In a desperate attempt to defib my erstwhile blog back to some semblance of an animate entity, I uploaded a bunch of my photos taken with the blackberry, and they go back a long way (almost 2 years now). I present them in reverse chronological order, starting with this past weekend.


This is what trying to get a SIM card on a Saturday morning. In Addis Ababa.


This is what I'm hoping will be my next car. Not this exact one, but this model.


There is no happier day for the expat than that of the Care package. Especially when it has BACON!


Look what Brandon and Shannon hath wrought. Namely, Sienna, who has the bluest eyes of any baby of all time.


Pizza! In the DRC. I was just happy to have pizza there. Broke the monotony. Sometimes its kind of sad what you are resorting to for comfort in some of these places.


OK so this is from when I was back in the US, while I was up hanging out in MT with Care's family. Her sister and the younglings needed a ride to the Billings airport. Billings has a Cabela's, which is basically like a Wal-Mart sized hunting / fishing / camping store, which is basically awesome. The Billings one has a 25,000 gallon fish tank *inside the store* and this is that tank. It has all the local species of fish, and it is awesome.


My first proper meal back in the US - from an awesome Mexican joint in downtown SF. God bless Mexico.


Roadside snacks for sale in rural Malawi. They are mice, and you eat them whole. A delicacy!


This was at my hotel in Blantyre, Malawi. This guy was a solid 40 feet above the pavement, sawing off a limb on which he had the ladder leaned up against. With no rope or harness or anything. We had to leave for our meetings so I couldn't stay around to watch him die.


Kind of blurry but this is Sheila and Debbie, the latter of which has forsaken us Nairobite Americanos, and is missed.


Enough said.


OK so this one and the next one are from Accenture's ill-fated bid to bank all of their marketing on the media-elusive Tiger Woods, who I always ALWAYS knew had a dark secret waiting to burst onto the national media. Anyone that famous and that intensely private always does. Anyway, I was only able to capture a few of these in heaven-knows-which-airports when the whole scandal was blowing up, I'm sure by now Accenture's destroyed any evidence of them, but what I wouldn't pay to have one of these to hang in my garage when I some day have a garage...


Also, I think its kind of funny to play that game that people play with fortune cookies where you add the words "in bed" on the end of the Accenture tag line. Works much better post-revelation.


This one and the next two are from our massive (massive) warehouse in Harare, Zimbabwe. Used to be a tobacco warehouse. Now its a mainly food warehouse that we kind of vainly hope government officials won't show up to confiscate before we can distribute it to beneficiaries in the field.






Teton Gravity Research is one of my favorite extreme skiing video producing outfits, out of Wyoming, I believe. I saw this tire cover on the back of a car in Arusha, Tanzania. I am pretty sure I'm one of the few people in the world who's ever been to Arusha that even knows what TGR is. That group does not include the driver of this car.


Whilst in Arusha I found a nice backpackers type lodge that served a semi-American meal. It was nice to have what at least looked to be a "safe" salad. I eat a lot of "safe" salads. Its like salad roulette.


This is the motorcycle that clipped my front side panel when I was making a completely legal right turn (remember in TZ we are on the other side of the road, so that means across the oncoming lane, like a left turn in the US), with my blinker on, and this moron was buzzing down the median line taking his GF for a joyride. What ensued were accusations that he heard one of my colleagues tell me to hit him on purpose, which he apparently heard from his motorbike when all of our car windows were up. I moved my car out of the two lanes instead of leaving it blocking the busiest street in the entire town (also Arusha), which is what you're supposed to do legally while you wait for the cops to show up. I did this after photo-documenting that he moved his bike first, but to no avail - we would end up having to go to the police station, drive the cops back to the scene, be subject to endless lectures that I shouldn't have moved the car (the same one I had to bring them to the scene of the accident in), and then return the cops to the station and wait a couple of hours while they took statements for their report. I didn't insist on filing the report, they made me - I was willing to just leave with the scratch on my vehicle and pay for fixing it myself. The guy who hit me couldn't even afford proper shoe strings for his boots, and being that it was a work motorbike, he probably lost his job anyway.


Somewhere in TZ. "Mustle bound."


This was from Dagoretti School for Boys, which is outside of Nairobi. Jen and I were kind of investigating if it was "outside enough" that if we brought some of the street kids we were working with there, they might actually stay in the school instead of returning to the streets to sniff glue and beg. This is one of those glue bottles that the school kept on a shelf to remind the boys in the school where they had been, and encourage them to stay. I saw one of the boys that we were struggling to keep in a school back on the street the other day. I asked him if he'd let me take him back to the school, and he asked me for money.


This was right in front of my house in NBO. The dogs of war.


From a restaurant I had lunch at in Santo Domingo, D.R. when I got there for a weekend when I was working in Haiti. I took a lot of pictures of that weekend's explorations and have no idea where I put them. Maybe on a backup drive that caught a virus and ate all the data.


