various weighty matters

zebras and their hooves

I hadn't visited the bonobo handshake blog for a while, and was happy to find it still going strong, and moved as always by those fascinating beasties. I'd heard that the fierce fighting in the Congo was wreaking havoc, as if bonobos didn't have enough to contend with, but at least the principal bonobo habitat, in the central region, is away from most of the fighting. Still there are scads of hungry desperate soldiers hunting throughout the whole country. 

Wish I had the money for a t-shirt or two.

Pronunciamento: when the army, in those countries where the army stands pretty big in its boots, illegally proclaims a lack of confidence in the prevailing government, setting the stage for a military coup. In expansionist Japan in the thirties there was a pronunciamento mood against the more cautious governments of the day, but more in the junior ranks of the army than among the top brass. 

Yesterday we visited the airport in an attempt to farewell my favourite six year old, who was taking her broken arm with her back to Mount Gambier. I was armed with a video camera, and carried too a little talking zebra she got from MacDonalds [not the farm] and left at my house, after painting its white hooves black [because that was the colour they should be, according to Her Certitude]. I have a funny relationship with airports. Because I've never flown in my adult life, never having the money for a ticket, they're like places where the other half live, though the other half looks more and more like myself. 

We kept telling ourselves we had plenty of time, which meant that we were running terribly late. We stopped at a post office for some reason, and then when we got there, we got into a confusion as always, finding ourselves precious minutes away from where we wanted to be. Then tried to find the Rex airlines departure area. We found the arrival area, and nobody to direct us, so we walked thousands more steps  until we found the departure area, which seemed to be immediately above the arrival area. By this time we were realizing it was going to be too late, and she was very apologetic, and I was cursing the awfulness of airports that I didn't belong to.

I love that girl so much. I'll ring her today.

From tomorrow plastic bags will be banned in South Australia. I'm not sure if the general public is ready for it, I have plenty of carry bags here but I keep forgetting to keep them in my car. I'll put them in right now. 

My weight, precisely measured at the right time of day, is 81.1 kgs. Today I'm restarting with CSIRO, volume 2. I did 5 kms on the exercise bike before 7.30, followed by a brief walk. If only I could keep it up, but do I ever? The boy is away for a few days over new year, and that's much relief.