Selamat Hari Raya 08

Selamat Hari Raya and Eid Mubarak, everybody. It’s been a heck of a few months since I embarked on an overambitious home improvement project. The bricks began to fly in July with the demo crew, and it has been non-stop since then.

I’m adding a two-story addition to the back of my house, more or less doubling the amount of living space, while making repairs to the existing portion. The upshot is I had to move the family out. We’re renting a duplex (or semi-D as they call them here) down the block, living out of a few suitcases. I’d tell you a sob story about how all five kids are forced to sleep cuddled together on mattresses pushed together on the floor of one room, but who am I kidding? They preferred to sleep that way in the old place too. The plan was to be back in the new house for Ramadan - that date came and went, and by the time we started fasting it was pretty clear we wouldn’t be in for the holidays either. Mom is coming to visit in mid-November, so here’s hoping the house, if not complete, is at least livable by then. In the meantime, we are celebrating the holidays in the duplex, in which these pictures were taken.

[You can check out a flickr set of the house project if you like.]

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You’re currently reading “Selamat Hari Raya 08,” an entry on Bin Gregory Productions

Published:: 10.02.08 / 11am

Category:: Journal

Briefly

Anwar Ibrahim and the Opposition: Malaysian Seeks End to Decades of Firm Rule - a pretty decent roundup of political developments in Malaysia, from the New York Times.

The Spiritual Aspirant: Sidi Khalil Moore will be in Singapore conducting a workshop for The Spiritual Aspirant, to be held 27 June to 5 July. I had the pleasure to hear Sidi Khalil speak in Detroit back in 2002 in conjunction with the US tour of Habib Ali Al-Jifri. I regret I won't be able to make the short trip across the South China Sea to attend, but I recommend it to anyone in the area. The workshop is being sponsored by Simply Islam, under the capable hands of some of the fine people who put on the Journey to Ihsan event a couple years ago, which I did attend and enjoyed immensely.

Collapse Preparedness: The transition from the USSR to the republic of Russia was a catastrophic event for the people who lived through it. The eventual (imminent?) collapse of the US will be much much worse, warns Dmitry Orlov. The USA has a Collapse Gap. Orlov realizes

that some people will react rather badly to having their country compared to the USSR. I would like to assure you that the Soviet people would have reacted similarly, had the United States collapsed first. Feelings aside, here are two 20th century superpowers, who wanted more or less the same things – things like technological progress, economic growth, full employment, and world domination – but they disagreed about the methods. And they obtained similar results – each had a good run, intimidated the whole planet, and kept the other scared. Each eventually went bankrupt.

Valuable lessons on what to expect and how to prepare follow. Read it yourself, but the condensed advice is this: Live on the margins of society. One encouraging sign that Americans are picking up the skills they will need to survive: haggling at the mall.