So my house is full of random occurrences. Maybe random isn’t the right word, but you tell me. Sometimes my toilet leaks. Water will be on the tile floor around the base of the toilet. I mop it up. I mop it up the next day. The third or sometimes fourth day, it isn’t leaking anymore. This has happened 3 different times in 3 months.
My landlord wants me to identify where the leak is coming from so he has a better idea of what needs to be done to fix it. I say he should come and figure it out for himself, because by the time I get around to telling him it is leaking and he would get here to check it, it would have stopped. And my floors are indestructible tile anyway. Plus, mopping around the toilet every so often isn’t a bad thing. I actually thing there is an underground spring, right under my toilet and every once in a while it just needs to, well, spring. Like I know?
I also had a run on weird small bug droppings or tiny pieces of bugs just behind my gas range. There is no place they could be falling from and there wasn’t really enough evidence to discern what/who the heck it (once) was. Just every day after work and before cooking, I would have to clean it and then cover my pots while cooking in case something fell from the sky into my pasta.
Speaking of pasta, I am eating my last box of Annie’s pasta tonight, and I am half way through the large container of Parmesan cheese my mom let me steal from her. I am just saying. And then right after saying that, I have to say that I am not starving or anything, so no one really needs to rush out and send me something. I would rather the money were spent on helping my friend Arto (actually Erto, but an error was made on the web page raising money for him so….).
By the way, does anyone besides probably my dear friend who sent me the Annie’s actually NOT eat the whole box in one sitting? I am admitting to piggy-ness here, but it never seemed practical to only eat half of it. Half isn’t enough and if you eat more than half then that little bit left over isn’t really that much and not worth dirtying a plastic container, right? Besides, this is Official American Comfort Food, meant to be eaten in Official American Supersizing Style, right? I just can’t figure out why I bothered to make a salad with a boiled egg to go with it.
Then there is my door into the kitchen, when if closed, locks. Luckily I discovered this early, when my friend Tom was here to let me out. If you are outside the kitchen, it is no problem, but if you are inside the kitchen, you are locked in. There is a door to the outside from the kitchen, so now I keep the keys to that door in the lock, but since I always lock my front door even when I am home, it won’t do me much good to be able to get out of the kitchen and into my yard. I guess I would rather get accidentally locked into my kitchen than my bedroom, where there is no food or water.
My kitchen drain pours directly into the garden, which is kind of cool because sometimes I see little chicks from the neighbor’s chicken family poke their heads into it to see what is coming out. It’s not that cool if some awful animal were to decide to climb up the pipe, or if a chickie were to get itself stuck in it, but I am planning for neither of those things to happen.
Maybe my house isn’t so much full of random occurrences then it is full of my random thoughts. The power just went out again, so it’s me, my computer screen and the candles to thwart that evil spider, should it ever find my home.
Someone needs to come over here and provoke the Botswana government to seriously work on solar power technology and installation. If someone could create the technology that could run an extension cord that transfers extreme heat from everyone’s tin roof into electricity in their electric meter, this country and I would be dancing in the light right now.
I had big plans for tonight, Friday, September 23, 2011 before the power went out. First I am celebrating that I will be forever 49 because my sister Kami decided that she was not turning 30 today after all. Since I am 20 years older than her (always have been, always will be) that means I have to stop the madness at my end as a show of solidarity.
But I was also going to grab firmly the reigns of my Volunteer Reporting Form (VRF) and get all my goals and objectives, activities, number counts for the hundreds, nay thousands of lives I have already impacted, fit perfectly and sensibly on the Peace Corps form. I was going to write of all the people I have been working with, contacts I have made, capacity I have built, things I have learned, etc.
My plan was to reward myself with one beer from my neighbor’s bottle shop. Maybe a hard cider too, so that I could mix them if I wanted, have a nice dinner, and then work away. Well, now that I have shoveled in a whole box of Annie’s, drank a beer, and lost my power (perhaps also metaphorically speaking), I have also lost my will. I can’t see my papers (49 and holding, you know. I should have held at 39 when my eyes still worked right) and have indigestion for obvious reasons. Plus it is Friday night and I should be relaxing, right?
I also ended up buying an extra beer to try to make it easier for my neighbor to give me change for my 50 Pula note. See, with the extra beer it came to 25 Pula, rather than 18 for the one beer and cider. For some now to me unclear reason, I thought that would make things easier (and I hadn’t even had a beer yet). But neither she, nor any of the 4 guys drinking at her “bar” (which is a bar where they stand and actually peer at her on the other side of installed burglar bars meant to protect the contents of her bar and maybe her I suppose, if these guys got too unruly) had a 5 Pula coin. So now she owes me 5 Pula. She is my neighbor and good for it.
This extra beer will come in handy when I make my next attempt at that report. Or if I want an afternoon nap. I still have the weekend though, right? Well, bits and pieces of it anyway. Saturday morning I have a 9 am support group meeting in Tuang – a 30 minute bus ride away (read “garbage dump”), then my girls are coming over to entertain me and be entertained by me around 3. Then I might want to clean the house. I have to take the passport application over to Cathrine for her and Arto and walk her through it, buy some airtime once my favorite vendor has some to sell. And then Cathrine’s neighbor, who is also yet another one of my landlord’s cousin (one of about 200 hundred living here, I am guessing) is going to come over and get some clippings of some of the plants at my place.
She has a little nursery and sells all kinds of plants and wants to add to her collection. Right now she has some beautiful roses blooming like mad. I think she takes the stuff to Gabs or supplies businesses there. So heh, adult company on Sunday!
Sooner or later, with day light, I guess I will work on the report when I can spread my papers and confusion all over the kitchen table and actually see it. I don’t usually procrastinate….
Oh, two more random things at this house. The light in the refrigerator doesn’t work. It only works when the power goes out and then back on. It’s like the Botswana power grid is rebooting my fridge each time. Nice. Except it only works that first time I open the fridge when power returns, then stops again until rebooted with the next power outage and onage.
And my kitchen faucet, at random times and with no discernable provocation, just spews out a ½ cup of water or so. It can scare the beejeebezz out of a person when not expecting it.
And now, a random cooking tip. You can boil eggs the same time you boil water for your pasta. Just in case you hadn’t ever thought of that. See, I am waiting for my gas cylinder to go out any minute now, so have to multi-task my gas usage. Plus, it just makes sense right?
When my gas cylinder does finally go out, it will bring the Beekeeper back to the house. I ran into him and explained my plight about changing out the tank. Now, every time I see him, he asks me if it’s been sorted. I think he is kicking himself for agreeing to help me move the 48 liter tank from my kitchen out the door and around to where it needs to be hooked up. That is one heavy son of a gun. The tank I mean.
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