Sunrise/Sunset

Sun just set here - don't worry buddy I'll take the shuttle bus home.
Sila's up and probably working on the boat right now, if Dave Jablonski doesn't get hold of him today! I miss this very much, all the elements are in this photo. Cozy boat, cold Tecate, Netflix, good books, and oh yah, my darling Husband. I'm surprisingly unhomesick but I do need somebody to go around with. Went shopping today at a normal western shopping mall and went to the REI lookalike and got some lightweight pants with lots of pockets - no shorts in Mozambique.

When the sun rises on Sila:

The sun sets on me:

And vice versa.

Busy bee

Lots to do here my friends! Just realized I was neglecting the blog - thanks to Hilde who's actually reading it! Yay Hilde thanks & miss you. So I haven't had much new scenary this week but I did go see Inconvenient Truth with John R. and his wife Phil and they took me out for a lovely Italian dinner at the V&A waterfront. Nice weekend activity. Now I'm trying to write three (tiny) grant proposals for three different projects, get my 3rd year practicals (7 labs in 4 weeks!) organized enough to turn billets over to the techs for microstructure, and lay out my lecture schedule IN SPECIFICS before leaving for Mozambique on Monday, unless of course it continues to rain/flood in Mozambique and Jodie Miller decides to postpone the trip. She is fast, and funny, and Australian and I can't wait to work with her. She speaks bluntly and is always smiling.

Mozambique! Shaped like California but slightly larger than Texas. We are flying via J-berg to Maputo for 7 days to look at fluid flow in a bimodal rift volcanic sequence - that's all I know about that - then north to Nampula for 8 days to look at the Mozambique Belt - seems like that should be awesome. The Zambezi River is flooding again (as per today's Guardian.co.uk) and we may have trouble connecting to the north.

A warning to American travellers - I paid R700 for my 2-month tourist visa to Mozambique - "Reciprocity Policy". And a note to my mom - My health insurance is covering emergency care and they have your phone number.

Paradise Office

Ah, the sixth floor office. In spite of numerous warnings from all sides that it's going to turn into a sauna, I have all the windows open and I am loving it! Loving it up here. and the thighs of steel will be thanking me too. I hate the lift! It's creaky and humid in there.

These two pictures are both taken from the north wall of the office, from either side of the bank of file cabinets. The office is L-shaped and huge. It was the department chair's office for the old PreCambrian Geology department that was later absorbed. So it has a little secretary's office adjacent, with wacky old phones, which I will now refer to as my "bike's office".

I love the bookshelves. Love love love! Can't wait until my books get here. All those rocks belong to my predecessor, they are rad ductile stuff (most of them) which I will cut up and see if I can make thin sections and start working on the teaching collection! My thin-section-ductile-structure is a bit rusty after years in mothballs at UCSC.






Oh yah, and here's a link back to when I first discovered this office with this view!!

Guinea Fowl

On the way to work... Guinea Fowl... with babies!

Cape Hangklip Day

My colleague John has a great Honors student who is doing a project out at Cape Hangklip. On Saturday the three of us went out there to scope the field area and see if we could find some of the outcrops described by geologists who worked the area previously. Cape Hangklip is a beautiful peak east across False Bay from the Cape Peninsula. It is composed of the same Table Mountain Group rocks, but more deformed than on Table Mountain intself. On top of Table Mountain, relatively conformably overlying the Peninsula Sandstone which forms its ramparts, is the Pakhuis Tillite.


Donna and John and myself spent Saturday hiking around Cape Hangklip with the goal of finding the similar strata as are exposed on Table Mountain, and chasing down an old mystery John found in the literature about their true origins. Here are Donna and John entering the park where we started our hike.


We had a long slow hike up the pass (east to west in the Cape Hangklip google earth image above) and crossed a lot of quartz-cemented breccias. By the top of the pass we still hadn't uncovered our quarry so we did a little bush wacking looking for it. We had a report from (other) John and Roy that was easy to find, just past the waterfall. So we went way off trail following the sound of this waterfall. Donna didn't say but I think she has some climbing experience.

