The Sunday morning breakfast meeting is being changed to Sunday afternoon brunch or Sunday evening dinner. Gardening is the rule of the day and we are putting sweet potatoes, artichokes and asparagus in the garden. The watering system works, the air is clean and quiet, only the mosquitoes that I seem to be breeding are relentless.

There was a moment. Maybe we should buy a eucalyptus ointment that truly worked to repel mosquitoes. Almost as soon as I said it, my ex partner showed me a box that she had bought the previous year. We have exactly what we need to repel mosquitoes and it was only 10 rubles last year. Three bucks.

But then I remember the hack that I learned in my first year here. Coffee. If you rub coffee grounds on your skin or where mosquitoes would have a chance to bite you, they hate the smell. It works amazingly well.

I thought about the situation for a short while and took a pot that I never used because it came from a place where there was a lot of sausages cooked in it. I still don’t believe in how clean it is. But I have cleaned it and it’s probably a perfect pot to make some coffee that you have no intention of drinking. My choice was to put the coffee in the pot and roast it a little and then douse it with water and let it boil until the coffee became thick like a cream. Let it cool and rub it on your skin and voila, less mosquitoes.

Why the naked picture? Because we’re gardening. How do you garden?