Procrastination is the Thief of Time

When I was a little, we had a section in English class about aphorisms. We had to select a quote by a famous person and illustrate it. Even at eleven, I LOVED efficiency and hated wasting time, so I chose the phrase from Edward Young, “Procrastination is the thief of time.” I thought I was so clever—I drew a picture of some Looney Tunes character sleeping in a corner with a long list of things to do with a giant clock sneaking up to steal the list away from him. I know, fascinating, right?

Well, when you are a trailing spouse (as we call ourselves) and you move, you usually have way too much time on your hands when you get to a new post. There is really no such thing as procrastination or wasting time because you have no obligations and your “to do” list is short. Taking a page (no pun intended) from the women’s magazines (see numbers five and six below) I’ve been reading, I decided to create a list of what I’ve been doing with my time:

1. Learning about our enormous house: We have five bathrooms. Five. In the first week alone, I only visited three. We went from almost zero cabinet space to cabinets in all five bathrooms with shelves above them going up to the very tall ceilings. I need a ladder to get to the top shelf.

Our kitchen is almost the size of our apartment in Arlington. We have a refrigerator/freezer, and an additional freezer that take up maybe 5% of the room, the kitchen is so big. The freezer is completely empty, by the way. WE DON’T NEED IT! Our kitchen is so big, it has an actual roach motel behind the stove. Unfortunately, they check in and out, Black Flag.

Once while sitting in one of our two living rooms (one for me to read magazines in and one to read books in, of course), I got so bored that I decided to see if I could jump rope in every room of the house, save our bathrooms. Did I mention we have five of them? I will keep reminding you of how many we have. I was able to jump rope in all of them, hallways included.

Our house is so big that when it moves it does the Harlem Shake. Our house is so big all it wants for Christmas is to see its own feet. Okay, I’ll stop. Anyway, it’s big, and I have time to explore it. And to anthropomorphize it. But, I do leave the house for…

2. Walking the dog: Dogs, like in much of the world, are something to fear here. Dogs only have two real occupations in Rwanda: terrifying guard dog or terrifying street dog. So, when I walk Yoda, I truly feel like Shrek. People run in horror to the other side of the street. They walk into oncoming cars on the street to avoid passing him. They ask me if he’s vicious. They glare at him with anger. They glare at me with anger. Still, I have time to walk him, so I walk him 30 minutes to an hour almost every day. Even though we have a big yard (so that we can look at it from our big house with five bathrooms) where he can run around on multiple levels of the yard, I still walk him for something to do. And because I have so much time, I decided to research cute collars on Etsy.com. I ordered him a navy chevron patterned collar with a matching bowtie. Quel cute!! I know! I will blog about my walking experience with him once the bowtie collar comes in, but I have a feeling we will still suffer from Shrek Syndrome. Luckily, I only suffer from this syndrome walking with him and not…

3. Walking in general: So, I have extra time not just to walk the dog, but to walk to do errands. All of them. The closest grocery shop is about 30 minutes away and you cannot get all you need from one place, so almost every day, I walk to different stores—the cheese place, the bakery, the Kenyan version of Walmart, the Italian Store. Yes, there is actually one here, but there is no deli and no burger place next to it, like the one on Route 29. Sigh. Walking, like running, means I get to be the mayor. Kids shake my hand as I walk past, or give me high fives. Street sweepers point to me and say “muzungu!” That literally means “white person,” but it’s what foreigners are called and you hear it everywhere. I usually say, “where?” when they say that, but they don’t get the joke. But I give a great big belly laugh after I say it, although number four below is whittling that down a bit. Moto taxis and cars honk at me to get me to ride them since they cannot believe I am choosing to walk. Sure, our car is still en route from the States, which is one reason why I am walking, but even when it comes, I’ll still have time to kill and a major fear of driving here. Walking everywhere feeds into the next item on the list, which is…

4. Exercising way too much: Hard to believe since I was kind of an exercise freak before, but I am able to exercise even more now. So, I can run, then come home and eat breakfast. Then swim in the freezing pool at the hotel gym we joined, then come home and walk to the grocery store. Then I can do my stretching/strength training. Then eat lunch. Then walk the dog. Then read. The possibilities are limitless. I am even making plans to start teaching an aerobics class at Hubby’s work place next month. I haven’t started playing tennis yet since that takes some planning (need to be a club member or play with a member or…gasp…the courts are far enough that even I can’t walk to them). But I have already resurrected Swim Team Kigali (team of three, but we are a mean three, we) and am joining a running club. I do exercise my mind, too, though with…

5. Reading: I was impressed with how many books I have read since we arrived until I read my friend’s blog. She has read 12…I’m looking at you, Crystal! But, I’ve read five, which isn’t bad for me for six weeks. All depressing, of course—about Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Rwanda…to liven it up, though, I am now reading Joan Rivers’ I Hate Everyone…Starting with Me. Did I just lose major street cred with my intellectual friends out there? Then stop reading because I am also devouring magazines: Elle, InStyle, Glamour, Self, Lucky…all of which lead to…

6. Conducting a closet inventory/fantasizing about having a tailor make fabulous clothes: Even though we don’t have that many clothes here since we are mostly living out of our suitcases, that hasn’t stopped me from looking at every single item in my closet to see what needs to be tailored and what I would like a tailor to make a duplicate of. And what I would like to have made from the pages of the many magazines I am reading. Of course, I need to find said tailor, which is on my to-do list this week, but I will…I have also done an inventory in my head of the clothes coming, that’s how much time (and brain cells, since I’m not using them for a job yet) I have. When I’m not editing and adding to “The Boutique” as Hubby calls my closet, I find myself…