The creeks run red here due to the pH affect from the tannins and other organic acids from the rich fynbos soils. These then acidic creeks run over Fe-Mn cemented breccias in the Peninsula formation - I don't know about their origin just yet - but their timing might help shed light on the Pen. Fm. history. My other colleague "John" [Andy! More "Johns" than Women!] has a student looking at the geochemistry of these cements on Table Mountain. I'm hoping to get up there to do some field work with him in Skeleton Gorge as soon as possible. Here is the Fe-Mn breccias weathered out along the slope:

Donna and I looking down this CRAZY CLIFF to Betty's Bay. Her family has a place out there so she can get in a lot of hours on this mountain in relative comfort. Here we're seated on the precipice at the head of the gorge, on what appears to be a crushed damage zone with most fractures running actually perpendicular to the gorge axis, and roughly vertically dipping. Cementation of this damage zone might be responsible for creating this nick point. There's a big waterfall below.

While climbing around and down one side of that gorge, we could see across to the other. See how there are nice concentric anticlines with crush zones where the synclines should be? Rad! Is that evidence of ramp thrust propogation? [Note to students: if you are snooping on my blog, you better be able to answer this question. Rick will help you.]

Now, in my previous life in North America I think we were rather strict about using the word "tillite" in that "tills" are sediments deposited directly by ice. Sedimentary rocks which suggest that ice was around but which are deposited in water or other means, we wouldn't have called a till (when lithified, "tillite"). If till is reworked and deposited by a river, it would contain glacially formed clasts, but it would have more sorting and sed structures of a river or delta, this is called a sandur. I already took note at Laingsburg that the Dwyka Tillites (these are amoung the famous deposits which link South Africa to other parts of Gondwana) some of which are really glaciomarine basinal sediments with dropstones. Are there any ice people out there who would care to get me off my high horse about the word "till"? CAn I bring myself to accept this flippant usage of a geological term? Anyway I dgress. Here is a faceted quartz pebble in the Cape Hangklip Member. These pebbles are the strongest line of evidence for ice processes in this section.

The Peninsula Fm. is a thick sequence of very very clean quartz sands, medium to coarse grained, with massive bedding and abundant crossbedding ( trough, herringbone, etc...) with common pebble beds and lenses with the pebbles nearly 100% vein quartz and chert. Sorting is near perfect. Now low greenschist-facies metamorphosed with abundant quartz cements, all non-quartz material is strongly aligned fibrous sericite in interstices, fibers are bedding-parallel. OK, simple mineralogy, simple microstructre, everything is explicable so far. Two models exist for its deposition: braided fluvial (maybe sandur?) and shallow marine. At Cape Hangklip there is a diamictite of fine quartz silt matrix with random assortment of quartz pebbles, basically no bedding. It is a lens a few km long within the upper portion of the Peninsula Fm. So the main question of Donna's thesis will be to determine the origin of this "Cape Hangklip Member", interpret its sedimentary origins, and compare it to the Pakhuis Tillite from Table Mountain. It is so similar in fact that there is a question of whether the CHM is just a repetition of the Pakuis/Peninsula contact by faulting. Here's the diamictite at Cape Hangklip:


I won't go into detail about the controversy because that's Donna's job! Suffice it to say that so far I have the opposite opinion to my colleague and I think that's best for Donna because she can make up her own mind without two advisors pushing her in the same direction. Finally, here is a blurry picture of a beautiful pair of orange-breasted sunbirds in the garden birdbath:

Khuluma Workshop

I've spent two of three days at the Khuluma Workshop - it's a sort of voluntary challenge day for any staff of UCT that wish to attend. I've been to plenty of diversity workshops and leadership camps and what have you before, and although there are some elements of this experience that recall those, Khuluma has been quite different. In our class of 16, I think we have 2 white men, 3 white women, 3 Black women, 1 Black man, 2 Coloured men, 5 Coloured women. They are from various staff offices and schools. The facilitators are a Black woman from Soweto and a white woman raised in Kenya and Uganda by British parents. They are both very very good. Embodiment of gentleness. Embodiment of authority.

First of all - when the question is asked, "Relate a story of a time when you experienced discrimination":

A Coloured man related the forced relocation of his family from a neighborhood which was reclassified as "white".
A Muslim Coloured woman related being ejected from "white" beaches by the police and threatened with arrest.
A Coloured woman related the story of her green-eyed Coloured boyfriend who was able to "pass" or "go for white" and purchase a house in a white area. This necessitated getting the signed permission of everyone in that neighborhood for him to move in.

And that was just from my small group.

And when the question is asked, "Relate a story of a time when you discriminated against someone":
Initially, I was the only person in my group who had a story. I don't think there's been enough time and dialog going on for lots of people to think about that way. The history is so one-sided.

