Birthday Birds and Birthday Cakes

Family tradition dictates that not only to member of the family have a birthday bird, but also a birthday cake.  TJs bird is the kingfisher, mine is the oystercatcher, O's is the lilac breasted roller, FPFJ's has yet to be determined.  It'll come to him...maybe it already has.  You don't really get to choose your birthday bird.  It kinda chooses you.  (FPFJ's could be the coucal. I'll have to check.)

Now, birthday cake? Well, that's a different story.  Mine is a chocolate torte with raspberry sauce and TJ's is a blueberry sour cream coffee cake. Papa's is the amazing torte marguerite.  Owen and Finn are still experimenting....baked alaska with 6 kitties skiing down? that was the last one.  You don't have to have the same cake every year but eventually you find that every year you request the same cake. And that is your birthday cake.

Today is the big guys' birthday and I could put together so few ingredients from the actual recipe that I had to abandon the birthday cake.  All missing from the list of ingredients?  Blueberries for starters. brown sugar (boo, no struesel topping), no pecans (double BOO), no unsalted butter, and of course no sour cream.  (We have sour milk!  but no sour cream.)

Boo-Hisssssss.

So, instead of substituting the whole essence of the recipe away, he ended up with a dimply plum cake with cardamom.  And an orange glaze.  Super-yum.  Some one will have to do a make up cake in July.

In the meantime, here is your piece:

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY! 

Chipolopolo's Beautiful Game

Heartfelt congratulations to the Chipolopolo Boys and their Africa Cup of Nations VICTORY!
Here they are as they pass by our place yesterday.

Screen shot of the team's arrival at Kenneth Kaunda International airport.  Fans left on foot for the airport even before the game was started such was the strength in both support for the team and the certainty of their victory.

While it was amazing to see the welcome, the day revealed a spectacular lapse in, uh, airport security. Anyone? Security?  People were scaling the fence, climbing the towers.  They rushed every plane that came in from 7am on.

The fam, melting, while waiting in Great East Road for the team convoy to pass. (yes, IN the street, hence the look of concern)

20 minute trip from the airport took 2 hours.  The route was thick with fans and the wait provided ample opportunity for awesome displays of enthusiasm and stupidity.  (yes, I said the "s" word) The car below is moving at about 40 kmph.  please tell me who is driving?  These Donchi Kubeba guys passed by a half a dozen times.  They win for best fake trophy.  That they had their window-wipers on AND a reindeer hanging from the rearview mirror was icing on the cake. But please.  who is driving? They did, as they say, their  "level best" and avoided cars, pedestrians and cyclists.

This was nice - party in the back, drivers IN the cab, driving:

 "Always on Time"  but of course.....4 hours late.

Above and below: Quiet street scenes on Central and Great East.  We only witnessed one accident (matatu v. tiny sudan) and two near accidents a 1/2 hour apart with the same gorgeous new light blue BMW.  The driver nearly got t-boned (he didn't notice) and on a double-u-turn (two cars at once) missed a long appointment with the panel beaters by literally 2 cm (also a near miss the driver also didn't notice). TJ, below, after his TV interview with our friends at MOBI TV, our awesome neighbours.

The team heads off into the setting sun...

 

WAVE YOUR FLAG, ZAMBIA! 

Kodak Moment

World, meet the "Kodak Vest Pocket Autographic Camera"  Produced by Eastman Kodak from 1912-1926, it features a Kodak Anastigmat f 7.7 lens. This model was made Jan 1913 and so is 99 years old. It came all the way to me in Zambia from an antique shop in Michigan.  Can I embarrass the Winters with a very huge and public THANK YOU?!!  Thanks, guys.  Clearly, I'm smitten. 

 This camera has 4 shutter speeds:  1/25, B, T, and 1/50; and 5 f-stops: Moving objects f/7.7, near view & portrait f/11, average view f/16, distant view f/22, and Marine, Clouds and Snow f/32.

 Charles Linberg carried this camera with him on his flights, as did George Mallory and Andrew Irving on what may be the first summiting of Mt. Everest -- 29 years before Hillary and Tenzing's documented climb.  Many of their personal effects were recovered but Irving's body and the expedition's KVP camera was not.  If it is recovered - there are efforts underway to fund a controversial climb to recover Irving's body -  his camera may be the evidence needed to prove if Mallory and Irving were first to summit.

Compact and portable, advertised as the "soldier's camera" during WWI, it's utility has outlasted our point-and-shoot nikon by nearly 100 years.

Now, to find some film. 

(It takes Efke R100 127 from Fotoimpex...just in case you are out and about in Berlin)

Elephant Quarantine

We took a little trip yesterday to go and see 3 baby elephants.  The three are in quarantine at a lodge just outside of town until they are fit enough to be transferred to an elephant orphanage in Kafue NP, part of the David Shephard Wildlife Foundation Elephant Orphanage Project in Zambia who work in tandem with Game Rangers International and ZAWA, the Zambian governmentWildlife Authority

7 month old Musolole and his keeper

Kavalamanja (1 year 7 months, rescued from the banks of the Zambezi River in September) and Maramba (1 year 5 months, rescued from outside Livingstone) get their bottles....the 2 litres of milk went down in about 2 minutes! Both were found by their mothers, killed by poachers for their tusks.

