Coccyxitis or How I Broke My Bottom

Ok, so first off, my bottom is NOT actually broken.  Inflamed, yes, broken probably not.  Starting last night I had really strong pain in my tail bone (coccyx).  Apparently it's the last bone of your spinal column and back when we were creatures with tails, if that ever was, this is the bone that would make up the end of the tail.  Oh, and when this little bone is in pain, you cannot sit at all.  I'm not joking, it is incredibly painful to put a lot of pressure on my tush.  After large doses of Excedrin, which taken late at night do nothing for your ability to sleep (each pill contains as much caffeine as a cup of coffee) and a cute little homemade rice heating pad, I could finally lie in bed and fall asleep.  Unfortunately, I have class at 10:30 on Tuesday mornings so going to Emergency wasn't going to be a realistic option unless I was willing to ditch class, and frankly I wasn't.  I was pretty glad I stuck it out, we toured the NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) Lab for my Polymer class, and it was so cool.  Yes, this makes me ridiculously nerdy, but wow it was impressive.  After my last class ended around 2 I darted over to the medical clinic here on campus.  That was also pretty darn impressive.  I'm really grateful to have good medical insurance here.  Even though I went to emergency because I didn't have an appointment and honestly wasn't going to go through the trouble of scheduling one, it was still quick, relatively efficient, and free.  I've heard horror stories about how people wait all day in emergency rooms in the US and I'm so glad that wasn't the case here.  Unfortunately, since it's my tail bone that is the problem, there is very little they can do to help me.  So after a couple of prescriptions for pain and anti-inflammatorys, we were done.  Since sitting down is a major issue, most people with tail bone problems use a doughnut  pillow to sit.  But, they don't have any here.  So I'm going to be doing a lot of standing in the next week or so because the only other option is lying down and it is really quite hard to get anything done when lying down (big surprise).

Since I'll be working standing up for awhile, Steve improvised me a workstation!  It's pretty clever, just one of the small end tables stacked on top of the coffee table and it's the right height for working and computing!  Thank goodness for small wins.

Trips to Jeddah

This weekend we took another trip to Jeddah.  We're looking for a kitten, but aren't too keen about picking up a stray from around campus.  Getting around Jeddah is an interesting experience all by itself.  There are weekly trips scheduled to a few of the malls in Jeddah and to the International hospital.  The more we go to Jeddah, the more malls we find.  We've been to four different malls, and honestly they're all the same for the most part.  The Mall of Arabia did have a really cool indoor amusement park which included a water slide!  Anyway, after a lot of searching online and talking to the vet clinic here on campus, we were able to get a decent idea of where a pet store was in Jeddah.  Finding this out was no small feat, because unlike in the US where you can just Google a business and find their address and phone number and such, you can't really do that for businesses here.  We did manage to find a blog that mentioned a specific store that actually did have a website; it turned out to be pretty close to one of the vet clinics in Jeddah so the vet here on campus drew us a general map of the area.

After getting to the Mall of Arabia, we then had to catch a taxi to the pet store.  Again, no small feat.  The key seems to be to find a driver who speaks enough English to actually understand where we want to go.  Thankfully it only took a couple of tries to find a taxi driver who knew where to take us.  The trip to the store was terrible on my nerves.  I feel like everyone here drives like they're the most important people on the road and everyone should get out of the way.  Lane lines, turn signals, seat belts, and even medians all seem to be suggestions when driving in Jeddah!  After only one minor slow down from traffic (the police were checking if taxi drivers were wearing seat belts, apparently it's a 100SAR ($27) fine if they don't) we managed to make it to the pet store.  We had a really interesting "conversation" with the taxi driver which started with him asking whether we liked Bush or Obama.  Talk about an awkward question.  I can't really say this is really the place where I would wear my political affiliations on my sleeve, so it was interesting to see that the taxi driver supported Obama and thought Bush was bad.  He also liked Martin Luther King and Jimmy Carter, but I honestly don't know much about Carter at all.

We darted to an electronics store to get a printer cable, since the printer we bought didn't come with the necessary one.  We're still looking for a slow cooker, I swear one day we'll find one mixed in with the rice cookers and what a day that will be!

