It's my Birthday

It's my birthday, yay. I tried to do lots of fun things this weekend like biking 30 miles on my fixie in Eastern Maryland with friends, putting snazzy new red tires on, and my first lead climbing and rappelling on Monday. Also a tree burst into a huge pulsating lightning-style fire while we were climbing, caused by a splice in a power line. Bryan got a picture and I'll post when I get it.

Today's really busy at work (annual report shitshitshit) but tonight, more climbing and burgers at Dizzys.

Long lost bike

I'm bumming around the internet, trying to figure out why my Nishiki has no rack braze ons (just spent 30 bills on a rack and some dinky panniers, but they won't attack to either of my bikes), and I found the Nishiki!

She is from the 80s, which is earlier than I had pegged the teal color scheme. Her new wheels arrive wednesday, and then it will be Showtime! Today I even bought a 4 foot cable so that I'll never leave my wheels unlocked again.

No, really, Mt. Blanc

On Saturday I went out with Bonnie, our new teammate, Valentina from WHO and Mark from Global Fund. Mark paraglides off his mountain every day after work. It was free winetasting day in Geneva so we hit three vineyards, one of which also made absinthe. When we walked in the absinthe-maker was playing a waltz on this horn.


We had lunch and some excellent gelato in a lake town, Annecy, in France, then headed for Chamonix to see Mount Blanc. My mother doesn't believe the mountain really exists because she's never seen it and I'm sure these pictures won't convince her either.

Can you see the badass climber in the rocks in the foreground?


Betcher wondering how the heck we got all the way up there anyhow.


It was a totally awesome day and then Mark made me buy two quickdraws at the gear shop, as souvenirs. I was being practical and didn't want to pay in euros what I could get them for in dollars back home with my REI discount, but he was very convincing, I guess that's how he managed to distribute like 30 million mosquito nets in one year.

Mt. Blanc

Geneva was much better this time than before, in January, when it was cold and I didn't even get to see the lake. At a cocktail party I got a net company to get involved in Salif Keita's tour (ok, I had some help from the Handsomest RBM Board Member) and then our database project rocked out on day two of the board meeting. Before it all started I adjusted my internal clock by walking around looking for fixies and checking out bike parking.



I only found one fixie. It belonged to a giant.


The giant had a giant friend too.


There were about 9 million bikes in Geneva, ridden by young punks and guys in suits and moms whose husbands have UN jobs which means they're not allowed to work and can only produce babies to stave off the boredom. It was sunny and beautiful and people played chess in the park:

Cats Jesus

I don't know why cats are funny, but this is causing audible laughter.

p.s. Props to my pediatrician friend who is scoring me some antibiotics for my sinus infection, now spreading to my eye socket. In tree weeks babee, I knock de teef outta dis infection.

Pooperama

Hey! So things have been really shitty lately. To top it all off I finally went to the dentist after 3 years, or more like 6 really since I don't count the Malian dentist who checked my teeth in Bamako when I left the Peace Corps. Everything looked pretty good until they got the LASER out. Apparently it measures the density of your tooth to find hidden cavities. Cool! Normal range is like 1-10, over 25 is a cavity, and it goes up to 100 (totally rotting, shell of the tooth's former self, fasttrack to dentures). It makes a little noise in your mouth like a tiny buzzsaw. So Vicky, the totally nice hygienist who looks like Lily Tomlin and told me all about her overbearing mother who never let her travel and made her get married, "not that THAT worked out", runs the LASER around my mouth. Wrrrrrr. So far so good. WrrrrEeeeer. Oops. Small cavity. WrrrrrrrrrrrrrEeerr. Another small cavity. Jeepers. WrrrrrrEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEr. 87! Holy crap! There is DECAY IN MY MOUTH. Fucking hell.

Mind you, I have never ever had a cavity before.

Also over the weekend my window was leaking rain onto my head through infintessimate gaps in the woodwork, which may have contributed to the massive sickness that was my weekend and my monday. Monday was a full-on sickday spent lying in bed feeling sorry for myself, making toast with moldy bread because that's what we had, watching 7 hour-long episodes of Friday Night Lights, a TV show about Texas high school football shot with a gritty handheld realism. It's not as good as West Wing but it is damn good. The pilot episode made me cry. Of course, just about everything makes me cry right now (the end of Bobby, on the plane), which just makes me feel bad because I'm being a Debbie Downer for all my friends and family. Vicious cycle, yadda yadda yadda.

Anyway, this morning I was actually happy as I woke up, but I think it was just because I had been able to breathe through my nose the entire night, and so my mouth wasn't filled with awful dried saliva and nastiness. Probably just because all that has now settled into my lungs, super!

Edith and I are trying to buy a house. This is awesome. Plus she got into Hopkins Med School because like duh! she kicks ass. We drove around looking at neighborhoods on Sunday, in the rain, near both UMD and JHU, lots of cheap stuff in the ghetto near boarded up blocks, but a lot of cool cute places to be had in the nicer areas. Very exciting. If only I had time at work to look for houses, because my stupid Mac is about to get a thrashing for being so goddamn slow. I know it's 4 years old, which makes it the Methusalah of Macs, but that doesn't make it any easier when the spinning color wheel of frustration comes up everytime I ask it to switch programs or google something.

But hey. We all got problems.

Light Speed in Mali

I got to Mali Monday night. Tuesday afternoon there was a meeting to talk about activities for Malaria Month, which is April. One of the participants was Fanta Coulibaly, an actress in a Malian soap-opera called "D'ou la Famille". We thought hey, maybe we can get malaria messages into the soap, wouldn't that be cool? So we called up the director/writer and he came right over. Thought it was a great idea, except for one thing: filming had finished a year ago! But maybe we could film some skits to air right before the series?

Super, no problem. We agreed on a price and he went home while Djiba and Kouressy went over to the TV station to negotiate broadcast fees. Sidibe (the director) came back the next day for his malaria messages - 4 in total, one for each sketch, to air weekly during April. The first one had to air the following friday. It was Thursday.

Over the weekend Sidibe wrote 4 scripts, presented them to us on Monday, filmed the whole thing (12 minutes total) on Tuesday, edited on Wednesday, screened them for us Thursday, and we aired on Friday, as hoped for. I think we set a world record for fastest production - from concept to airdate - in Africa. When else do you go on a 10-day trip and get to see the beginning AND end of your work?

Plus, the sketches are really funny. L'Hadji, the father, is so incensed by malaria that he comes out of the house with his large-caliber rifle, wanting to shoot all the mosquitos. Sidibe is the Man.