Clutter, cooking and compost

So last week I finally got around to doing the rearranging I had been threatening since the start of September. The start of September was the time when Jeni left, Loraine came, we renegotiated our housing situation, the fire destroyed everything and I said goodbye to the last of our winter volunteers. It was a pretty sad time for me, watching everything change as I stood still in the middle and just waited. At the time I had the urge to tip the whole house upside down and start again, instead of having to look at the empty spaces and ash. This week it finally happened, and I managed to rope Emma and Loraine into helping me. Turns out the boys are no good at heavy lifting and ran away at the first  sniff of hard work.

After a lot of talking and meeting over several months it was decided we would stay in the house we are in now, and Malvina would build a new house for her tourists. The new house is right next to the camp ground where visitors stay and we were supposed to be moving there in November. The tourist season is about to hit and I’m really not looking forward to it. They are noisy and disruptive, disrespectful to the forest, drop rubbish, and sometimes interfere with our traps. It’s a bit of a shock to the system after the peaceful quiet of winter and having sole use of all the land for so long. I told Malvina one night (after some beers) that I was really excited for the tourists to come. Since we would be so close to them. I was keen to be able to talk to all the people and enjoy the forest with them, party with them and tell them all about biology. Shortly afterwards she decided we should stay at the other side of the stream, in the house we are already in, as far away as possible! If I wasn’t so happy about this decision I might be offended, but my secret plan worked.

It was also the perfect excuse to turn the house inside out. I had to buy all new beds anyway, so I made a deal with the furniture salesman and got 4 shelves thrown in plus some big tables for eating at. I am going to borrow some more items from the ‘TTU list of everything you could ever need’ including a new sofa, chairs and a freezer which was installed at the weekend. The office is moving out of my room and into the bigger area across from Conception’s room and the museum will go with it. In two weeks time I will have my own space with a door I can close without people walking in and out of it at all times of day - can’t wait. The kitchen has been reordered with a whole table as a preparation area for our new cook, space made for the new freezer and a kind of wall art mural thing to hide the ugly wall on the outside of the boys bathroom. Looks nice and I felt like a Carol Smiley/Rolf Harris combo.

We cleared out the garden and planted watermelons, yellow melons, yellow peppers and cucumber. We also tried experimenting with raised beds so we will see how that works out. Apparently when it rains heavily, it won’t uncover the roots as much. The new bed is composed of the compost from our compost bin, horse manure and sand. I weeded the whole of the vegetable patch, so now it looks like there is nothing growing – but there is! We have picked squash for soup and the first tomatoes are turning red. The garlic is sprouting well and the onions and beetroot are still powering through. Every time I go in there I think of Rosemary and Derek. Thanks so much for the garden guys. If you two ever come back I will have a thousand questions for you on how to grow things – I have no idea what I’m doing.

The new cook started yesterday, but about ten minutes into our conversation about her duties in the house, she told me she doesn’t know how to cook. I asked her to do something simple for lunch – egg mayonnaise (egg salad) sandwiches. I gave her the instructions so she boiled the water then said “now what?” We each ended up with a plate of sliced up egg with some mayonnaise squirted on top. Seems the concept of a sandwich is also a tricky one. Today though I went for something even easier – ham and cheese sandwiches. I was expecting a bag of bread, bag of ham and bag of cheese put on the table which is what we normally do, in a do-it-yourself sandwich type way. Instead we got neatly stacked, perfectly square sandwiches with one slice of ham and cheese in each and all the crusts cut off. She is a fast learner. Tonight we are having guiso de arroz which kind of loosely resembles risotto. She is preparing it now and hasn’t asked me any questions yet so fingers crossed she knows what she’s doing!

So I guess the transformation is nearly complete. Once the office goes, the house will no longer be a work space, but a new improved living area. Para La Tierra is about to become a beautiful butterfly – hopefully one of the really rare ones.