lazy, dizzy day

Sunbeam-laden breeze moves white on window to bring me the thick heady scent of a hot Botswanan afternoon. The fan above my head turns lazily, rotation after rotation. I track the blades with my eyes, squeezing them shut when I get too dizzy. Parts of my room are fluttering in all this breeze – the mosquito net, hanging limp above my bed, my gray-blue silk housecoat with lace-trimmed edges, a little gathering of guinea fowl feathers, presented in a discarded jar.

Outside my window, birds flutter too. They hop from branch to branch in the shade, occasionally dipping down to sip a drink from the dog’s water bowl, or to snatch a bug that exposed itself too much.

It’s a lazy day, and were it not for the list of things to do as long as my arm, I would just as soon lay here, making myself dizzy under the ceiling fan. 

You know those colds that make your head feel like your brains are made off cotton, like your nose has grown twice the size and as red as Rudolph's, like there is a ringing bell between your ears? Ugh...

What makes it worse is that I am to be writing a script for an evangelistic film we are putting together. I'm having trouble stringing more than two rational sentences together at a time.

Others are saying I will feel better any day now, yet I keep thinking about all that I'm supposed to be doing and all that needs to be ready for next week. Special services tomorrow, visitors for lunch, paperwork to get together, another long trip to Gabs for immigration, visits to be made and Bible studies to grade... and that pesky script which should have been done days ago.

Maybe all the worrying about these things is just making me worse. Maybe I'll drink a cup of tea, take my handful of vitamins, and just go to bed. Now that sounds like a worthy goal...

My Strongest Sense

My fingertips smell like oranges, which of course reminds me of Christmas. I can’t really explain why exactly, except that we almost always got a box of clementines for Christmas every year, which we would eat like candy. And since they weren’t actually candy, Mom let us eat as many as we wanted and would usually go buy us another box or two when we all remembered how much we loved them.

So now my fingertips smell like oranges and my memory fills in the rest of the scent of Christmas – fresh pine needles stuck in our old brown carpet, fresh-baked yeast rolls and a roasting turkey.

I can still feel the scratch of my old fleecy pajamas (scratchy fleece… remember that? Way back before fleece became so cloudlike and soft?) and if I close my eyes, I can picture my 11-year old self with pink-rimmed glasses and bangs hanging in my eyes, and straight blond hair down to my waist. Sleeping in my newly redecorated ‘grown up’ room, my bed firmly anchored in the center of the room where I could slyly watch every person who came up and down the stairs or in and out of the bathroom. Down at the bottom of the stairs burned our wood stove and the rhythmic hum of the fan blowing the heat into the rest of the house lulled me to sleep on many a winter night. Outside, I would tiptoe through the snow right before bed, not wanting to break the spell of the quiet. Inside, all three brothers laughed and joked and we were only a family of six.

Those days seem so far away in so many ways, and yet all it takes is the whiff of orange on my fingertips and I am instantly there.

Of Course

For weeks, I've had some herbs that I've been tending planted in pots. There was cilantro, parsley, lavender, rosemary, and mint. These were lined up on the stoop, and although they suffered a bit when I went to South Africa, they revived within a couple days with the help of some fresh water.

Thinking the dog was used to them enough (she apparently has a vendetta against plants), we prepared a bed to plant them. Mom transferred them the other evening, adding a dill and thyme that I bought. We wanted these things to spread out and fill in, so that we could pick them whenever needed.

Wouldn't you know, that very night, the dog DESTROYED that bed. Dug up the whole bed, chewed the lavender and rosemary back to their roots, and I still haven't found the dill.

Of course.

What I'm Reading

Two books I recently enjoyed as a free download from Amazon! Even if you don't have a Kindle, you can read these books on your computer if you download the free Kindle app. Check them out!


Letters of a Woman Homesteader


From a publisher's note:
"The writer of the following letters is a young woman who lost her husband in a railroad accident and went to Denver to seek support for herself and her two-year-old daughter, Jerrine. Turning her hand to the nearest work, she went out by the day to work as a housecleaner and laundress. Later, seeking to better herself, she accepted employment as a housekeeper for a well-to-do Scottish cattleman, Mr. Stewart, who had taken up a quarter-section in Wyoming. The letters, written through several years to a former employer in Denver, tell of her new life in the new country. They are genuine letters, and are printed as written, except for occasional omissions and alterations of names." 


