Well I'm sorry it's been so long, but I have no excuse but my own laziness. Actually quite a lot has happened in the past few weeks, so I'll start with the biggest doozie of all.

As many of you already know I was actually employed here in Qatar for a very short period of time. For approximately one week I was the employee of a British school for Arabic children. My position was to teach English to grades 1 and 2. I'm not lying, they actually hired me to do such a thing. During my interview (I should clarify that they contacted me from an add I posted to tutor children in the evenings. I didn't actually go looking for this job) I tried to explain to the administration that this was not exactly what I was looking for. But after much debate I agreed to give it my best. After all the pay was not bad and the holidays would match Erin's school. So very long story short, after a week of being in a class of 34 five year old children whom didn't all speak English. I had a nice long sit down chat with the principle and explained to her that this was not fair to the parents of the children whom paid large amounts of money for their children to be taught by a qualified teacher. The thing was that even after I explained that I could not see any success with these students by the end of the year, they still tried desperately to stop me from leaving.

So now I sit here at home again laying on the couch all day with the dog looking for things to do. Oh did I forget to mention that we have a new member of the family? Yes we do, three weeks ago Erin and I took a walk through QAWS (The Qatar Animal Welfare Society) and spotted Hazel (now known as Tikka) a young Saluki mix not yet a year old. She has turned out to be the most well behaved and perfectly trained dog we could have hoped for. She does still have a few things to work through. Understandably so as she has grown up living in a small kennel her entire life. But she is adjusting well to the apartment lifestyle, now we just have to work on some of her fears. Like say for instance the terror that is a parked car. Turns out that adopting a dog is not really any cheaper than buying one, but we felt it better to save one from the shelter than support the abusive pet shops in the local market. Who would only replace that animal with another. So now we have Tikka, who has now been spayed and micro-chipped so she can come with us when we leave.

I suppose that's not too much for the last few weeks, but it sure felt like it. Little else has happened, I did take a very nice tour of the Museum of Islamic Art. Unfortunately Erin was not able to come, but it is free so I'll just have to go again. The artifacts were amazing, I couldn't believe how old some of them were. Coming from western Canada where 100 years is old for anything. They had things dating back to 1000 AD.

One of these days when Erin is not using the computer with all my photos on it I'll be sure to upload a bunch to the BLOG. And for anyone who may scold me, let it be known that I did not use a flash for any of the photography in the museum. So I have not contributed in any way to the decay of ancient artifacts.

Thanks for listening everybody and have a great day,

Shane