Pretty sure this is the airport in Port Au Prince.


This is the High Line Park in NYC, post-redevelopment. So in this case, I was exploring it legally, unlike the previous case. This must have been roughly August of last year when I was around for Dave's wedding.


Sometimes I look at you and wonder whether I miss friends and family more, or you. This makes me feel bad.


This was from right here in Addis, but from July-ish of last year when I was first here. The hotel we stayed in had a floor "-1." I never went to that floor for fear of ending up in a John Malkovich movie.


My first work trip after moving to Nairobi was to Uganda, where I met Ben, at a hotel restaurant where he was having lunch with some of the Save The Children folks he was working with. Why can't my organization work with Ben? Hmph.

I really wanted to start this sentence with the word "so," but I refrained. Have you ever notice how people tend to use that word a lot lately in beginning a sentence? Someone raised that question recently. Its almost taken the place of "like" although I doubt "like" will ever really go away in my lifetime. "So" goes at the start of the sentence, usually, though. Seems like maybe its half verbal stutter (like "um") and half transition or prefacing.

Lately another one I've heard that I'm not sure I particularly like but I may have even used it myself at times is "I know, right?" This might be attributable to the movie Juno. I'm not sure.

Anyway, (there's another one I use all the time!) its almost October and I didn't really have a chance to write much of anything this month. Although I haven't been with a client, things have still been crazy (nobody ever believes this, but I think sometimes not having one is even worse). And I can't even use watching the A's fight for a playoff spot as an excuse, because, well, they didn't.

I fly tomorrow back home for Margy's wedding, and there's been a lot of...shall I say, prep-work and prayer going into that. Plus I'm staying the following week and hoping to meet up with a partner on a project we recently sold out there and see if I can weasel a way onto it in the near future. And perhaps surf, if I happen to find myself south of Santa Cruz dressed in a wetsuit.

I realized I needed to post today because my blog has come up in exactly 3 unique conversations, and my posting as of late has been next to nonexistent. So to direct some of you to the places you might be looking for: if its the snake story (yes, it is true), you can find that here. If you want to see the blog we did for the Youth Group missions trip to Uganda, the post with that link is here. And if its sermon notes we spoke about, you can find one of those here.

I fly in 8 hours and haven't packed or finished re-writing the edits on my piece for the church's literary magazine, so that's what I'm going to do now. Then maybe I'll check back in on the collapse of our financial markets (apparently the FDIC just seized WaMu and sold them to JPMorgan, and the $700 billion bailout? Yeah, that number was just kinda made up.). Then maybe eat finally.

People we're still getting mail for who don't actually live here:

Ms. Jessica Delisser (apparently she was into the arts - some museum down on Bowery)
Ms. Corey Geremia (dance theater workshop, maybe she was roommates with Jessica?)
Pilar Menendez (Loehmann's - they're having a shoe sale)
Eric Andrus (Fashion Institute of Technology)

There's been a number of others but those are the only ones we got today.

Chelsea Market's Free Public WiFi User Agreement:

I promise to refrain from any hanky panky
Or anything that would make anyone get cranky.
Anything I do with this connection that is lame,
I absolve Chelsea Market et al of any blame.

Random stuff mostly related to being in Africa:

I'm going to Lesotho this weekend and am going to do the highest abseil in the entire world. So I can cross that off the list. See here.

South Africa has the highest number of HIV infections in the world. Something like 70% of the worlds' cases exist in sub-Saharan Africa. See here.

My hands are doing just fine, because its summer here, but even in the winter it stays warm enough and there's enough moisture in the air that I don't think I'd have a problem. I'm debating whether this is a sign, or not - but I like living somewhere that I don't have to worry about them.

Tipping is a bigger part of life here, there's more of it, but you tip less, amount-wise.

The food here is pretty good. Pizza rocks. Chinese sucks. Burgers are average. Bacon is different and is sub par so bacon cheeseburgers are right out. Salads are not big here as its a very meat-eating culture, so usually they're average at best. Steaks are pretty darn good, and the highest-end ones are cheap, in USD. They have most of the normal fruits and veggies I'm used to although my blueberries are now imported from Europe. They have Hass avocados (but they call them avos, here), so this officially qualifies as somewhere on the planet I could live long term. Cheeses are average, and the selection is much smaller. The water is fine, haven't had any problems with it. Oh and there's an organic strawberry yogurt from Woolies (Woolworth's) that I will miss very much when I leave.

Its still a pretty lonesome (which is a different word than lonely) experience here on the whole. I don't really have a lot of friends, and the nature of the work is such (typical of a consulting project) that I don't have a lot of evening time to make them. I've been trying to make them through church and so forth, but my social muscles have gone a little slack. Plus the whole introversion thing. I have more time to myself (be it working or otherwise) than is probably good for me.