Elinore Pruitt Stewart was a good writer, and I loved her descriptions of homesteading life in Wyoming and stories of the interesting people that she met. 




Love Among the Chickens


I was recently introduced to the writings of P.G. Wodehouse from a blog recommendation. I enjoyed his Jeeves books, but Love Among the Chickens is my favorite of his works that I have read thus far. 


Jerry is an author who finds himself in a slump and needs to get away from big city life. Through the hair-brained scheme of a friend, he finds himself helping to run a chicken farm in the country, falling in love with a beautiful girl, and generally causing quite a stir in the neighborhood. I laughed out loud in many places in this book!

I suppose it might be bad that so much of my mood of the day is dependent on the weather. I try to be cheerful, to look at each situation in the best light, but sometimes I just get tired of all the heat and the sun and the dust and the dry. To wake up one day to gray skies and cool breeze gives my spirits a lift and sets me up for a productive day. I know that many of my readers are in despair of ever losing their winter skies, and are more than ready for sunshine and green grass. Yet here I am after months of summer, more than ready for a cool day where I can comfortably wear a hoodie and socks. Bring it on, I say! :)

Thinking about today...

"Faith goes up the stairs that love has built and looks out the windows which hope has opened." -C.H.Spurgeon

in conjunction with...

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you, who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time." 1 Peter 1:3-5

So remember that post back at the beginning of the year, where I said that I wasn't going to lose my groove and was going to be sure to keep trying new and exciting recipes? Yeah. I think I did too much cooking and baking in the first 8 weeks of this year. These past couple weeks without a plethora of guests (only one or two at a time) has meant that I've tried just about NOTHING. Nothing but ice cream, that is. And really, ice cream is the good stuff - the center of the food universe you might say, at least my food universe. Last night was the worse, because I even messed up the ice cream. (In my defense, I think it was a very old can of coconut milk that messed it up...)

Losing my groove could also be due to the heat. There's nothing worse than heating the entire house along with the oven for several hours while you experiment with new recipes. We even strategize to determine the least required amount of time to turn on a single burner... it's that hot!

I'm soooo over summer. Ready for some cooler weather, and with it, a resurgence of trying new recipes. :) Bring on winter, I say!

(Also, I need to find some good recipe blogs in the same hemisphere I'm in. All the amazing recipe blogs that I read are just coming out of winter, and while spring recipes may appeal to me, warm, comforting winter recipes do not. It's an interesting dilemma. Maybe I need to browse through their archives from July and August. :)

A Quiet Night

It’s not quite 11 PM and I’m here typing away on my laptop. Why? Well, quite simply because I’m hoping that by sheer force and determination, the internet signal will come back. Probably not going to happen, but a girl can hope, right?

It’s a quiet night in Francistown. But wait… is it really that quiet?

There’s a particularly obnoxious cricket right outside my window (and I mean right outside) and he is backed up by a whole chorus of his friends. It’s not his friends that I mind, it is his closeness. I need a little bit of personal space.

My fan clacks above my head. When it starts to sound like it is going to clack right off the ceiling, I stand up and grasp the tip, gently swivel the whole unit, and center it again. This helps… sometimes for a couple hours, sometimes for a few minutes. Once I’m sound asleep, it doesn’t bother me… it’s just in the half-asleep state that it sometimes interrupts my stillness.

Outside my window, all the dogs of the neighborhood, who were just a moment ago pleasantly snoozing, are now howling and baying and snapping – no doubt giving their opinion to someone who is walking by. And right outside my bedroom door, I hear a snoring Rottweiler, who is choosing to ignore all her buddies and sleep peacefully on. I’m so thankful that she isn’t a barker – only when it’s someone actually at our gate. Let’s hope she doesn’t pick up any bad habits from the neighborhood.

Then there is the dripping from the hot water heater (or geezer). It tends to overheat, overflow, explode, whatever you want to call it from time to time. This can be a problem since it is right by my window and if my window happens to be open (like last time) I end up mopping my floor on a day when I wasn’t planning on doing so. But when it is happy, it just pleasantly drips from time to time, so that’s a nice sound.

These are the sounds all around me on this 'quiet' night in Francistown.

