey Extraction Moon

    Over to Carlson Toyota this morning.  Why?  To have Kate sign over the Tundra to me, as a gift.  The purpose?  Avoid sales tax on the title transfer.  My name alone is on the Rav4, for no particular reason except that’s how we did it that day.  Her’s alone was on the Tundra.  We used the Tundra as a trade-in.  QED.  Right?  Enough to make me pull out my hair and shout.

    I’m a little short of equilibrium as we try to get Mark through the visa process for his job in Saudi Arabia.  A routine physical turned up an abnormality.  That means seeing a specialist.  Seeing a specialist means costs and delays.  The visa itself takes time to process and he needs to be over there by September 14th.  Time is getting short.  A lot of juggling here and there.  Kate’s called in favors to move the process along.

    At this rate and given my starting point I’ll have no hair left by the first week of September.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Travel 📎and tagged

  • Drawing Blood

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                                           Waning Honey Extraction Moon

    Took Mark in for a counseling session at 8 am and then over to Allina for lab work.  He said the phlebotomist kept putting on more tubes to collect blood. “I’m woozy,” he said, as he drank a cup of hot chocolate.  After this, a fasting blood draw, we went to IHOP and had breakfast.

    He’s been here a while and I’ve gotten used to having him around, but this job in Saudi Arabia is a strong next step for him, a chance to reassert himself as both a teacher and a world traveler.  His anxiety about it is normal, new job, new town, new people, new culture, but those are also all the things that make this an exciting opportunity.

    Easy for me to say, of course, I’ll be home here in Andover.  Still.

     


    📂This entry was posted in Family Health Travel 📎and tagged

  • Those New Job Jitters

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                               Full Honey Extraction Moon

    Mark has a new job in Ha’il, Saudi Arabia.  He will teach English as a foreign language, as he did so well at AUA in Bangkok for twelve years.  He worked hard over the last five months to recollect himself, to figure out next steps then find a job.  This last he’d focused on hard the last couple of weeks and it got results.

    Kate and I are both happy for him.  He’s “wired” right now, still shifting his mentality from unemployed to suddenly employed and about to undertake a journey from Minnesota, which has begun to slide toward fall and Saudi Arabia, where seasons are much different.

    His word and Mary’s, who’s worked with educational programing in Bahrain, for the culture there is austere, at least from a Western or Southeast Asian perspective.  By austere they mean at least the prohibition on alcohol, unveiled women, internet censorship and the overwhelming presence of Islam and not just any Islam, but an Islam markedly influence by the Wahabi sect, spawn of Islamic extremists like bin Laden.  Also no movies and sharia justice.

    Mark has a German friend who attended a public execution, held on Friday right after prayers.  He found himself shoved to the front of the crowd to experience the scimitar facilitated beheading.

    This will also mean a change for us, a move back into Kate’s retirement, leaning into that more as Mark’s saga here, at least for now, comes to an end.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Travel 📎and tagged

  • Please Let Me In

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                              Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

    Mark went to a hospitality industry job fair in St. Louis Park.  I took him, then went on out to Minnetonka Travel in Wayzata.  I picked these folks almost at random to help with the cruise, but I gotta say, they’re pretty damn good.

    Today we set up the processing for our Brazilian visas.  The visa process has taken almost the same effort as booking the entire cruise.  When I first learned that each visa would cost $160, I had sticker shock.  This was what we would have to pay to get off the ship in Rio and then take a taxi directly to the airport.  $320 for passage from one form of transportation to another.  Of course, this is not the intent of the Brazilians.  They just want reciprocity for the way the US treats their citizens coming here.

    Still, for us, whose 37 day cruise ends in Rio, it creates this very expensive transfer with no additional benefit.  So, we changed our minds and added two days in Rio after our cruise.  At least we’ll see a little bit of Brazil for our money.

    Our travel agent has been to Rio and says it’s a beautiful, vibrant city, but also very dangerous.  I’m a bit dubious about how others see foreign cities since I’ve been many places considered dangerous and never had a problem, even so it’s foolish to ignore advice from someone who’s been on the ground there.  She recommends staying in the Ipanema Beach area, a redolent name for this of who grew up in the 60’s.  We’ll go to Sugarloaf and a Mardi Gras themed evening.  Which, Lori, the travel agent, said, “All the men will enjoy.”

    The visa is the last difficult piece of business necessary to make this cruise happen.  The rest, checking out clothes, buying new luggage, deciding what books to take along (on the Kindle) do not require new skills.


    📂This entry was posted in Travel 📎and tagged