The Elephant's Child

Understatement on Day Three.

I'm trying to follow World Rally Championship racing better this year than I did last year. (Hard to do from the States and without cable TV, but hye, there's YouTube.)

This image was screen-captured as the commenter said, "... a bit of bumper damage."  

 

A bit?  The whole front end is gone!  I love it. 

Travel Manifesto.

1.  I will not attempt to "do it all" lest in the attempt I exhaust myself and others and come home with nothing but a blur for my memories of the trip. 

2. I will do reading and research before I leave, so that I know what I'm looking at.

3.  I will generally avoid (wording changed from previous version) areas that are created solely for tourists, unless kitsch is the main point of the trip in the first place. 

4. Wherever it is about which everyone says "you HAVE to go!" I will avoid that place like the plague. 

5. I will take time to "do nothing" in the place where I am visiting. I will people-watch, I will go to a grocery store, I will sit and read in public spaces and in parks, I will learn the public transportation system.  I will try street food.

6. I will not take any guided tour longer than one day in length. 

7. I will not, under any circumstance, be an Ugly American.

8. I will find a church and attend on Sunday.

9. I will not contruct a trip that violates (Number of days of trip)/(number of countries visited) = <5

 10. I will visit the Tower of London, skip the Crown Jewels, and have no regrets. (I actually have done exactly that.)  

 

Packing.

Shoes here, shirts rolled along the top, jeans and pants flat in the bottom.  Vanity bag there. There's a ritual about packing when you've been using the same suitcase for twenty years, a mechanical, half-brain sort of motion that leaves your brain free to obsess about what you're leaving behind.  

Her suitcase was a navy blue Samsonite, a going away gift of sorts for going away to boarding school, with the pull handle broken from the time the men loading the bus from the capital city up to school had thrown it from the ground up to the top of the bus.  No fancy spinning wheels, just a plain, hard-sided suitcase.  A medium sized one, one that had been packed over and over and over again. It had held a sweatshirt for arrival back in the States, it had held leather sandals with car-tyre soles, a wooden recorder, jeans, contraband cassette tapes, both illegally copied and illicitly played in her dorm room with headphones. And now it was going back to Africa, after so long away.  Surely it would acquire a few new scars. Katie figured she would, too. 

Lappa, two yards of fabric she'd held and hoarded for all these years.  Flip-flops, hiking sandals, cool tee-shirts and linen pants.  Anti-malarial meds.  Water purification tablets. A swimming suit.  She wondered what the beaches were like now.  Would she finally figure out which beach had now become Poo-Poo Beach?

Legos

Sorry, Folks.

Going through another spell of lots of car stuff on my mind.  I've been watching this documentary (YouTube, approx 90 minutes), about the 24 Hours of LeMans.  Been gazing longingly at the Alpina B2 and gorgeous Alpina wheels.  

Steelies on the Minivan.

We lost a wheel cover in April, and we decided to try just taking the other three off and cleaning up the steel wheels.  I like the look and I like the incongruity of "steelies" on a minivan.  

There's a missing trim piece on the driver's door.  We have the piece but haven't been able to locate the plastic trim clips that hold it to the door.  Enough of them are broken that the trim piece doesn't stay put, so we took all the clips - which are bright white - and the trim piece off for now. 

We also took off the chrome running boards.  They were catching water against the van and causing a bit of rust.  We'll put on some plain black mud flaps instead.

We took the faded and grubby looking dealership tags off the back liftgate, too. 

And today, Mad Musician replaced the rear shocks - likely orginal to the car, a 1995 with just over 100,000 miles on it - with brand new Monroe Sensatrac shocks.  OH MY WORD the difference in how the car drives!  Massive difference.  It's not terrifying anymore! The shock (it's really a damper) on the far left had no resistance left at all, and its cover had rusted completely away.  The other was leaking badly and still functioning a little bit, but as you can see, was also in very bad shape. 

The van is completely remade.  Long-haul trips will be much more comfortable and much less scary now!

Living Room.

This is the east end of my living room.  Something's wrong, but I don't know what.  No, it's not the clash of patterns, because I'm going to be recovering the couch cusions.  

I like all this furniture, I like the grouping, I like the colors I have.  But I don't sit in this room much.  Maybe the grouping is too tight and I just don't like having to walk over to the cane chair at the back-left of the group.  Or maybe it's because the trunk isn't padded and my feet aren't comfy when I put them up.  Or maybe it's because none of the chairs faces such that I can look out the window.  I'm not sure.  I'm open to your ideas. 

Reasons My Kindle Is Better Than a Dead Tree Trade Paperback.

I can hold it open with one hand, even if the book is over 600 pages and I'm halfway through it.  

It lays flat so I can read while eating.  I don't have to hold it open. 

I can read all the words, not just the 9/10ths of each sentence that isn't glued into the binding. 

I can't see the printing on the next page through the page I'm currently reading. 

I never lose my place or a bookmark, because my Kindle remembers where I was. 

I can change the font size. 

Nobody can see the cover. So I can read brainless, stupid books without you knowing. 

It doesn't smell like a smoker's house, like books from the library sometimes do. 

The pages won't crack and fall out of the binding. 

The paper won't yellow. 

I can take twenty books with me on the airplane.

If my house burns down, Amazon knows what books I have digital rights to.  I haven't lost my library. 

and the number one reason I like my Kindle....

It irritates the Luddites. 

The Living Room.

I've been doing some more thinking about my living room.  

Something's wrong with the room that's causing me to not want to spend time in there.  I like how it looks, but it doesn't feel right.  

It's snowing today and the light is poor, but I'm going to try to take some photographs to post.  Put on your Home Dec hats, people, and watch for my next post. 

TBR Update.

My To Be Read list.

I located several of the books at the Collegetown library some 30 miles away.  Went to the checkout and discovered that I'm now only allowed two books at a time because the Collegetown library has removed itself from the larger multi-county library association.  I asked if I could pay the out-of-town fee for full access, as out-of-town people can at my own small-town library.  No, I cannot. 

Why can't I?  I pay a little over $6 per month for Amazon Prime. I used to pay $8 a month for Netflix. I'd be more than happy to pay even up to $15 a month for full access to huge library such as the one in Collegetown. But I can't. 

Anyway.  I triaged my pile and settled on two. The Last Resort: A Memoir of Mischief and Mayhem on a Family Farm in Africa, by Douglas Rogers and The Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis.  The Sci-Fi paperbacks were hidden on a back-wall shelf.  I had to ask for help locating them. 

Oddly enough, Watermelons: The Green Movement's True Colors, by James Delingpole, was nowhere to be found.  Oddly enough, neither was The New Vichy Syndrome, by Theodore Dalrymple.  Huh. 

I'm nearly done with The Last Resort. It's a terrifying book and a hilarious one.  Strange combination, but then, that's the way Africa is.