Africa Slideshow - Click on image for enlarged view

Just a few images of the many still filed in my computer. Some captured by the camera and so many that are only memories. How do you really present a trip? A series of photos, some words and somehow you hope to convey the enormity of what transpired. But it doesn't matter. It happened. That's enough.

Ephemera - Altered Books

It's 9:52 pm. Just finished rearranging my little office again. Seems it's the only way I ever actually clean it is to throw everything into the bedroom and then slowly reintroduce it back in, piece by piece. I had this compulsion for several reasons, first, because that's just what I do. I need to shake things up and can't stand anything to stay the same too long. Second, I'm avoiding the article about Malawi that I need to write. A more gracious explanation could be that I'm incubating ideas...yeh, that's it. Third, I'm onto this altered book thing. I love collages. Love them. And have seen altered books at various points over the last couple years, but somehow it just really hit me the other day, that I really, really had to get going on this. So, of course, the office space must be reconfigured to add this new area for exactly that. Tomorrow, I start. Gluing, cutting, pasting, collecting little bits of maps, tissue, cards, words, ephemera as they say in the collage and altered book world...ephemera...things of no lasting significance. Ephemeral - that which is fleeting, that which lasts a very short time.

Back At Home

Wow.
Back from Africa. It's hard to reconcile these trips. Not really sure where to file this new information.
Where do experiences like watching a leopard haul a reedbuck carcass up a sausage tree fit in? Is it in the same category as the roasted duck dinner - served with a very fine rose wine - that Kevin & I had the other night?
Or what do you do with the memory of two young boys named Frank and Cameroon eating our group's leftover chicken carcasses out of the big oil drum garbage can? Does it belong with my latest health focus of making sure I get my 800 IU's of Vitamin D?
Being charged by elephants while in our safari jeep in the Serengeti doesn't really relate to yesterday's experience of walking to the IGA with my cloth grocery bag.
When people tell you the world is small. Tell them this. They're wrong. We are, all of us, living on completely different planets. The world is huge and diverse. It is a freakin' miracle. Every square inch of it.