O gets to hold a baby bushbaby (also called galagos), a small, nocturnal "early" primate.  He, Gizmo, is so unbelievably cute and his fur so soft he hardly even seemed to be real.

Clearly.... he is a primate!  Here, Gizmo is clutching his surrogate momma, a stuffed teddy bear. 

Musolole (7 months old, orphaned at Siome Ngwesi at the Namibian border) is recovering well from injuries and is slowly but surely putting on weight.

Kavalamanja, making a go at opening the gate.  The babies have the stables as 'home base' and have a large area of the miombo woodlands set aside at Lilayi to explore.

Sandyland

The sandbox is a hit.  it's also going to be an ongoing headache.  There are a few options for sand here:  building sand, river sand, quarry dust and filter sand.  If you are really ambitious you can load up beach sand from Mongu or Samfya but it's 8 hours away for either place and unlikely that you can convince anyone to do this load for you.  The filter sand is closest to what we want for the sandbox but at 12x the price of the river sand it's really not practical for a sandbox this size.  We bought 80kgs of it.  this will hardly make a dent.   For now we have the space half-full of building sand and will need to organize for another type of sand.  Why?  The building sand is perfect for building strong sand sculptures.  However, it's the rainy season.  And after a downpour?  The sandbox?

 It turned into a mud pit of the Eastern Europe Spa variety.  It was fun for one day. Also a complete soupy, slurry, sloppy mess.  Fun, but not really what any of us wanted after that one day.  Fine for the rest of the year but we need the thing now! We have one month off school and need to be busy from sun up to sun down! (if there is sun, that is)

The next day after the downpour as a school holiday - it dried out OK but now it was too sunny out there!  It's great for afternoon play but, again, for the rainy season when the kids have a month off school, we need some morning shade and some other sand.  Finn and I set up a shade tarp.  But see that PALE back in the distance....not under the shade tarp....and that pale back, belonging to a friend, was a painful shade of pink by lunchtime.  I'm thankful my two don't burn easily but they also are pretty good about wearing hats, shirts and just making sure they play where or when it's shady.

Above, Finn loading up his Tonka truck (which is now 5 years old! Talk about a great toy for a child!) for the big kids... 

For your next long distance call?

I'm not sure if I have seen anything cooler.
Of course we had to buy it.

The sand in the timer is neon pink, by the way, and the glass broke after about a week.  But the box is going in my permanent collection of awesomeness.

Elves of Jesmondine

An early santa project? Uhhh, no. This was begun for xmas 2010 but the elves got distracted by work and food and football. With reindeer again round the corner, we felt renewed holiday pressure and finally figured out how to youtube a soundslides production. 

Merry Christmas, mom!

Finny trailer, movie set for release in 2012

Let me dutifully give props to The Kinks for supplying the audio from their fabu Arthur album released in a fabu year (1969).  Seems the attorneys at YouTube (aka Google, their march toward world domination continues) get all atwitter when music is applied too liberally for their briefs.  But so far the result is only an inability to view this trailer (still unrated, mind you) in Deutschland.  Nein!

Friday commute

40 Celsius

Things to do on a really hot day when the lake right off your doorstep is oh so inviting but oh so infested with crocodiles.....

1. Dump water on your head. (check)

2. Dump water on your brother's head. (check)

or....this:

Activities #1 and #2 occupied things 1&2 for a 20 minutes but when we added an art element this kept them busy another 2 solid hours.  Good thing b/c we had 4 hours to kill.  After this we moved on to counting monitor lizards.

Flame Tree study

FlyBoy and little gecko

We half expect the boys to sprout gills or wings. (above, O needs both, plus a good insurance plan)

Here is a welcome November surprise -- baby geckos! They are everywhere inside and out and the littlest ones will sit tight like a little logo on your shirt... or in a welcome (and wet) hand. (that's Owen's hand -- this is one of the smallest we have seen)

Advent-tureland

What is this monstrosity? An early Christmas gift from SantaMere.  In the kids advent calendar today there was a pile of sand and a note from the me+big guy in the red suit:  "Can you dig it? Yes, you can!"

Somehow we managed to construct this monstrously large sandbox without the kids really registering what it was.  "Wouldn't it be cool if mom wasn't really building a patio??! It would be and awesome sandbox!"  Uh, yes, duh.

While we were away this weekend, it was (mostly) finished and the kids got to see it before heading out for escuela.  We came home from school today at 1:30pm, changed out of school uniforms (tho they both put on orange shirts and blue shorts. how very odd) and it's 6pm...they are still out there.  there was one minor complaint, one angry shout and a heated discussion that lasted about 4 minutes but otherwise, I was able to work this whole time undisturbed....it's already paid for itself.

We still need more sand, must plaster the pool wall, tidy up the construction mess and plant some flowers or something to make it look a little more garden and a little less WT-Industrial.  The sandbox is our answer to missing the beach so much.  It's a poor substitute to be sure, but it's all we can do for the time being and it will surely be enjoyed by many friends and be home to many battles between plastic dinosaurs, kitties and various other critters. We have some sand from zanzibar here to add and will start adding in shells collected from all over, some stones that somehow came from Lincoln Park and Cannon Beach, etc.  Bring a pocketful of sand next time you come over, will ya?!


(Egads!  I missed posting anything in November!  For what it's good for, November was too busy with living to get around to much blogging, so I can't feel too badly. )