This Sucks!

The Internet is working so slow it's like watching paint dry. Ugh, this happened the same day VB arrived back in Cairo (yesterday.) VB will try to make amends ASAP, with a double header Funkengroovin Wednesday, if need be. For now, here's the lowdown:

Internet outage hits business from Cairo to Colombo

"CAIRO (AFP) — Damage to undersea Internet cables hit business across the Middle East and South Asia on Thursday, including the vital call centre industry, prompting appeals for people to limit their surfing.
Around 70 percent of Internet users in Egypt were affected when two submarine cables in the Mediterranean Sea were damaged on Wednesday, also rupturing connections thousands of kilometres (miles) away."


And, if that ain't bad enough, for those of you trying not to get foreclosed on, or calling a service center for help:

"In India, the Internet-dependent outsourcing industry was severely disrupted, with businesses saying it may take up to 15 days to return to normal.
"Information-technology companies, software companies and call centres that provide online services to the UK or the US East Coast are the worst affected," said Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India.
India's 11 billion dollar outsourcing industry employs 700,000 people working for companies that deliver services ranging from answering customer queries to analysing equity markets for global clients."


I would love to add the video of Sen. Ted Stevens describing how the Internet is a series of tubes, but that's a total no go right now.

Again, THIS SUCKS!!!!!

Funkengroovin Wednesday Not! - I'm A Loser!

I'm a loser, haha, two times now. (1) I submitted a photo essay to the National Geographic Photo Contest, and I lost! (Sorry I don't know any monks from Nepal. Why are monks so popular anyway?) Sorry for the non- Funkengroovin Wednesday post, but (2) I had difficulties with the photos I loaded. A couple of weeks ago Blogger (not me - the Internet program) had a problem with enlarging photos. Well, it didn't end there. There were also problems with the photos that were uploaded during that time period. You know like the "Would You Buy This Truck" post. Since I had gone through my links, and then the photos, which weren't working late last night, I just gave up. Give Vagabondblogger a break - It's Christmas, or Eid, or Hanukkah, for God's sake! The holidays warrant a drippy story, and this is just one of millions and billions. I will reload the photos (and the truck ones too) in a day or two, and post a belated Funkengroovin post. Ergo, I am posting my pathetic, sappy, embarrassingly lame photo submission for a diversion.

So, here it is "The Story" I submitted to National Geographic: (As usual click on the photos for a larger view, and descriptions are below the photos.)
______________________________________________________

While at a souvenir shop in Cairo, Egypt, I asked to see several of the cat statuettes. The elderly shop owner said, “Misses please do not call them cats. It is disrespectful. They are Bastet! The goddess of pleasure, joy and dance.” I told him of: how I was a dog lover, how my dog had passed away in Cairo a few months earlier, and how I was getting a new puppy to bring back with me. He retorted, “please, please don’t get a new dog. Loosing something so important in your life leaves a great hole in your heart. If you bring another puppy here, you will loose it too, and you will have another hole.”

Two weeks before my dog passed away, a young feral cat showed up on the porch ("The Golden Boy"), and much like the tale of The Three Bears, stole my chair. He had been hanging around the apartment building, near the garbage can, but eventually found my private little niche on the side porch. As I was about to clean out the dog food bin, I thought, instead of throwing it out, the young cat might appreciate it. At first I dropped handfuls on the porch, then eventually fed him from plastic bowls, calling him to the front porch with a "psst." Our secret relationship lasted about two weeks. The message had gone out to the neighborhood ferals, "new feeding station now open for business." One thing led to another, and as I got to know him, I learned more about the feral cats in my neighborhood, of their personalities, and how they survive in Cairo. It might be just another feeding hole to them, but for me, it has been a healing experience.

King of the Porch
The Golden Boy in all his glory, sleeping on my chair. A non-aggressive cat, flight before fight type, he survives by evasion.


Girlfriend
Golden Boy’s pregnant girlfriend started to show up for feedings too, always bumping heads when they met. Still a small kitten herself, with all the markings of a roughed up street cat, she’s the only cat who rubbed up against me, and allowed me to pet her. Patient and kind, until her pregnancy progressed, she has now disappeared.


The Bad Ass Cat
This one followed Girlfriend over then fence, into the yard. Afraid of nothing he seemed to have been around, seen it all, and is quite the whiner, albeit usually ignored by the others. He is not posing for me, but focusing on the cat lying underneath the car directly behind me.


Cat Fight
Immediately before the joust, a lot of caterwauling takes place. This garbage bin bully, who has become quite a nuisance, goes after every cat he encounters, and now confronts Bad Ass Cat. Pickings during Ramadan are slim during the day, and that's when this extremely aggressive cat arrived. Fighting is one danger, but the municipality sanctions the use of poisoned food, and shooting strays. A practice considered inhumane to The West, but common elsewhere in the world, it has become a local controversy, as of late.


