Friday, December 6, 2013

Mosquitoes

Ok, I get it... the underlying theme of this blog is really about how much I hate mosquitoes.  It just goes to show how much I think about them on a daily basis.  For instance recently I've been thinking of how I could do a comparison of blood loss during all of the times I've donated blood in my life... every 4-6 months from the ages of 19-24... to the amount of blood stolen from me by mosquitoes in this country.  I mean really I kill at least 3-6 a day, but I get bit about 3x an hour during the day double that at night.  Those are conservative estimates... Also I think if I going to go into biology (which I hate) I would try to develop a mosquito virus to kill all mosquitoes... this would inevitably backfire and lead to zombies (I know I should not be a biologist). On that note, life does go on in this mosquito filled world...

Today I was rather lazy. I probably ran about 1.5 miles and walked a lot.  I went to la Romana to get my secret santa gift for the Women's Association christmas party, and picked up a few gifts for some special people back home :)  On my way I tried to read more of the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  Which is an interesting enough book most of the time, however like most self-help type books I think I would get just as much out of it if it were 50 pages, as opposed to 358 pages... I hate the feeling of reading the same thing repeated 10 times, just to fill some space. On the other hand it is interesting to look at development work through the perspective of the core paradigm shifts he discusses.  All too often we try to improve our lives through an outside in perspective (changing our environment, and expecting a real change in our live)  as opposed to focusing on changing from the inside out (focusing on improving ourselves and habits to change our lives).  And then come the development workers... and that whole dependent, independent, and interdependent thing comes into play... and I won't bore you by going into it.
After the trip I went and traded more books with kids and ended up playing card games until it was dark and the mosquitoes made me go home...
Today's diet- papaya & banana smoothie & coffee in the morning, grapefruit for dessert
Today's diet failure- I was hungry on the way to la Romana and I bought a slice of pizza $50Rd (it was the worst looking pizza I've ever eaten but I conquered it of course...) and then I was hungry on the way home so I bought a chicken and corn empanada and my favorite empanada place $50 + $20 RD coke (so delicious, and worth it).  Finally I was relatively cheap and fried a platano to make toastones drenched in tabasco sauce and ketchup, ~$20RD + $10 Rd grapefruit... so all in all I spent about $180RD  which is $4.50 US :(

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