This is my 9th time in Ghana. Today is the first time I’ve seen rain like this. It rained hard for more than an hour and then steadily for another 5 hours or so. In the past all I’d seen was the 30 minute absolute downpour that then simply disappeared and got hot. Today stayed cool afterwards.
I’ll have more to write about my teams and their humanist work when I get back to Chicago. Today is a 5 or 6 hour wrap-up meeting with the people that work directly with me. Then I fly out tomorrow night to Amsterdam, meet my friend Lory at the airport for coffee (she lives there) and then back to Chicago early Sunday afternoon.
I didn’t sleep at all on the Chicago to Amsterdam flight Thursday evening (very unusual for me), caught about 2 hours worth at AMS and then about that much again on the flight to Accra. As a result (I think), Friday night I slept straight through, which has never happened to me on my first night in Africa.
Yesterday I met with 5 of my team members and 2 people from their teams. I was missing 4 of my people (3 unexpectedly, 1 that I already knew was working during the day). We had a very nice meeting, focusing on the The Principle of Immediate Action: “If you pursue an end you enchain yourself. If everything you do is realised as though it were an end in itself, you liberate yourself.“
We also made a schedule for the week. I’ll be meeting wtih each of their teams, each of them individually, and my team as a whole twice more. Today I’m off to town (Accra) for a Ghana national coordinating body meeting where representatives from each of the Humanist Movement councils active in Ghana meet to coordinate common activities and calendars.
When I was in Ghana last November, I had trouble accessing my gmail because all of the computers in the cyber cafe near my hotel are running Windows 2000 without the updates for Internet Explorer 6.0 (still using 5.0 or 5.5). At that time, gmail couldn’t be used by these older browsers. (Now gmail has a version for older browsers so these machines can be used as-is.) What I had taken to do was run windows update on every different machine I used, upgrading them to 6.0. This time in the same cafe, I’m finding Firefox installed on about half of the machines I’ve used. It needs to be upgraded, but it’s here (and upgrading is easy). Woo hoo!
So the move when great yesterday. John and I both slept in our new places last night. I’m really sore today. And happy. :-) I look forward to the rest of the crew moving in next weekend and then before the end of May.
Today is the day! Packing is mostly done, though we ran out of both boxes and steam last night so there are definitely odds and ends to finish up. Hopefully not enough that our helpers will notice that we’re not doing the heavy lifting. :-)
Time to make a good breakfast and then get out to get the truck.
I use bloglines.com to read my favorite blogs. It uses what’s called RSS to let me know when there is a new post (or 10) on any of the blogs I subscribe to and when I click on that feed, it shows me only the new posts from that blog. Makes it really easy to keep up.
Except when it’s down. Bloglines asked me to log in this morning which is very unusual. Normally it just remembers me since I’m always using the same computer. So I put bloglines in google and found this german language blog that lead me to the bloglines technorati tag which lead me to this:
For the last hour or so, Bloglines has been down: access to my RSS feeds is impossible. No word about that problem on the Bloglines blog but when I tried to setup a new account, I got a ‘There is a problem with the database. Please try again later’ error message, eventhough the search engine is working fine. Note to self: export Bloglines subscriptions into another RSS reader. — miss-information.net
Great, it’s not just me. Guess I really should get packing. :-)
Update 11:51a Seems bloglines is back. Right, back to packing!
Update 5:02p Seems to be back down. And again, back to packing. :-)
Update, still giving me problems but more or less back up again.
went to bed at midnight but up at 7 this morning – this is news because I have always been a late riser (right Mom & Dad?) – in fact, I’ve been cultivating my late-risingness for quite a while now – anyway, there’s plenty fo packing to be done today and no reason not to get an early start, so no fighting to stay in bed this morning
not yet sure how we’re going to organize moving two unrelated people out of one apartment, into one truck and then into two apartments – think I made a mistake by starting to stack my boxes near the front of the apartment a week or so ago when I started packing – John has followed my lead and we have two distinct piles of boxes, but very close together – and the rest of the place is gettting hard to navigate – so first order of business this morning is moving my pile back to a space that isn’t in the way of through traffic
we’re thinking of splitting the truck side to side so that stuff from both of us can be loaded at the same time but still kept organized – organizing this place first will make that a lot easier then so we can just broadbrush for our helpers (this huge pile over here is Ted’s, that one is John’s) and it will still make sense as the piles get smaller – we’ll see
Got an email from a high school friend yesterday. Haven’t communicated with her for more than 15 years. Turns out she lives in the same town where my mom grew up, about 30-45 minutes from where I grew up and we went to high school. She’s now a member of The Heggie Family
Some people I know in real life and don’t really know online (thinking of online mostly as email, in this case). Tonight I discovered by way of Johnny Payphone’s blog roll that one of the my friends from the new Hub housing co-op (I’m one of the first two to move in this Sunday and he moves in the following Sunday) has a blog. Check out Sam’s Innacan… Spam, Innacan.
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