RE:S7, my "Bio-distraction" helped to pass the day :)Yup. Hadramout, Sidr is no doubt special. It might even be advertised as the most expensive in the world for its health benefits. I first saw it on the national air carrier’s inflight magazine and them saying it sold for about $200 per pound. When I got to the rig I asked our Yemeni engineer, Mazen, about this special honey and he made the announcement that “yeah, it’s right here”. I asked him to try to get me some and that I hope to be able to afford it. (Negotiating). When he came back with the price I paid CAD$100 for two kilos of it. I’m sure that included his “commission”.
The Rest of the Story! I came home and told my wife of this special honey but she wasn’t as excited as I was about this Sidr honey. One day I came home from someplace and there are trays of honey cookies all over the counters..........Yup, you guessed it!, I had to slam my fingers in the truck door TWICE to get over what she had done. I guess she figured she had lots of it. I guess I have about two pounds left, dab a little behind the ears on special occasions. :)
Sidr Trees. If you see one about a foot tall, it’ll have about four or five feet of root on it. If a drop of water falls anywhere near it, I believe it’ll take it. However, nowhere does it rain like in a desert, rain in buckets and closely spaced, flash floods and washing our roads out.
And about good honey? I learned to check for good honey. Dip the end of a spoon handle into the honey and raise it up. Good honey will stay connected from jar to spoon. Our construction guy taught me that. He dipped the spoon and moved his hands apart then looked at me. I was puzzled. Then he put the jar on the floor and at slightly over six feet tall he raised his spoon hand as high as he could, honey still connected to the jar from the spoon handle. Still somewhat puzzled I was, he said, “do you want me to stand on that chair”? lol. Yup. Pure honey should stay connect with even the thinnest thread of honey for a long ways. How could anyone live without knowing that? :)
What did did you say about 72? I guess if you were born ahead of September then that makes you older than me.
I forget the name of the Sharjah port and harbour commisioner that drove that gold Cadillac but I privately gave him the nickname of Whisky Sheikh. He was thirsty at times. Sometimes he had bodyguards, sometimes not. Sometimes you could see his machine gun on the back seat and sometimes not, depending on his business at hand, but he carried a Colt .45 always methinks. Once upon a time we were at the Sheba Hotel and socializing over a small roaster full of Gulf Scampi, lobster tail with a wedge or triangle shaped head, no claws. Used to catch them on the rig with a homemade net we rigged up. They flapped their tail and swam backwards, eyes on the outsides of their wedge shaped body. In any case, BOAC had the contract with Sheba to accommodate flight crews and we were all at the same table this night for some reason. The flight engineer became very drunk and belligerent, very rude and was insulting Whisky Sheikh and arabs in general. I stood up to tune the Brit and Sheikh waved me off, only to finally have had enough later on and pulled the .45 and held it across the table to be pointed somewhere near between the eyes of flight engineer. I was sitting to his left so the Colt was right in front of my face so I was squinting because I believed the thing was going to fire. Whisky said “go from here”. Out of the corner of my left eye I watched a red faced belligerent drunk go white and polite like the Dali Lama. I’ve never seen a sobriety test like that since. Just as glad that Sheikh didn’t have to exercise his right to diplomatic immunity. Speaking of diplomacy, I always exercised the most correct conduct in Sheba’s lounge when the lovely BOAC stewardesses showed up, the lucky little things.
At that same time period, used to go into Dubai and freely drive into Sheiks Mohammed’s compound and his barns and openly visit his horses. Also, sometimes a few old timers were there with their falcons. Cool experiences there.
In Yemen, the Bedouin’s camels hung out at our water pit and I did a bit of camel whispering there, pretty much the same idea as horses. One time, there was one that was unsure of me and as I skidded my rump closer to it, she shaped her mouth to create a perfect hole where it looked like you could plunk a cigar in there nicely. I think I knew what was coming next so I stopped and looked away until I saw that she relaxed, got comfortable with me being there, unthreatening. I believe she was fixin to fire a shot of stinky, slimey camel booger at me. I came out of that unscathed.
Im breaking my promise. No more stories.