Today (the second day) we talked more about the history. I had read about some of the laws and some of the resistance in Nelson Mandela's autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom but there were far more laws than I knew of, the system was more insidious than Mandela's book expresses. I assume this is due to Mandela's famous spirit of forgiveness and effort toward Reconcilation. It is amazing to hear first hand what it was like. And it's not like going once a year to meet the 1906 Earthquake survivors at a special ceremony, it's not history. Everyone you see on the street who is older than about 10 has memories (scars) of life under aparteid. This includes the whites too - whether actively involved in "The Struggle" or not. What was terrifying for me to realize is how the first 20 years or so of aparteid were basically barely different than the segregation laws in the US. Where the ZA National Party made laws after that - many of them were identical to the unwritten laws that governed the life of American blacks prior to the Civil Rights Movement. I went into the workshop planning to be an observer and feeling somewhat naive. But what I heard started to sound uncomfortably familiar.

We were divided into white and non-white groups today - the term "Black" here is used both for genetic Africans and as a general term for "People of Color" - I didn't realize before that this is how UCT achieves its "50% Black" statistic - but that's another story.

To be sent into another room with the other white people was a horrible shock. After spending 1.5 days really digging into the experiences of my new friends and really being touched by their stories - to be sent out felt like redrawing the lines in the sand. The other person who was really troubled and had difficulty leaving the room was a white man in his mid-50s - like other white males he was conscripted into the South African Defence Force at 18 and sent to the Border wars - he lashed out against the commanders for what he was being asked to do and was imprisoned by the government.

As the white group we made a list of how the legacy of aparteid had hurt white South Africans and the country as a whole. Many items on our list will sound familiar to Americans as well -
-the "Pale Male" syndrome where white males feel rage over being disenfranchised, but a survey of the positions of power still shows extensive control of economy and media by white males.
-fear of non-whites as bringing crime, incursion into neighborhoods, "property values"... living in fear
-white families separating as white people left ZA (thinking of white South Africans I've met in US... all arrived circa 1995)
-Hard to form new alliances of real trust - now racism has gone "underground"
-whites afraid to give anybody feedback/criticism at work - overplaying of the "race card"

We are not so different after all! I could have made 75% of the list about America.

What WAS different - is the reaction of the Black/Coloured group to our list - many people were genuinely surprised, and even terribly sad and hurt - to see the extent of the fear among whites -
I think the communication has been so ABSENT between communities that many people never thought about the motivations behind white racism and resistance to change. Nobody tried to justify those things of course - but I think for some people present it put a human face on the "white menace". One Coloured woman came to tears to see that Transformation was coming at so great a cost for some people, as a white woman related that her sons had left the country in 1995 and made homes in Europe - never to return.

Tune in tomorrow after the session on WHAT WE CAN DO AT WORK

Househunting (sucks)

I was smitten with this little cottage with a big back yard and a tomato plant in the front with bunches of tomatoes on it!



I loved it when I got inside, with "Oregon pine' plank floors and tall masonry/whitewashed walls and ceilings. It felt like it would be so cool in the summer.



Then I found the kitchen. Where's the sink? Oh it's in a shed tacked onto the back door of the house. No plumbing in the kitchen. The bathroom was back there too. No shower. Unfinished plywood. Back to the drawing board.





Devil's Peak at night:

Flora of Table Mountain

You think this is not a real flower. But it is! It is the Protea!



This beautiful Disa orchid is the largest orchid of the fynbos.



King Protea overlooking Cape Town.

Table Mountain

Nicci and her friend David took me for a gorgeous hike on Table Mountain on Sunday - In addition to the great views and beautiful flowers we had a great time. After a SERIOUS climb up Constantia Nec we came out on the top of Table Mountain, which is actually not as flat in this area. There are a series of dams built to provide water to the wine farms on the eastern flanks and to the villages on the western coast. These are still in use and actually quite beautiful. Some of the natural drainages are said to run along faults.



These are some of the old cabins up top - they belong to the park now - and you can rent them! Check out this view! This is looking SSE toward the Cape Peninsula and False Bay.



Ah, in a drainage, way out of place... the mysterious folds in the otherwise pretty much undeformed Peninsula Fm. sandstone (Table Mountain Group). These are supposedly found at the top of the formation (which is overlain by the Pakuis Tillite). So some have suggested glaciotectonic origin. BUT as I understand it the Pakuis is pretty much a periglacial marine debris flow? Or a silty diamictite anyway? Not ground moraine? Time will tell.


