One year on from 30
Yep. 31. It was almost inevitable and it happened.
Quite a lot has happened over the past year. Just browse the entries on this site, and you can see for yourself, if you didn’t know it already.
Greece, Turkey, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Germany, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Scotland. Quite a list indeed.
Also, my plan of taking one picture every day at noon didn’t really work out, although the whole 30yp setup was, I suppose, quite succesful. Now, on the homepage, on the right, you can see the number of times articles have been read (or at least viewed) on this site. The number’s close to 35000, wich means an average of 100 articles viewed, per day. If only I had so much to say each day.
I think I will tone down a bit on my daily updates. When I’m at home, playing ‘Dancing Stage’ (I know, I AM a special fellow), there isn’t really enough to keep people interested anyway. Maybe some weekends will be interesting enough, and coming weekend might be one, with the Nyama (‘meat’ in Shona) festival in Delft, but surely, I will post heavily during trips abroad. That’s what I like doing and, based on visitor statistics, that’s what people, that means you, like to read and view.
Struggle
This year, I learned that all Zimbabweans struggle all the time, whether they have no food on the table or can’t afford to buy a third car and I like to struggle with them.
The last couple of weeks, in relation to my computer setup at home, I really have been struggling. Everything slowly but surely stopped working. Frantically, I tried to save my Red Hat 9 installation, but today, I gave up and finally opted for Fedora Core 2 and, thank your god, things go reasonably well. The two PCs (one windows box, one linux box) can finally see each other again and I’m even back to the windows box being able to transfer files to and from the linux box. The linux machine now even is able to see the windows box (a first), but I still can’t transfer files through the GUI.
Work – no work
On the money side, things are bleak. I did secure two paying projects some weeks ago, but progress is slow, very slow. I’m even looking at finding a real job now, which means things are really bad.
Farsi
And then there’s Farsi. Betsy and I started a Farsi language course with the totally friendly mrs Azami whom Betsy met through work. She’s Baha’i and already invited us to a unity dinner this weekend. I’m not sure we’ll be going. She WILL be making Persian dishes, however.
We had our second lesson yesterday, and it’s not going all that bad. Betsy is struggling a bit (hey, who isn’t – see above), but she’s doing fine.
We missed our planned second lesson last week, because someone really wanted to go the scenic route in Scotland (yes, that’s you, Joost).
It seems we enjoy the lessons as much as mrs Azami does, having tought Farsi a long time ago and finally being able, once more, to transfer her skills to some younger folks (she’s 69(!) but looks mid-50s, at most).
Statues
Our Shona sculptures still haven’t arrived, although they should be going through customs this week. I did some checks in Delft and Den Haag and it seems there’s a significant shortage of Shona sculptures. All arts shops appear to believe you can still easily get them ‘there and there’, but that’s what they all say. They keep on pointing you to the next shop, only to be pointed, well, to the next shop.
It’s a good thing. If only we can start selling them before the summer’s really over.
And birthday. Nothing much happening today. My parents are stopping by tonight. No party. I get a day older every day. I celebrate that enough already. In fact, I’ll have another whisky right now. Which reminds me, have you voted recently at 10GoodReasons.com?