The Rand (ZAR - their monetary unit) is back up to almost 6.80 against the USD. It was 7.30 when I got here, and dipped below 6.50 at points in the last 2 months. So now is a better time to go on vacation, but still could be better.

I am behind on my work.

Things that the sore on the inside of my cheek where I accidentally bit myself does not like: Italian dressing. Also, chips and guacamole, but its just had to learn to deal with that one.

There aren't a lot of cops here (and they wonder why there's a crime problem). So sometimes, when I stay late in the office, and there's not a lot of traffic out, I drive home like I'm in a Rally race. Which is pretty fun.

I've developed either a sinus infection or an allergy to something in the last 24 hours. I hope its the former and I hope it goes away soon.

I get to watch everybody wake up, so to speak, as daylight generally hits their part of the world and they log on to their various IM application of preference. When I get in, the London people usually show up about an hour after me. Around 2pm US the early birds from the Eastern US start to show up. Western US joins about 3 hours later, as 5pm here is 7am their time. I can also see who's generally up late in the US, because they're still online when I get in every morning.

It will be strange going back to the US and jumping straight into winter. Hasn't felt like Christmas here one little bit. Its hot. You don't have Christmas when its hot.

I'm gonna have a heck of a lot of video editing to catch up on when I get home.

We have a pretty cool 2-bed / 2-bath apartment here in Pretoria. By "we" I mean Paul, the consultant who joined the team recently, and myself. We're paying too much for the rent (by local standards) but its under our project budget so its not a big deal. Its furnished comfortably, although the general theme of the place is fairly minimalist, and has lots of nice deck space to sit out on (its a penthouse apartment). I'll try to get some pictures of it up. I miss the old place a little but the bed in this one is way more comfy, which is a big plus, although I'm struggling more to get up in the morning and run. Its right across the street from a shopping center, which is pretty key seeing as we share a car.

Dry cleaning is crazy expensive here.

Haven't been able to get around to any decent blogging time lately and there certainly won't be any time before Saturday as I'm fully booked between now and then, unless I get a few minutes to put the finishing touches on the introvert's manifesto that I've mentioned previously.

Work has been going well, albeit a little behind schedule. I'm wrapping up my first deliverable and starting my second this week, and will definitely have to pick up the slack with this second one and knock it out a bit faster than originally planned, which won't be easy, as this will the more difficult one to write.

Its cool to be working so hard for a client that I daily wish I could do even better for. I could get used to this.

My new roommate and the consultant working on our project, Paul, showed up this week. We won't be rooming together til the end of the month, and until then I'm still in my own place with the deck that I will miss having. Turns out I didn't lose my apartment-with-great-deck karma when I came here. Actually, the one at the place Paul and I will be sharing isn't half bad either. Actually, we have two at the new place...

Zambia was pretty cool, the week before last. I'll be writing about that once I get the pictures up, etc.. Which, if we work chronologically, won't happen until after I've blogged Medikwe, Cape Town, and Kruger. Oy.

I was pretty sick the weekend after we got back from Zambia and thought it might be Malaria from Kruger or a really bad strain from Zambia, but the first test came back negative and I was feeling better a day or two later. Not sure what that was about.

I've been back on the running horse, pretty regularly - have been getting in 5 miles a weekday, but I figure that's close enough to what I was at before, given that I'm running at 5k feet higher than I was back in the states. It makes a significant difference, especially given that my route now is pretty much 100% hills. Its also a social experience here - there are a ton of bikers and a handful of other runners out from 5:30-6:30am, which is usually about when I'm running. The sun comes up at 5 here - wakes you up pretty dang early. Anyway, the foot is feeling better, and I'm enjoying being out again. And I met one of my neighbors last night, she's pretty cool and invited me to check out her running group, so now I have friends to run with, hopefully. She said they do 18-kilo time trials on weekends - 11 miles sounds just about right to me.

What else? Tomorrow is dinner with Gib, the guy who leads the entire Accenture Developing Partnerships group. I was in charge of picking the location, so we're going with the Butcher Shop, which is supposed to be the best steakhouse in Joburg. Looking forward to that.

Thursday Tracy (the other manager here on the project with me) and I are headed to the Webb's for a Thanksgiving dinner that evening. David Webb is one of the pastors of the Every Nations church I've been attending down in Joburg, and he and his wife invited us to spend the evening with them and a whole bunch of other Americans they are having over that night. They're from Virginia originally, I think.

Friday our client, Gerard, has invited us - Tracy, Paul, and I over to his family's place for a little impromptu Thanksgiving celebration with them. Their daughter is in school in the states and has educated them on the holiday - and they seem keen to the idea.

Saturday I'm going to catch up on work and enjoy an evening to myself for a change. And maybe blog.

Its raining here in PTA again. Not one of the epic thunderstorms like before, but rainign all the same. Hope it lasts til morning so I can run in it, but given that's unlikely - it only rains at night here for some reason