Out with the Old and In with the New

I'm so excited about my new oven!! I can't even tell you what a blessing this thing will be. Ben bought it when he went to Douala to pick up Lee, but we haven't had a chance until today to move the old one out and the new one in. Isn't it a beaut!! The burners on top are basically the same as my old one...I had six before and I have 6 now. But the oven itself is over twice the size of my old one!! I can fit two 9x13 pans and another small casserole dish on the top rack itself! It has a roasting pan and it also has a rotisserie feature. I can skewer a chicken and it will rotate at the touch of a button. I just can't tell you how excited I am. It has a few glitches...but none that will cause huge problems. The whole oven is gas (you can see the rusty orange gas bottle to the right of it), but it has some electric features. It has an interior light, the rotisserie runs on electricity, and it has an electric starter. Well, we started the burners fine, but have yet to start the oven. So, I'm going to need to get one of those candle lighters for my oven. Kind of a pain, but I'll deal. The reason we got this is because we are hosting a lot more visitors and my old oven was so small and really difficult at times when cooking large amounts of food for large amounts of people. We hosted a family of 7 last term, so that was 13 of us eating. We hosted 7 adults this past year - again 13 of us eating, and this coming summer we are hosting a big church group, so having a bigger oven will be a bigger blessing and help to me...the chef!

Still no rain...keep praying! :) and here is a super cool website to check out the rainfall in Africa. When you see dark brown, you can tell that is where it is raining at that moment. I think the satellite for this site takes a new photo every hour, so I keep this website open a lot and keep refreshing throughout the day. Right now there is absolutely nothing over Cameroon...all blue. Check out Wikipedia here to see what Cameroon looks like and where Bamenda is located.

I was afraid that Rex wasn't going to be with us much longer today. Starting yesterday he was refusing to eat and he wouldn't even open his eyes. I started doing some research on chameleons and we were doing a lot of wrong things in taking care of him. He needs sunlight which he wasn't getting enough of. They don't like to be handled a lot and are stressed easily, so you should hold them as little as possible. They need water, but won't drink it out of a dish. They are used to drinking it off of leaves. So, we made some major changes today. We have huge floor to ceiling windows all around our parlor. They have screens on them and in the afternoon a lot of sunlight floods those windows. So, I stuck a big tall branch that I'd cut off of a big bush, into that window and put Rex inside it and closed all the glass panes. He had plenty of climbing space and leaves to hide under. Then I went around and caught flies in a little tupperware container and I kept releasing them in there and shutting the window. I know for sure that he ate 2 and possibly more. I was so glad to see him eating again. He really enjoyed the sunshine today and when it started getting cool I put him back in his bucket and put fresh foliage in there and sprinkled a bunch of water in there so he could get some liquid. So...hopefully we did enough to keep him alive and if he survives til tomorrow...we will do it all over again!