you spin me right round baby right round

the other day, my family had a barbecue. no big deal, right?? except that it was held under the hot desert afternoon sun. yes, we have become that big of a group of bbq addicts. we'll risk skin cancer and heat stroke for a good hotdog/hamburger combo. it's a disease i swear. it was mainly held for two reasons: my brother-in-law has the worst bbq addiction of us so my dad was throwing it for him, and my cousins all wanted to experience one of our bbqs because apparently the million pictures of them we have on facebook make them look really fun. almost everyone wimped out though and hid away in the cool air conditioned house. my dad was doing the grilling and a couple of cousins kept him company while me, another cousin, and my brother-in-law spent the entire day running up and down the stairs to get from our house to the grills running errands. lots of stairs. in the heat. with my hijab on. for hours and hours. it was torture. i couldnt even eat any of the food.

today - as i'm sure everyone who is not hiding under a rock somewhere has heard - is the first day of ramadan. so last night a group of us went out to bid goodbye to food for a month by having a really late super fun dinner at some chinese restaurant. okay that's a little over dramatic since i'll still eat 1.5 meals every day (i'm not a big fan of breakfast, but ill get down a small cup of water and a cookie) and the purpose of the outing was not really saying goodbye to anything. it was just a planned thing that got delayed for a few weeks. when we were done, the mall was practically closed and the door we came in from was locked. a security guard had to let us out of his secret security guard only door.

anyways, we got home last night at 1:30ish and i ended up going to sleep close to three. only to wake up at four to get ready for umrah. i could barely open my eyes and my contacts burned like crazy when i put them in again after only an hour of being in solution. i wear them too much - over twenty hours a day. my doctor tells me not to exceed 8 or 9 hours. but as i was saying, we went up to makkah for umrah and omg it was so freakin crowded. it was more like hajj. and that's after everyone said they're not risking going because of the big scary monster known as swine flu. mashallah though.

speaking of swine flu, we were at the supermarket yesterday and this lady started to lecture/yell at us for not wearing masks. apparently we were not taking care of the kids that were with us or ourselves and pretty much deserved to die of swine flu because that's apparently what we wanted. my cousin tried to explain that she works in the hospital and the masks do little to nothing to help protect you, but she wasnt easily convinced. today in makkah, this dude was wearing one of those eye-coverer-things (the ones you get on the airplane so you can sleep or whatever) over his mouth and nose as a mask. i had a really strong urge to ask him if he knew he was using it wrong. i didnt.

my point - which i assure you existed at one point - seems to have gotten lost somewhere around the second paragraph and has refused to ask for directions. going right back to the beginning though i'm pretty sure it was supposed to be about my family's love for bbqs and how ramadan is going to put a stopper on them for a while.

*You Spin Me Right Round - Pete Burns (not the new ugly version)