Sylvia's Journal

In an effort to save some of my enormous stash of accumulated vacation days from going ‘poof’ I have decided to join my sister’s family on a boat ride in Holland on May 8 to celebrate the wedding of my nephew Da(a)n and his Scottish bride Jane. Although we haven’t been able to find a reasonable fare, the boss has signed off on my leave request and our fantasies about the trip are dancing far ahead of us.

After some calculations I realized that I stood to lose 28 days (7 weeks of vacation) if I didn’t find a way to use these days. A 5 days trip to Holland and taking Thursdays off from now till the end of June will help a bit but I will still lose days unless a special permission is granted to me to carry more days over the Fiscal Year line than the max (30). This may require an Act of God, I don’t know; maybe a few prayers will help.

I also learned that I cannot be in the US for more than 27 days until the end of September. This has something to do with taxes, as per the advice of a specialist in these matters. So we are counting a lot these days.

For our Friday walk we went to Babur’s garden, a spectacular restoration compliments of Aga Khan. Inside the 7 meter walled garden Afghans can pretend it is peaceful here and enjoy the beautifully landscaped garden with their families, sitting on carpets, cooking whole meals in the ubiquitous little pressure cookers. This is the promise of Afghanistan, if only…(sigh).

After our walk we accompanied Steve on his weekly Chicken Street walk and was drawn to the store of Mr. Happy (Khoshal) who has enormous stash of embroidered pieces from all over Central Asia. Sozani is the local name for embroidery.

It is the Uzbek needlework that I am most enchanted with although, really, everything is vibrant, beautiful, and very very dirty.

I am dipping all the pieces I bought in a bucket with Woolite. I don’t know if that is sacrilege but how else do I get the stains from cooking, eating, living out of these textiles? The first change of water was black, or red if the embroidery was that color.

I have some fantasy of using the pieces in my sewing projects but one has to be practical – they need to be washed sometimes.