When Woodland Kingfishers Attack

This morning I saw one of these on the rail of our terrace:

At the time I didn't know what it was. I was only a few feet away from it and I didn't want to move or call out to Mike. I just watched him and tried to imprint his image on my brain so I could look him up later. 

He flew up under the terrace roof, right in front of me, and smacked into a column on the other end of the terrace. Then he took off for a nearby tree. Mike came out as he was flying off. He had something in his mouth and with the binoculars Mike identified it as a gecko. The geckos hide out in the seam along the edge of the roof, so he must have intentionally flown in to get the gecko; he wasn't just a stupid bird smacking in to something. He thrashed the gecko around a bit, then assumedly at it. He flew away before I could see him with the binoculars.

This was our first sighting of this bird in our yard. The blue is striking. We hope he sticks around! We have more than enough geckos for him to snack on.

Image from wikipedia.org.

He was a phenomenal cat

After a few days of what seemed like recovery, Grendel started losing weight again. Quickly. We had long days marked by visits to the vet and long nights where I was sure he wasn't going to be with us in the morning. But he kept pulling through, which kept my hope up. 

He passed last Saturday night. We had a sunrise burial on Sunday. 

We are overwhelmed by the love that has been pouring in from around the world. He was an international superstar. Thanks everyone.

Songs

I've had two songs stuck in my head the past few days.

Brand New Colony, by the Postal Service:

I want to take you far from the cynics int his town
And kiss you on the mouth
We'll cut out bodies free from the tethers of this scene,
Start a brand new colony
Where everything will change,
We'll give ourselves new names (identities erased)
The sun will heat the ground
Under our bare feet in this brand new colony
Everything will change

And The Kinks' Phenomenal Cat:

A long, long time ago,
In the land of idiot boys,
There live a cat, a phenomenal cat,
Who loved to wallow all day.

No one bothered him
As he sat, content in his tree.
He just lived to eat cause it kept him fat,
And thats how he wanted to stay.

Though he was big and fat,
All the world was good to him,
And he pointed out on the map
All the places he had been.

Regular blogging will resume here in a few days. I've done a bit of posting at What I Eat.

Ellie et le petit serpent maison

We get baby snakes in our house. The first time we saw one, one of our first nights here, we were horrified that we had some sort of worm moving in to infest our food.

But we soon learned that they are snakes. They are babies. And they are harmless, even as adults. They are called house snakes, or serpent maison, and they apparently come in both black and green.

The cats love playing with them and they seem to be in endless supply so we let the cats have them. As long as the snakes stay babies and stay on the floor. I'm dreading the day I find an adult curled up in my t-shirt drawer, as nonvenomous as they are.

Harry Potter and the Land of No Movies

There's one thing I'm really jonsin' about this year. I'm going to miss the new Harry Potter movie this summer. I've seriously been thinking about a July vacation in the United States or Europe just so I can see the movie (we have no other reason to take a vacation in July; in fact, Mike can't take a vacation at all until September). I've loved all the Harry Potter movies and there have been no other films in recent years that I've really wanted to see right away.

But Burundi has one movie theater, and the movies are almost exclusively shown in French. Maybe two or three times a year they'll show an English-language film (and so far they haven't been ones I've wanted to see). Since I really can't afford a vacation just to fly home and watch a movie here's my plan B: Befriend the guy at the theater who orders the films and lobby for an English-language showing of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. 

It's starting to work already! Mike works with the brother of the theater manager. The manager and I have exchanged emails. I just have to convince him that there are enough English-speaking Harry Potter fans here to warrant this being one of his few selections this year.

I have no hips

For want of entertainment around here, when a friend said she’d teach a belly-dancing class, I said I’d attend. I don’t know what I was thinking. On one hand, I like exercising and I’ll try just about any workout. On the other hand, I hate people and organized class-type situations. Plus I have no grace or rhythm and I’m not flexible.

Why not give it a shot?

It was fun. The music was catchy. I got to wear a scarf tied around my hips with little jingly coins on it. And while I found the whole thing enjoyable, I wasn’t overcome with the feminine sensuality that women are supposedly overcome by when they do something like try belly-dancing. (It’s like when I shot a gun. I was like, okay, I shot a gun. I didn’t feel strong or empowered.)

I don’t have hips. I’ve always enjoyed my slim figure and never once wished for a waist or hips or an otherwise hourglass figure. I know that technically I was doing all the moves correctly, but my little coins weren’t jingling as loudly as they should have. I probably looked like a robot. A quiet robot.

But I'm going to go back next week. Now that I've started, I want to finish the whole dance. 

Besides, what else am I going to do with my Tuesday nights?

Hardly Worth Reading

I had a decent post all worked out, done during some slow moments at work, but of course, since this is Burundi, the network went down and I couldn't email my post notes to myself to work on at home. Plus, now, I've been at Book Club and have had a bit of wine, so I can't recraft the post.

I like reading, and I enjoy the people at Book Club, and in theory I enjoy Book Club, but why does it always seem like such a chore? Once I come home I realize I've had a good time, but there's something about the label "book club" that's off-putting.

More on this later. It's time for bed.