Prepping Faidherbia albida seeds for planting (Part I)

It seems the Ku'omboka ceremony was peaceful, though attendance was very low. Depending on who you listen to, it was either the heavy government presence or the threat of violence by Lozi youths, though I'm sure the truth lies somewhere in between. Nobody wants to stop a bullet, much less on a holiday. Overall, still have mixed feelings about missing the (?) festivities, but water under the bridge.

Otherwise, literally worked myself sick this weekend; went hard at it all week and Saturday, but pushed a bit too much. Despite our being on the doorstep of the cold [relatively] season, the midday sun feels like it is about three or four feet away, and the temps are in the Philistine range. I always go about 45 minutes or an hour more than I should ... then I crash. The real killer here, though, is the three kilometer walk through this damnable sand in the absence of shade from our production site back to town. I'd be a shambles in the desert, I've decided.  

Anyway, I woke Sunday with a sore throat and even more phlegmatic than usual. Ugh. Nothing like catching a cold in hot weather; how does one pull that off? I don't know, but I succeeded.

Therefore, didn't do much; didn't write my overdue reports; didn't write up any success stories; didn't do much other than clean up my room. I wanted to sort out a bunch of Faidherbia albida seeds I had sitting on my shelf, but was remarkably unmotivated to pick through them to remove those that had been eaten by bruchidae (bruchid beetles), so I put them in a bucket and poured water on them, hoping the bad ones would float off (often bad legume seeds will float, whereas good will sink). No luck, however ... seeds with visible holes mostly sunk. Grr. Cranky about the poor returns, my sore throat, and my whistling nose, I threw up my proverbial hands and left the bucket, seeds still immersed.

When I thought of late in the day, I decided to dump them out and dry them for later sorting. I noticed that most of the bad ones had imbibed water and had swollen to two or three times their original size, making separating them relatively simple. The unaffected (presumably viable) seeds had not changed size whatsoever.

Hmm ...