Various Yet Again

Cats

My kittens are growing. They are eating a scary amount of food these days. As in, I’m seriously worried about the dent they’re going to put into my income if they keep going like this. I’ve been buying them dagaa, which is disgusting little dried fishes (note: many people do like dagaa, and the cats like dagaa, but I personally can’t stand it), and they’re eating it at a rate of something like 1/4th of my monthly income per month, and I didn’t have an especially big margin of spending money before starting to buy lots and lots of dagaa. I do have some savings I can draw on though to keep myself afloat for a while, and I can look into the feasibility of cooking and feeding them ugali, which is pretty much just water and corn flour, and dirt cheap, but a bit of a pain to cook and clean up after.

In any case, I’m looking forward to the day when they’re finished weaning and I can give some of them away. Presumably they should wean any time now, and then it’ll be two weeks before I can get the mom spayed, and then I won’t have to keep her locked up in the house 24/7, which I think we’ll both be happy about.

Hiking Around

Way back in the day, when I first arrived at my village, I went on a hike with a few of the other teachers. It was not a very interesting hike – basically the terrain in that direction from my school is really monotonous and not very interesting – and I was a bit disappointed, assumed that all of the terrain around my school was like that, and gave up on the whole “hiking” idea.

But recently, I got curious about reaching certain nearby hilltops and seeing what was on the other side, so I set out in the opposite direction from that first hike towards one of the hills. I ended up not having enough time to reach my target hilltop, but I found that the terrain in that direction is varied, interesting, and beautiful. So, I’m pretty excited about that, and will be doing more hiking in that and other directions in the future.

(Note: hiking without a giant backpack full of stuff, and doing it to explore and look at stuff rather than to travel from Point A to Point B, seems to be considerably more enjoyable than hiking with a giant backpack full of stuff for the express purpose of travelling from Point A to Point B.)

Also, when I was hiking, I met a little old lady (89 years old! She was 20ish at the outbreak of World War II!) whom anybody who’s played the Warcraft games would recognize as a gnome. She only speaks the local tribal language (Iraqw), so I exhausted my limited supply of Iraqw greetings and then we just sort of stood there for a couplea minutes looking at each other trying to convey goodwill through body language.

Removable Media

Had a clever idea the other day – I think I’ll teach my students about CDs by putting some games on some CDs, removing all of the games from the computers, and then when the students get free time to play games in lab, they’ll have to use CDs to play said games. Games are a very good motivator for them, and it’d be good, practical experience.

I also want to make them use flash drives some day, but I’m still working out a good excercise for them to both put stuff on and then copy said stuff onto another computer, and using only our very limited number of flash drives here.