chuckling to myself

It's a rainy Sunday afternoon here except that doesn't mean that it rains all of the time, but rather in spurts on/off. It's a good afternoon for recounting a few laughs I've had this week...

Today on my walk up the hill to church (just a few hundred yards) I passed by the church/community center cho (latrine) and there was a woman inside singing away...needless to say I chuckled to myself :)

This week a couple of times on my walk to and from the Health Center I've seen this character in Nyahuka wearing John Lennon like sunglasses (rare to see sunglasses at all) and a long pink raincoat...he also has made me chuckle to myself...

I got this super funny email from my dad who I had written to the day before to ask a question, and evidently I wasn't the only one who had written/called to ask him a question that day because he replied "Today I'm running a $2 special, it's your lucky day...if you want a better answer try back on a day when I'm running my $5 special..." maybe it's not so funny if you're not his daughter living all the way around the world and just glad to have heard from home...

I was pasteurizing my milk on Friday night and it has to get up to 160 degrees F, and it had reached about 130, so I turned around to do other things and promptly forgot about the milk on the stove until Craig, a visitor who was doing my dishes (I tried to stop him but he was persistent), said "did you forget the milk?" DOH! Yep, I had indeed forgotten the milk and it was billowing up to the top of the pan and had reached about 210 degrees, so I yanked it off and tried dumping it into the pitcher and it was a bit too heavy and so it spilled all over the counter before I got a good hold of it and got most of it in the pitcher...geez louise...more chuckling...

And the milk ordeal was at the end of the night that started for me in the kitchen with making a Mornay sauce...have you ever heard of Mornay sauce? Me neither, but Pat was making Chicken Divan for our guests for dinner and she was a little behind in some other things she was working on, so I took on the Mornay sauce...the Joy of Cooking recipe was WAY over my head but after plugging through it sentence by sentence, including "1 small onion studded with cloves" (who "studs" an onion with cloves, I mean really...), the sauce was a success believe it or not...but I was talking to Rachel and Craig at the same time and chuckling out loud to them while talking/cooking as I made my way through my first attempt at Mornay sauce...

Yesterday afternoon I decided I was in the mood for some brownies, which here means making them from scratch, so I started on that venture and then decided while I was thinking about it to make yogurt from the milk I had pasteurized the night before and was working on that at the same time...then after the brownies were done and the oven was still on I decided I should make granola to go along with the yogurt while I was thinking about it too, so I embarked on that ordeal too...trying to find a recipe that included things I actually had, etc. Needless to say I'm not one much for multi-tasking and there were a few points where I just turned in circles in the kitchen much like I did in the nurses' station at SLCH, but they all turned out pretty well if I do say so myself, but the whole process involved lots of chuckling...

Mom, could you send me your granola recipe by the way? If you've never had my mom's granola and you know how to get a hold of her, you should ask her for the recipe, she got it from Linda Blakeman and it's scrumptious and addictive, so watch out. I guess there are worse things to be addicted to.

The last thing I can think of right now is the three legged race I did with Julia Myhre at a birthday party yesterday afternoon for Lydia and Kym (two orphaned girls that Pat looks after)...the photo above is proof...needless to say we both laughed all the way to the end and back, and I think we managed to beat Ashley and Sarah (the other photo) somehow!