Across False Bay at Cape Hangklip is another outcrop of the upper Peninsula Fm. and overlying Pakuis Fm. One of the honors students I am working with here will be looking at a mysterious diamictite (Hangklip Member) which occurs within the upper part of the sandstone - is it indicative of earlier onset glaciation? Is it indicative of thrusting and repetition of the Peninsula/Pakuis contact? or is it just a debris flow onto a sandy shelf, with material derived from distant glaciers? We'll go across on Saturday to start looking for the contact. Secretly I hope it is a thrust fault (NOT SO SECRETLY!) but this is a great field project anyway, it is coastline and roadcut exposures only so I am familiar with that kind of field work.

Susan Arndt

My mother-in-law died this morning of an aggressive breast cancer. She was 53 years old.

I was pretty intimidated when I first met Sue, mostly (I now realize) by awe. Everything in Sue's orbit worked like clockwork. Her garden fed tens of people all summer. Her house was always full of wayword kids, family, college pals of her offspring and random hitch hikers. She gave them lodging, food, shoes, and a healthy dose of chores to do.

Sue's illness inspired an outpouring of love and help from the Homer community - not only because that's exactly how Homer deals with times of need, but because Sue was so important to so many patients and families facing illness. At the time of her diagnosis, she was working toward a masters in nursing instruction - to enable her to get grant money to help more people. One of her dreams was to travel to Bhutan and work with the nuns there in public health.

Sue was a sort of a frontier Martha Stewart to me - she had a recipe or a home remedy for anything, could grow anything, can anything, never threw anything away, in fact would go to great lengths to find a use for things like coffee lids and other landfill fodder, sometimes to the point of total inefficiency. In spite of her propensity for constant cookie baking, she had a spine of steel. Her vision for her environment was thorough and determined, and as a result, her home was a refuge and a mecca for all sorts of people.

In spite of my fascination with Sue's world, I wasn't sure at first that I completely fit in there. It felt like I was lost in the crowd and didn't make an easy personal connection with Sue. Then in the summer of 2004, I flew to Homer to meet Sila and he got stuck on the tug boat, couldn't make it home. For a week I paced Sue's kitchen, barely leaving the house in case Sila would call and say he was on his way. Aasta and Stefan tried to distract me with jogging and movies but I grew more anxious. Finally Sue switched her work shifts around and forced me into a kayak. Half way across Kachemak Bay I thought I would probably drown in the dark but Sue slowed down to my sorry paddling speed and encouraged me along. We spent the night camped on the beach at Glacier spit. We made a little fire and ate chocolate and smoked salmon. Sue produced a little flask of liquor. We talked little - at least compared to my family, who chatter and argue constantly and verbalize everything. I realized that Sue knew what I needed better than I did to get through my impatience, and furthermore, that this understanding had not required a word to pass between us on the subject. We packed up in the morning and paddled twice around Gull Island. I relaxed. A bird crapped on Sue's arm. We laughed a lot. By the time we paddled back to Land's End I couldn't exactly lift the kayak onto the Subaru. But I was no longer scared of kayaking across the bay and I felt a deeper connection to Sue.

Later that summer, Sue led my mother on the hike of her life, nearly to the summit of Poot Peak. I think this resulted in my mom eating all Sue's arnica. Sue on the other hand, was not the least bit fazed by this and led me on the backwoods bushwack of my life the next day, 12 miles in 8 hours through thickets of devil's club and spruce deadfall. She seemed immune to thirst and fatigue. A year and a half later she was diagnosed with breast cancer. By the time it was detected, it had already metastasized.

During the early stages of Sue's treatments, I saw another side of her personality that I hadn't experienced before. She seemed to display a wry sense of humor, even flip at times, about what was happening to her body. Although some around her might have found this unsettling, I thought it displayed another dimension to Sue's strength of character. I don't know if she intended it, but it was an easier tone for Sila. It created a little common space where he could be more literal, talking with his mom about what was happening. Some of my best memories of Sue are from that time - the long drive down from Anchorage, meeting the FedEx man in the Fred Meyer parking lot to get her iPod, slow walks on the bike path, and just hanging out with Sue and Sila. It was a difficult but hopeful time, and we were all on a mission together to treat Sue's cancer. I was only there for a small portion of that time, but it was an exhausting routine. It left me deeply impressed and grateful to Aasta and Stefan and Chris and Wayne and the Holmans and everyone who was living that routine instead of just visiting as I was.