Momma
Once the smell of food gets around, other cats start visiting too, including nursing moms. Some people provide food for the cats, but they are mostly expats, who come and go throughout a cat's lifetime. This mom hides out at a villa that had been a well-known source of food. That expat family has now moved on and the new family has chosen not to feed them.


Comfort
Once trained, the kittens are literally abandoned, aggressively rejected, and Momma has actually resorted to violence as the young grey, whimpering, kitten approached her. This may be the feral cats' version of tough love. Unwanted, they care for each other. Here the bigger male, spoons with his sickly smaller sister, who cries constantly for her mother.

Blue Eyed Sex Maniac
When Mom goes into heat, all sorts of males show up (as if the food isn't enough of an invite.) Obviously not afraid of a human hiss, he stares, demanding lunch.

Startled
Eventually more pregnant cats come by, but are shocked when I show up to size up the feeding situation, sometimes inadvertently scaring them away. This one was quite startled.

Deep Thoughts
A far away gaze - perhaps wondering where he hid that feather he stole from me? A cat’s life in Cairo is a hard one. The Golden Boy has a moment of deep concentration, and I wonder what thoughts go through his head. He often sits by the screened doors, looking in (as if, with a bit of desire) and watches me, like we humans watch animals in a cage. He will enter the house, but only to investigate, and then scampers away.


The Come On:
The Golden Boy, at ease on the porch, has since become a helpful caretaker to the two abandoned kittens. Here he lays back, in his “come on, let’s play” pose. Although I realize we have a connection, we will never be able to live together. He will always be a feral-wild and independent, never a pet. But he has opened a new door for me, one of respect for cats, and most importantly, he is the bastet who helped close the hole in my heart.

As of this post, according to The Boss Man, The Golden Boy has not been seen for days. The two kittens are still around, but I will know more when I actually get back to Cairo in late January.

More information on Egypt's policy towards stray cats and dogs, as well as their slaughterhouse procedures from SPARE - Society of Protecting Animal Rights in Egypt:
Amina Abaza's Article in The Adelaide Advertiser Newspaper

The world may not be so wonderful right now, but we can always wish, dream, and hope.


What a Wonderful World - Louis Armstrong

Just Shoot Me!

The next time someone asks me to go to The Khan, and I agree, just shoot me! If I were ever to go postal anywhere, it would be the Khan, especially in the heat of the summer. I hate the hucksters, they jump out right in front of you, and stop you dead in your tracks. They won't take "la" for an answer! Then they don't want to give you back your change and ignore you.

Everyone wants to go to the Khan - it's a souk, bazaar and yes, a huge tourist trap. Just check out the photo with all the tourist buses and tourists gathered in front of the coffee shops.

Granted they have items I would be interested in buying, but I'm usually too fed up to haggle, when I have to wrangle just to get through the alleys. So instead of going postal on an entire group of strangers, I would prefer that someone just shoot me, and we all could avoid the misery.

I know I'll end up going there again, especially if we have visitors.

Here's how Gridskipper describes it:

"Khan el-Khalili: Cairo is known for its bustling marketplaces so you have to go to a bazaar at least once. We like Khan el-Khalili for its abundance of shops and winding alleyways. They sell jewelry, antiques, shoes, fabric, and anything else your grubby tourist hands want. Everyone haggles here so don't be afraid to be aggressive and even a bit nasty. They like that we promise."

BTW, I don't own a firearm, so you'll have to bring your own.















































And, due to my ongoing problems between Safari and Firefox, and Blogger, I present another dose of:
The Computer Says "Noo," from Little Britain.

The Computer Says "No"

Due to my recent and ongoing problems with Blogger, Safari, and Firefox, I thought a bit more humor was needed. I was working on a new post and, again, encountered numerous problems, including Firefox not really saving periodically, even when the "Save Now" button indicates "Draft autosaved at the given time", subsequently resulting in the loss, not of my photos, but of my composition. I hope to have that up later today.

Besides, I become somewhat addicted to Little Britain.

Funkengroovin Wednesday - Handle With Care

This is the dog, from my "Dog On A Car" photos. This dog owns this corner! If it's not on a car around the corner, it's sitting here, in the shade, where the official garbage sweeping ladies gather to sit and drink tea. It's actually a sweet looking (and acting) dog, but it's wild and I wouldn't want to tangle with it.  I don't have a rabies shot, and I really hadn't planned on getting one either, but the paranoids around here think: "you need a rabies vaccine! you need wash your veges in clorox!"  (I bet that makes my lettuce taste like "ass in a glass" to quote Number One Son); and I forget and really don't care to remember the rest of the totally insane recommendations on how to survive Cairo (especially coming from people who've never been expats anywhere else).  It's getting near the 90's here, and perhaps a bit too hot for our dog to lay its buns down on top of a hot piece of metal, so today it's ass in the grass.

