le 6 decembre

Dad, in case I forget to mention this when we talk this weekend: a note from the letter you sent: To reset the clock in your car, the car has to be off, and then you can use the display to change the time. Maybe the key has to be in, and it's one of the buttons up by the display screen that says like "Setup" or something like that. I remember the tricky part last time was that the car has to be off.

Today

I have...
- thought again about how intense, time wise, these (relatively) short two weeks of lang immersion are. I cannot think of any other time, except maybe thinking about crucial workouts in track or cross country, when I have been so terrified about missing a single day's worth of activities.
- woke up with a headache. Thought it might be clogged sinuses, used this as excuse to run as usual. Did get rid of headache during run, but felt bloated, very tired all day. Bad headache around lunchtime. Obviously not clicking at 100%. Kinda switched into survival mode of just going through the motions. Lang immersion seems to be an eternity and today more than any other day, I want to be back at the training site where at least there is an infirmery to escape to to sleep something like this off. Plan is to sleep a lot tonight and be back to 100% tomorrow. I'm lucky; it could be a lot worse.
- slowing down, felt the first pangs of homesickness since several weeks. Yesterday, I played golf with another trainee, and I thought about playing cards with Poppie while I was taking the FR classes at FU and maybe about the fun vaca we had in Maryland and maybe about the holidays I will miss while I am gone. Trudging more than usual during my pathedic 15 min morning run, I thought how awesome it feels to be able run 90 minutes through the woods and feel real good about it. Stuff like that.
- realized that I will have to get very good at getting stuff done business as usual when all various degrees of sick
- looked around when we were in a garden by a small pond-ish body of water that dries up in the hot season and floods during the rain season and saw...the landscape, and felt a little better

I have not...
- thought that I would much like to be in this place as my permanent site (it supposedly is a CHA site)
- shaken apprehension over doing a mini presentation (??) in Zarma about how to make a sugar/ salt gatorade like mix to help rehydrate people when they have diarhyea (sp again), etc. Yesterday, I ran though some of the scenario a bit in my head and was suprised that I could say most of what needed to be said, but beyond our finite "scrip" (which we will def need to prepare), we will not be able to field many (any) questions or provide much detail in our explanations. The FARM trainees with me face a similar challenge explaining pepineirs (sp) and cookstoves. We decided last week we're going to do all the tech work together, but still intimidating.
- brushed my teeth three times. Last week, I was brushing my teeth three times a day. I was really clicking.

This post is a disatrious ramble. It's 1947h. I'm going to be in bed within 45 min at the latest.