Abu Halen has lived in Abu Dhabi for one month. Nothing has really happened. Except I have received three speeding tickets. What can I say. I was born to be wild. And also to meekly pay my fines before they double after four weeks of delinquent non-payment.
You might wonder what the weather is like in Abu Dhabi in the summer. I will tell you. Imagine a sauna. Imagine the sauna is on fire. Imagine you are in the flaming sauna wearing native Inuit clothing. Imagine you are also doing burpees. The weather in Abu Dhabi in the summer feels something like that.
We live in a villa in a housing compound. It is a nice villa. Nice and tall. It is three stories high. The bottom floor is the living area. The second story has all the bedrooms. Except the master bedroom. That is on the third story. Abu Halen must climb 48 stairs to get to his bedroom. We have established an aid station halfway up stocked with electrolytes, orange wedges, and blue M&Ms (blue M&Ms have 4% nitro content, that is a fact).
Those calves are going to be hulking after three years of climbing the stairs to my bedroom. Two is the number of times I have to stop and rest on my way to bed each night.
There are a lot of fun things to do in Abu Dhabi, like drive around in a white Lamborghini with windows tinted so black that they exhibit certain properties of black holes, like being black. Alternatively, if you’re poor, you can drive around in a white Range Rover. And also there is Abu Halen’s pencil lead-colored 12 year-old minivan with a big scratch down the side where Shannon tried to fit into a parking spot intended for compact cars.
The other thing that happened since we arrived in Abu Dhabi is that my teenagers suddenly developed social lives. I just get texts after school that say, “Coming home later sometime, hanging out with friends.” Just kidding, they don’t actually text, they just don’t come home. The good news is that pretty much everything is illegal here, including the Electric Slide, thank goodness, so nothing bad can really happen. All immoral behavior can be traced to the Electric Slide, after all. Except cousin-marriage, which can be traced to the song “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” or the Tudors, depending on how cultured your cousins are.
When the kids have had a tough day at school, we always take them to Sparrows to drown their sorrows.