After two weeks in Bahrain, it’s really difficult to see my brother Hani, his lovely wife Gillian and their daughter Laura go back to England. To say the very least, they have left a huge gap in dad’s house! For another year we won’t hear and see Laura doing the “Piano Man” dance!

Laura thoroughly enjoyed the visit to our house. She had a good swim in our pool, and chased Phoebe around the garden. And THAT was my “blackmail” spot to get her to come to me! Whenever I tell her that I’ll take her to see Phoebe, she volentarily comes to me to pick her up!

Hani said that the first thing she asks for when she wakes up from sleep is “FEEFEE… WHAY AAA YOOO?!” I took a lot of pictures of her and hope that she’ll remember us by looking at those pictures.

Now you would think the last thing that you do NOT do just before leaving a country is get involved in a crime!! Hani and Gillian can thank my wife for that, the criminal mastermind!

Gillian lived most of her life in Bahrain where her father was an employee of the oil company here. They lived in a house in Awali (the oil town in Bahrain) for 14 years. That house has not been occupied since their leaving and it is scheduled for demolition now. But, it still has his name plaque on the gate! It was a tradition for Gillian to visit that house whenever she comes to Bahrain. This time was no exception where they went for a quick visit yesterday and took pictures etc. Especially of that plaque.

After lunch yesterday she was telling us all about it. My wife of course suggested that they should have taken the plaque!! Gillian and Hani’s eyes immediately lit up! You can see it on their faces: why the hell didn’t we think of that?. My wife stokes the fire a bit more and suddenly Hani goes to the store and gets the tools. More than that, he roped both my daughters to go with him.

On their arrival at the house in Awali, my daughters (obviously taking after their mother) immediately jumped out of the car; one went to the end of the street as a lookout and the other was handing Hani the tools to take the plaque off!

He called on his way back to the house saying that they couldn’t get the plaque… we all thought “yeah sure”. Gillian was visibly dissapointed.

In they come through the door a few minutes later and tarat-taraaa he got the plaque!! All smiles and feeling a real “he man”! Amna and Hanan of course are also over-joyed and beaming with smiles. The criminals!

It was wonderful time all around for the whole two weeks though, and as they say, time does fly when you’re having fun. This is only the second time we meet Laura. She will be much bigger next time we meet and we all can’t wait for that to happen soon!

God bless and God speed!

Yep, today is the 14th day of my using Linux almost exclusively! go on, congratulate me!!

The feeling is that I really didn’t miss Windows as much as I thought I would. I have continued in business with only a few set-backs attributed mostly to tinkering with the operating system and its various programs to get it to work how I want it to. After two weeks I think I have now a more-or-less good operating system for my daily work that requires only very few additions in order for it to be complete. Working on any operating system is an evolving process and if you’re like me, you’re never completely happy and will continue to massage it to get it “just so”, then screw it up again and get it back to a production state. Sick I know, but that’s the fun of it, and as I can do it, let me just show off!!

What things did I achieve over the last 14 days?