Otherwise occupied, sickly, invaders

This has been a week full of classes for me. Monday and Wednesday were online and in-person classes respectively, while Tuesday was a day in the office preparing for the class I presented yesterday. That is not a heavy load, but the time away from the computer takes the time I would ordinarily spend writing this blog. Yesterday was an interesting class because it was mostly my coworkers who attended the class. There were two participant who were from client companies, but neither of them had yet taken on the responsibilities the class teaches about. That leveled the playing field, so to speak, across the class and gave me the opportunity to start the newbies out right when they are required to do those activities at some future date. It was a little longer than usual class because there was a great deal of discussion. I welcome that. No one was in a particular hurry to leave the class when we were done so we got the chance to continue our informal discussions after the class. It is always amazing to see how everyone relaxes once the test is over. I was pretty tired when I finally got home. Not only from the hours spent talking and standing, but from a very poor night’s sleep the night before.

After Mama and I took care of the evening feeding, I took a short nap before getting ready for church. Mama stayed home since she was not feeling well – an ongoing cough has her feeling puny. We had a missionary on deputation headed to Nigeria last night. He was delightful. He preached about the disciple’s reaction to Jesus’ interaction with the Samaritan woman at the well. Not only was she a woman, but she was a despised Samaritan. When Jesus told the disciples to look on the fields which were white unto harvest, perhaps Jesus was seeing the many persons responding to the woman’s testimony of her conversation with Jesus as they came out of the city to see for themselves. His question was, do the differences you see in someone else hinder you from sharing the Gospel with that person? How big do those differences have to be to cause you to stay uninvolved? It was a great message.

I was given the liberty to work from home this morning because I have fulfilled my obligation to spend two days in the office by teaching two classes already this week. There are actually a few things I could do at the office that I cannot do from home, but I will catch up to those administrative tasks at a later date. Mama needed my help with the morning chores here at the farm while she tries to rest and recuperate. On the very sad side of this illness, she refuses to kiss me while she is sick. We will catch up at some later point, but I am not used to being so avoided.

This morning we had the house sprayed for insects. Our focus is on fleas, but the organic recipe used by the man doing to treatments offers a broader protection against multiple invaders. Although the smell from the treatment is not overpowering, it is definitely noticeable. With the cough Mama is dealing with, the addition of the vapors of the treatment to the air we are breathing is not a pleasant combination. It could be worse. The treatment is made from crushed chrysanthemums. Not wholly unpleasant, but we will need to light a few candles as well as opening the windows. Right now, the outside temperature is 81° F. also not unpleasant.

On the funny-how-things-happen side of life, when Mama opened a window in the kitchen, she did so by lowering the top windowpane. When she did we discovered that wood ants were starting to invade our house. Since the man was in the house to apply his treatment for bugs, he was able to identify the invasive species, spray and kill them and let us know what to do if they come back. Now if we could discover a workable way to keep the wasps from building their nests everywhere, I would feel like we were making headway against our insect invaders.

Speaking of invaders, mice are really bad this year as well. Since we are focused on protecting the chickens and the dogs, it is proving difficult to get ahead of the mice. We cannot set out poison. We have to use sticky traps. So far, those have proved minimally effective against mice although we have caught a chicken, multitudes of grasshoppers and a poisonous snake. We have eliminated only four mice with the traps. I can safely assume our population of mice is significantly higher than that.

So, the fight goes on.