The worm had an interesting reddish-brown head, which contrasted nicely with the rest of its clearish-grayish inching body.

I watched for a few seconds. Then I carefully ate around the worm-habitat.

As I slowly chewed the last few bites, I considered the possibility that I had already eaten another worm, its digestive tract also showing darkly present inside its body.

Oh well.

Bonus protein!

This morning there were ants all over the spare bed in our room. I had put my stuff there, judging it to be more ant free and less likely to get wet in case the roof leaked with the oncoming rain. I worried that they had somehow gotten into my bag of snacks, and indeed, a third of the bag was engulfed in the beasts. I picked up a handle and gingerly moved the bag about a foot away from the dead insect the shifting bag had uncovered. The insect was the real focus of the seething mass of crawling things, and having discovered it, I relaxed.

I’ve noticed that ants very rarely want to have much more to do with us than we want to do with them. Generally, when they come in en masse it’s because they’ve discovered some kind of food in your house or because they think your house is a nice place to store the piece of insect they’re in the process of butchering. Or because they’ve decided inside your walls is a nice place to live, which is, admittedly, a bit more problematic.

Sometimes I find a mass of ants in some forgotten part of my house. Usually, they’ve found a dead insect I hadn’t noticed and so I leave them to it, doing my best to remember not to interrupt their busy work. A day or two later, I return to check and find, as I expected, nothing there. The ants have vacated the premises, and as a sort of reverse rent, have taken the dead insect with them. On an installment plan.

Of course, there is the other type of ants, the ones that are rude and climb all over you and bite. They have no manners and should be punished.

Michelle and I watched clouds of lake flies obliterated by heavy storm clouds.

Me: I find it difficult to be upset about that.

Michelle: I feel bad. They worked so hard to get all the way out there.

This from the one who freaks out about ants and spiders and all other kinds of critters.

Yellow shading into blue-y purple front to back, or, for variety’s sake, purple-y blue shading into yellow top to bottom.

Cobalt blue so dark the only way to tell it isn’t black is by that edge where the color of the body erupts into the sky-coloured top fin. Or when it flips around, exposing its flat side to reflected sunlight and the basic black transforms into a symphony of blues.

Blue, white-tipped crab hiding like a two-year-old. Seems like that’s a poor defense mechanism, unless its only predators agree that they can’t see it when it can’t see them.

There seem to be two types of nests built right now—brown ones made of twigs and dried up stuff, and green ones made of fresh leaves and the like. Michelle and I were wondering if the girl birds like the green nests as something new and original, or if they prefer what they’re used to.

It’s exhausting, watching the weaver birds. They flit in from their building-material collecting missions and then hang upside down, wings beating furiously to keep the bird aloft. Eventually they head over to another branch to rest for a few seconds, then return to finish their construction and fly away to get more material.

Whoever invented fitted sheets is a genius, and deserves a Nobel Prize of some sort, although I’m not sure exactly what category under which they should win: their genius so transcends the genius of mere mortals that a new “Innovations in Bedmaking” category may need to be invented. This is an ode to not having to spend 45 minutes making my bed with sloppy, upside down hospital corners at the end of a long day of doing all the chores that pile up when you have no labor saving devices to help you. Now if only someone would invent self cleaning water filters. . . .

I love being able to say that my shower drain was slow because a frog decided to move in to the outlet drain. Well, the frog and hair that had been liberated from my head. But really I don’t like to place blame, especially on myself, so we’ll forget about everything but the frog invasion as the reason for the slow drain.

In Chichewa, the letters ‘R’ and ‘L’ are pretty much interchangeable. So, for example, some people spelled the name of my homestay village Mterera and some spelled it Mtelera or Mtelela. And you get kids named Malia but it’s pronounced Maria. When we were in homestay, we visited a traditional birth attendant (TBA). She said that every mother coming to her for delivery had to bring her own lazerbraid. Most of us were looking around at each other, all kinds of confused, although I was also thinking that if I were going to a TBA and I had a lazerbraid I wouldn’t have to worry about forgetting to bring it: Anything called a lazerbraid must be so awesome that I’d want to take it wherever I went.

Bryce eventually figured out that the TBA was saying “razorblade,” which while vitally important to the whole uncontaminated cutting of the umbilical cord thing, is just not something I’m going to carry around with me at all times. A lazerbraid, though, man, I think I could rule the world if I had one of those.

