The coming darkness

In the middle east, because of cheap and plentiful petrol and power, they overdose on lighting in the houses. In our informal living room where we hang out most of the time we have five ceiling light fixtures, each having 2 bulbs. In our formal living room downstairs we have five fixtures hanging from the ceiling, four with three bulbs and one with five bulbs. (17 bulbs is a lot for an average sized room!) As we are merely renting, and leaving the country soon, we long ago stopped replacing all these bulbs as they burned out. You don't need most of them anyway. As our departure draws near, the bulbs are popping more regularly and we are inching towards darkness. It is getting dangerous going down our darkened stairwell, the same one I fell on and broke my foot, and many of the other rooms are getting darker and darker, especially since all our lamps have now also been sold. We also have very high ceilings and no ladder, so it is even hard to reapportion bulbs from little-used rooms to the few remaining that we inhabit as our house seems to disappear from around us as more people come buy what little we have left.

It always works out that when you move away from an area there are lots of things to do and places to see you have taken for granted and not done, since you can always do it later. As the end draws near you rush and try to get in the things you have always been meaning to do. We are no different and were going to use the last few weeks, when neither of us was working, to do our list. That is before I broke my foot and put an end to our opportunity to do many of the things we had been meaning to do ever since we arrived. Oh well, it leaves a few things for us to come back in the future to do with the kids.

Alex and Ellie are still handling all the chaos very well. Alex is already looking forward to his upcoming airplane ride and really eager to ride the train again when we are in England. He amazed us with a perfect count to ten, all on his own with no prompting, and he can do a really good "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" sing song. Ellie keeps smiling and is starting to push back more when Alex tries to push her around.

The new owners of our last remaining items in the house will be collecting them tomorrow. We have sold just about everything we needed to except our Dodge Durango, which we will have to leave with our friends Hans and Rosie to try to sell for us. (Maybe all those problems American car makers are facing are having an impact on us here!) A last we will not mourn was our last visit to our bank, HSBC, this morning to close our account. We have no plans to ever be in an HSBC bank anywhere in the future! As our house will be bare tomorrow, Thursday morning we will go to the Shangri-La Resort for our last couple days to wind down after the chaos of the last few weeks. Tomorrow we will close our internet account, so this may be our last update from Muscat. Fortunately we will not have to remember to turn the lights out as we leave, there won't be any left to turn off!

Remember, wherever you go, there you are! (Something to think about for all you travellers out there. Free dinner next time we see you if you can tell me what movie this quote comes from)