Thursday, August 10, 2006

The Dog Days of Summer

Every day I remind myself that this is August, the dead heart of summer. I should be laying on the beach, sweating my mind off, drinking gin tonics and planning a 'mini-break' with the HMF.

Besides the last two, you'd be way off the mark.
Yesterday morning, it was 9 C (48 F). That's cold!

This past week I've been tucked away in my office, frantically trying to finish this 40-page research paper that's sucked away my entire summer and afforded me some pretty cool opportunities (can anyone say "Malawisaurus" without grinning?). But all I'm getting is squinty eye syndrom and the worst backache in the world, which means my back hurts, my eyes hurt, my brain hurts. I'm terrified that when my boss reads this he's going to say "We paid you to do THIS?! Give us our money back..."

I'm also planning a brown bag lunch (why was thisa good idea to do my last week here?) to aid in my thesis research, which should be good (lots of pizza) but that I have to pull together a presentation for. On what? I have no idea. I've got four days to figure it out.

I've managed to make friends with all the athletic people in Malawi who like climbing and running marathons, neither of which I can do and thus am reduced to cheerleader status (boo). I am in an office and have not gotten any real exercise in well over a week (last time I took a jog, I stopped after a little girl threw her arms around me in a big hug. How can you run after that? I was smiling too hard). We keep going out for "last dinners" with friends and keep eating my weight in mashed potatoes, then they go out and have kickboxing matches til dawn. I roll over and pretend it's Thanksgiving or Christmas. This has got to stop.

On top of that, I've become addicted to what I believed were corn muffins that sell for like, 25 cents at the grocery across from my office, only to find out today that they're actually cupcakes.
So now not only have I been cooped up in my office all week growing my ass, but I've been stuffing CUPCAKES into my face all day! Crap.

I need some endorphins and some vitamin D - soon. Every once and awhile I hear the crickets chirping and the light is just right (that mid afternoon that turns into a long dusk at home). It's only then that I realize it's actually August. Somewhere in the world people are sweating down to their eyelids and surfing.

I think it's getting time to go home.

1 comment:

Beth Young said...

It's nice to be ready to go home when it's time to. I never was able to do that before I got married. Now I don't even want to go anywhere. Funny. I remember after going home from Africa white people all looked so ugly to me for a while.