"You're smarter than you think."

Just when I'm about to give up on my daily fortunes, they come out with a doozy. I've been hearing this from various people lately, or at least variations of it which include "you know more than you think you do." It's all encouragement to get me through my PhD exams. I scheduled them yesterday. In the next two weeks, starting next Thursday, I'll have three 24 hour periods in which to write papers on each of my fields. I get the questions at 10:00 a.m. and return the paper the next morning by 10:00 a.m. Thank goodness for email, so I don't have to waste time driving around.
The doctor just diagnosed me with allergies- they are horrible!- and set me up with sudafed and some natural nasal spray so that Sami doesn't get a body full of drugs. I'm also going to start taking a Vitamin B complex to give me energy and help my brain work! Pray for clarity of mind for me as I prepare and then dive in.
Thanks.

"This weekend will challenge your assumptions"

Oh goodness. And it's only Tuesday! What suspense! So far, what I've got going on this weekend is snacks for Leila's third soccer game of the season. Maybe the girls will surprise me with what they eat? Oh, and we have Girl Scouts on Friday. Hmmm....
I was going to quit posting these as they keep repeating them, but this one was too good to pass up!
In other news:
Yesterday, Ali told me: "Sami is a rascal to me!" I came into my bedroom to find Sami crawling over Ali, as he is wont to do. He usually ends up on his head. Apparently he had hit Ali a couple of times. If someone says "Ow!" Sami grins.

"You are a superstar. Go you."

This is exactly the daily fortune I need on a Monday. It's so hard getting back into the swing of things at work- I wish every day was a summer day (but with cooler temperatures!)
Anyway, if not a superstar, I am a super hero. "Super Mom!" (If you remember, my super power is super vision.)

"Your dreams are your best guide to the future."

I was looking for a crystal ball the other day when trying to decide if I should accept the offer on my house or not. In the end, I did accept it, the inspection was the other day, and they didn't ask us to do anything too expensive. So, it looks like once I sign this, we go to pending. Hurray!
Hopefully tonight I dream about a good house to offer on next. One that we offered on last week got three offers, and they took the one with no contingencies. I mostly wanted it just to be done with the whole house hunting process!

"Someone wants your body."

I thought those biology/anatomy lab people were looking at me funny this morning. Help!

"Your job will not teach you about life."

This is the craziest fortune ever. Clearly they know nothing about my job, which is all about life. More to this post later!

"A surprise announcement will free you."

This was yesterday's fortune- and it was true- sort of. I was supposed to facilitate a workshop in the afternoon, but my co-facilitator canceled, freeing me up, to!
I had a headache when I woke up. I looked around at the mess we'd made from the house and all the stuff needing to be put away from our trip- ughhh. The phone rang. It was the real estate showing service. Could we show the house in 45 minutes? No Way! My realtor quickly called to reschedule- how about in 2 hours? Luckily I had already unpacked and put a lot of things away. With H's help, we managed to get the house pretty spotless, and were almost out the door when the people showed up.
For his Eid present, Ali had gotten a new DSi chip, but Leila told her dad she just wanted love for Eid. (She's very non-materialistic).
I decided she should at least get some new clothes. She doesn't really need much, but it's fun to have some new things for school, and she's been wanting to go clothes shopping at the mall. After a food court lunch, we went into H & M and she got a couple of new outfits. Then we stopped in Macy's and got her the LOVE t-shirt we'd seen on the way in. After all, Love was her request for Eid.  She'd already chosen a first day outfit from her closet, but I think it's been usurped by something we picked up.
(I did go to work yesterday- we had evening meetings.)
Today we're going swimming with girl scout friends.
I hope today's fortune "A long, lost love will cross your path," won't come true, unless it's something like a food or activity I have forgotten.

"Insecurity is your biggest hurdle."

Anyone who knows me knows that this isn't true. Except it is a little true when it comes to feeling prepared for my PhD exams. After a nice talk I had today, though, I'm feeling more secure about them.
Today was my first day back at work after a long, hot summer which ended with a road trip to California and back again. We pulled into town just in time for the kids to go to Tae Kwon Do class yesterday after a rather eventful trip.
I dragged my sorry butt out of bed this morning for convocation. It was lonely with my best friend on sabbatical in Mozambique, but I had a good time chatting to people, and ended up in a long discussion with a friend who is also a PhD student in my program, but a few semesters behind me.
Then I lunched with a friend who is ahead of me in the program, and she's the one who really encouraged me to go ahead and take me exams, trusting that I am more prepared than I think I am. I know she's right, as I'll never really feel ready, and the best thing is just to get done with them.
After a division meeting and a bit more catching up, I returned to a messy house- no showings this week, I hope, as I don't have the energy to unpack yet!

"The light of a hundred stars cannot equal the light of the moon."

I've always loved the moon- it pulls me.
The kids saw a movie yesterday- Brave- where someone sweeps all the extra stars up into a crescent moon.
I married a man from Ksar Hellal-the castle of the crescent moon- sounds romantic, doesn't it? Reality, of course, is rather different. When he first took me to Tunisia, he talked the guards into letting us into the ruins of ancient Carthage after dark. As we walked in, the moon was just rising, bathing the fallen columns in silver. We had five enchanted minutes before the guard turned on all the lights.
As a child I watched the golden moon paint our lake gold, then silver as it rose higher. Sometimes we swam out the path it made for us.
It became Leila's dream to see the moon rise like this, spurred partly by her obsession with mermaids. My parents fulfilled this on an RV trip this summer, parking one night by a lake where the clouds held back long enough for her to experience the magic. (I warned her not to go swimming, though, as I didn't want her sprouting a tail everytime she gets wet, a la H2O.)
I had wanted to give her the middle name of Lua, but H wouldn't go with that. Instead, she's named for wisdom.

