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Here's a funny kid story
February 20, 2002 by Sue in Wielesek
Here's a funny kid story. An attorney friend has a son named Max, who must be about four or five. Chuck was fixing a bath for Max, who came in and announced, introspectively, "You know, Dad, my hand likes to snuggle with my penis." Ah, kids....
All's well. Hope to do some babysitting this weekend.
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You can't imagine how pissy and grumpy I feel...
February 10, 2002 by Sue in Wielesek
You can't imagine how pissy and grumpy I feel right now, having just hung up from a recorded message from the Eugene Water and Electric Board which certainly didn't include our neighborhood as the places crews were working today. I do understand that it was probably the worst windstorm in forty years, and the Eugene crews, along with crews down from Washington and Portland have been working incredibly long hours. But as dirty laundry piles up, I feel none too cheerful. Fortunately, all the kids have electricity.
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A little more of the travelog
February 05, 2002 by Sue in Wielesek
A little more of the travelog.
Going north through Pretoria was a genuinely trumatic experience. We finally escaped Johannesburg and the airport from Hell, and headed toward Pretoria, where we got lost for about the 100th time. Oregon was laid out by a bunch of neurotic Northern Europeans, and all roads are marked not just once but many times. Ah, did we have much to learn about letting go of the need to move from point A to point B via the roads we expected. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what side of the trees the moss grew on - there aren't a lot of mossy trees between Johannesburg and Gabarone. But about this time on the trip, Dick got the hang of driving left handed - sort of like trying to eat in a mirror. We got lost in Pretoria in a slum which felt like
a surrealistic view into a really bad future. We saw squatter towns in South Africa - though we didn't see people begging anywhere in the three countries we visited.
Botswana was a wonderful change from South Africa. Sadie explained the difference as being based on the fact that Botswana was never colonized - because, she pointed out, diamonds hadn't been discovered there yet, so nobody wanted it. Maybe it was just that Sadie could speak enough of the language so we could say hello (Da Mel Ah) and occasionally remember the social niceties, like holding your right elbow
with your left hand when you give or take something or shake hands.
We stayed in a bed and breakfast in Gabarone. amd used it as a home base to go up to the village where Sadie had stayed with a family during part of her time in Botswana. The village was actually a town of about 10,000 people, but like towns in Mexico, there really isn't much of a Main Street. There are wide places along the main road with stores, shops and indivuals selling food and various things. The rest of the town is pretty much cinder block houses and the ubiquituous rondevals, small round houses with thatched
roofs. It is so hot that there is usually a cooking hut separate from the main house. We also met Sadie's Gabarone
family - a cosmopolitin family whose son had gone to the University of Michigan.
Moe later, Moe
We were delighted to meet Sadie's host mom in the village -
she didn't speak any English, and Sadie and one of the other girls there helped translate my thank you to her. There was going to be a wedding in the family (like Russian weddings, wedding there apparently fo on for three days) and all the family was gathering, so we met eight or nine relatives, sitting in the shade in the front yard. By about this time on the trip, we stopped feeling the awkwardness of being a different color of the vast majority of the population and being in a new culture, and just started to relax and have fun. Those common bonds among all of us are pretty amazing.
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Hi, I'm trying to see if this will work
February 05, 2002 by Sue in Wielesek
Hi, I'm trying to see if this will work.
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