Every several weeks for the last few months, we’ve had at work a personal trainer guy come in and give talks on various health-related topics. The last one he did was on posture. My posture isn’t bad, but I’m conscientious of it and think it could be improved (especially since I sit at a desk all day), so I attended. After the talk I spoke with him, and realized during our conversation that this guy’s shoes had each of his toes separated, so it rather looked like he was barefoot, except that he was clearly wearing shoes. I had to know what they were, and he told me a bit about them, including that they’re made by Vibram (the same company that makes, for example, hiking boot soles), and they’re called FiveFingers (due to the separation of the toes).

My buddy Jack thinks they ought to be called “Monkey Feet,” but that’s another story altogether…
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Okay, so the first pic is a still life only in the sense that it’s a photograph. Check out the video though, it’s hilarious – Rhythm just goes tearing around tormenting these sheep that are only trying to protect this little baby lamb between them all. And Rhythm just goes racing around them, darting out of the way when one tries to ram her – no fear, just play. Nothin’ but play. What a great dog.

(Incidentally, these were taken by my now failing camera in Tara’s compound when I came to pick Rhythm up after my trip to Sapu – stay tuned for a post on that trip, I’m working on it, but there’s a lot to say so it’s a long one at several thousand words).

Actually, you can’t check out the video… I can’t upload it. It’s 16 megs and the web interface for uploading stuff times out before I can upload it, and I can’t use FTP because these computers in the PC lab are really locked down. I’ll try to use the systems at GTTI to upload the video, but the internet there is flaky and everything’s all virused up, so I’m sort of paranoid about plugging any of my flash drives into those systems. Well, at least you have the photos for now. Too bad about the video though, it’s really funny.

To maintain sanity, it’s important to occasionally take your routine and, as it slowly hardens into a fixed and immutably rigid structure, strike it with a blow of sufficient force to shatter it to pieces. This isn’t to say you should throw away what you have and start over from scratch (although that is always an option), but rather that you should “mix things up” every now and again, allowing those component pieces to reallocate themselves into a different and perhaps more interesting configuration. Variety is the spice of life.
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I think I’ve recently, just in the last few days, really discovered some of the “romance” I’ve been hoping to find in an exotic far-away locale through my Peace Corps experience. For months, I’ve been dealing with much of the frustrations with moving into a new place and getting settled, so I see it as something of an important milestone to find myself really just finding myself in awe at so much simple beauty around me.

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So, last weekend I went up to Dakar, Senegal for the West African Invitational Softball Tournament. About 30 PCVs went up from The Gambia, with many more from Senegal, Mali, and Mauritania. Three types of people went: those playing competitively, those playing non-competitively, and those going just for the heck of it. I was solidly in the non-competitive arena, in large part because I suck at softball. Haven’t played since little league, and I wasn’t all that into it then either. But it’s fun, and it breaks the ice, so why not?
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Okay… some people have expressed an interest in getting some updated pictures of me without my PC-training-acquired scruffage. So, here’s a couple shots. The close-up isn’t so great (perhaps part of is that I take a lot of these sorts of close-ups and , but I really like the zoomed-out version.

So, I finally finished Rhythm’s crate yesterday. Woo hoo! It came out better than I thought, the thing is really strong (I can sit on it), if you shove it around it feels as sturdy as a rock, and all the pieces fit together well enough that I’ve actually impressed myself, given the basic tools I’ve found with which to build it.
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I wake up in the morning to the sounds of chickens and people busying themselves with various preparations outside. It’s rather dark in here, given that the only light comes from the back screen door and window of Sara’s domicile, and as it’s near the winter solstice, even at 7:30 the rays come in at such an angle that tall trees of the village scatter and dim the light to a near-twilight luminescence.
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The day began (almost) like any other. 7:30 AM: wake up to Rhythm crying and scratching at the kitchen door to be let out. Go let her out, make breakfast, and – in a progressively delirious state of mind (on account of pulling a long string of nights in which I return home by 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning, so I’ve been getting about five hours of sleep a night for almost a week), decide how the day should unfold.
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Last week, I went out and bought a bunch of supplies to build Rhythm a little crate, or cage if you prefer, because she’s getting big and able enough to wreak quite a bit of havoc if left to her own devices. So I bought a bunch of tools – a drill, hammer, saw, a bunch of nails, tape measure, metal caging material, screws, bolts, and all kinds of other stuff with which to build something like a dog crate. Everything except the wood for the frame – the store I went to didn’t sell wood (I’m thinking 2×2 inch dimensions), and the place that did apparently was trying to toubab me with an unusually high price. I’ll probably go this week sometime with Mustafa, the Peace Corps guy who repairs PCV houses, to see where he buys his materials.
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