Bow Down

Mom is the 2006 Schnoebelen Family Game Champion!

After years of claiming we'd write up questions ahead of time to speed up the game, we finally followed through. The fastest game yet, finished in under 1.5 hours.

Tyler insisted on evening up the fairness of the board and revamped it by re-ordering the colored squares. It still didn't help him any. Dad was slow out of the starting block and was sporting his pouty face. And Katrina is still acting as if she were the Reigning Family Dictator...

Advice on Wooden African Masks

1. Smell it. A horse hair beard may look cool, but you may not notice that barn smell till it's too late.
2. Freeze it. It'll kill the termites and all those bugs living inside the horse hair.
3. When you bang the mask against the side of the house to get rid of the creepy crawlies and the horse hair actually starts falling off the mask in chunks, admit your mistake and throw the thing away.
4. Hope that the Guinea god/spirit that the mask represented doesn't have striking power all the way to Ghana.

Happy Farmer's Day (in Ghana)

My mom said, "Ha! Farmer's Day!" That's when I remembered it's an unusual holiday, even for an Iowan.

Yesterday I took 4 tro-tros, a shared taxi and did a lot of walking all around the city. Traffic demonstrated a test of wills---who would back down (and up) when one car tried to cut off another and there was a standstill (which happens all too frequently). I was in one of my amused modes and just laughed---but mainly because my taxi driver was making his own lane and we were moving while everyone else was not. I went to see my seamstress Lucy and even did some handwashing. So often I go from home to office and back in a taxi, which doesn't require much Africa interaction. I saved about 50,000 cedis ($5.50) by taking public transport instead of 'dropping taxis' and was sweatily reminded that I live in Africa...

And, oh Charlie, it was tiring.