7. Ordering online way too much: In addition to preparing to put the children of my yet-to-be-discovered-tailor through school with the business I will give him/her, I am also spending too much time on Amazon, NetGrocer, and Etsy. I order so much that I have yet to visit the package room at Hubby’s office without having to use a cart to pick up all of the boxes. It’s my patriotic duty, though, right? And who doesn’t need twelve boxes of Lundberg brown rice? Girl’s gotta have fiber during the End of Days.  Speaking of which…

8. Engaging with proselytizers: When I see missionaries in the U.S., I don’t stop. No time, no interest for this recovering Catholic lass. Here, I not only have time, but find it fascinating to be approached on the street by Rwandans. A few blocks from my house while walking back from the Kenyan Walmart, two young people asked in English if I had time to talk about Jesus. Of course I have time, I said, completely intrigued. They spent about 10 minutes going through a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet about self-injuring among teenagers (the Witnesses weren’t amused when I said, “ah, cutting, yes, I used to do that when I was five. I was an advanced kid.”), not being a slave to wine (but, I always say, remember that Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding, not the other way around), and the wandering albatross (about intelligent design).  

When they finished, I quoted Stephen Colbert’s line that those who don’t believe in God will have the last laugh because they will have an eternity in Hell to prove it, but they weren’t buying it. Of course, I didn’t say that to them, but it gave me a chuckle thinking about it. And I did feel compelled to tell them that while albatrosses may be intelligently designed, they are not good to eat. Just ask the guy in Laura Hillenbrand’s book Unbroken, who couldn’t eat them even after starving for weeks on a raft in the ocean.  He used them for bait instead. I read that book last week. I digress. The Witnesses thanked me for the tip on albatrosses and even let me keep the pamphlet. I will read it in the downstairs living room. Or maybe the first part there and the second part in the upstairs living room.

9. Cooking toddlers: Some of you may recall my fiascos with cooking… forgetting to put yeast in pizza dough; mistaking Uzbek hot sauce for pizza sauce and using it; putting cookie dough on cooling racks instead of baking sheets causing cookie dough to drip all over the bottom of the oven; using yogurt butter to sautee a veggie burger, only to realize that it wasn’t really butter so the pan burnt to smithereens. I should have invented PinterestFail, blurgh.

Here, I have time to make beaucoup fails. Like when I made cookies for the third time in a week and got lazy. Or high. I can’t remember. In any case, even though I have time, I tried a shortcut for making the cookies since all we have in the welcome kit are two pots and no baking sheets. The pots can hold about five cookies each, and the batch makes 45, so it takes awhile to bake them, then cool (no cooling sheets here to mess up with!), then put the next batch in.

Any. Who. I decided to make a cookie cake in one of the pans. Did I adjust the amount in the recipe? OF COURSE NOT! So, the “cake” completely oozed out of the pan all over the bottom of the oven. I wish I had taken a picture of it and my attempts to use other things (pot lids, plastic containers…not good, by the way, plastic in the oven, not good…) to catch the dripping in order to salvage some of the cookie cake, which utterly failed.

While visiting Bathroom Number Three, I thought to myself the other day, why not pull a Julie and Julia with Ferran Adria (of El Bulli fame in Spain)? I will call the book Bulli! Shannon and Ferran…with quotes from Teddy Roosevelt. And if I don’t have the tools to make all of the food, I can make them with all my free time. And that is the perfect segue into my final item on the list…

10. Trying out new activities/hobbies: I took a welding class once when I was in prison so I am in the process of making a liquid nitrogen dewar. Fingers crossed—I’ll need that dewar for the Bulli! book to work.

Some of the quirky, fun things I’m truly, actually doing: outdoor disco bowling (they set up the pins manually! Manually! And use hockey sticks to collect stray pins, it’s adorbs), Vinyasa yoga (fine, I haven’t done it yet, but my friend is the instructor, so I swear I’m doing it soon), and chatting up everyone.

I am on a first name basis with one of the guards at a nearby Embassy, whose name is Joseph and he’s a dead ringer for Stalin (whose first name was…coincidence??). I joke with the guards at the Kenyan Walmart who no longer check my backpack or make me go through the metal detector and instead say, “no bombs, right?” while I fake laugh and point my index finger at them like a politician. I show the guards outside the bazillion daycare facilities in our neighborhood the tricks I have taught Yoda. Those guards know me well enough that they know Yoda isn’t Shrek. They particularly love the Bang! trick, where I point a trigger at Yoda and yell “Bang!” while he slowly lies down and turns around (he does this slowly simply because he is confused, not because I am that good) on his back playing dead.

Since I still have time for more hobbies, I’m now starting to read Amy Sedaris’ recession-friendly book Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People to learn how to make slingshots with wishbones and beards from hair in people’s hairbrushes (Halloween is just around the corner, you devil worshipers).  The reading is slow going, though, as the book is in Bathroom Number Four.

Okay, this is a long blog post and it’s getting way too silly. For I am high again. Totally joking about cooking toddlers, by the way. I apologize, dear readers, on with your day!