"Thursday is a Special Day ..."

It's Friday morning in Riyadh.  Friday is the holy day here where I live.  Thursday is the Saturday.  Yesterday as I cooked, cleaned, shopped, and groomed.  I kept singing in my head.

Thursday is a special day it's the day we get ready for Friday.
We clean the house and we shop at the store, so we won't have to work until Saturday.
We brush our clothes, and we shine our shoes, and we call it our get the work done day.
Then we trim our nails, and we shampoo our hair, so we can be ready for Friday.

I've now lived in places where the holy day is Friday, Saturday, and or course Sunday.

Meeting the Prince (or My Time as an Illegal Immigrant)

In an effort to explain to others why I missed the birth of our son James by 28 hours, I am turning to this blog as a means of explaining it.  In this post, I'll focus on the facts and events while trying to keep many of my feelings and emotions separate.  After much deliberation and keeping this as a saved draft, I've decided to publish this post.

I arrived in Riyadh on the morning of 19 May 2011 on a one-way ticket.  (For more on the decision to move to Riyadh, see: The New Job, The Next Move, & The Winds of Change)  The plan from the beginning was to stay in Riyadh up until the birth of our son unless I would need to leave the country to advance my residency visa application process.  On 25 June, I'd been in the country for 37 days and was getting my cultural legs under me.  I was bemoaning the lack of progress in my residency visa process to one of my local colleagues and teammates.  I showed him my passport and he looked at my business visa affixed on one of the pages.  He told me that something was wrong with my visa.  Though my visa was a 5-year multiple entry visa, it said -- in Arabic only -- that each visit on the visa must be less than 30 days.  As Scooby-Doo says, "Ruh-roh!".  I immediately reported this to our company support staff.  The initial reaction was, "No problem.  This happens all the time.  We'll get it fixed." so I wasn't too fussed.  Uh -- big mistake.

These Are Days

I'm feeling pretty good about being back in Kingdom with my work visa and things moving quickly to get my family here.  Though there is so much darkness and garbage in the world, I choose to remain an optimist.  I said to myself, "These Are Days" and continued to say "to Remember".   I love this song from about 21 years ago and how it still captures my emotions and hopes.



Optimism can be contagious.   Let's remember that the future will be as bright as our faith and try to make both faith and optimism spread.

Snowbound?!?!?!

I left Saturday night (4 February 2012) to fly from Arizona back to Riyadh and enter on my work visa.  From Arizona, I prefer to fly through London Heathrow on British Airways because it's only one stop from Phoenix to Riyadh as opposed to two stops if I were to go through Frankfurt, Paris, Dubai, or Doha.  I've generally had good success with this strategy.  However, there was a winter snow storm that came through Britain.

Visa!!!!!

Some 9 months after leaving Australia, I finally have a full work permit for my assignment in Saudi Arabia.  This means that we are a big obstacle down in our journey to get all of our family together.  I'm so excited that I can hardly type.