Life Imitates Art

Tonight's James Bond movie on eTV is On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which is triply famous for being the one where James Bond gets married, for starring George "Who!?" Lazenby, and for being based on the book by the same name, which I incidentally finished reading this morning. I'm not even ashamed that I plan my Sundays around these anymore.

Algebra!

I remember approximately nothing from high school algebra, but a Saturday in the office - being in pajamas the entire time = 0.

Adventures in Respiratory and Skeletal Health

Ugh, it turns out I have a bone fragment lodged in the back of my throat. Of all the ways I could potentially spend my last two weeks in South Africa, the prospect of throat surgery is somewhere at the bottom of the list, around, say, getting carjacked or losing my passport. I can allocate approximately twenty minutes to throat surgery, and anything greater than that will cramp my style.

(On the upside, I looked at the x-ray at the hospital, and I think doing yoga over the past two months has really helped my posture.)

Medical Slapstick

I have this persistent lump in my throat, and I'm kind of concerned that it's a fish bone from a sandwich I had about a week ago. It doesn't hurt, and I don't think about it most of the time, but there's a lump very low in my throat that I don't remember having there prior to spitting out another bone from this sandwich.

Apparently, it could be a phantom bone, which allegedly happens when you swallow a fish bone and fuck up the lining of your throat a little. (I learned this from Yahoo!, where the barely-insured like myself get all of our foolproof medical advice.) After a week, though, that's starting to seem implausible and I suspect that there's just a tiny bone painlessly but sort of worryingly hiding in my throat.

I plan to do shots of lemon juice tonight to see if I can soften the bone, and if that fails, I think I'll finally go to the emergency room tomorrow to see what they suggest I do about it. The saddest part is that, as embarrassing as that would be, it would probably rank third on my list of mortifying ailments that I've had to go get fixed in a foreign emergency room. I'm at the point where I count my blessings when I don't have to ask a volunteer to translate my problems into Dutch.

Quote of the Day

David:

:-d
:-d
:-D
i got so excited i caplocked

The Giving Tree

I'm sorry, I know this is old, but this is my favorite by far - any reference to Boo Radley is instant gold.

Back on the (Eskom) Grid

I thought I'd be posting all kinds of whimsical updates from my roadtrip, but then that didn't happen - partially because of spotty internet access, and partially because I preferred to sit outside and read novels. (I finally had time to read the Mail and Guardian from cover to cover, a bunch of Namibian dailies, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, American Pastoral, the Yiddish Policemen's Union, Eva Luna, and Rubyfruit Jungle, which I am a terrible lesbian for not reading years ago.)

It was a fun trip, though - I went to Victoria Falls and took a boat trip out to Livingstone Island, went into Botswana for the day to take photos in Chobe, spent a day in Zambia, and then caught a very long, hot, and crowded bus trip to Swakopmund in Namibia, where I went sandboarding and quadbiking and splurged on kudu steak and kabeljou to supplement my backpacking diet of oatmeal and pasta with veg. I also ate a kind of gross amount of German pastry while I was there - the town is super-German, so I figured I might as well binge-eat apple strudel while I'm there.

It was really sweet getting back - I hadn't seen Anna for a month because her trip to Canada overlapped with my roadtrip, so we caught each other up on the happenings on our respective continents, made dinner, and watched the South Africa-Australia rugby match with Ma. It gave me the warm fuzzies, and makes me a little sad to think that I'm leaving for London in just over three weeks.

(That said, David and I just closed on this adorable flat on the top floor of a house down the block from the anthropology department, making our move back to Oxford suddenly seem very immediate and real. The fact that I'm getting all sentimental over conversations about whether or not David should bring a printer for the apartment probably means I'm ready for the move.)