Sylvia's Journal

Thunder and rain storms continue their pattern from July without mercy. I am glad we are not camping somewhere and dealing with a wet tent all the time. But we have our own dampness problems. All our gutters were clogged. We finally cleaned them out, a piece of maintenance that had been skipped last year and, as a result, led to flooding in the basement.

One thing led to another. I cleaned my office yesterday. This was partially spurred on by the fact that you could no longer enter my office without climbing over piles of books and other stuff, and partially because of the mold that was beginning to grow on stuff exposed to the dampness that came up through the floor from the cellar. This included the Mauritanian CD box that Anne gave me some years ago. Its brown (untreated) leather was like a Petri dish and grew white fluffy mold all over; cloth-bound books also showed colorful signs of mold. It is no wonder that Axel has these sneeze attacks when he walks into my office. I think he was ready to do the cleaning himself. He also urged me to get rid of books; “you’re full,” he says, repeatedly (I could say the same to him).

The only thing here that loves all the rains is the garden. We have zucchini the size of baseball bats, the beans are reaching to the sky, the raspberries keep on producing and the blueberries are turning purple one at a time (to be promptly eaten). The asparagus bed has transformed into a feathery forest and the lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, onions and chard are flourishing. The resident bunny, supposedly, is also doing well as leaves up to a certain height, are vanishing as quickly as they grow.

Part of the indoor activity was the setup of my new (old) desktop that I won in the lottery at work. MSH periodically sells its surplus of old computers via a lottery and I now have, for the first time, a desktop all to myself. I installed Flight Simulator on it. I used to have it on my tiny laptop but I crashed all the time and finally gave up. Now I have a screen that actually allows you to see where you’re going and I am ready to try it again. I also organized my photos and disentangled all the personal stuff from the work-related stuff on my MSH computer. In between I did some MSH business and discussed, among other things, virtual platforms to keep our colleagues and their counterparts in Afghanistan connected and in learning mode. The escalating security problems make it increasing difficult for them to meet in person. We think we might be able to help, from a distance.