Here I Am..

Here I am.  Almost 2 weeks after I mentioned on a Facebook post that I would write about our adventure trip to Ngurunit and back.  Since then life has had some other surprises too.  It was school midterm break time from February 24^th to March 3^rd.  So I suddenly had 4 students arriving at the house for a place to stay and assistance to get home for a few days to pick up important papers.  The Form 2 students were required out of the blue to provide their parent’s ID numbers and original results slips.  This is easier said than done for kids who live 200 km away from their Maralal schools in places with few transport options.  But as always, we managed to send on their journey the 3 kids that needed to make the dash home and back during the break.  I had plans for a quick trip to Nakuru so I decided to take the 4^th student, my niece Rameli, along with me to see the big city!  That turned into a quick dash too, leaving on a Monday at 1 pm and being back to Maralal by 8:00 pm the Tuesday the next day.  In between we traveled the 4 hours down to my friend Anne’s house in Gilgil for Monday night.  Had dinner out with her and her son so we could meet a couple Rotarians from the Rotary Club of Gilgil.  Woke early on Tuesday morning to head for Nakuru to drop off my dog Acacia at the vet, Dr Cran, for spaying.  Rushed into town to do errands and shopping before a Rotary Club of Nakuru meeting at 12:30 for lunch.  I got a call from Dr Cran at 10:30 to inform me that my dog was actually expecting puppies so wondered how to proceed.  I made the decision to let nature take its course, but please hold on to her in his kennel until after the meeting.  Attended an amazing rotary meeting handing out certificates of participation to their many Rotary Community Corps, some of whom I had met last August.  Had a nice lunch.  Then the rush to finish up shopping, pick up the dog and head back to Maralal by a reasonable hour!  Exciting but exhausting trip.  Through all this, Rameli followed me around wide-eyed at all the hustle and bustle of a big city of more noise, people, pollution and traffic than she had ever imagined possible!  It is good that we got back to Maralal quickly because by the next day, the whole student crew had returned, with a few additions, back to Maralal to organize for going back to their studies this last weekend.  This involved several days of shopping, hair styling trips to beauty parlors, watching tv for entertainment and catching up on sleep.  Acacia is back in her place with the other dogs the same as she was when we left.  Definitely starting to look more expectant every day.  It is a mystery.  We thought we were so careful during her first heat cycle in December.  It appeared to be over by the beginning of January, but apparently not as the estimate is that she conceived sometime in the middle of that month, thus puppies expected to arrive within the next couple of weeks.  We never noticed her leave the compound.  No intact male dog came in.  It will be interesting to see what the pups look like.  After she has them and the challenge to find good homes has been accomplished, I will try the spaying trip again.  I’ll count this one as a practice run.  It did go better than I had expected it to.  Acacia has never been trained to leash and she has ridden in the car only a couple times around town.  She is about 10 months old and very sweet, but a little wild.  I took Mouse along with us to help keep Acacia calm, which helped.  Though a couple times they had a little control tiff.  This is my bed.  This is my car.  This is my human.  But overall they get along well.  Acacia wasn’t so sure about the leash.  But it helped to see Mouse on one and with a tug here and there, she would follow along and not fight it too much.  A quick learner.  Riding in the car was no problem at all.  Acacia just lay in her bed sleeping most of the way with Mouse sleeping on the seat beside her.  It surprised me how calm she was. 

Wow, here I am having written a lot about nothing really and never did get to the Ngurunit trip adventure we had in the middle of February.  I don’t want to go on too long so will end here with another promise to tell the story on my next blog.  This time I will try to not let time pass by so fast.  I will make another excuse as to why so distracted from writing because it is a happy one.  It started raining heavily last week here in Maralal! Yay!! I have heard it is all over the country, including in Ngurunit!!  That is so wonderful as water was becoming very scarce.  The side effects of this rain are several.  One is that power has been off about 50% or more of the day almost every day since.  That really disrupts work requiring electric powered equipment.  No power at the moment so trying to finish and post this before computer battery runs out.  I fortunately have a solar phone charger so will be able to get a hotspot for internet.  The other side effect is flooding.  Nairobi inundated.  Pictures of submerged cars fill my social media.  I had a challenge last week even crossing the small rivers between my office and home!!  The old adage of flood or famine is playing out.  Such is life.  But water is life, so we will just have to deal with the difficulties.  My garden is thriving.  That makes me happy!!  Time to go.  I will have to be patient until the power comes on again for another quick battery charge before disappearing during the next rain storm.  The fickleness of technology.  Incredibly useful when working well.  Incredibly frustrating when something not right.  Until next time:  May your lights stay on and your feet be dry….