Random happenings…

Hi all… Cam here again…

Tonight there are 6 women in my lounge room getting ready to watch a girlie movie so I though it was a good time to go and do… Well anything, including writing a blog post. There are lots of little things that have happened or happening so I though I would just spew information digitally at you in some dot points… Here’s goes:

– I bought some flat packed desks the other day and wondered why the guy was hanging around after he helped get stuff in the car… After a conversation where I though my portuguese was really quite bad as I just wasn’t understanding him… I thought he was saying he needed to come home with me, turns out he was. Seems flat packs come with a person to put them together here… Free of charge!

– I have been trying to buy some local hardwood timber from the villages north of town, partly for the cheaper price and partly for the adventure. The first attempt failed even after ordering and visiting the logs out the back of nowhere. When we went to get them weeks later they weren’t “ready”. We now think the guy got cold feet selling to a white person as he didn’t have a cutting license and this selling to a whitey has a greater chance of getting caught by the authorities. Anyway, today I managed to get some nice “pao ferro” for 150 mets (about $5) for each 200mm x 2000mm length. Ordered some stuff to be custom cut too… Great fun!

– killed another snake here a couple of Sundays ago. It was about 30 cms long – so not really big but after about 12 small snakes since we’ve been here it gets me to thinking “where’s mummy black mamba”? Maybe it’s best not to think about it 🙂

– the lack of furniture shops here (read IKEA) means that I get commissioned regularly to make new furniture. It’s a bit like when we were first married and had to make furniture as money was tight. So part of my weekends are often spent holding onto a belt sander. So far I have made a coffee table our of old windows (actually quite nice, I should post pictures… Maybe later, it’s in the room with the girls at the moment), a large desk for the school room, a new kitchen cabinet for the other little house on our property, a outdoor table and benches, numerous bamboo mozzie net frames, a double bed frame, a shelving set for the office, coat hooks for the office, house and the school room, a new dinning table top for the other house and currently working on the first bunk beds for our house… One more set to come, then another double bed. Whooooo. Although sometimes Kath’s dreams soar further than my abilities. She currently has some couches on the books for next priority. I think this a little out of my league and out of the league of the materials at my disposal. But, I think I’ll give them go! Wood’s cheap and I need something to do on the weekends!

– our team is growing to a reasonable number but we do notice when people are absent. Last week on Sunday there were 4 missing… There were still 6 adults, but it just didn’t feel right. I think that’s a good thing.

– malaria is certainly in fashion at the moment. Locals are getting it very frequently. One person in our team just had it the other day. None of us have had ityet, maybe the prophylaxis the family has is actually working in spite of some evidence of mozzie bite. I am on my third type of tablets and not convinced that I’m not having side effects from these ones as well… I may need to drop them altogether.

– language learning doesn’t get easier, it just gets different. I would love to steal Kaths ability in some way… It’s like her brain is wired for it. I have had this experience before – when I was trying to learn complex multivariate statistics from the developer. It just took years of hard slog and using it when I didn’t understand it and eventually it started to click. I’m thinking language will be like this for me. There’s other things that just click for me, just that language isn’t one of them. I even get the same dread in my guts that I used to get with multivariate stats whe I think it’s all too hard. There are however enough small rays of improvement to keep it interesting.

– immigration continues to challenge the team. The situations seem so outlandish that it seems that there really is a reason “someone” doesn’t want global interaction here. It’s an encouragement to keep at it.