mugwort tea

A cool drink for a hot day, an infusion of mugwort leaves. Mugwort grows so tall, pale and silvery on one side, olive green on the other; I just pick the tips, pretending I'm harvesting tea. Well, it will be a tea of sorts.

It has a scent like chrysanthemum and pine. Here's leftovers from the first batch:



It looks like rich pond scum doesn't it? But it's delicious and cooling.

kite patch

This is an amazingly innovative idea for a fighting mosquito-born diseases like malaria, dengue fever, encephalitis, and West Nile virus. It's a tiny, nontoxic patch that you put on your clothing. It disrupts the mosquitos' reception of your CO₂ signature, so they don't find and bite you. It lasts for 48 hours.

It's been proven effective and safe in preliminary tests, but, as with all pharmaceutical developments, it takes a whole lot of money and time to get FDA approval. Boy would I love to have some of those patches to take with me to East Timor! Both the teachers I'll be working with have suffered bouts of dengue fever, which is rife in Dili. But it's not available to the public yet, except in the test area of Uganda.

The indigogo kite patch campaign has reached its initial goal, but as with many of these campaigns, there are various stretch goals. Take a look and see what you think.