Rain Rain Go Away

It rained all night.

Okay, perhaps not ALL night, but it sure seemed that way. Although it could have.

When the alarm went off at 5:45, I woke Fahim up and then went to the bathroom – potty break – with full intentions of returning to bed. But since I still had my blasted headache, I went into the kitchen for the aspirin and noticed water on the floor. I called out to Fahim, who finally dragged his butt out of bed, and we determined that we had at least two spots where water was coming through in the kitchen. I then looked in all the other rooms but didn’t see anything.

Later, as Fahim was getting so anxious to get me hooked on an xbox game, he noticed another leak in the living room which landed on the dvds and games. Four inches in another direction and all our books would have been wrecked. Or, all the books we have here would have been wrecked.

It’s still raining. It rained until seven thirty or something close to that. And it rained some more this morning, and it’s otherwise been nothing but overcast today with occasional showers sprinkled in for good measure.

And Fahim set up the xbox and put this program on for me to play. He showed me how to play and then left for work, me firmly entrenched in playing. I played for another hour or so before I got frustrated and shut the thing off. See, there’s a reason I’m not a huge game person. I hate having to do the same thing over and over again just because my man dies. And I hate doing it even more when I can’t figure out how to do what needs to be done. I thought I did rather well – not giving up until I’d made at least a half dozen attempts. But after that? Forget about it. So I saved the game and shut it off.

And I did two loads of laundry. Okay, ya gotta remember – a large load of laundry here is probably half the size of a large load of laundry in North America. Our washer is small comparatively speaking.

And then we had a power outage. It only lasted maybe fifteen minutes, so not bad at all. And it’s been cool today – completely comfortable. I didn’t even need to put a fan on until lunch time.

Lunch. Chicken. This is a first. But since Fahim found a halal chicken place, chicken is on the menu. This has me very heppy indeed. Heppy heppy heppy.

 

Chicken and Mushroom Curry

chicken, enough for two people, two meals, mixed with

1 1/2 teaspoons curry powder

1/2 teaspoon chili powder

1/2 teaspoon pepper

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons red chili pepper flakes

Then tossed in a frying pan with:

1/2 cup of water

1 tablespoon coconut oil

Cook on low heat for half an hour, then toss in:

1/2 cup oyster mushrooms

And cook for another half hour, still on low heat. At the end of the hour, there should be enough liquid left to form a sauce. It was gooooood.

 

And it was served with vegetable curry and pink rice.

 

Fahim and I talked about the Book In a Month challenge, which starts tomorrow. He and I have discussed my writing quite a bit, and he’s completely supportive of me being a writer. He’s so completely and totally wonderfully supportive of me being a writer. I can’t believe how lucky I am. I haven’t done much writing since I got here – that is, writing that didn’t consist of my blog. My blog, I have done a helluva lot of writing. I like writing in my blog. I think it helps to keep my writing skills alive – and now that I think about it, it also proves that my first draft can be pretty decent. I have done next to no editing with anything I’ve written in my blog. I write it, I publish it, I don’t touch it again. But other writing – as in my novels or screenplays or short stories or anything else – that, I haven’t done hardly anything with.

I made the mistake of asking Fahim what he thought my goal should be. He says 400 pages. That’s barely 13 1/3 pages per day, completely manageable. I just about choke. I don’t think I can manage that. I’m thinking, way before I talked to him about it, of maybe 100 pages. Manageable. Possible. I can do that.

Fahim and I have previously discussed a reward system for my writing, and no, blog writing doesn’t count. We have the larger goals all sorted out, but not the smaller ones. Yesterday’s chocolates, no doubt, are a part of the reward system. Unfortunately, Fahim thinks that, whenever I get a chocolate reward, he should get a chocolate, too. I don’t think it’s fair. He gets it free without having to do anything.

He doesn’t agree with me at all. I think that, if you, dear reader, agree with me, that you should comment in this system – he sees the comments, and so do I – so that perhaps, he’ll change his ways.

