A day in the life....

Pitta bread ready for the oven

Have you ever had one of those days when you know that you would have had a more productive day if you had just stayed in bed?  First I put the bread maker on to make Pizza and realised I had put in the ingredients for pitta bread instead.  So now……I have 8 pitta bread, because, of course, I just had to double the quantity…and the blunder.  I still have to make the Pizza dough because I have nothing to put in the pitta bread as yet.

Then, as I was minding my own business (not very well I’ll admit) I heard this very peculiar noise from the back garden.  It sounded like someone cranking a piece of scaffolding or something like that, and when I looked I just couldn’t believe my eyes!  What is it with our garden and birds???  Last year it was Moriarty the seagull and this year it’s a ……turkey (Actually.....NOT a turkey but a guiinea fowl as corrected by a lovely reader in the comments below, mashAllah) !  I just have this nasty suspicion that someone is trying to tell me……I’m for the birds.  Tell me something I don’t know.  Then, as I was trying to take a photo of the flamin’ thing my camera wouldn’t work and I think that the memory stick has gone kaput.  And….to cap it all….I burnt my milk saucepan.  It was wet, I NEEDED a cup of milky coffee so I put it on the cooker to dry before I put the milk in and ….promptly forgot about it until I smelt it. All of this before 9.30 am.  I really wished I’d stayed in bed.  So now I’m going to make pizza and then I’m off to do my spring cleaning.  I mean….what can go wrong with a bucket of hot, bleachy, suddy water and a cloth??? 

You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to give the kitchen in this house a really good scrub.  The problem is not with its size but more to do with its popularity.  There is ALWAYS someone in it needing something to eat, or drink or put the kettle on.  I have always really admired the way Algerian women in small over crowded apartments just bulldoze their way to a clean home every morning, cleaning everything in sight and not letting anything or anyone get in their way.  I just don’t have that knack so a simple scrub turns into an all day job.

Loquat fruit tree or Mishemsha as it's called here in /Algeria

But the upshot of my inauspicious morning is that the guinea fowl flew off, only to return briefly at coffee time, my camera memory card works on my daughter’s laptop so my son’s pictures of his visit to the countryside are not all lost Alhamdulilah, the pizza went down a treat and everyone’s looking forward to pitta bread for tea, and the Loquat fruit tree (mishemsha in Algerian derja) in the front yard and the fig tree in the back yard are both bearing fruit Alhamdulilah. Soon after we moved into this house my youngest was at a neighbours' house devouring their mishemsha when the lady of the house told him to plant the seeds in his garden and the picture above is the result mashAllah.   The fig trees were already in the garden when we moved in and both fruit trees have withstood total neglect on one hand or too much water on the other,  on my part, and total abuse by various workmen down the years Alhamdulilhah.

Figs...in April!!!!!