Ice Cream Recipes

With the arrival of our ice cream maker in the container, we've been making lots of the creamy goodness. It's a wonderful way to cool off and a nice treat instead of baked goods which involve an oven. We can buy ice cream here, but it is not the same as what we are used to in the states. A quick look at the list of ingredients shows you why - instead of using full cream milk, they use vegetable fat. It's similar in consistency, but the taste (and aftertaste, ick) are much different. Making our own means that we can use real cream and real milk... much better for you, I'm sure, and more what we are used to. In the long run, it's a lot cheaper to make our own, and there are so many more options for flavors and mix-ins!

Vanilla with Chocolate Chunks

Do you have an ice cream maker? Our is like this one here, and filling both bowls yields us two quarts of ice cream. Here are some of our favorite recipes and combinations.

Basic Vanilla Ice Cream
1 16-oz can of coconut milk
2 cups cream
1 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla
Pour into bowls, then fill to the top of the beaters with milk.

Basic Chocolate Ice Cream
2 cups cream
1 cup milk
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 T cocoa powder (or more... I just dump it in until it looks dark enough :)
Pour into bowls, then fill to the top of the beaters with milk.

Banana Bread Ice Cream

Banana Bread Ice Cream
3 mashed bananas
2 cups cream
2/3 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 tsp cinnamon
1 T custard powder (you could leave this out if you can't find it)
Pour into bowls, then fill to the top of the beaters with milk.
(This easily turns into 'Chunky Monkey', as we like to call it, by omitting the cinnamon, adding chocolate chunks and nuts.)

Mango Frozen Yogurt
2 mangoes, peeled and mashed
1/2 cup orange juice
4-5 T honey (or more to taste)
2 cups plain yogurt (if you can find greek or bulgarian, that's even better)
Pour into bowls, then fill to the top of the beaters with plain yogurt.

Mango Frozen Yogurt

Orange-Banana Sorbet
5 or 6 juiced oranges, with pulp
2 mashed bananas
2-3 T honey
2 tsp vanilla
2 cups plain yogurt
Pour into bowls, then fill to the top of the beaters with plain yogurt.

The options are limitless, of course. We like to throw in extras of whatever we have on hand - nuts plain or toasted, chocolate chunks, crushed candy bars, crushed cookies or brownies, mini frozen cookie dough balls, swirls of caramel or fudge, ground vanilla bean, crushed coconut, etc.

Behold, I show you a mystery

Bhut Jolokia peppers are the third hottest peppers in the world. Up until December of last year, it was confirmed as the hottest pepper in the world, but two new hybrids have since come along. Still, it's pretty hot. ;)

My brother Sam has guarded his Bhut Jolokia pepper seeds and painstakingly planted some when we got here. Out of the four he planted, only one lasted long enough to be transplanted into a larger pot. That one pepper plant has had a hard life, seeing as it has to live in a certain dog's territory - a certain dog who thinks it is her duty to eat every living thing in sight. But once the plant grew to a certain height, the dog seemed to leave it alone, and then it flourished.

By the time the pepper plant was about 30 inches high, it was covered in pretty little white flowers, the beginnings of the Bhut Jolokia pepper. Sam was so excited! If each of those flowers produced one pepper, he'd have enough heat to supply the entire city of Francistown. A little bit goes a long way when it comes to the Bhut Jolokia. Soon one little baby pepper was growing and all the other flowers looked promising.

Then we went to South Africa for one week and the poor little pepper plant suffered in the heat and very dry weather. When we returned, all the flowers had fallen off and half of the leaves were crispy brown. Sam trimmed, watered, and babied the plant until it perked back up. That one little baby pepper was still hanging on, now almost full size. All we had to do was wait for it to ripen. Even just one pepper would help him make a large batch of very hot sauce.

This morning, I saw the pepper basking in the sun. At lunch, Sam pulled aside the curtain in the hallway to check on his little Bhut Jolokia. It was gone! There was the stem, with the raw edge where the pepper had been freshly snapped off. He searched all around the plant, to no avail.

And therein lies the mystery. What happened to the Bhut Jolokia? We may never know.

The assumed culprit, of course, is the dog. But we don't think she ate it, because I'm sure we would have heard her pacing around for hours, whining at the burn in her mouth, drinking buckets of water. So that only leaves us to assume that she buried it, which is what she does with all contraband items she steals (car washing rags from the garage are her favorites). But her hiding places are many, and finding a buried bright red dishtowel is easier to unearth than a small, green pepper.

Who knows? Maybe one day we'll go outside and there will be another little Bhut Jolokia plant, growing in some unusual spot, planted by a Rottweiler.