I Miss

Journal Entry from last night (after an afternoon of cooking and drinking)
The rain started late this evening and as I sat on my steps with my raincoat hood down I let the wind blow the water onto my face and feet-and it reminded me of love. Thunderstorms that is. They are beautiful but scary- all consuming- make you shudder-with happiness, eagerness, concern as well-what happens now? My brother has always had a fascination with storms. As a young child he would hide in my room or call incessantly if left alone until the storms would pass. But his curiosity for storms outgrew his fear and he wanted to chase them-learn more about the phenomenon that terrified him and could cripple him. So I am with love.

Has been an interesting week here. We were without water for three days we have been unable to find the baboons nearly every day and most are convinced it has something to do with all the storms that we have been experiencing. They usually stay at a certain sleeping site but it they aren’t there we have a few backups. They seemed to have figured out this teleportation thing that I am so adamant about as we have been unable to find them at any of said sites. So lots of early days, which are certainly nice from time to time. The beer bandits-in hindsight-were not the best of characters as L got a nasty cold the next day after drinking from everyone’s beer. Attempted to have a Samhain dinner last night, but L and I found ourselves unable to fully express the tradition to the table that was nearly entirely Christian- and the first real longing for home and my friends set in. Made loads of food (from scratch of course) that was potentially unappreciated-even by the Swiss vegetarian who seemed to have the mindset that it was the vegan margarine that set her pineapple crisp crust on fire in the oven. It made me realize that I had taken for granted the fact that no matter what I make Thierra always tells me she loves it and eats it-and I missed that. L has actually taken over that post very well-and Spook and Dale will eat anything and always tell me it’s lovely so that’s nice too. We added monopoly pieces to everyone’s sweet potato biscuits and made up what they predicted-I got the old maid. Halloween isn’t really celebrated anywhere but the States evidentially-as L and I spent most of the evening trying to separate Halloween from the old Celtic traditional ceremony-we couldn’t use the word pagan, we had already used the word vegan and to them that’s scary enough. Spook, L, Dale and I will head to Joberg Friday morning where L will fly onto Cape Town to see Amy. Then the three of us will head to Pretoria for the weekend. I am excited to get into town because I am feeling a bit of cabin fever set in, and Pretoria is supposedly the music capital of SA so hopefully we will see some shows. I hear there is a sushi place there and a sake bomber is just what I need. With the rains came lots of bugs so I added a few of those on here. Some of dung beetles on some buffalo dung (after which I took a small video clip of them in action) and I know most of us have seen African millipedes but in their natural state and with so many color variations I had to get a pic of this little orange one. We also saw a few giraffes-very close- and finally got a decent pic of some warthogs. There was also an adorable bush baby at our camp on Sat night that jumped around between all the cabins giving us great up-close looks-but no good pics. Hope everyone had a blast at their parties and will hopefully have safe but hilarious stories from this weekend for the blog next week!
B-Man- Lords I miss you as well, I sent you a post card this week so hopefully you get that soon, though it doesn’t say much cuz there’s no damn room on those things. Yes that was a kudu-we see loads of them but they run away before I can get my camera out so this was one of the better pics I got. Also see lots of rock monitors and tree monitors. Good luck with the job stuff-it takes time to find the right job. Glad the zoo is keeping you busy though. Will try to write you an email soon to catch you up on things here, but please feel free to keep writing me. I don’t always get the time to respond but I want to be kept up on how you are and how things are going.

Henley-going to be very excited to come back and eat something other than an iceburg salad when we go out. Hope school and life isn’t getting you down, or making you get drunk all day. Send me an email and let me know how things are with all the details.