Rain!

I was woken up early on Saturday morning by a storm and the blessed sound of pouring rain! I never thought I'd say this but what a brilliant start to a Saturday. It continued to storm on and off all day, finishing off with thunder, lightning and hail at 3am on Sunday morning. Now the air is clear and everything looks green and shiny. Lovely ^_^

We went out to lunch on Friday with the technical staff from the lab to thank them for all their hard work over the last few months (finishing some big projects) and to farewell one of the girls who is leaving. It was Mexican (again) but tex-mex this time! I had grilled vegie quesadillas... Cheese and vegies between two grilled tortillas, kinda like a Mexican pizza! Yummy but you couldn't eat them very often. They also had chicken fried steak with cream gravy on the menu...

After that we took some of the lab staff bowling! Now most of you know that I am NOT the queen of sports or in any way gifted with coordination, but after bowling a rather dud first game, me and my slow bowl with the little 10 pound ball came home to whoop some booty for the rest of the time! I even managed to bowl multiple strikes in a row! After a couple of games we decided to play left handed...no easy task! But since I had nothing in the way of gifted skill and was bowling technically, I bowled almost exactly the same with my left hand! It was lots of fun. They gave you all sorts of stats with each bowl, including your speed, so matt worked on breaking the 20mph barrier (I was lucky to hit 10). I worked on not hitting myself in the leg as I bowled, and letting go of the ball during the forward motion, rather than backwards.

After bowling we headed over to the home of one of the guys who works in the lab (who came to lunch but not bowling). He's from Nepal and has his family here now, and they cooked us the most amazing dinner. There must have been 20 people! We had Chicken dumplings (called momos) and a chickpea curry salad and gorgeous goat stew and a chicken stew and for main we had dahl bhat tekari (lentils, rice and vegetable curry). So good! My favorite was the beaten rice (chuira?) which was like flat dried rice with toasted peanuts, coriander and little slivers of salty fried mushrooms. A great snack and so yummy! It was sort of like eating dry, toasted museli without the fat :)

Well, short and sweet but that may do for now. I'll post more soon ^_^