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Truck Off

We had a rather busy weekend lined up, which involved dashing over to Suffolk today (successfully achieved but not easy with all the rain and flooding), then dashing back to Oxford tomorrow to go to the Truck Festival. Unfortunately, Truck has been rained off (apparently the whole site is under water - eek...)

The good news is that my friends phoned to tell me before we traipsed back to Oxford tomorrow (cheers Adam, cheers Pete!).

Truck will be rescheduled for September, but it's a big blow for a small charitable festival, I hope it doesn't ruin them.

Stranger than fiction?

I've just been playing with Google's webmaster tools, which enable you to do all sorts of rather interesting but slightly geeky things with regard to the Google ranking of sites that you have control over.

A Very Cheesy Birthday

It was hev's birthday last week (happy birthday babe!), and Heather carried out her promise (threat?) to cook a five-course cheese meal for us. The menu was as follows:

Back from the Internet wilderness

After several wreks of nomadic existance, staying with various relatives, we will get our house back on Saturday. We're already back in Oxford, currently staying with friends (cheers Pete and Heidi!) and back on the internet, but only at work, so I better go do some...

The Big Picture

When we were packing up our house to rent it prior to going to Cameroon, we were fairly ruthless (by our standards) and chucked out a lot of stuff. Among the casualties was my old 17" Apple monitor. Since flat-screen monitors were available pretty cheap, I figured it was time for it to go, as it was a little bulky (imagine a 17" screen attached to a small shed).

Back to Blighty

So, we're home. Our journey home was extremely trouble free as it turned out. We left Buea on Thursday evening at 6.45, ending a long, painful procession of goodbyes. All our flights were on time, our luggage was under our (admittedly very generous) allowance, we declared our masks at Douala airport and paid the correct duty with no messing around.

Goodbyeee....

We've spent the last week saying goodbye, and we're still not done.

In a way it's quite overwhelming, saying goodbye to so many people who we may never see again. On the other hand, I'm a bit goodbye'd out and have gone slightly numb to it all.

We're leaving in two days and I just want it to be over, not because I want to leave Cameroon, I don't (well, yes I do, except I don't, er...) I just want all the leaving to be over.

Leaving is sad.

So long Buea, I'll miss you...

Reverse culture shock?

I've heard from several people that sometimes returning home after an extended period away can be more difficult than making the initial adjustment to a foreign culture. I can sort of see that, after all, adjusting to a foreign culture is one thing, but returning 'home' to find that you feel alien in familiar surrounds could be really disconcerting.

Tick tick tick...

Time is ticking way, Helen arrives today (Hev's nurse friend who's going to continue her work), Hev's off to meet her at the airport soon, tomorrow is our farewell party (well our first farewell party... ), on Thursday Genesis leaves for the U.S. and next week we go home.

It's all happening rather fast now.

I finished my last Web Design class last week, and this week I'm teaching my Introduction to Digital Images class for the last time.

National Day

This Sunday was Cameroon National Day, which was an excuse for all manner of festivities. Among the less entertaining available activities was marching. To my mind, marching ceremonies embody all the worst aspects of Cameroonian life: pomp, ceremony and waiting around for hours until the 'big man' arrives.

Joseph Bloggs

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