Okay, so I mention things, but don’t give full enough descriptions/explanations or provide links to web pages, that sort of thing. A few of you have been calling me on it – thanks muchly. I’ll rectify it, and please, if/when (when is much more likely than if) it happens again, please let me know and I’ll expand later/provide url/whatever is required. But since I’m scatterbrained at the moment, it probably won’t be now. Sorry.

Hey, at least I know SOMEONE is reading this thing other than me and Fahim. That’s always good to know.

And tomorrow is the Book in a Month, which means that damn, I gotta finish/work on/something like that/ugh my plotting today. I procrastinate, yes, I do.

Marlene called around 4:30 pm wanting to talk to me and could she come over. Sure, of course. While she was walking over, I stood on my steps to make sure she got the right house – she’s only been here once and that was in the back of a trishaw. I figure better safe than sorry.

While I’m waiting for her, a man who’s doing some work for the neighbors across the street says something to me. I don’t understand, so he repeats himself, pointing at the area just outside the fence and before the gutter that he’s been clearing out of vegetation. Ah, he wants to know if I want him to do any yard work. I say no, thanks, we don’t need anything. He doesn’t understand, so I repeat myself, shaking my head. He’s very polite about the whole thing, smiling all the while. People here at the bottom of the economic totem pole are very poor. I gather from conversations I’ve had with various people that poor people from the rural areas come to the big city – Colombo – to earn a better living, and they’re the ones who hire themselves out as maids, yard guys, whatever – all those so called menial jobs that people who live in the city won’t do because it’s beneath them. It also means that to hire a maid or someone to do yard work costs very little money. Marlene, for example, is paying her maid – full time, live in – something like 6000 Rupees a month, or about $60USD. Not a whole heck of a lot of money. On the other hand, it’s not like people here actually do a great deal of work. The Sri Lankan work mentality is to do as little as humanly possible without actually getting fired. Her maid, for example, one week would only do laundry but no other housework. She was too upset or something. In North America, this would never be tolerated – she’d be booted before she could blink. But here – it’s standard. They resent foreigners who make a lot of money, yet they don’t do anything to actually warrant earning that same amount of money or anything closely resembling it. No strong work ethic.

And of course I’m lumping people into generalities, and of course not everyone is like this. But it seems to be fairly accurate.

Marlene arrives and we sit down in the living room on our sofa set (see, Fahim, it really was necessary. 🙂 ) We start chatting, and she mentions that I came up in conversation at her school several times. The short version of it is that there are a few people at her school who are drooling over me for a few different reasons.

A couple of people are drooling over the idea of having me working with kids who need help with English – working as a teacher’s aide. A few other people are excited over the possibility of having me volunteer with them on various projects. The Canadians are excited over meeting another Canadian. And a man is excited because his wife doesn’t work, stays home, and could I possibly meet her and be friends and be social? I haven’t even met any of these people yet.

One man – and again, I’m fairly certain I’m butchering the spelling of his name – named Khairu, has his hands in many many pots at the school, likes the idea of me being a teachers aide there, and would like to start the ball rolling by having me volunteer. He’d like to meet me Friday at 9 am. Okey dokey. So I agreed. And a group of adults – teachers, parents, spouses, whatever – are doing one of their projects Friday afternoon – Children’s Hospital – and want me to come along. Marlene has told me that there are four or five special projects that I could be involved in, and has suggested that I could go to each project once and see what I think before I make a decision as to which I get involved with, if any. Yeah, that sounds reasonable.

It started raining again around 5:30 – torrential downpour with occasional twinges of just plain rain – and didn’t let up at all. Marlene and I talked about other things while we waited out the rain. Finally at 7:30 she gave up and when home in the rain.

Up until now, the rain has lasted minutes – one to ten, or something like that. This is my first experience with long long rains. I didn’t know what it was like for it to rain that hard for that long. And it’s loud.

Fahim and I watched some television and then went to bed. And it was still raining. It just didn’t stop, not even for 5 seconds. It just continued on and on and on.

Author: LMAshton
Howdy! I'm a beginner artist, hobbyist photographer, kitchen witch, wanderer by nature, and hermit introvert. This is my blog feed. You can find my fediverse posts at https://a.farook.org/Laurie.

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