Update: Invasion Confirmed...

Curious, I peeked back into the guest room this morning before work and discovered the ants have painstakingly begun to recreate...well...whatever this is:

Also - the flying/dying ants are back only according to my Dad, who knows everything worth knowing, there are no flying ants.  If it has wings, it is a termite.  

Totally grossed out, I stopped on my way home from work today and bought Raid.  I picked the version bottled in the US of A, not Saudi Arabia, because everyone knows America is the best (as I found out the hard way when I bought Heinz ketchup bottled in Egypt).  

I cleaned up the pile-of-important-things being built by the ants and then worked my way throughout all the back rooms with the Raid, spraying the baseboards.  Tomorrow I will set off four of the bug bombs sent to me by Rachel (thanks for your foresight in sending 12 bombs!).  And hopefully I will emerge victor of this latest round...

Sam, a storm is coming!

It feels quite apocalyptic outside. These pictures don't really do it justice but it's 2 p.m. and yet the sky is a strange greyish-brown and the sun is completely clouded over. The streets are empty and filled with blowing newspapers and the only sound is the occasional siren. 

I feel like I'm in one of those disaster movies where they scan out to a picture of the doppler radar and there's a giant storm heading towards the city and I'm the one person who didn't get the message to flee...

Urban flock...

This is my local neighborhood flock. They go from undeveloped lot to undeveloped lot, eating...trash and weeds? Because that's all there really is in these lots. 

Somehow I imagine that up close, these sheep all have knuckle tats and are smoking hand-rolled cigs...

An invasion...

In preparation for some friends coming to visit (sooo excited to see you Carolyn and Bobby!), I went into the guest bedroom to air it out and put clean sheets on the bed.

And discovered a patch of dead and dying winged ants and several strange piles, the likes of which I had never seen before:

These little piles were each presided over by two or three very small red ants. After carefully sweeping them up and examining the evidence, I was able to come to no scientific conclusions.

What the hell is this?? And why did they so carefully collect and pile it up?

So, I made up an explanation. Clearly, I am in the middle of an ant invasion. The colonies living in my next door neighbor's house (they are besieged and have been telling me horror stories since I moved in) were getting too full and they decided to expand their territory into my home. They sent an advanced party who set up supply depots (that or these tiny black dots that made up the piles are baby ant eggs?).

After finding and sweeping up several piles and many many many dead/dying ants, I feel temporarily confident I have stymied their nefarious plans. But I have the feeling the victory is only temporary.

Packing...

Thanks to the miracle of Gold Member status on United, I was able to check three suitcases for the flight back to Jordan.  Packed in and around my clothes in the suitcases were the following items, all crucial for continued survival in Jordan:

1000 staples

200 plastic sleeve protectors (for a scrapbooker in the Branch)

110 packets of Crystal Lite

100 tea lights

25 pounds of candy (for the Young Women, I swear!)

13 Cadbury Eggs

8 assorted DVD's and 1 copy of Just Dance for Wii

7 books, a mixture of old and new friends

7 bags of jelly beans
5 plate hangars

4 jars of eco-friendly dishwashing liquid

4 boxes of Trader Joe's cookies

3 boxes of roach killer-die-now-traps

3 glass lanterns (sadly, two were in smithereens on arrival)

3 new pairs of shoes

2 Bybee bowls

2 glass canisters

2 jars of Prego spaghetti sauce

2 blankets, 2 bath towels, 4 hand towels, 4 washcloths, and a tablecloth

2 strings of outdoor patio lights

1 birdhouse

1 jar of peanut butter

1 game of Scrabble

1 resistance band

1 Brita pitcher

1 ball of yarn

Sadly, I took it all out and put it away in a jet-lagged stupor before taking a picture of the masterful packing job.

Oh dear...

The last thing I did before heading to the airport was let Rachel cut bangs.  We were going for hipster cute but I'm secretly afraid I look like the love child of Dorothy and Mark Hammill...

Cooling down...

Not to complain too much but the weather was pretty unbearable hot (making me fear greatly for June and July).  We ate lots of ice cream and drank as much cool water, fruit juice and Diet Coke as we could.  And we splashed our way through Hezekiah's Tunnel (thanks Pam for being my flashlight buddy!).

Note - for the first time in my life, I had to duck...

So that you, too, could experience how terrifying it was in the dark, Pam and I made a short video.  Sorry its sideways but we were working under adverse conditions (dark and damp):

Jerusalem...

I cannot believe its been twelve years...

We saw so very much - we stepped waaay back in time and visited King David's City, including a rather refreshing foray into Hezekiah's tunnel (I'm afraid I was much more amused by splashing Pam than Pam was amused by being splashed). We walked past the Kidron Valley and made it most of the way around the city walls, including going into or out of every single gate. 

Moving forward in time, we spent some time retracing the events of Easter weekend 2,000 years ago, visiting the Room of the Last Supper and the Garden of Gethsemane, following the Via Dolorosa into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and then contrasting the chaos of that site with the peacefulness of the Garden Tomb.

We also took some time to wander through modern Jerusalem, Jaffa and Ben Yehuda Street, the Armenian and Christian Quarters (sooo much shopping to be done), the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall, and the Muslim Quarter and the Temple Mount (where we almost got kicked out for dressing immodestly). It was pretty nice being mistaken for a student still by all the shopkeepers: "Hey BYU! Hey, Mormonim, come here and take a look!"

We also ate a lot of really delicious hummus, falafel, shawarma and pita.  And some sushi.

Walking through the city felt like waking up from a dream with the details that were so vivid already fading. I remember that I went to all these places but the memories are disjointed and fuzzy. I'm glad to be able to go back and revisit more, over the next while.

David's Citadel and the Old City Walls

Tombs in the Kidron Valley

Shabbas at the Western Wall

The steps of the Temple, under the al-Aqsa Mosque

Lilacs and the Dome of the Rock

The Dome of the Rock

Poppies at the Pools of Bethesda

A little posing fun in Israel...

We draped.  We owled.  We planked.  We shadowed and vamped.  We Banksyed.  And we "hello"-ed in very inappropriate settings.  We even tried Awesome Air-Kicking (not pictured because we realized, in retrospect, it wasn't a good idea to try kicking your legs into the air while wearing skirts).  

And just once, we all posed nicely together.

The Deadly Dead Sea...

It all started out so innocently:

But quickly turned tragic when Heidi decided to try jumping into the Dead Sea, to see whether she would be able to make herself sink.  We warned her but she couldn't resist picking up the rattler and carrying him down the mountain ("You knew what I was when you picked me up...").