It rained, yesterday, quite dramatically. My coworkers and I ran outside to re-enact the Shawshank Redemption scene, but with the rain came a sideways wind, I presume from the temperature differential between the sunny areas and the odd cloud. It was almost as though the sky at ground level was shocked, SHOCKED! to feel water actually condense and fall through it, and tried to bat it away. I look forward to the real “rainy season” in the winter, although I have heard that it is mostly violent cloudbursts that flood things, then slink away for another year. That would certainly explain the flora and their waxy casings and hard thorns, like cacti too uncertain of their next drink.
Besides excitement about rain, I have been reading Charles Stross’s The Traders’ War, which is a great page-turner with some big ideas about alternate timelines, different types of societies, and the overall mean streak that underlies human nature. Despite the grittiness and drama, it is still a welcome escape into worlds with trees, water, and interesting people to imagine meeting. Lately I have been having dreams of other lives – not in some mystical sense of feeling as though I were peering into an alternate timeline of my own, exactly, but dreams that have all of the details and foibles of real life. I can tell that my mind misses trees and water more than my waking self is willing to acknowledge, but overall I seem to be adapting to the new surroundings fairly well. This is definitely not my first long-term stay in an unfamiliar environment, and, I hope, will not be my last.
A friend of mine here wants to go to Seychelles in February, and I was looking it up today to become more familiar. It sounds like a real sort of paradise archipelago, albeit with plenty of its own issues. Certainly fewer, though, than most Caribbean resort islands.
This update is long on chattiness and short on substance. In the interest of making it somewhat useful, I will share a very tiny tip I have discovered. I take a fair amount of vitamins, and melatonin to help me sleep, and what I discovered is that you can use the cap of the bottle of pills to measure out the right number (in this case, one of each.) That way you don’t have to get them in your hand, or worry about them scattering across a surface and bouncing away, but you also do not need any extra equipment.
Dictionopolis 