The sky has been growing darker and darker over the last week, and today, fat drops of rain finally began to fall, just in time for Spring tomorrow. This probably marks the end of late afternoons at the basketball court/sandpit, but who knows? I seem to remember from last summer that the rain was constant but surely that’s not possible and there were some breaks. Since the house opposite us was vacated during the holidays, various workers have been doing a full renovation on it and the last week or so has been spent painting the outside. They were putting the finishing touches on the paint this morning as the first drops fell, so hopefully they were just in time.
One good thing about the rain though is that it will save us watering our garden a bit. A month or so ago we planted some seeds in egg cartons with the kids, and they had the time of their lives watering them (and mostly themselves) with a spray bottle. Since they got big enough to plant out in the garden, Brent used a nail to punch holes in the lid of a water bottle after the fashion of a watering can so we’ve used that instead to give the tiny plants a little flood a couple of times a day, but the ground dries out so fast in this heat. About half of the seedlings that sprouted survived the transfer to the garden so hopefully we will have some zucchinis and apple cucumbers before we leave in November.
We’ve had lots of afternoons watching the digger, which has usually corresponded to an outage of the water. The pipes were breaking and leaking a lot, resulting in them constantly having to be dug up and patched, so a plumber (I think from Australia) was engaged to come and supervise the replacement of the mains pipe with a stronger and more flexible rubbery-looking one. The opportunity was taken to sink a bore at the same time, so we also went on occasion to watch the drill going, which was on the back of a truck and belched the most potent (presumably diesel) fumes that it made the spectacle of the digger much more appealing, although this apparatus was more unique. We happened to be walking by at the exact moment they turned the pump on for the first time and so we witnessed the first geyser of muddy water spew forth from the ground. The big pond near the gate had almost dried out completely over the winter, so they pointed the pipe in that general direction, presumably out of a desire to let the water flow until it ran clear rather than refill the pond, but it has had that side-effect nevertheless.
Both of the kids just love being outdoors and Reggie, particularly, will play for hours out the front of our house, whether with other kids or alone. He will just tell me, ‘Mummy, I will be playing outside.’ And off he’ll go, and find a bit of plastic to scrape in the dirt with, or a stick to poke at things with, or he’ll take a truck and you’ll hear the imaginative commentary. There have been lots of other kids around too, for the August school holidays, and Reggie even found another boy named Reggie!
In other excellent news, the Fulton shop is now selling watermelons grown here at our farm, lying in a circle of rope on the floor and marked with a price according to their size. I’ve never been a huge watermelon sort of person because I’ve always found the spitting out of the seeds to be more trouble than it’s worth, but these watermelons have totally converted me and I am smitten. (Can one be smitten with the taste of a watermelon?) We eat the icy pink wedges straight out of the fridge and they’re completely delightful. Reggie just walks over and opens the fridge and helps himself. Also, mangoes have not yet appeared in the market, but we did see them being sold on the side of the road on the way to Lautoka, so we are hopeful that we’ll be able to get some soon.
Speaking of which, we fit twenty-one people in the fourteen-seater taxi van on the way home from Lautoka the other day. Certainly was quite the ride!
The mid-semester break is fast approaching; I think we have only one more week of school left. Brent is researching/writing away on assignments now so possibly he might be enough ahead for us to go on some small adventure then. Otherwise, we will just be hanging about here. We shall see.
Reasons I Choose To Look Up 