Monday, May 30, 2005

oh god how i wish this was actually a dream

We have a maid who cleans and sweeps and dusts and airs out and all of that three times a week.
The sheets get changed at least once a week.
We wash our clothes with almost every wearing.
We each wash our own bodies, separately of course, at least once a day.
We don't have any pets.

And yet.

And ... yet

we have... fleas.

I am itchy.

Saturday, May 21, 2005

this is my chance to be discovered

Hey, remember a while back, when I recommended a bunch o' books about uganda/east africa, and one of them was The Last King of Scotland, about Idi Amin??? WELL, randomly/interestingly, that book is being made into a Major Motion Picture starring Forrest Whittaker, filming right here in Kampala (and environs). Neato, right? Well that's not all... This morning, myself and about 150 other whiteys living in Kampala responded to a casting call to become extras in the movie. To the surprise of absolutely no one, I will be an Israeli hostage, while my various friends and acquaintances will be Dancing Party-goers, People On The Street, Airline Pilots, English Military Officers, and Party Minglers.

I'll be the chick in the back trying hard to Get Famous.

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

they go marching two by two, hurrah!

Last night, I twice woke up, bounding up because my bed was swarming with ants. The first time, I ran out of my room, and decided to flop down onto the couch to sleep. I lay on the couch for a minute or two, went into the kitchen and got the can of Doom spray, and went and sprayed insecticide all over my bed. I was about two-thirds of the way through the spraying process that i realised it.

There were no freaking ants in my bed. It was a dream. And I had gotten out of bed, chosen a different place to sleep, gone into three different rooms, found the insecticide, and used it, before the non-reality of it all dawned on me. WHAT THE HELL.

(By the way, we have an ant problem in our apartment, but it's pretty much confined to the kitchen. Heather goes medieval on those ants, yelling at them, Doom-ing them to death with a look of murderous rage in her eyes. My oft -repeated advice during the Lashing Of The Ants is to 'become one with the ant-ness, heather', or to accept the fact that any insect that will let you wipe them up with a sponge isn't an insect you should get too worried about. Well, looks like someone has been unknowingly disaffirming the reality of their ant-hate. Oh well. If I'm going to discover a sublimated prejudice through my dreams, let it be this.)

Thursday, May 12, 2005

ch-ch-changes

I switched templates. Partly because i couldn't seem to get the whole 'comments' thing to work, and i suspected it was because of my incompetent Mucking Around in Things I Don't Understand (ie even the most basic html.) So I decided to just start over. So now there are comments again, even if they are all empty. (*shakes fist at Comment This*) Plus, now you get that fabulous picture of me over there on the right. (No, that isn't seaweed, it's my hair, goddammit.) And theres that nifty thing where you can email my posts to people, although why you'd want to do that is beyond me. That function should be left to real journalism, like the Wall Street Journal, or the Onion.

Okay, so now i'm going to muck about some more, and see what else i can screw up. If anyone wants to tell me how to make the font of the heading bigger, and to reply those watermark-ish background photos with photos of my own, why don't you just leave some tips in the handy new comments-that-work?

Toodles.

Thursday, May 05, 2005

comments go kablooey

Comment This!, the comment service I had been using, has gone and had a server meltdown, and so now any and all comments ever left on my blog are gone forever. (That sucks a bit, you know?)

Additionally, I'm having problems getting Blogger comments to work. Although hopefully i'll either miraculously develop a greater understanding of html in the next few days, OR somebody from Blogger help will actually get back to me. Both seem quite unlikely though!

In other news, I've been on a money spending spree this past week or so, with the payment of a gym membership, a sailing club membership, and the purchase of a not-very-cheap laptop. I'm pretty pumped about all of those purchases, but mostly about the laptop, which is appropriate, given that it is about 8 times more expensive than than the next most expensive thing on that list.

In addition to all the advantages re: work, this means that from now on, instead of sitting in the dark, reading books by candle-light, or going out for expensive and fattening dinners or drinks to avoid the dark, I can now watch DVDs on my laptop during 'load shedding' nights. ('Load shedding' is the lovely term for turning off our electricity every second day from 6:30 to 10:30 pm.) Woohoo!