Speaking of buns, (in reference to my wonderful, Number One Son, who gave me the Bonnaroo Cold) I would like to add that about two days after coming down with the cold, I started feeling totally bummy. I was smacked sideways by Ramses' Revenge, King Tut's Trots, Cleopatra's Craps - you decide which phrase is most apropos, but when it comes out, it's all the same. In Azerbaijan we used to call it "The Baku Belly," which lasted two weeks (not less, not more - exactly two weeks). Subsequently, most of the photos I've caught here, were just recent, within the past (actually, just less than a) week.  I'm hoping, since I am feeling better, to get out and catch up on a few cars I had initially mentioned before my trip back to the States (hint: the tricked out bug with front light wipers).



Nice Tan Bug near KIMO, but a bit banged up.



Let me not forget to mention, what a pain in the ass, but from another angle, Blogger / Safari has gotten (exact origin unknown).  I think I've mentioned my recent problems with Blogger and Safari previously (a couple of times.)
First, for some unknown reason Safari became totally incompatible with Blogger during a Blogger update. So I downloaded Firefox, which gave me innumerable editing accessories I didn't have with Safari. The type of accessories that in Safari, require you to write your own HTML, which is tedious, and takes up all sorts of thinking and time wasting. So, I downloaded Safari 3 beta, which appeared to be just like Firefox. But, later, while trying to download photos, Safari 3 beta froze up, at which point I had to revert back to Firefox. You may say, "soooo what!" Well, all my tracking devices use my Safari cookies to exclude my computer from tracking. When you use another software program it registers as a new computer, thereby totally fucking up my tracking stats! So, for those of you, besides myself, who look at my stats, the ones for Cairo are skewed - just like my mind, at this point.











Purple Bug which looks like someone either keyed it extensively or it's been traveling through hard country. Lots of chipped paint on this thing. Do those teeny, weeny little fog lights work?



I had considered making Firefox my dedicated Blogger software. That would entail re-submitting all the new cookies from Firefox, for tracking, reading, etc., my blog. Duh. Not so easy, especially after I downloaded the Safari 3 beta and thought it worked. Call me stupid. 
In addition, I have to keep remembering to change the dates for my posts. Blogger saves the date you initially start your draft, and if you're not attentive, or maybe trying to "game" the system, i.e. pretending to put up a post on a date before you actually posted your entry, then they make it quite easy for the cheater in us. I have actually checked Technorati regarding a few dubious blog dates, since I personally thought I was loosing my mind, or that senility was starting to set in, or just to satisfy my suspicions. Since I draft my blogs, sometimes almost a week in advance, I keep my eyes out for that date (and time) religiously. I've found that a lot of things related to Blogger, either with Safari or Firefox, need to be handled with care, just like all of our old VW's.  I may talk like a truck driver, but I do try to be honest about it all.








Delivery van near Residence Hotel. They get daily deliveries, so I've had pretty good luck catching a variety of VW Delivery Vans here, at various times of the day. It's possible that I caught this van from a different angle, once before.
























Orange and white VW Bay Window Bus. This Bus looks like it's been keyed too. Looks like we have a few key using graffiti artists in our midst.








A blog about turning a gas guzzling bus into a vegan.
My Sustainable Summer Road Trip

We call our 1982 Volkswagen Vanagon a "volksvegan" because it is a diesel that my boyfriend modified to run on waste vegetable oil (WVO).

It has been quite a process getting her roadworthy, but after installing a new turbo engine, a second tank and system for the grease, and replacing parts on our old bus bit by bit (including installing the all-important hemp/organic cotton pop-top canvas), we are finally ready to hit the road for the ultimate test of this experimental sustainable fuel.

You can also read about their trip here.


The German Car Blog is showcasing a VW Multivan for the price of 130.00 Euros. Um, that's $177,423.00.  Are you kidding me!  If you're interested you better rush out to order one right this minute, as quantities are limited (and god only knows how much they'll be charging for VW Vanagons next week)!  Seems like prices are skyrocketing.  


To sum it all up:

Reputations changeable, situations tolerable

The Traveling Wilburys - Handle With Care

Funkengroovin Wednesday

Dear Readers:

I had a blog all written out for my belated Funkengroovin Wednesday. As I was trying to embed a YouTube Video onto the last section, somehow, my whole blog was deleted.