Insects and the murder thereof: I have discovered that I have changed my behavior towards insects since I have come here. While I have an order directly from the primitive part of my brain to kill any mosquitoes and cockroaches on sight—the first because they are potentially deadly but mostly because they sometimes keep me up at night, the second simply because they squick me out (I mean, come on, you kill them, smush their little insect brains all over the place, but they keep on moving)—most other insects get a pass from me, at least the ones that don’t look like they may be related to mosquitoes some how. Which, I guess most of them did before, anyway, but now, with my new permission from myself to search and destroy mosquitoes and cockroaches I feel more magnanimous about letting the other insects live. Maybe I am drunk with power. That’s probably it.

Speaking of insects I didn’t kill, yesterday a one-legged (well, actually five-legged but the missing one was one of the obvious, big ones) grasshopper decided to try out Chez Sika & Derek to see if it was the kind of place in which it may want to dwell, even though Derek says this is a low-rent establishment as evidenced by the lack of meat for dinner last night. The grasshopper seemed unperturbed by the lack of mince and had to be (not very) forcibly convinced that we don’t serve his kind here. I didn’t eat him though, no matter what Derek says.

There is something different about eating food when you propagate seeds from the food you eat. It is similar to the slow food movement in a way: maybe it could be called the Even Slower Food Movement (somehow I doubt that would appeal to most people, though.) It begins in the market, when you select fruit and vegetables based on appearance, smell, general appeal. Here fruit and vegetables are usually sold in piles, so you don’t pick individual perfect fruits, but rather the piles that appear to have the most potential. Since there are multiple vendors selling the same fruits and vegetables, and there are also the contributing factors of price and prizies* to consider, it can be a complicated thing to pick out the best choice.

Another complicating factor is that often I remember that I am trying to propagate seeds only when I have already bitten into a fruit or vegetable whose flavor, when recollected later, will cause my mouth to water and initiate a retroactive envy for the me of an earlier time who was able to savor the pure cucumberness of that cucumber or the pure mangoness of that mango. At this point, all I can do is ask myself, “Have I already destroyed the seeds I would need to propagate this?” The answer is usually, “Dammit, yes I have.” (Mangos are different: in the process of eating one I rarely mangle the seed enough that I can’t plant a tree from it, but I wouldn’t see any fruit from the tree before I went home.)

I create, over time, a mental catalog or scrapbook of produce: how they look, how they smell, how they taste. I file away into long-term memory the different factors that make the best produce. I dream of the day that my garden produces miracles like the fruits and vegetables I like the best and imagine how I will prepare them, both for eating and for propagating. My awareness is heightened. My food is a part of my life. Now if only I could propagate oreos and skittles (did you know that those old commercials where people grew skittles were lying? I’m traumatized.)

Hey techie friends: I have a couple of requests for you: 1) is there a way to download the most relevant of these so I can start training the other tutors in powerpoint? 2)Do you know if any of the free learn to type programs are better than any others? and 3) Is there a program that would enable me to take photos and text and put them on the computer as reference material in a way that’s easy to use and navigate and will also allow me to easily convert it to book format (like, an actual paper, retro-type book) later? Danke

edited to add:  I was in a rush when I was posting this and realized after I got home that I wasn’t very clear. What I need is something that will allow me to have a column of pictures with 2 columns of text next to the photos, one to describe how to do the tasks photographed and another on why you do it the way I say. What I would prefer is something that is then accessible to the students in file format (they can see the photos and read the accompanying text) so that when we finally finish all the topics they can be printed into a book, but are still usable on the computer before then.

*Prizies are what you get when you are either a regular customer to a vendor, a vendor hopes you will become a regular customer, or you buy a bunch of stuff. For instance, today I bought 3 heaps of green beans and got another one as a prizie. Prizies can be problematic. For instance, once I wanted to buy one leaf of Chinese (bok choy) but they were only 2 kwacha and I felt bad only buying one, so I bought three instead. And then the vendor gave me three more leaves as a prizie. So I had six leaves of Chinese when, without refrigeration, I could only eat one or two before they went bad.

But viscerally, that’s a different story. Pretty much every PCV I know has shivered when the subject of these spiders has come up. Oh yeah, talk about black or green mambos in your house and that’s scary; talk about eating mice on a stick and that’s gross; talk about the beetles bashing themselves against the ceiling and then dive bombing your face before they commit mass suicide and that’s annoying, but only these spiders are somehow wrong.

Then again, my dog just ate one of the creepy spiders and he isn’t dead yet (the puppy, not the spider who is quite dead although it wasn’t until it was already half eaten which was, need I say it, creepy), so maybe the spiders aren’t quite as creepy as I thought. Then again, the Barenaked Ladies taught me that you cause floods when you kill a spider and rainy season is almost here, so you never know . . .