Merry Christmas to you all!
It has been far too long. If you need to jog your memory…it’s me, your formerly semi-regular poster and correspondent. If I had been on the ball, I would have fired myself and found you someone with more regular habits. But my irregular habits got in the way. So in the spirit of giving and forgiving, here’s something from under our tree.
I'ts hot, and there are empty threats of rain...it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas here.
So we loaded up the sleigh and its tractor reindeer and set out on a round the 'hood caroling, good will toward men tour. "We wish You a Merry Christmas " greeted everyone in our way, including my daughter, Allison, who happened to call while we were enroute.
After we cleaned the snow off the sleigh, we retired to the patio for a party, which always means for us, food and dancing. This is Fiona, our new Matron, and Christmas present.
Just before Sammy was snapped here, he put some popcorn on a piece of sausage and, down the hatch. No wonder he's smiling.
Michelle and Mercy.
There was a CD of Chrismas salsa music playing, so Fiona and Jeff, who is an imaginative and fantastic tripper of the light, took a Latin turn.
I kept trying to take a shot of the girls crowded around Christine and her mobile phone pics, and Joshua and Jeff and Prudence successfully kept timing their jumps to "frame in."
Mildred, Gilbert's wife, and Lucky.
Prudence giving her housemother, Jane, a little Yuletide sugar. God bless us, everyone.
With the Christmas news taken care of, the following are some snapshots of life around here recently.
Christine and Jacqueline in locked in a staredown...what's going to happen next?...you might wonder.
They're going to turn suddenly and start staring at YOU...that's what.
Mama Peggy is telling Peter the one, singular secret to all of life.
Peter is astonished when it turns out to be a "knock, knock" joke.
Meanwhile, Johnny realizes that it's true..."the center cannot hold."
Apocalyptic visions notwithstanding, we carried on.
Ben and Gilbert making a muddy 45 degree connection in four inch rain water collection pipe here.
Ben's rainy day work boots.
Uncle Pat greeting Uncle Sam after his work week absence in Nairobi.
Nairobi traffic gems: I'm not quite sure which specific ones this designer matatu is advocating against, but no doubt it has fractured evrything traffic related in the last quarter hour.
An empty truckbed, an set of earphones, and thou. Ideal.
We took the little ones and picked Peter up at school for the holidays.
And within the hour, he was at Mama Mulandi's,
quartering and hauling the party's main course
into the pick up.
I bought this tortoise. He came cheap because, like many of us, he's a bit damaged. Someone broke his thick shell, and then he got stolen before he made it to his new home at Red Rhino. But we stayed in the market and now have two others living and hiding along the fenceline at the property.
The next section is by now old news, but if you’ve been entirely without news, I guesss no news is old news.
This is a refrigerator. It's at Red Rhino. It runs on electricity.
This man is a pole climber, not recreationally, but as a matter of employment.
That is our property in the foreground. And the pole climber is readying the poles for transformation.
This is Gilbert, on the road between our place and Daystar.
These are the guys Gilbert went to see.
You might recall that in another age and lifetime, when we built our buildings,
we wired them in hope.
That one of these would come our way on someone else's dime.
Well, about nine cents of it did. And we've been pretty regularly illuminated since.
Truth is, we were born and bred in this place and managed just fine off the grid. And they don't get much monthly from us now.
But we're thankful, for the fridge, for the internet, for the light at the end of the switch.
And now that we're making the front patio an indoor space (studying, reading, hanging out mostly for the older kids), we're carving out of concrete and quarried stone new pathways for the stuff.
It’s a Bug’s Life, pt. something.
Maybe you lie awake at night wondering if there are still bugs in Africa. Rest easy, there are. And here's one of the gold medalists...the dung beetle.
It's a scarab beetle, you know, the ones the pharoahs looked up to and wore gold ones, for brooches and the like. Maybe they were unaware of their habits.
What's in a name? Plenty. A dung beetle by any other name would still be a big bug that gathers up fresh baked crapola and rolls it along, backwards, until , like a snowball, it gets bigger and bigger. This one was about racquetball size.
Then, before all the watching world, she finds a soft patch of ground and proceeds to dig up,
(A part of the watching world, who evidently has nothing more pressing on his plate.)
until, in truly unbelieveable fashion, she buries the entire ball
...without a trace.
Evidently to keep it out of harm's way. Which at our place is not so easy.
This is as close as we get to time lapsed photography here. This is a fresher offering of the smelly stuff. Upon closer examination you will notice the little fellas are as happy as crap clams in this mix.
In all the excitement I forgot to mention that somewhere in all that rolling, Mrs D Beetle lays her eggs, or whatever beetles have, in the ball and so the fry are hatched into what amounts to them, a world of french fries. They eat their way out into the cold cruel, where they, I guess, begin the whole unenviable cycle all over again.
You'd think the pharoahs would have been a little more careful in their accessorizing choices.
We send you all our best wishes for a Happy Christmas and a New Year filled with love and proper accessories.
David and the gang
Comments(2)-
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Candy says
December 18, 2012 at 6:21 pmMerry Christmas to David and all of your lovely RROP children and staff ! We send big hugs from Colorado and wish you God’s blessings throughout the new year!
Peggy says
December 19, 2012 at 10:22 pmThanks, David.
Wonderful to see news old and new: the staff, the bugs, especially the kids – all with the beautiful bougainvillaea blooming in the background. Welcome to Fiona and Happy Christmas to ALL.
PS: That is Mama Joy with the knock-knock joke — wish I were there, but am still in cold Calif.