"Write a letter to an old friend."

Last weeks "be a slacker" fortune was up for a couple of days, making me suspect it was really directed at the fortune posters..
I was a slacker though, which is nice in the last two weeks of summer vacation.
Today's post is apt, as I did send a Facebook email to an old friend. Does that count?
Yesterday there was no time for letter writing as we went up to a nearby dam with a lake for sailing and canoeing. Ever since my sister has had her little sunfish sailboat, I've wanted to go out in it. We took a very short sail at the beginning of the afternoon, and when I jumped out to keep the boat from hitting the shore, I scraped my foot on a stone. That slowed me down a bit. It was also HOT! We were hoping for cooler weather, but no luck with that. We were in an area with no swimming, so a lot of us "accidently" fell into the water, or capsized the boat out in the middle, or helped push the boat out a little ways before we got in.  The kids had a great time canoeing and going out in the sunfish with their cousin. Sami played on blankets set up under a tree. My mom said it was a fun day, but with a small "f." Had it not been Hot, we could have put the capital letter on fun.

"Just slack off today."

Okay, I will.

"Don't spend so much money on shoes."

This fortune is hilarious. Right now I'm not the one spending tons of money on shoes- it's H! He's been doing some carpentry at a shoe warehouse, and has gotten shoes for our whole family and most of our friends- and nice shoes, too!
He has about 7 new pairs himself, each of them unbelievably comfortable, apparently.

"You don't need to win the lottery."

This is kind of true. I forgot yesterday's fortune. It wasn't very good, and I didn't have anything to say about it.
I guess this one is meant to be comforting. And I KNOW I've read it here before.

p.s.- Christians shouldn't send out emails with the subject line "S___ is home!" One never knows whilch home the person has gone to.

"It's right in front of your nose."

This fortune must be talking about my computer- that's what is right in front of my nose, most of the time. Sometimes I have a steering wheel there.
When I was a kid I had a book in front of my nose- or I guess, the expression goes, I had my nose in a book. Lately I don't do that much. I feel guilty reading for pleasure when I should be reading for school. Course, that can be pleasurable, too, I just have to get going at it.
I do enjoy a good detective yarn now and again. I discovered the Louise Penny books this year, which are set in Montreal (which H and I visited two years ago and loved) and the English townships south of there, which is the area my grandmother was from. (My grandfather was from Montreal proper.) Anyway, her books are the nice kind of detective stories where you get to know characters, and the chief detective is someone you want to have dinner with, and she describes all sorts of delicious food, too. When I'm done with one of her books, I want to move to the village of Three Pines, even if people do keep getting murdered there!

"You have the exceptional ability to understand the fancies of marketable ideas."

But, unfortunately, not to understand wordy fortunes.

"Keep your feet on the ground even though friends flatter you."

My friends need to work harder!

"Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought."

If only I had the opportunity to think profound thoughts!

"You will step on the soil of many countries."

This sounds a little ominous. Is this because people from many countries are going to be tracking soil into my house tomorrow during the open house?
Yesterday we had a Lebanese guest here who lives in Angola, but was raised in Liberia and who once had a Cuban girlfriend. Maybe that's what the fortune meant, but he had new shoes, so he wasn't tracking in soil from any of those countries.
Speaking of tracking in soil, when we used to fly back to university in the US after spending Christmas vacation back home in Colombia, the agricultural inspectors would ask if we'd been on a farm. If we said yes, they would spray our shoes, which was strange, since they weren't the shoes I'd worn to the farm. They didn't ask that.
Really, this fortune is a little oddly worded. Do they mean I'll travel to many countries? Or is it more threatening than that? If I travel to a lot of countries, I hope I'll do more than step on the soil. Though, if you think about it, there are some countries one could travel to and never step on any soil at all- just pavement. Hmmmm.....
(I count landing in airports on my way to somewhere else when I count the countries I've been in, and it helps up the number. I'm somewhere around 30, I think.)

"You will be the center of attention."

But today, I don't want to be. I want to lie down and pull the covers over my head and make this headache/sick feeling go away. Too bad I'm in such high demand.

"You find beauty in ordinary things, do not lose this ability."

Is it too much to ask that these fortunes be written in proper English? I see enough comma splices in my work; I don't need them from my online seer. (Though, perhaps that title is stretching it....)
There are some ordinary things that I find beautiful, true. But maybe they aren't really ordinary. Maybe by recognizing them as beautiful, they are elevated to extraordinary. Who gets to choose what's ordinary, anyways?
In college I took a couple of drawing classes. I was crap at the still lives- my bottles just didn't look like bottles, I guess, but something about the live models in my life drawing class worked for me. Maybe it was because the lines didn't have to be so rigid but flowed and curved as living flesh.
Our models weren't completely naked (not at my conservative college they sure weren't!), but their bodies were well displayed. The man was probably in his sixties, fit, but not taut, and the woman was older, and curved marvelously everywhere. They were both beautiful as they stood in the middle of the room, and we focused our young eyes on them and sketched.
Now sometimes I stand transfixed in the supermarket, marveling at the red bell peppers, that twist and curve, or the radishes, so visibly crisp. No wonder Weston elevated vegetables to high art.