Sometimes life gives you a break.  Like when you are fed up with meetings and people being mean and the heat, and then you get a day like today, which is cloudy and cool (ish), and where I have no obligations whatsoever.  Its a well needed respite.

The last few days have been rough, I seem to hit a point after about two weeks at site where I get frustrated and my mood takes a turn for the worse.  Some point in August or September I am going to try and stay at site for at least four weeks, which doesn’t sound like much, but with all the traveling we do, is actually rather difficult.  In August there is girl’s conference, and then in September (I think) is life skills training (AIDS), neither of which are the monthly trip I should get to my regional capital.  In fact I have only been to my regional capital twice four months I have been at site.

I’d really like to do a six week stint at site, because if I can last six weeks, I will probably never have to last six weeks again, and so my times when I am down won’t seem so bad.  I know that makes it seem like all I am doing is enduring until my next trip away from site, but it isn’t really like that, its just that three weeks, which is the max I’ve stayed at site up till now, doesn’t seem like that long.  I wish in fact that I had less trips to take and could stay at site longer.  All the travel makes it exponentially more difficult to do anything.

But that should change after training for the new stage, which is December through February.  After that there isn’t (I don’t think) any more required training, and the only thing I can think of that I will have (well, want, since it isn’t required) to go to is girl’s conference in the summer.  But by then my service will be more than half way over.

My cat is still with me.  She seems to have decided that she actually likes me and now sits on my lap any time I am sitting down.  I paid an exorbitant amount ($14) to have her vaccinated, so there is no way I am giving her up, especially since the reason she poops in my family’s house is because they take her in there at night.

I just finished a ridiculous girly novel about a fashion designer who leaves New York for Paris and searches for the man of her dreams, called Paris Hangover.  Lets just say it is definitely not written for men, though it does have a lot of sex in it and the descriptions of Paris make me want to give Paris a second chance (I wasn’t that big of a fan when I went there with my high school French class).  In fact I probably am losing manliness points just for admitting that I read it, and even more for saying that it wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be.  But then manliness means something different here.  You can do a little hip dance in nothing but a towel while asking other guys to watch you and not be any less masculine.  You can wear pink, play with children, and hold hands with another guy and it means nothing.  But if you wash dishes or prepare your own food people will laugh at you.  “That’s women’s work!” They’ll say.

Also I was told that if a white person stays in the sun long enough he becomes black, and that I shine like a star during the night (my mefloquine induced whiteness must be reaching new levels).