I've been staring at the photo (above) of Sue and I on my wedding day, July 10, 2006. In it, I am all bleary and teary eyed in her (borrowed and blue and new) scarf. Sue, in spite of having lost her hair to an intense first round of chemotherapy and radiation, looks like a pillar of strength. Maybe it's my imagination but she looks happy too, happy to have me joining her family. When we said goodbye to each other a month ago, in the same place in Sila's house where this picture was taken, was the first time I ever saw a tear in her eye. It was pretty clear it would be the last time we were together. I had a good cry afterwards even though I had been trying not to cry about it in front of Sila.

In retrospect I wondered if I shouldn't have held back the tears as Sue was leaving the house that day - I didn't want her not to know how I felt - neither did I want her to feel the burden of other peoples' sadness. But looking at this photo I think she knows that she is family to me - always will be - and any time in my life I am struggling, I can remember the experience of Sue paddling ahead, hiking ahead, but reaching back and pulling me forward.

right kind of siding

Having lunch today at the UCT club with a couple other young women i met in the staff orientation, one from zoology and one from mathematics ("maths"). I knew I liked the club right away. There are a few reasons for this. One is the location, overlooking cape town and adjacent to the rugby fields. One is the menu. One is the bar, called the "laboratory", with old rugby jerseys, older science equipment, and some kind of taxadermied wart hog thing. But the best thing has to be the Malmsbury phyllite siding on the outside walls:




On my walk home last night after a little rain, I was overwhelmed by a beautiful scent that reminded me of Hawaii. The rain knocked some flowers off the tree so I took some home:

I'm going to miss the Daniel Family trip again this year, I got my teaching schedule and I have a seminar that runs June 11-29. At least there are plumaria here. Maybe I will make myself a lei.

Sideline?

If this geology thing doesn't work out, I could always start my own line of inspirational posters.

sun/clouds on Devil's Peak


Sunrise across the Cape Flats


But to return to the main line, that is, my actual job: I am potentially going to Mozambique to start working in two localities: one is a bimodal rift volcanic sequence, may be some structural meat there for me. Certainly fluid inclusion possibilities. The second is a charnokite, there are weird sort of mylonites in super course nepheline pegmatite!!??? unfortunately it's all recrystallized since it is kazillions of years old. wha! how can i do structure on this soup? we shall see, we shall see.

Newlands Forest to Kirstenbosch Gardens

Bruce and Nicci took me on a beautiful hike on Sunday. Table Mountain has three "contour paths" at different topographic levels. We entered the Newlands Forest from below and worked our way up to an upper path. The view from the bottom was pretty nice.



On the flanks of Table Mountain it felt so similar to a hike on Mt. Tamalpais on a really hot day. The same introduced eucalyptus trees are being removed. The fynbos reminds me so much of our coast chaparral back home. And then there are a few little things that don't look like home, like giant red locusts.



Looking around on the lower slopes, it's pretty clear that most of the flanks of TM are debris flow deposits. Reddish, silty matrix with clasts from pebbles to giant house-sized boulders everywhere. As you may know, Table Mountain (as seen above) gets its weather-resistance and its tabliness from the Peninsula Fm. Sandstone (I would call it a quartzite myself) which is shallow marine, nearly perfectly sorted arenite with rare pebble beds and lenses - and the pebbles are vein quartz (by and large.) There are remnants of the Pakhuis tillites on top - depositionally (unconformably) overlying the sandstone. Anyway long story short, was wondering why no slope stability problems on this oversteepened (according to my calves) pile of quartz dust and paleosols. Here's the quick answer:



plants. Native fynbos, specifically. Also no uplift.

Bruce, Nicci and Shadow:




Hoping to join them again for a hike all the way up to the top one of these weekends

Social Science creeping on my mind

As I was walking up to campus this morning, I passed a bunch of security guards that I've been passing every morning. Usually they are spread around through campus but today they were hanging out, talking in I don't know what African language. I wonder if all the orientation stuff this week, there will be a chance for language help. I couldn't even hope to learn a new language but I sure would like to be able to identify one or two. When the guards saw me, they greeted me in English. Obvious enough. The guards are all younger than me, except maybe for one guy who seems sort of the "elder statesman", and doesn't smile. The rest are quite friendly. Anyway hearing the rolling, clicking, speach from the VHF reminded me of my recuring nightmares from last August about remembering and pronouncing my students' names. The very least I can do is get their names right. I love the sound of the language on the radio. The cadence and intonation remind me of the Caribbean and the American south. I wonder if there's any link there, or if all African languages still sound the same to me? If the orientation was being run by Americans, it would almost certainly include an introduction to some of the more prevalent languages and cultures among the student body. Well, I guess I'll ask. How typically American of me to want a cheat sheet or a powerpoint bullet slide telling me what I need to know in 50 words or less. Gotta quit this feeling of "hurry." I don't have to understand it all THIS WEEK.



