Jonathan Field - Maker of Random Stuff

I meet Sophie at the airport just before 7AM . We haven’t seen each other in well over a month, and last time we were working ourselves weary with my departure. I give her a big hug and kiss and a little stuffed leopard as soon as she makes her way through the crowd. I’m excited to show her around, though in fact the first six nights we won’t be anywhere I’ve been before myself.

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Today I am going to Johannesburg. Sophie arrives tomorrow at 6:20 AM, so I’ll be driving up today and staying the night there. Not in Johannesburg proper! Ha! No way! That would be suicide! Or so people often tell me. I’ll be in the nearby suburb of Kempton Park. It’s just a couple kilometers from the airport.

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Easter, unlike the other holidays that have passed since I got here, is celebrated by most. In the past day or two we’ve noticed the town clearing out as people go on vacation. When we meet folks they ask us about our Easter plans, which it turns out are not many. But we are going to a little non-Easter party today at a Hindu family’s house.

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After unwinding all morning, I head over to the trailer in the early afternoon. Alan has a couple Mac Classics set up on the table, so I play World Discovery and Storybook Weaver. I’m getting pretty good at World Discovery — I can usually do Central America, South America, and the Middle East without fail. Europe has too many little countries. I haven’t really tried Asia or Africa yet.

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My uncle is into folk songs and choral music. I borrowed an album from him recently by the group “Finest Kind”, on which I came across this song which I imagine I would have liked to hear each time we ran the old markdown script.

We’re going to Enyanyeni school today, to do major surgery. We want to add software to all the machines, but the software is too large to be installed by stiffy. So the plan is to replace all the hard drives with fresh ones which Alan has created. There are probably about 25-30 machines.

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After yesterday’s sleep deprivation, I appreciated another day off. I sleep in for a ten hour night, and even after waking I have a dramatically slow start. I enjoy my morning sleepiness for a good hour before switching the invisible weights behind my eyes to naturally pull open instead of naturally pulling shut.

I write, I read, mostly about African politics. In such a dramatic environment there’s so much to criticize, yet I don’t know precisely what I’d do better. Sure, more jobs, less crime… but how?

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Zing! Up at 7 and running! I’m tired as heck — even a hot shower and some extra strong instant coffee don’t do much to change that. We’re going to Nordenfeld today, we were there exactly a week ago. They are supposed to have power now; we physically set up the color machines last time we were there but they had an outage so we were not able to configure them. I am dead tired and a little out of it from having only an hour and a half sleep. Zenzo notices and says I’m very quiet today.

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I sleep in again — no major plans today. School vacation is on now, and though Alan and Donna do have several things planned at the schools, the next two weeks are largely open. For me, it’s like a vacation inside a vacation.

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