We got to the pet store right as they were closing down for one of the prayers so we had to hang around outside the store for about 20 minutes until they opened back up.  It's always so much nicer to get stuck inside the store, rather than outside; with big stores like the hyper markets they just close you in the store until they open again.

Sadly, they did have super cute kittens, but they were way over priced.  There's no way we would reasonably spend 1,000 SAR (~$280) just for a kitty!

So we ended up back at the Mall of Arabia and settled for dinner at TGI Friday's where I got the best mudslide (nonalcoholic of course) and then did a bit of shopping.  I really needed a new sweatshirt.

Now we're going to wait and see if we can find/capture a stray kitty from around campus.

Kite Adventure

With the good wind here on the Red Sea, we decided to try out the kite we brought with us.  We got a Symphony Beach 1.7 m kite while honeymooning on St. Martin back in July and had only gotten to fly it once since buying it.  We wanted the 1.3 m which apparently was more of a beginner kite whereas this one calls itself intermediate.  Anyway, it's a bit of work to keep it in control and up in the air!

We flew the kite on the football (soccer) field at the park near our apartment.  It's a really quick bike ride to the park and they've done a couple of campus events there this year.

This is unfortunately how our kite ended up more often than not.  It was really hard to control since it had two lines instead of one.  We both made it nose dive straight into the ground a couple of times and the poor kite took some pretty hard impacts.

Cute little gazebo in the park. 

Some housing near the park.  I think this is where faculty and administrative staff live with their families.

Our Weekend

Weekends here are on Thursday and Friday, so we've spent the last two days hanging out enjoying a few days off class and job searching.  We had dinner at Quizno's here on campus tonight, trying it for the first time; let me tell you it definitely left something to be desired.  The food was decent, but it some ways it doesn't live up to Subway where they let you customize to your hearts content.  The level of service here is just lack luster non existent.  It took three tries to tell the worker that I did in fact expect lettuce on a veggie sub. Three tries. No wonder I don't look forward to trying to buy anything here, because any verbal communication necessary takes at least twice as long as it should and is flat out exhausting.  We tried to get Quizno's last night, but for some reason by 6:30 pm they were "Close" (I promise that's what their sign says!).  Now I don't know why they were "close" so early and they couldn't seem to tell us their working hours when Steve asked.


After dinner, we took a few pictures of us together.  We haven't really taken any together since the summer so it was definitely time for some new ones!

So it turns out, neither one of us can look in the right place at the right time, oh well.


On a final note, I found this the other day.  It is definitely worth reading and really made me consider what was on my to-do list.

To Bake or Not to Bake

We've been doing a tiny bit of baking lately, some purposefully and some to make up for other baking mistakes.


First, we made these delicious chocolate chip cookies.  They claim to be the best chocolate chip cookie recipe out there, and while I can't say definitely that they're the best they certainly were delicous!  We only have 1 cookie sheet and a smaller than average size oven so we rolled most of the dough into individual cookie balls and then froze them.  It was beyond amazing to pop half a dozen cookies into the oven and in 10 minutes (they need less time when already frozen) get a batch of cookies!

Are these not the most beautiful cookies you've ever seen?  They're certainly the prettiest cookies I've ever made!

  
Unfortunately I really wanted to try out this Brownie Pillow Cookie  but with a single bag of chocolate chips running about $4.20 here it was going to be almost $20 worth of chocolate to make this recipe plus the Outrageous Brownies  that would make up the "pillow" part of the cookie.


Our next foray was into one of my absolute favorite recipes, Banana Bread Cake.  Banana bread is good in so many different ways.  You can make it like a cake, in a bread pan so you can slice it like bread, or in a muffin pan to get individual banana bread muffins.  Right now we're making it cake style since we don't have a bread pan or a muffin pan.

We also made a loaf of bread, sorry no pictures from that, it just didn't last very long!  Our second attempt at bread did not rise at all, so instead of giving up on it we turned it into breadsticks and an elephant ear type snack.


For the breadsticks we just rolled long ropes of dough and baked them in the oven until browned and delicious.

For the elephant ears, we rolled the dough very thin and fried it up in some oil until crispy. We then added some cinnamon and sugar, but powdered sugar would have been better!

Steve frying:

Final product:

Up next we're going to give wheat bread a try.