Hi and welcome to my
blog. My name is Jenn and I live in Beirut with my Lebanese husband and our two
kids. As you may or may not have cunningly deduced from the name of the blog, I
am originally from Alberta, Canada.
In the off chance that
you are reading this blog but aren’t related to me, here’s all the boring
background information about my life you could possibly wish to know.
-I
call Calgary my hometown because it’s simpler in that people have sometimes
actually heard of it. My real hometown is a dot above and to the left of
Calgary called Sundre. It was here on a farm — which, depending on the season,
felt like a pastoral heaven or a frozen mound of horse pucky — where I spent
the entirety of my formative years.
-I
have been in the Middle East for a total of fourteen years: in Saudi Arabia,
Dubai and Lebanon. This is the second time I’ve lived in Lebanon. I can’t seem
to get away.
-I
haven’t worked outside the house since the first year I was married, and with
each passing year I find my interest in resuming paid employment shrinking a
little more. Dust is boring but at least my thoughts (or, some days, 'thought'
in the singular) is/are my own.
-We
live in an apartment in central Beirut. For our first three years back in
Lebanon we lived in another part of Beirut in the same building as my
parents-in-law. Our new apartment, though smaller than the old one, is in a
much nicer area and also has the incalculable advantage of allowing us to come
and go without later getting a telephone call: “I saw you going out around noon
today and coming back an hour later. Where did you go?”
-People
always ask where I met M. I wish I had a more exciting answer but the truth is
I met him at university in Calgary. Our paths didn't cross during class hours
-- he was across campus in the engineering buildings while I wandered
indecisively between biology and English classrooms. I spotted him working the
door at a Shuffle Demons concert in Mac Hall on a portentuous September
evening. Thinking him quite the dish, I went over to talk to him, and that was
that.
The
people behind the nick-names (or in M’s case, abbreviation) that sometimes
appear in my blog are the following:
-M:
my spouse of twenty years; volatile beneath a still surface, has seized life by
the gullet; known to occasionally drink Nyquil straight from the bottle.
-Noonie:
our daughter; high school student, aspiring novelist, Olympic gold medallist in
the Long Shower event.
-Dude:
our son. A year younger than his sister and a head taller, he eats as much red
meat as he can lay his hands on. Alley cats run in fear.
-Theo:
my sister. I haven’t called her anything but Theodore since I was small and
nobody knows why. She spends her days as a virtual automaton under the spell of
a mesmerizing, rotund cat named Marsali who compels her to open the feed tub
merely by staring into her eyes.
-Big
C: Theo's husband. I won’t tell you what the ‘C’ stands for but I will share
this with you: although I’ve never got a really good look at his face on
account of it being so high up he looks a lot like Mark Messier. He has always
maintained that he is not Mark Messier but I have noticed that the
two of them are never in the same place at once.
-Kassem:
a paid employee, our faithful driver. He’s earnest, eager and twitchy with a
physical energy that always gallops far ahead of any cerebral governance. He
puts me in mind of a dog on caffeine.
You will find a list of
all my blog posts on the Archives page. There I have labelled each post with a
short description such as "Personal" or "Living in Lebanon"
to make it a bit easier for you to know what the post is about. All of my blog
posts are personal in nature, but the ones that also describe some aspect of
life in Lebanon are labelled as such. If you have come to my site hoping to
learn about the country read the posts with a "Living in Lebanon"
label.
If you would like to say
hello please contact me at:
not-alberta@hotmail.com
If you have something
rotten to say about my blog please consider sending the email to an inmate at
your local penitentiary instead of to me. They have a lot of time on their
hands and would probably appreciate the note more than I would.