Busy Days

We've been so busy that I finally crashed this weekend.  Slept all night Friday and all day today, Saturday.  I'm fighting off a cold.  I think I will be successful.  So excited that our son Eric and his lovely wife Jocelyn had a baby girl on November 28.  Our 5th grandchild!!

The buses here in Nairobi are painted and decorated so creatively.  I wondered what "Ready to Drink" referred to until I saw on the side of the bus that it said "milk shake!" 

We still enjoy our neighborhood "grandchildren" who often come to visit with their mothers.  Since we are old enough to be the mothers' parents, we are definitely old enough to be their children's grandparetns.  Yaro was intrigued with this little camera tripod that you can twist into all kinds of shapes so that you can hook it wherever you want to take a picture.

Hash likes to lift my weights.  His mother is expecting in March so we will have a brand-new baby next door.

We love our neighbor grandchild Faye!  Her mother is Ugandan and her father is English.  Lovely people.

We went to a Christmas Devotional at Upper Hill.  After the devotional, we had a nice lunch.  I really should have tried these fish heads but I just didn't have the stomach for it.  The Kenyans ate them with relish.  You just grab the head and pull the meat out with your fingers.  They say it is delicious.  Kenyans eat most food with their hands.  So there weren't many utensils to be had.  I had a plastic spoon to eat with.  Thank goodness for some rice, some nice vegetables and some Kentucky Fried Chicken!

This is what one Kenyan ate.  In the middle is the fish head and on the right is a very greasy chapote.  They also had a green vegetable called squma wiki, which we know as kale.

This was Elder & Sister Lyman's last meal with the Service Center people with whom they have worked for the past year and a half.  Lyman's left for home Thursday night.

Last Saturday we had a tour of the Karen Blixen home.  Those tall palm trees are about 90 years old.  Karen Blixen planted them long ago.  This is her home here in the Karen area of Nairobi where she attempted to grow coffee.  But the coffee didn't do so well because we are almost 6000 feet above sea level and coffee, apparently, needs to grow at 3000 feet.  I've never read the book by Karen Blixen called "Out of Africa" and I've never seen the movie and don't intend to.  She was born in Denmark but came here to Kenya from England back in the day when Kenya was a British possession.

We laughed to see all these old time pieces of farm machinery.  LeRon remembers his grandfather using such things.

Here our guide talked to us about coffee growing.  This is a coffee tree.  I didn't know it grew on trees.

And this plant is a "Christ's Thorn."  You can see the horrible sharp spines on it.  The young man said that this is what Christ's crown of thorns would have been made from.  Hmn . . .

And this millstone was turned into a table.

LeRon & Colleen at the millstone table at the back of the Karen Blixen home.  It just looked and smelled like an old house to me and I know I won't be back.  I've seen a lot of old things and places in our travels.

Is this the start of a Bottle Brush Tree blossom?  Pretty neat.

It's the season for the African Lilies to be in bloom.  Gorgeous blue heads on long stems.  They grow everywhere.

LeRon laughed when he saw this old tractor.  Notice the sign:  "Polite Notice:  Kindly do not sit on the tractor."  You see "Polite Notices" everywhere.  Also, "kindly" is used the way we would use "please."  Sometimes I get emails from people saying "Kindly send me a . . . kindly."  They use lots of "kindlys" even in one sentence.

Another cool slug outside our front door.  Love those antennas!

And here you can see the size of it next to LeRon's fingers.