Home

We have all been having trouble with terminology. Maybe I have started it. Sometimes I tell Jarrah to put her dirty clothes in the garbage bin instead of the dirty clothes basket. Sometimes I say get the broom instead of a knife - stuff like that. There must be some kind of vitamin to cure this problem. A word recall problem. Maybe I am developing a dementia of some kind. Who knows. The problem however is even developing in the kids. But related specifically to our location and what we call the places we frequent.
We have now moved into our fourth house since Ben and I got married. Our first house which Ben (and a carpenter named Eye) built was in a village called Kruel (pronounced Krill). Sadly we only lived there two and a half years. Then moved north about 120 km away and to a village called Jombok Paim in Rovieng. We built a smaller house and not as finished as our first house since we realised our living there may be short term. We ended up there for the next twelve years. So it was easy to keep the two places straight. Kruel and Rovieng. Fast forward to 2014 and April. We moved to the forest here in Songkom Thmey near a village called Ta Bos but much closer to a mountain called Phnom Tnout (or Sugar Palm Mountain). Now, here lies the problem. Since moving out here, I have had a recall problem and almost exclusively refer to our house in Rovieng as Kruel. But it doesn't stop there. When we first moved here we lived at the "Teis-an-a-kar" which means headquarters or office or something like that. This was the building Ben built for the Community Forest Headquarters and for our temporary house. From April through to just now - October 18 to be exact, that was our home. We then moved to our permanent home. While living at the Teis-an-a-kar we called where the house is, appropriately "the house site." Now that we have moved to "the house site" we are now calling our house, the house (I guess) and the Teis-an-a-kar, "the house site." Why I don't know. And we all do it. Ben. The kids. Not just me thankfully.

The Garden

We have been growing and trying to grow various green things in our garden. Some things work (like eggplant and pumpkin) and other things have not done so well with our sometimes negligent care (like the cucumbers). I brought back from Australia a bunch of seeds - lots of herbs that I want to use in my food and other miscellaneous stuff that my avid gardener mother gave me. So today before it got too hot, the family all trooped out to the garden and started working. The kids planted trakuen (or gas-zoon-u-et in Burmese or morning glory in English) and I planted cabbage, rocket, spinach and parsley. I was complaining to Ben that these seeds seem so small and my gardening efforts always seem to be for nought as nothing comes up, or little spindly things come up or bugs eat it or something happens. I am a pessimistic gardener. Well the first sign that my day was not going right was when halfway down the spinach row I realised I was planting on top of the rocket. It was only about 2 or 3 metres worth so I quickly corrected myself. Then I moved onto the parsley. I did a whole row of italian parsely imagining lovely tabouli salads in the future. At the end of that row I realised I had planted the whole row on top of my spinach. Ben made some smart comment about why my gardening efforts never work. Anyway, lets see what happens. We watered the rows and in 2 or 3 weeks we shall see what comes up. Fingers crossed. I better go out and water them every day too. What a lot of work!

posted from Bloggeroid