I have awesome new year's resolutions this year ( Read more... )

I love fresh produce in the summer time :) I grew up on an apply orchard, and we always kept a vegetable garden for ourselves when I was a kid, so I just really enjoy getting fresh, local produce that you can't the rest of the year (around here ( Read more... )

So, I'm currently job-hunting, which means I'm of course up for distractions. For some reason, I've chosen to take the time to look into the tragedy at Jonestown. I know, I could be watching anime, but I guess it's a case of driving home the point, "It can *always* be worse ( Read more... )

…or, maybe I should write blog posts sometimes ( Read more... )

Before coming to Ethiopia, I was a little leery of moving to a tropical country because of the…bugs. Giant spiders, hissing cockroaches, ants crawling all over everything. Bugs carrying awful diseases, like African sleeping sickness and malaria. I really wasn’t looking forward to that at all. But…that’s not what I found here. Ethiopia may be ( Read more... )

We cook with lots of fresh vegetables here in Ethiopia. They’re readily available, generally of good quality, and super cheap. For instance, a few days ago, we stopped by the stand right outside our compound and bought: 1 kilo of bananas, 1 kilo of tomatoes, 1 kilo of potatoes, 1 kilo of carrots and ½ kilo of beets… for 51 birr ($3); 1 kilogram = ( Read more... )

…and all the boards did shrink.
Water, water, everywhere
Nor any drop to drink.

March 26thThe little rainy season has begun, so we often have quite a lot of water here. Well, that is… we had rain for a week straight, and now occasionally in the evenings. On Friday, it even hailed! Marcy’s doing weather with the 5th grade now, so that’s ( Read more... )

March 10th

Tsom no. It’s fasting time here in Ethiopia. The Orthodox celebrate Easter on May 5th, so the Catholics here do the same (with less than 1% of the country being Catholic, it doesn’t make sense to celebrate Christmas and Easter on the Western dates, so… we don’t.) The Orthodox, however, are more hardcore about their fasting, not ( Read more... )

February

So Sorry I don’t write very much these days! I was tempted to say ‘see Marcy’s blog’ for this, but I wrote up a little about our travels. Hers is Here and has pictures.

At the end of January, the schools were closed for a week, so Marcy and I decided to do a bit of travelling. Lalibela is pretty much the place to see in Ethiopia, ( Read more... )

So, it turns out the movie Blood Diamond is much funnier when you watch it in Africa. I hasten to clarify that a movie about civil war, child soldiers and diamond smugglers is not actually funny; it’s meant to be serious and depressing, and of course it is. Leonardo diCaprio’s character is rather a bastard and if anyone else played him, you’d ( Read more... )