Every once in a while it is nice to stop and savor the small sweet things in life. Today is my 60th birthday – not exactly a small sweet thing – but enough little gems have occurred today that they deserved to be savored.

At about 5:30 this morning I was sitting on the living room couch checking emails in the dim fluorescent glow of a battery powered lantern (the generator comes on at 6). I heard a munching and scrunching coming from the ceiling. That in itself isn’t unusual, straw roofs are good transmitters of animal sounds. This was loud enough, though, that it was definitely coming from indoors.

I took my trusty REI torch and directed the beam at the rafters. There was a fuzzy tail bobbing along behind the braided straw trim where the wall meets the ceiling. That darn squirrel, I thought. But then a head and body appeared with two, forward facing eyes flashing red in the light. This was an itty bitty carnivore. A galago (or bush baby) – a small nocturnal primate – stared down at me, round faced, pointy eared and fluffy. He ran around for a little while and then disappeared through one of the multitudinous gaps between our roof and walls. People spend hours trying to spot the elusive bush babies in trees. This one came right in and introduced itself.

A few hours later, I was still on the couch working out a sample tourism circuit for the Northern Rangelands. I could see Rehema in the bedroom doing her normal sweeping and mopping. She’d pulled the suitcases out from under the bed and was using a broom to rid the area of cobwebs and dust. Suddenly she jumped up and came into the living room. “There is a snake under your bed!” she said looking scared. “Come look. What should we do?”

“What kind of snake?” I asked, my mind flashing back to the snake-in-the-shower episode. John wasn’t around, it was up to me to extract the snake. I walked into the bedroom, bent down and peered gingerly into the shadows under the bed. “Where is it?”

Then I realized that people were singing “Happy Birthday to you.” I looked up and there were Rehema and Wamuyu singing, smiling and pointing to a cake placed in the center of the bed. On the top, in glistening frosting, it said “Happy Birthday Anne.” They clapped, laughed and looked very pleased with themselves. We cut the cake and had a morning treat.

Here are some other sweet things we’ve encountered.