Wednesday, April 29, 2009

If we live in Kenya...

I want to drive a Toyota VITZ. It's basically a hatchback Yaris, and...they come in pink. If we are to buy a car, a 4x4 is probably more practical. Getting around town, we can just use public transportation or walk. It's very easy to do both in Mombasa. And if we are to need a car of our own, it would be for an out-of-town trip, or to take someone to (or pick someone up from) the airport. Or if we wanted to go to the national park for a safari without having to pay the fees for renting a vehicle. So...a subcompact wouldn't be practical at all. They are useful for navigating city traffic because you can squeeze in to tight places, and there are a lot of those. Oh, but I would have to get over my fear of Kenyan traffic before I could drive one there. But the pink VITZ is very cute, see:





I would never want to drive a subcompact in the US, though. Other cars are too much bigger. But Kenya has a lot of tiny cars. Even their 15 passenger vans are small.

Monday, April 27, 2009

disgusting, but i have to share it

A week or so ago, Rodgers mentioned that our bathroom sink wasn't draining well. I had not noticed, but he usually turns the water on full blast and I don't, which I guess is why he noticed the slow drainage first. I figured that, over the past few months that I've lived here, some of my hairs must have fallen into the sink while I've been combing out my hair. I never wash my hair in the sink. I have long hair and lots of it falls out, so it seemed viable. We picked up a jug of 10 Minute Hair Clog Remover. After one treatment, the sink got a little better, but was still slow. At that point I discovered that, though the plug isn't removable, the top flat part of it is. This is the kind of plug it is:



So I unscrewed that part of the plug (the body of it was still in the drain) and saw tons of gunk. Using some long, flat devices, I began to pull the gunk out of the drain. The gunk was enough to make me gag. But, as I pulled it out, I discovered that the gunk was stuck, not to my hair, but to dental floss! Yards and yards of dental floss, cut into single-use lengths. I spent a good 20 minutes pulling dental floss out of the sink drain. So here is a PSA to the previous tenants of this apartment: used dental floss should be thrown in the garbage, not rinsed down the sink drain. I'm going to go throw up now.

Friday, April 24, 2009

annoying

Has the word "pop" been banned from our language already? It should be, but not all instances of the word. I'm thinking of a specific usage.

Someone wants a particular element to be eye-catching, to stand out more than the other elements in a spread, webpage, wall hanging arrangement, landscape, outfit, etc. Rather than saying that x should be the focal point or any of a number of other ways to describe the effect that they want, they say that they want it to "pop." OR, someone says that it's good to wear an outfit in neutral colors with bright shoes, handbag, or belt, for a "pop" of color. I could scream every time I hear this.

There's another thing that drives me crazy. With online forums, blogs, and social media, too many ignorant people are able to broadcast their thoughts to the public. I may not agree with their thoughts, but that's not the problem. The problem is: they seem to have abandoned that very basic element of expression in our culture, which is language. I can admit that I don't have perfect grammar and have never won a spelling bee. But, seriously, I just read a product review that said the item "go's" with everything.

I spent the past 20 minutes trying to say something about that. But, well, it speaks for itself.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

1 month anniversary

Our 1 month anniversary is tomorrow! Since we both took today off, as a sick day, to take Rodgers to have his medical exam for his green card, we decided to cook a special dinner tonight. It was GREAT!!

After returning from Waco, we were having some donuts at Shipley's, discussing what we want to eat this week, so we could make a grocery list and go to HEB after donuts.

Somehow, I thought about cooking something Kenyan. I remembered seeing a recipe online for samosas, which are sort of fried dumplings. Rodgers said that he had never made them before, but we decided that with our memories of samosas, we could figure out ingredients.

So, we got some won ton wrappers, breakfast sausage, and a bag of peas and carrots. We decided to cook them tonight, in celebration of our 1 month anniversary, since we had lots of time for cooking tonight and won't have tomorrow. Rodgers' assessment of our samosas was perfect: These things are freakin good!!


We put them in a bowl and sat down to watch TV and eat as many as we possibly could.


SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO good!!!!


yum!