I can't find it and I don't know where it went. I'm totally upset about this and it's not the first time it's happened. This is becoming a continual problem and I'm not sure what I can do about it it, except to start saving all my blogs in html on Word documents again. When I try to "save" my blog manually, then I end up with several drafts, and when I try to delete the incomplete ones, then all my photos get deleted.

Ever since Blogger updated the site, a little over a month ago, I've had these re-curring problems. I had to resort to using Firefox, because Safari wasn't copacetic with the Blogger updates for a few weeks. I never had this problem with Safari, but now that I'm using Firefox it's happened several times. I don't get all the accessories with Safari, that I get with Firefox (like not having to write in my own html for every single little thing.)

I'm not sure I'll be able to re-load or even re-think my thoughts, and what I had originally written.

I worked on this blog for several days (actually, more than several), waiting until I returned to Cairo to edit and finish it off - which apparently, I did.

When shit like this happens, I truly fell like I'm in bloggatory.

I'm distressed, depressed, and rethinking my blogging life.

It sucks to put a lot of work into something and then just have it disappear.

Apologies,

Vagabondblogger

Letter to my ex-maid - Get A Life!

Dear R:

R, I did not fire you.

You quit!

Okay?

Got that?

Stop playing childish games with me. Stop the asinine, immature, and annoying shit you’ve decided to pull.

Stop calling the grocery delivery people with fake orders (you couldn’t make a call for the Boss Man when he was alone and requested it, so why bother now?)

Stop making your male friends / family members call my mobile speaking in Arabic, laughing, and cackling while I continually say, “Arabi, shway, shway, No speak Arabi;" and then;

Don't personally call a few minutes later on my home phone asking, "Do you speak Arabic? Ha,ha." Like I wouldn't recognize your voice. Did you say you have two children? Some role model you are – who the fuck’s the adult in your house?

Stop having your friends call my phone in the middle of the night and then hourly the next day. I don’t sleep with a phone – I find it interrupts my sleep and I just happen to make sleep a priority. So, I only noticed those phone calls when I woke up, had some coffee and decided to ignore any further calls from that number.

Oh and btw, I have never received a fake, strange / wrong phone on my mobile in Cairo, until you stuck your finger in my face, turning down my offer, handing me your key and stomping out of my apartment blaming me for your son’s education.

Get off that pedestal! Give up the princess act. Your not Queen Nefertiti. Stop decorating other people’s homes (you’re not the wife either) and start doing your job – cleaning. Yes, I know, moving dirt from one room to another is a monotonous skill, but one you need to hone like the maids in Baku (who are experts at shit shifting.) Also, don’t try to impress me with your re-cycling know-how with filth from the previous day’s work; by not washing out the bucket, leaving dried up grains of sand and scum in the bottom, and then plopping it back into the sink and re-filling it with water. That just doesn’t wash with me.

I guess my question is: where the hell did all the cleaning supplies go? Were you drinking them? I mean it’s pretty obvious you weren’t using them to clean my house, and by your behavior, I’m concerned you may have overdosed on the Toilet Duck.

Perhaps you prefer to dust mop our floors with Pledge, like some maids, (so we can slip and break our necks) instead of vacuuming. I personally think you slit the throat of my new vacuum sweeper, out of spite. It now sits in the hallway, awaiting delivery to the electrical shop for repair and re-sale (actually, the salesman says he’s giving it to his wife – what a lucky gal.) It looks pathetic and it’s only three months old. How could you? What? It wasn’t good enough for you?

R, it has been many a domestic’s dream to please the Boss Man, but hiding things from him, washing his black socks with white tee’s in hot water with Clorox, breaking the IKEA Parson side table next to his TV room “command center” chair, and then staining the marble dining room table he just bought, among other things are not the way to do it. Surprisingly, a hapless maid is not what he’s interested in. It must have been a blow when the Boss Man told you, "not to touch," the new huge plasma screen TV. S our houseboy in Abu Dhabi knew how to do it right, like ironing the Boss Man’s pajamas; burning incense when we returned home from a trip; and detailing the car when he cleaned it, making everyone else in the neighborhood totally jealous. He would also admit when he broke something, too. You don’t even pass the sniff test. Besides, once the Boss Man started decorating and we started to actually accumulate some furnishings, you couldn’t handle it. Empty rooms, sure, easy - furnished, no way. Those little nick-nacks, furnishings, etc. got in your way, now didn't they honey? Actually, I think a lot of things got in your way and for now, I guess it's me.

GET A LIFE! Quit calling me. Go smear dirt around someone else’s house and get real – I didn’t fire you. You quit!

Cheers,

Vagabondblogger



p.s.- Boss Man says I should heed my own advice (“get a life”) and quit blogging about this shit. I had to explain to him that bloggers don’t have a life and that’s why we’re all here, in bloggatory. -v