online rihla

http://umms.wordpress.com/

for the mess that is my blog.  It appears there’s a bug somewhere that is messing with my pictures.

Randomly:

There is something sureal about rolling mahshy while watching Julia Child sewing up a chicken and then slapping blanched bacon on the outside before roasting it on a spit.

Hello Kitty has finally been retired.  I think I’ve had a Hello Kitty wallet for the last 10 years.  My new wallet came today and it’s faboo.  I do need to cut down on cards however, so it does not suffer the same fate as my last wallets – too many cards for the poor little pockets to hold, so they burst at the seems.  I also need to get a new picture of AbuS to put in it.  The one I have is 8 years old :0

I can’t decide on a good theme for ma blog.  I like the one that’s grey with the swirls in the background, but for some reason the categories are all messed up -  it only shows a few, and there’s no option to see more.

This cat must sleep 22 hours each day.  Except if it’s 3 a.m.  Then it’s time to talk.

I have nothing of substance to say.   It’s Friday, so it’s jummah (huzzah), but why can’t it just be the weekend already?

It’s raining, which makes me not want to stand out at the bus stop to go to jummah.   I drove today, but I parked a mile away from work, as it’s $13 to park downtown and only $1.50 to park out there.  So I could conceivably walk to get the car and drive to jummah, but that would be just as silly as standing out in the rain.  Alhamdluilah my parents gave me a nice umbrella that I haven’t yet managed to lose.  I usually buy the cheap ones, as I have an unfortunate habit of leaving them on the bus every few months.  Cheap ones don’t hold up well in the wind, and we usually get a lot of wind with the rain.  This one is quite pretty as well as being particularly sturdy.  I love impressionist and post impressionaist paintings.

My new shukr clothes are excellent as always.  The white scarf is a bit see through, but the purple one is absolutely fabulous.  I’m wearing my new gray tunic with the purple scarf and purple socks.  Am I the only one who matches my socks with my scarves?

I purchased the black and gray kitty wallet, although I almost changed my mind when I saw this lime green one.  Now I looove lime green, but the red bow doesn’t quite go well with the green.  I hadn’t every heard of espe before, but their stuff is uber cute.

As much as I adore Shukr, I’m a bit miffed with them right now.

So I have packages shipped to me at work.  When they’re shipped to my apartment, they arrive while I’m at work and sit outside in the hallway, just begging to be stolen.  So I enter my contact info as such:

First name, last name/a b & c LLP

I need to put my name and the company name on the same line, as the rest of the address takes up the 2 lines they give for addresses.

For some reason, the package was addressed to:

c LLP

I can see how they might leave out my name, but to cut off most of the company name too?  It’s a blessing from Allah (swt) that it even made it here! 

So the mail room had to open my package to see who it was for.  And my name wasn’t in there either!  Thank God my cell number was on it so they could figure out who it went to.

I am reading the diary of the man who shot up the health club a few days back.  Very sad, lots of dispair.  This passage however, made my heart go cold:

Maybe soon, I will see God and Jesus. At least that is what I was told. Eternal life does NOT depend on works. If it did, we will all be in hell. Christ paid for EVERY sin, so how can I or you be judged BY GOD for a sin when the penalty was ALREADY paid. People judge but that does not matter. I was reading the Bible and The Integrity of God beginning yesterday, because soon I will see them.

Please note, this is not meant in any way as an indictment of christianity, nor is it meant to imply that christianity is somehow responsible for this man’s actions.  It’s definitely a sick twist on  Luther’s “sin boldly” philosophy.

…since I first saw the Squeakster in her little cage at the humane society.  From the second I saw her, I knew she was my fuzzy soulmate.

2 pictures, same caption.  I have an lol in the similar vein playing in my head.  Just gotta get the picture.  I don’t know what it is about the Squeaky and books.  Whenever I pull one off the shelf, she has to sniff it and rub it against her cheek.

From Green Zabiha:

Cows:    Cows are fed grass, right? You would be correct in thinking that, after all they were created to eat mainly grass, but in modern factory farming that is not a viable (read: profitable) option. So no grass, instead they are fed grain, which their body has a difficult time digesting, so much so that many are in a perpetual state of disease which is why we need to pump antibiotics into them to keep them alive. If that was all it’d be bad enough, but that is just the beginning.

Grain isn’t exactly cheap, and in an effort to find ways to feed animals more calories cheaply, Factory farms turned to protein rendering. Rendering takes meat scraps and waste products (carcasses, bones, fat, entrails, organs etc.) and through a process ‘renders’ it into liquefied edible protein.

So, back to our cows. The government allows cow feed to include

1. pork(!)
2. cow fat (!)
3. blood (!)
4. poultry and
5. horse to name a few things

…

Chicken: When I asked the Controlling Officer what the restrictions were on chicken feed, he chuckled and said ‘I don’t know of any real restrictions for poultry feed’.  You can feed them ground up chicken, pork, beef, whatever. He mentioned in his State ‘we have large poultry processor and their chicken waste goes to rendering plant and most goes back to the processer for feeding the chickens’.  So in the case of cows, we’ve turned a ruminate (grass feeder) into a meat eater, and the chicken into a cannibal (though the cow does get to eat cow fat). He did mentioned there were ‘only’ 9 or 10 drugs that can be given to poultry used for meat, and 3 for egg producing hens. And there is supposed to be a drug ‘withdrawal’ period, the poultry should be off the drugs for a time before going to slaughter. Who knows if that happens, probably hard to even detect or enforce.

Alhamdulilah, we’re blessed here in the twin cities to have Holy Land Grocery that sells meat that is vegetarian fed.  It isn’t organic and probably still comes from a quasi factory farm, but at least it isn’t pork fed.

My dear sister Suralla, with whom I braved the RNC riots last year, has been stricken with swine flu.  Yes, swine flu.

inshaAllah the worst of it is over and she is on the road to recovery.  Please make lots of duas for her and send positive vibers her way that inshaAllah she’ll be fine in time for Ramadan.

My faithful hello kitty wallet is on it’s last leg.  The card holder is ripped almost all the way to the top, and my Macy’s card managed to break free to regions unknown (which btw, they can apparently look up at the store with your driver’s license and ssn.  but only if they put the ssn in correctly when they opened the account.  otherwise they claim that you have no account and they can’t do anything, despite the fact that you have a reciept clearly showing that you had a card and made a purchase no more than a week ago.  And no, it’s not my husband’s card.  If it were my husband’s card, I would have said so.  Just cuz I wear this thing on my head does not mean my husband controls my life!).  *breathe in, breathe out, calm*

So yeah, I need a new wallet.  Which one should I get?