Notes on my new room[1]:
[1] I moved last week.
[2] Probably when I moved to SA and bought all my room things at the same time.
Fun exchange while chatting with a friend the other day. I’m not quite sure how much of the humor translates without all the context.
me: yp
wow, brilliant typing
friend: you are a skilled typist
me: there’s a reason I’ve made my name in the field
…
[later, after I told him not to worry about me dating someone in particular]
friend: I’m not at all worried
about you making a move
ON ANYOEN
oh damn
undone by poor typing
it’s like I’m you!
me: haha
it’s because you have giant fingers
that are unsuited to normal sized keyboards
friend: it’s true
you should see me type on the G1
me: like a clown in a midget[1] car!
friend: everybody needs an automobile!
this was the largest car I could afford!
[1] Of course I mean a very small car, not necessarily one made for or used by little people.
So the One AM Radio is having a contest with their new song (found here or at the myspace page) and I’m trying to put off some other work, so I’m going to enter. The contest: Ok, let’s do this: the first person to transcribe all the lyrics correctly will get a prize. Type them out, and post them on your facebook page, your blog, website, or something like that, and send us the link.
It’s a good song, by the way. I recommend checking it out.
Oh oh oh oh oh (4x)
A old photo of your new lover
That you discovered in a book she left
Shot in some sun-drenched piazza
Or whatever in Rome or where ever it is she went.
There a sly glint in her eye
And you can only guess at what it might have meant
There’s a world without you.
There’s a world without you.
Oh oh oh oh oh (2x)
A new photo of your old lover
That you discovered to your chagrin
It’s been so long since it all went sunder
That you stopped wondering where she’s been.
Her hair’s changed. Her clothes are strange
At a party where the likes of you would never get in.
There’s a world without you.
Yeah, there’s a world without you.
There’s a world without you.
Yeah, there’s a world without you.
You don’t want the news if you’re not a part of it.
Even if it’s true you still fall apart a bit.
You don’t want the news if you’re not at the heart of it.
Even if it’s true.
Even if it’s true.
You don’t want the news if you’re not a part of it.
Even if it’s true you still fall apart a bit.
You don’t want the news if you’re not at the heart of it.
Even if it’s true.
Even if it’s true.
There’s a world without you.
Yeah, there’s a world without you.
There’s a world without you.
Yeah, here’s a world without you.
Oh
Oh oh oh oh oh (8x)
As far as I know, the only person to design multiple nation’s flags is Frederick Brownell who designed South Africa’s and Namibia’s.
My pony is trotting off into a field of bulls. He is not supposed to. He is supposed to be going down the steep hill. Vincent is yelling instructions.
His name is Power; I like to think of him as POWER. We’ve been walking along a flat dirt path now for a few miles. It’s been easy; surprisingly easy if you consider this is the first time I can remember riding a horse. I’m starting to think I’m good at this. Perhaps I’m preternaturally gifted at riding horses.
But I’m not. It’s just been easy. Vincent, our Besotho guide, arrives at the top of a steep hill, with a path covered with smooth, round rocks, and starts heading down without a hitch. POWER does not head down as easily. “Pull hard to the right! Hiy! Hiy!” I do what Vincent says. After walking through the bulls we’re back at the top of the hill. This time POWER starts the descent.
It’s very steep and POWER loses his footing on the loose rocks but finds it again quickly; this happens many times. I’m jarred. I’m jarred again. My heart’s racing and my knuckles are white on the reins. I’m starting to think we’ve made a big mistake. Is it too late to turn back?
We don’t turn back. My momentarily terror lessens to the point where even the steep parts seem quite normal. It’s beautiful out here. The roof of Africa, they call it; the lush green mountains with red dirt strips are gorgeous. It’s very sparse out here, very rural.
I think a lot about my gradfather’s journey through these parts seventy four years before. I can’t imagine him doing this alone, with even fewer resources and even less development. He must have been an strong man.
I don’t remember much of him; he died while I was still young and half a world away. He helped me make a tiny table and chair out of wood once with the kid’s tool set that I’d just gotten. He must have been patient as well as strong.
POWER’s stumbles-and-refooting become common place. I wonder if Grandpa’s horse stumbled, too.
I wanted to get a more local cap to be my go-to cap (my A’s hat, seen here, is my current go-to). Going through a thrift store I saw a rugby cap that had a good design and was pretty cheap, so I picked it up. Apparently I don’t know the teams very well because Waratahs are actually from Australia. Ooops!
Maybe I should just pick up a Western Province cap, like this one.
Update: Problem solved!
Still no updates on my trip(s), but I did post a lot about the road trip on my photo blog. You can start from the end and check it out if you’d like.
