Green and Blue

Amos favorite color is darkish-bright blue, and my favorite colors are cobalt blue and olive-ish green.  Hence our wedding colors, which I think looked very nice together. :)

Happy Wedding Day! July 9, 2011

Anyway, a few weeks ago Amos and I went to Goodwill.  Amos wanted to see if they had a bulletin board.  I wanted one for a project, but he hadn't been able to find one at the Goodwill across town.  We didn't find a bulletin board this time either, but I did get four books. :)

I finished The Good Daughter by Jasmin Darznik, one of the books I bought at a Borders going-out-of-business sale (I saved $60.00 in books, only spending $18.00).  It was an interesting memoir about life in Iran.  Interesting, but I did not like Darznik's writing style.  Anyway.

I finished The Good Daughter and picked up Down the Nile: alone in a fisherman's skiff by Rosemary Mahoney, purchased for $1.99.  As the title says, she wanted to row down the Nile in Egypt in a skiff.  Last night I was reading  her descriptions of Elephantine Island and Kitchener Island in Upper Egypt, near the city of Aswan, all of which I've explored.  One of the reasons why I love books about the Middle East is because oftentimes I can say, "I've been there!  I've seen that!  I had that same observation about the culture!" and sometimes more arrogantly, "that's not what it's like there" or "what were they thinking?"  Oh dear.  In any case, I love reading about the Middle East, and this book is awesome so far.

Mahoney describes Kitchener Island as an island stuffed with exotic plants and trees.  I visited this island with a few friends in 2006 while I was on spring break from IBEX.  I tried to write down everything about my semester in Israel and my spring break trip, but there was too much to do; I didn't want to spend my time writing when I could spend time doing. My very brief notes on Kitchener and Elephantine Islands read:

Botanical Gardens on [Kitchener] island
  very pretty
  guy with gun 

Elephantine Island
  Nilometer
  creepy guy

Haha!

Anway, back to Down the Nile.  I was reading along, identifying with all of Mahoney's descriptions, when a few sentences just about leapt off the page:

...[Mahoney] moved on past Kitchener Island, a small island wholly taken up with the most exotic botanical garden I had ever seen.  It was filled with tropical trees and flowers, everything marked in Latin and Arabic.  On another trip I had seen a horseradish tree there, a cape honeysuckle, a mountain ebony, baobab, an ironwood, a rubber vine, a spotted gum, a sliver trumpet tree, and an enormous mahogany.  I had seen a Strychnos nux-vomica, a strychnine tree, and had put one of its spherical seedpods in my pocket, then later threw it away for fear it would poison me.  Kitchener was cool and quiet and shady, and it was home to a curious cat that had one green eye and one blue.

Wait, what?!?!

...it was home to a curious cat that had one green eye and one blue.

Whoa.

Whoa.

I had a picture of the same exact cat.  I was so thrilled and excited that I read the last sentence to Amos before interrupting his time on the computer to find the picture I had taken five and half years earlier.

The famous kitty

Even this morning I was so excited that I had found that sentence and that I had actually seen, with my own eyes, the same green-and-blue eyed cat that this author had seen, on a very small island in a foreign country on the other side of the world.

Have I mentioned I love books?

*sigh*