As I continued up to campus I crossed under De Waal Dr. and started thinking about basic pronounciations. Growing up in California we learn to interpret place names as English or Spanish and assign a different phoenetic system when we pronounce them. This happens without thinking. In the case of De Waal, the double "a" tips us off that it's Dutch, and therefore the "w" should be pronounced "v". But the Californian method isn't really Spanish in pronounciation, but a California pigeon. Like San Rafael - We say "rafell", real Spanish would be "rafiyel", but applying more typical American English phoenetics would give us "rafale". In order to follow directions here I often have to get someone to spell out street names. If you have heard "Duvall" would you (driving on a freeway) know to turn on "De Waal"? That's an easy one, try a street name with clicks in it! Shoot.

Farmer's market

Roxy picked me up yesterday morning and took me to a weekly farmers' market off Main Rd. in Salt River. It was pretty upscale! Lots of organic stuff and elegant sauces and breads and tarts and spreads and non-native-at-all crafts. If it wasn't for the dangling meat sticks it could have been California. I stocked up on tasty vegetables. Roxy went especially for Edie's Lemon Cordial to which I am now addicted, I bought a bottle plus a bottle of the Lemon Ginger. it's like Rose's lime juice only slightly fizzy. I have been sipping it in a glass of either hot or cold water ever since I got home.



Sila asked me what fish people eat here, this is the main one that's caught locally, the Kingklip. It is mostly found in the form of fish sticks because English people love to deepfry perfectly good food. So until now I wasn't sure what it would look like. What kind of fish is this Sila? Do you think you could catch just one? Maybe we could pay somebody to help. Heh heh.



This will be Sila's first word in Afrikaans: Koeksister. I'm sure he will learn to pronounce this perfectly. I'm not sure why I photographed the donuts instead of the gorgeous spreads of local organic produce and flowers and potted plants. I am seriously considering buying a little herb garden pot for my deck. I have never grown anything successfully but this looks easy. And the flowers are incredible! Next saturday for sure. Maybe I will have a car or a bike by then.


From the market, Roxy and I went to the bank and discovered that I couldn't open a bank account until I had a letter from my employers proving who I am, where I live, and how much money I make. I understand this strict policy is a result of money laundering in the past. This is a hassle though because it tacks on at least one more cycle through the HR department before I can get paid. Harumph.


Finally we went shopping at Cavendash Center in Claremont to find me a "swimming costume" (got to add that one to the old list!). Claremont looks like some upscale shopping district in LA. They even had some American chains, and stores that look just like American chains, so much like that I bet they are the American chains under a local name. So basically we went to a bunch of places that are just like California. Hm, will have to try a little harder if I want to get culture shocked. But I got to admit the comfort of having California-like produce at home. Made a nice cauliflower-broc-carrot saute last night with funny fat carrots with extra "limbs" on them, just like Sue's. So I guess I have to expand my produce love to just say, it makes me feel at home. I spent a bunch of money on crusty seedy wheaty bread and ethiopian spicy sauce and it was totally worth it.

Glorious Morning

It is easy to see why Capetonians speak of the Mountain like an old friend. It seems to watch over all corners of the city. Here it is as seen from my front door this morning:



It feels good to be back here. I woke up before dawn and walked up Main Rd. toward campus. Here's what Main Road looks like through Mowbray:



The walk took me 20 minutes south on Main Rd. to Rondebosch and then about 20 up the hill to Geol. Sciences. I am out of shape. The commute is a good start I think. I will have lots of orientation days coming up. Exciting to be back.

home maker

Ah, the new place. They gave me a 2-bedroom apartment for some reason, don't know if i'll be keeping it or not as I don't want to pay for the extra space. Anyway it's on the 3rd floor (that's what we would call the 4th floor back home.) Here are some photos. I love the broken tile mosaic shower. I have a little concrete balcony off the "lounge" (that's living room), hidden in the photo by some ugly ass pink curtains. Time to go grocery shopping.