–
I’m not very good with uncertainty. I know, this is a surprising admission. But if an obsessively clean person can be cured by touching lots of pay phones and door knobs and toilet handles, then maybe I can be cured by having as many things as possible be uncertain. I’m moving this weekend (for which I don’t have movers yet) and I’ll have new flatmates and a new area of town. I started lecturing last week and it’s too early to tell how that’s going to turn out. I don’t really have a way to cover the rest of my living expenses. I’m not sure how long I’m going to stay in South Africa or what I’ll do with myself here or when I get back to the States. This has been the longest period of the most unknowns in my life.
So for just about everything in my life, I have to say, “we’ll see!” But life seems to turn out okay.
Any reasonably class covering manufacturing engineering will talk about Toyota and how they’ve created a process that’s really helped them launch ahead of many other car makers. They’ve long inspired me. This NY Times Magazine profile of Toyota reminded me of that.
Management theorists who study Toyota’s production system tend to say that it is difficult to replicate, insofar as the company’s methods are not simply a series of techniques but a way of thinking about teamwork, products and efficiency. Still, some aspects of the system were clearly visible in San Antonio. In the Tundra plant, there is no real inventory of parts, which is a hallmark of Toyota’s approach. Once a truck chassis begins its run on the factory line, an order goes out to, say, an on-site parts supplier that provides seats for the interior. At Avanzar, an independent company located in a large workroom adjacent to the assembly line, I watched workers build a car seat from scratch. They chose a raw steel frame with springs, put it on their own minifactory assembly line to add padding, then leather, and then they transferred it (via pulley, over a partition wall) to the Tundra assembly line, where it was installed in the truck. If the front seat had not been ordered 85 minutes earlier, it would not exist.
It reminds me of a Forbes profile of Honda I read a couple years ago.
Of all the bizarre subsidiaries that big companies can find themselves with, Harmony Agricultural Products, founded and owned by Honda Motor, is one of the strangest. This small company near Marysville, Ohio produces soybeans for tofu. Soybeans? Honda couldn’t brook the sight of the shipping containers that brought parts from Japan to its nearby auto factories returning empty. So Harmony now ships 33,000 pounds of soybeans to Japan. An inveterate tinkerer, Honda also set up a center nearby to develop better soybean varieties and improve agricultural processes.
Fantastic out-of-the-box thinking!
I’m back ‘home’ after over a month of travels–DC, North Carolina, New Orleans, and a road trip around South Africa and Lesotho. That’s a lot of miles and I’m glad to be in one place for a little while at least.
I saw friends and family. I saw traditional Besotho villages; I learned ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ in Sesotho. I rode a pony for the first (and second and third and…) time. I saw a New Orleans brass band play till the small hours of the morning. I felt like an extra in a movie about the antebellum South at a New Year’s party in New Orleans. I danced; I know, shocking. I walked through 20 inches of snow; I felt the African sun beating down on me. I crawled through a cave under the Karoo. I saw where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet. I changed a tired in a parking lot in Bloemfontein. I skinny dipped in the frigid pool under a remote waterfall. I bowled while listening to a live Zydeco band. I got chills looking at the founding documents of the US America. I saw a herd of over a hundred elephants. I finally spotted the rock monitor after staring in the bush for three minutes. I rode a heritage street car. I hugged and smiled and laughed.
More later, but for now you can see some of my photos on my photo blog.
And how are you? What have you been up to?
ingwavuma from ipickmynose on Vimeo.
I finally put together some of the clips I took on my Flip Mino HD in Ingwavuma into a video. It’s a bit shakey and I was a bit hurried on the editing but overall I feel like it gives an idea of what life in the town is like.
The clips in order are (in Ingwavuma unless noted):
sunrise self portrait
clothes on a clothesline
kids on zipline
store entrance in Bhambanana
roadside between Ndumo and Bhambanana
returning from the pump with washing
Fana and co at Okhayeni school
kids playing soccer
people in town
minibus taxi ride to Okhayeni
cows resting
Bridgie and her daughter Zaza
the road in Bhambanana
Swifty looking over Swaziland
petro station store in Bhambanana
soccer
overlooking the valley
driving through Jozini
Andrew and Fana in Bhambanana
I referred to some reverse culture shock since I got back. I thought I’d elaborate about what I’ve noticed anew in US America.
I left South Africa on Thursday and traveled for about 26 hours until I landed in DC on Friday morning. Everything has gone pretty smoothly so far. The flight and travel felt shorter than I expected; I got in before the big snow fall here; I’ve had a great time hanging out with friends; and the Steelers stopped their losing streak yesterday in a ridiculous game.
I was hoping for some cold weather and snow when I got here but I didn’t expect the biggest December snowfall in DC’s history. We mostly just huddled inside, had some beer and pizza. In the evening, we went for a nice walk on still-unplowed streets in picturesque neighborhoods. It reminded me a bit of Norman Rockwell.
It’s been a bit disorienting being back. Besides going from the hot summer to snow and winter, there have been some cultural shocks as well. People speak differently and think differently, things work differently, some things are easier, some are harder.
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