I had a meeting at 11 am at a local coffee shop. It’s been raining hard nonstop since Monday morning. This is not unusual back east, but it is unusual here, and because the drainage infrastructure isn’t built for it, it’s a cause for concern. We’ve had a lot of flooding. Not in my neighborhood—we’re fine—but elsewhere in San Diego, during another round of storms last week, cars were swept away and people had to be rescued.
I went around and around the house looking for my phone, searching the usual places again and again, and finally got down on my hands and knees with a flashlight next to the bed and discovered the black phone had fallen off the nightstand and into a black shoe.
My father received these humorous fake orders when he was discharged from the army in 1945, the end of the war.
I found this document while doing some decluttering in my home office yesterday. The paper is brown with age and fragile to the touch. It’s apparently typed and mimeographed.
The document is written in the style of a military memo, instructing the men how to behave when they get back home to civilian life.
June 2019 Our final Africa safari stop was Little Kulala Desert Lodge, in Sossusvlei, the Namib-Naukluft Park, Namibia. We took another small charter flight, from Hoanib Valley Camp – or, rather the nearest airstrip from that camp, which was about two hours’s drive away from the camp itself. Sossusvlei Geluk Airstrip is the usual empty airstrip, just a cleared length of land with one or two sheds. As at our other camps, one of the staff picked us up in a Toyota truck converted for passengers, enclosed but not air conditioned.
I encountered the idea of a “digital garden” Friday and was instantly enthusiastic and spent some time this weekend nerding out about it. Here is the result – the beginning of my digital garden: mitchwagner.com.
A digital garden is a personal website curated by its author, with essays and information about the subject or subjects they’re excited about. Some are wide-ranging and complex and cover a variety of subjects, while others cover a single subject, such as neurology or books,
June 23, 2019 — Yesterday, we left the camp for our next stop. Festus drove us two hours over those rough desert roads to the same airstrip we’d flown in to. We arrived 40 minutes early so we had time to spend with our new friend. We sat in the same shelter where we’d had our first lunch together three days earlier, and talked.
Festus told us how he found his way when guiding people through through the bush.
A friend asked her Facebook friends what was the first movie that they remembered seeing in a theater.
I dug through the IMDB to find some of the earliest movies I remember seeing in theaters and enjoying. They include Doctor Doolittle, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the Love Bug and the Jungle Book. They came out in 1967-68.
Also at about that time I remember a movie with Sammy Davis Jr. — I probably had no idea who he was when I first saw the movie, but I recognized him later, in memory.
June 21, 2019 - Yesterday was busy even by the standards of this trip. Up at 6 and out at 6:30 to the main tent for breakfast and coffee. The coffee is not bad here; it’s not great, but drinkable black.
I chatted with Jordanna, an Asian woman with a posh English accent. I asked where she is from; she said London. If she had said Singapore, I would not have been surprised – Crazy Rich Asians.
June 19, 2019 — We got our cold weather yesterday, up at 5 am for the morning game drive. Camp Kipwe wasn’t cold. I’d assumed it might be at night, knowing the wide temperature fluctuations you get in the desert and judging by the heavy blankets the resort laid on the bed. But it remained warm all night and it felt like the mid-60s at breakfast and when we set out on the drive.
These were taken June 18, 2019, in Namibia.
Our cabin at Kipwe Lodge in Namibia.
View from the cabin.
View from the cabin toilet.
The cabin bathroom.
The cabin sitting room.
Another view of the cabin sitting room.
The cabin bedroom.
Driving across the Namibian desert.
Typical of the planes we used when flying between lodges in Botswana and Namibia.
Plaque inside the passenger hut at a Namibian airfield.
A passenger hut at a Namibian airfield.
June 17, 2019 [Note from 2020: Overlap here with yesterday’s entry. I’m repeating myself.] We arrived at Windhoek in Namibia two days ago, after a commercial flight of less than two hours, and were greeted outside customs by Antone, who put us in an enclosed VW van with air conditioning and car seats. He drove us through Windhoek, a relatively new city 29 years old [Note from 2020: That’s what Antone said.
June 15, 2019 – Yesterday was a travel day. We had an 11:25 am charter flight from the LLT airstrip [Note from 2020: That’s the Leroo La Tau safari camp, where we stayed for a few days], and could have jammed in a short game drive, packing and breakfast before then, but it would have been too stressful. Instead we decided to sleep in, which turned out to be 6:30 am for Julie and 6:55 am for me.
After my Mom passed away in 2000, and then my Dad in 2004, I inherited my Mom’s rolltop desk. It’s in my home office. If you’ve ever done a Zoom call with me, you can see it behind me. It’s not my primary desk; it’s just sitting there with piles of stuff on it.
Yesterday I was looking through the drawers of the desk for a Post-It note. The drawers are mostly empty; I don’t use them.
Julie has picked up a few words of Tswana, one of the two major languages of Botswana. The other major language is English:
Kealeboga =thank you Dumela mma= good morning - different ending if you’re talking with a man vs. talking with a woman.
Re mono fela= we are just here
Re kgobile= we are relaxed 📓 🌍
In the morning at home, I look at the news. Here in Africa, in the morning I look at the gnus. A herd of wildebeest gathers on the plain outside our cabin as the sun rises.
Last night, one of the guides gave us a brief five-minute tour of the African starscape. One thing I keep forgetting is that we are in the southern hemisphere now, so the stars are completely different.
