I didn’t know what a drip tray was:

I get home early one Monday morning after a weekend in Nairobi with my family. There is this awful smell coming from somewhere in the house. It’s not over powering but it smells like something small has died and is putrefying. Or perhaps the house help who comes on Saturday to wash my clothes and clean the house in my absence may have switched off the fridge and now the meat has gone bad, I think to myself.

So I drop my stuff…..stuff here meaning my dirty laundry and the special lactose free milk that I can’t get in Nyeri and which my wife bought for me to bring to Nyeri. I am lactose intolerant and can’t digest regular milk so it’s the Kshs. 130.00 per half liter bottle for me of Bio, but I digress!!

I look in the fridge, and sniff about like one of those wolves I see on National Geographic channel as it sniffs the air for goodies, but nothing. That smell isn’t coming from inside the fridge which thankfully is switched on and my meat is nowhere near rancid. It can’t be my dirty laundry either as it was in the car with me or I would have noticed. For good measure I take an extra strong whiff of it confirming that it’s just the regular dirty laundry and correct manly smells!!

I look through the rest of the kitchen and house and other than what appears to be some liquid in a container bolted to the back of the fridge I can’t seem to find anything out of the ordinary. So I open the windows, spray some air freshener and after a shower off I go to perform my nation building duties!

Fast forward to evening! I have just come from the kinyozi and I am feeling well coiffed, itchy beard gone and hair looking smooth and lustrous…………..and jet black!! I feel and look 10 years younger. That smell is still there, pervasive and funky as ever and the house help is also at home. She has washed the dirty clothes and is cleaning the house and cooking my Monday evening dinner the leftovers of which I’ll have for Tuesday afternoon lunch or dinner depending on my mood.

She has also noticed the smell but can’t quite figure it out. She thinks it’s the container of liquid that I noticed in the morning but we can be sure because it’s hidden out of sight and you can’t even drain it properly. We conclude that the pallet that the fridge came on could have been stained by some liquids following a defrosting exercise a week ago and it probably just needs airing for the smell to clear. So we lift up the fridge, remove the pallet and she takes it outside the house to clear up the smell.

But this smell just won’t go away and I can’t think of what I’d say to any visitor that may come calling, though it’s unusual for me to get visitors anyway but who knows, someone could just visit me after the smell no longer bothers me and leave with a very poor impression about my personal hygiene habits!

So down on all fours I go to peer closely at this liquid thingy and using the corner of one of the kitchen towels try and drain the liquid. It is now crystal clear that this is the cause of the stench because the minute that towel soaks up that liquid the smell overwhelms. That this is the source of my problems is now clear!!

A closer look reveals that the container which I later find out is called a drip tray has been screwed onto the fridge with two small nuts which I promptly unscrew, gingerly lift the tray and empty the stinking brown contents into the toilet……….together with one of the screws that makes an audible splash as it disappears from view into the murky waters!!

But I can’t return the tray with only one screw and I don’t know where I can get a screw at this time of the night so like any clever chap and against my better judgement I have no choice but to reach in and pick up that screw which thankfully is still at the bottom of the toilet bowl after which I quickly flush away the remaining muck ensuring that it becomes someone else’s problem.

I then rinse of the drip tray, dry it off and then reattach it to its correct position and after a through wash of my hands with anti-bacterial soap and some apple cider vinegar thrown in just to be sure, I have solved my problem and there is no longer a malodorous odor in the house.

So next time you get a stench in your house whose source you can’t trace you have learnt from the expert that the drip tray on your fridge could be your source of woe and that’s how I found out what a drip tray was!!

My pretty neighbor:

She smiled at me this morning and waved at me shyly through the window and it made my morning and I can't stop thinking about her the whole day!! But let me start from the beginning because like many stories already written and yet others still unwritten, this is a love at first sight tale.

I live in an apartment complex of 12 units on three floors. One of my neighbors is a real looker, a cutie pie as one of my brothers would describe her, and though I don’t see her many times, the few times that I do my heart skips a beat. As she passes close to me on those few occasions that our paths crisscross I can’t help but look admiringly and longingly at her. She is shy and bashful and there is always a hint of a smile playing on her pretty face.

She reminds me very much of others who have been in my life in the not too distant past in her innocence and pureness, unsullied as yet by the difficulties of life and seemingly ignorant of the rat race scurrying around her. Wherever I see her, strains of Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t she lovely” belt out stereophonically and loudly through my head as I wonder where she has been all my life. I shouldn’t be having these thoughts because I am old enough to be her father, her grandfather perhaps god dammit! But I can’t help myself.

The other day she talked to me! This pretty face actually shyly looked me over and asked me a question and my knees buckled. Why me, me of all the neighbors in all the complexes in Nyeri, why did she choose me to have a brief conversation with or was it my lucky day or was this perhaps just a cunning plan to entrap me?

She was almost surreptitious in her approach to a conversation, unsure of whether I’d respond to her request. But it had happened because she needed my help; she needed my help to assist in a rather difficult and delicate task for her to retrieve something that had been dropped over a fence. The God's of fate had smiled down on me and put me in this envious situation .

You see she is not cut out for climbing over fences and gates and so on but I would do it in a heartbeat, in a jiffy even……and I did soaring over that fence almost as it wasn’t there. Carl Lewis that champion hurdler of yesteryear would have been proud of me. And after all, ladies should never ruin their trousers on account of such things when a gentleman is around!!

She had dropped something, a ball actually, and she needed it to be picked up and for her to go back home. I guess it is possible to accidentally drop something and then be unable to retrieve it hence asking a kindly passerby to do the gentlemanly thing and I happened to be that gentleman who was at the right place and at the right time………or maybe she was baiting me looking out for me to exit my house and then dropping something at that opportune time so that she could strike up a conversation with me, I will never know!

Suffice is to say that I was happy to have been of assistance and if I had been a puppy I would have been wagging my tail furiously a million times a minute secure in the knowledge that I had been of assistance however brief and fleeting it had been to this angel.

So who is this amazing human being, a little girl who can’t be more than 2 years old that lives in my complex but who has an amazing command of English in a grown up sort of way. I don't believe that I was as confident back in teh day as the three and four year olds I see nowadays loaded down with books (as I would imagine) in their back packs confidently believing all that their teachers tell them.

This little girl reminds me of my own daughters all those years ago just starting off in their journey through life innocent and pure in their thoughts and actions. One of them was so precocious and adventurous when young that she almost got lost at Heathrow Airport as we waited for our connecting flight as we proceeded on a family vacation, her older sister being less adventurous firmly seated next to me despite my entreaties to look our for her little sister. That's why I feel weak in the knees when I see these young ones and marvel at what comes out of the mouth of these babes and boys.

Enjoy your kids while they are young because soon they will fly the coop and become independent and free then you'll wonder where time went!!