On Labor, Rats and Gloves

The adage 'When the cat is away, the mice will play' has thus far not applied very well to my four days in Tabuga all by my lonesome while Jason and Andrea are in Quito for work. On the contrary, I've somehow managed to work even harder than when Andrea's around -- but I have good reason. We have hundreds of tiny little seedlings crowding our front and back porches, all tomatoes and peppers and others, that will soon need to be transplanted into some friendly soil in our ever growing and greening garden.

With that in mind, I've set out early each morning to the garden with pickaxe in hand to till and push around large quantities of dirt. As you can see below, I had a not-small piece of real estate that needed to be completely tilled, layered with compost and shoveled into beds for planting, and only the early morning and early evening to work, as my wimpy Irish skin cannot hold up to the daily pounding of the midday Ecuadorian sun. Here are the three beds, taken today before I finished the third:


Sadly, and obviously, my hands (especially after my layaround time in the States) are nowhere near callused enough to withstand 5-6 hours of pickaxing per day for three days, and midway through the first day they made their concerns known with long trails of blisters. The second day I was able to switch hands and become fairly ambi-pickaxe, but today (day three) I needed something better. My Ecuadorian father-in-law (don't worry, we're not actually married, they just think we are) came over yesterday and I proudly showed him my work, explaining that while the work wasn't incredibly hard, my hands just weren't up to it. He took one look at my hands and said that I needed 'guantas', which is the name for the large indigenous jungle-rats that are quite delicious. It says a lot about my estimation of his indigenous medical knowledge that I figured that I needed something along the lines of the fat from a skinned guanta, but later that night I looked up the word in the dictionary and found that 'gloves' are 'guantes', so instead of being weirdly shamanistic he was just being practical. Unfortunately, it would be easier for me to procure jungle rats in Tabuga than gloves, so I made do today with duct tape, which actually worked great.



And yes, I am repping the United States hard core with the above Jersey. U! S! of A!

Lastly, my third seed bed was tough at the end because I happened on a patch of pottery shards. For those of you not familiar with our area, this part of Ecuador was home to a pre-Incan (or maybe Mayan? Aztecan? I'm hopeless without Andrea) civilization called the Jama-Couaque, who were quite prolific potters and have left artifacts all over our region. All I found in our garden was shards, but below is a picture of Dre with an artifact that our friend reckons is around 1,500 years old and was found nearby. Neat, eh?



That's all for now. Please put my mom in your thoughts, she's leaving tomorrow on a three-week tour of Africa to hike Mount Kilomanjaro! Go Carol.