Weekend!

Once again, I've had quite a good weekend here. Of course, it's not a long weekend, so it's right back at it tomorrow morning... but I have had some good fun this weekend anyways!

Friday night was movie night in our new home! I set up a screen which had been welded together for us from extra fence parts. One of the Kenyan chaps who was building our fence this past spring thought we needed a screen for our movies - he was tired of watching dvds which had crazy distorted faces from our makeshift screen in the guesthouse! It's quite a clever design, and all it needed was a white sheet stretched across the frame. Some good-meaning soul sent up some pure white sheets to be used for the guesthouse on the last truck. Personally, I would never send white sheets to be used in this guesthouse - I probably bathe more than the average bear around here, and I know how filthy my sheets get. I know that after one use, these pure white sheets are going to be grey and are just going to look awful.

So I had one of the brand new sheets in my hand, ready to be cut up to be made into a movie screen. But my conscience got the best of me... I just couldn't bring myself to make a brand new sheet into a screen. So I compromised and used one of the old plastic table clothes that's already falling apart. It used to be quite pretty, with a nice floral design... now it's so faded that it makes a perfect white-ish screen!

Of course, the grey sort of screen didn't help our movie look any brighter - we watched "Wuthering Heights", which is quite a gloomy movie! I didn't realize that story was so dark. We've now added a name to Scamper the cat - he's now known as Scamper Heathcliff.

Anyways, it was good to watch a movie together with our nieghbors. We have good nieghbors.

Yesterday, we were pleased as punch to realize that the barge coming down the Nile from the north, carrying all of the cooking gas cylindars had arrived in the city! For weeks now we've been waiting for this barge to come so we could get some gas for our house, and refill the cylindars in the guesthouse. In fact, we were getting pretty desperate- Vicky has already been cooking our lunches on the charcoal stove to conserve the gas, and while I was making lunch for everyone (pasta for 9 people!), the gas ran out just as the pasta was cooking. Fortunately, it caused the pasta to come out perfectly "al dente"!

Richard and I loaded up the truck with the old cylindars, including 2 from the Christian Blind Mission clinic, who were also completely out of gas for sterilizing their eye surgery instruments, and took the gas cylinder place by storm! We came out of there with so many cylindars, it was amazing the truck didn't bottom out on the way home. Anyways, it's nice to be able to cook again... and for the first time, we can use our new stove and cook in our house :)

We had great plans to cook dinner on the new stove last night... but then we were invited out for Chinese food instead! I'm still amazed that I can actually get sweet and sour pork in this city. At least if there's no gas to cook on, and no food in the markets, there is still sweet and sour pork! I think they fly in their food, since they have meat and produce that's certainly not available here in the city. In fact, this past week, even the pineapples and bananas were almost impossible to find. The rains have been really bad over the past little while, and the roads on which the trucks have to travel to bring the produce to the city are atrocious. Most of the produce is just rotting on the trucks on the way, since it's taking them so long to get through.

Oh, my battery is almost finished - better post and write more later!