Pressure

I know, I missed a day, but I am sure you'll forgive me once you hear what I have been up to. It seems technology and I will never be friends, despite all the effort I make. So in addition to my motherboard going into a coma, my work-email moved to a new server and all my emails were lost.

All my legal documents and communication that I was hoping to use as a backup, now I no longer have my laptop, gone! Luckily we got our IT guys to revert to the old server temporarily. After spending h o u r s researching whether I could forward a bunch of emails at once, it seemed there was an obstacle at every corner.

In the end I had to give up and go through, select and forward as much as I thought I needed of my thousand emails. Annoyingly, actually forwarding the emails manually took less time than I spent researching mass forwarding.

This morning, I dropped my phone and when I turned it on, message after message popped up in my inbox. Suddenly I got all those messages that friends and contacts had told me they had sent since last Saturday. Imagine the added wahala of having to deal with each issue that was in the text (still not done!).

Today's Christmas song is a twi Christmas song by Kaakyire Kwame Appiah. To be honest, I hadn't heard it until today, but I am hoping others will recognise it. Why this song? I recall that the last or second last Thursday Before Christmas is usually carols' night at the Ghana School of Law and the best songs are without a doubt the Twi songs. Come to think of it, for me, carols' night there, or at Ridge Church is when the Christmas spirit really sets in for me. I hope those of you in Ghana have had the chance to attend some this year!

Also, I'm in the Ghana mood as I made some omotuo and nkatiekwan (rice balls and groundnut soup) for dinner this evening and it was lush! It may also have helped upgrade my Christmas present from the hubby...

Go nuts!

If you've ever bought Kofi Brokeman (roasted plantain with groundnuts) and asked for peeled nuts, you'll have noticed that the woman selling it will quickly put the nuts in a piece of paper, twist it round a bit, then swish, swish, then hand you perfectly peeled nuts.

Well today for some reason, I craved groundnuts. This is strange as I usually hate peanuts and groundnuts, guess I need the nutrients in them. I bought 10 pesewas worth ($0.10 or 0.65 SEK) and took it to the house. In the kitchen I tried peeling them by swishing them round in my hand, from one hand to another to sieve the peel off and then finally into a bowl. I felt like a pro until I stopped and looked. When I looked down, I had a bowl full of a mix of groundnuts and groundnut peel and a kitchen worktop covered in groundnut peel, with the occassional nut found here and there.

As I cleaned the countertop and reminisced of the seller peeling, I had to ask myself, how the hell does she do it???