December 5, 2010
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It’s 11:32pm. We’ve already slept almost 3 hours tonight, but now i’m up again blogging while Josh is waiting at the airport.
Friday was Judah’s 5th birthday. He felt fine despite fears the day before that he was still going to be feverish and pukey. It was somewhat anti-climactic therefore to have only one gift to open and a normal school day for his big day instead of a party with jacked-up little boys. Alas.
It seems that ‘guns’ are on the preferred present wish list these years. Judah got 2 large ‘double barrel’ water guns for his birthday gift from Josh and i. I also made gingerbread men people snowflakes for his school class.Yesterday and today Josh and i both scored some early windfalls with regards to Christmas treats: litchis from Manakara (?) brought in by Patrick, the other pilot. Apparently they were 2,000Ar for a huge basket full (very approximately 5kg?) We’ve got more litchis than i’m sure we can eat in the amount of time it’ll take before they go bad, but the sight of litchis in the wooden bowl and the heady scent of them as i work in the kitchen is enough to make me think of Christmas… funny. I must be turning into a ‘southerner’. haha. I also received half of a 10kg bag of cashews. There is a place near to our house that processes and sells spices and cashew nuts for exporting. We can buy them there in 10kg bags for 50,000Ar/ $25! We tagged along with someone in the know of how to get there and now we’re hooked up with nuts for Christmas at 2.50$/kg. Can you imagine!! 5kg gave me 35cups of cashews. Anybody have some tasty recipes we could try out with cashews in it?
So, with the litchis and nuts put up, i also bought armloads of flowers today, my mother’s 50th birthday present yesterday at the Christmas Bazaar (i’m really quite jealous of it!), i put up 6 cups of pureed pumpkin so that i could make, among other things, pumpkin pie in the next few weeks and pumpkin bread oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow. I found a delicious recipe on a hostess blog this past week for a chocolate and pumpkin cheesecake! ACK!
Have i mentioned recently how uncomfortably hot it’s been in the last few days! gah! I heard today that Jirama (the grossly mismanaged equivalent of MB Hydro) is sponsoring rain cloud seeding to force rain because the water levels are so low and the rice fields are desperately dry. I suppose i was mistaken in thinking that December was supposed to be this rain-free.
Perhaps tomorrow, if you’re lucky, i’ll cajole a parent into blogging some first impressions.