Leroo La Tau, our current safari camp, is in the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park in Botswana, on the banks of the Boteti River. The resort is on a cliff overlooking a river and plain. We can go out on a deck and see wildebeest and zebras and elephants and stuff. Last night when I woke in the middle of the night, I heard a terrible screeching. It sounded a little electronic.
We’re on a 12-seater Cessna now, on our way from Camp Xakanaxa, where we spent three lovely days, to our next stop, the name of which I cannot remember.
TS, our guide at Camp X [Note from 2020: I’m not going to spell it out] is tall, thin and handsome, with dark black skin and a broad smile. He tells people his name stands for True Story, because he only speaks truth.
I literally squeed when I saw a mother baboon carrying her baby. “Oh my god it’s a baby baboon!” I exclaimed in a high pitched squeal like an 11 year old girl. The baby dropped off the mother, stood on his hind legs a wobbly moment, then looked puzzled and fell over. Who would not squee at that?
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Dawn river cruise. Instant coffee from metal camp cups at sunrise, mixed with hot water from a Stanley insulated bottle
Yesterday was our first full day really in Africa, when we got out of the airport/hotel complex in Johannesburg to the Chobe Game Lodge in Botswana . This place is posh, with a vaguely colonial style and dozens of staff, smiling and jumping to attention. Indeed, service is both overly attentive and not quite what we wanted.Four or five people serve us at each meal, and yet service is slow and it can be difficult to find someone if you need something.
We arrived at Kasane Airport, a small airport outside Chobe National Park in Botswana, yesterday, and when we stepped outside the airport that is when our trip really began. A driver from the resort met us, a dark-skinned black woman wearing a navy medium weight coat and wool beanie hat despite 80-plus degree heat. We loaded aboard our vehicle, which was not the shuttle bus I’d expected, but rather a flatbed truck with high sides and padded bench seats.
I fell down an Internet rabbit hole this morning. I received an email from someone signing himself as “Alan Tarica.” It read:
“How do you have nothing to say? Idiots like you need to be exposed for having no critical thinking or meta cognition and no integrity.”
I had no idea what this was about. I thought it might be related to one of my political posts, but experience tells me that it could be about _anything.
Yesterday, Lake Murray was open for the first or second day since the social distancing order became law in California (which was March 20, by the way, so that’s nearly two months now). I went there on my daily walk.
Too many people! Social distancing was difficult, too easy to slip inside the six-foot distance. Only about half of the people were wearing masks. Maybe less than half. You could walk in and out freely but they had park workers set up on the entrance road to keep the parking lot from filling up.
I had long, thick hair when I was a young man and I miss it. For years I’ve wondered if I would look good with long hair today, even though my hair is extremely thin now. Social distancing gave me an opportunity to find out; I went far longer than usual between haircuts.
The answer is that I look terrible with long hair. I am back to number two clippers all over, for good.
Garry Armacost, was wounded fighting for his country in Vietnam. Now he’s in the fight of his life, against cancer and the bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Garry is a big, cheerful, quiet 75-year-old who lives in San Diego. He needs cancer surgery for his survival. The surgery is complicated, long, done robotically, and requires sophisticated post-operative care.
Garry has had bad experience with post-operative care at the VA, which proved nearly fatal in 2012.
Yesterday I read some of “Storm before the Storm” a history of the fall of the Roman Republic, by Mike Duncan, and “Silver Pigs,” the first in the mystery series by Lindsey Davis about Marcus Didius Falco, a private detective in Imperial Rome. I’ve read that series before but I’ve forgotten most of it so it’s nearly new to me.
I finished re-watching “I, Claudius” Sunday — that’s the fourth time I’ve seen that.
A young woman ahead of me at airport security was walking with a cane and had a “boot” on her foot – a removable enclosure to immobilize an injured foot.
The security guy asked her if she could walk without the cane, and take off the boot, and put them through the security scanner. The security guy was nice about it; he said if taking off the boot and walking without the cane caused any discomfort at all, she should just leave them on.
I watched Britannia, with Julie, and am rewatching I, Claudius.
I just started reading “Silver Pigs,” the first book of the historical mystery series by Lindsey Davis about Marcus Didius Falco, a private investigator in 1st Century Rome. I read many of those books years ago but I have essentially forgotten them so I’m quite enjoying “Silver Pigs.” I did not get through the whole series then, and plan to do so now.
We had drama. Julie commented at bedtime that she hadn’t seen Vivvie, our slate-gray cat, for about 24 hours. So we spent some time looking around the house for her. I went down in the courtyard, though Vivvie never, ever shows any interest in leaving the house. She’s a timid cat and runs away at any sign of busyness. No sign of Vivvie. I kept my eyes peeled around the yard when I was putting Minnie to bed. No sign of Vivvie. I looked in the spare room and closets. Nothing.
Vivvie did not come to bed with Julie during the night either.
This morning, we looked around some more. Still no sign of Vivvie. Julie was distraught. I was concerned and also puzzled. Sammy is an escape cat. If Sammy was missing that amount of time I’d be sure she’d gotten out. But Vivvie stays put.
Then Julie had an idea: My recliner in the living room. I’d been sitting in it yesterday. What if Vivvie climbed up in there when it was open, then couldn’t get out when I shut it and got up?
And we went to the living room and opened it up and Vivvie SHOT OUT AT TOP SPEED.
We are often in the living room with the dog and Vivvie is wary about the dog so when she got stuck in there she didn’t complain the whole time we were in the room. Or I don’t know maybe she liked it. Cats are weird. 📓
