We just had our first meal at "home" - of which we contributed almost nothing. Talk about left overs, the meal was almost entirely made up of what Erik and Jean had left us as well as lettuce that Alain, the pilot, brought us. I contributed garlic powder. 

We had one suitcase arrive with some clothes, some kitchen stuff and my yoga mat. The box arrived a long time ago to Entebbe but is coming by road so seems to be taking a lot longer as is our food order which I'm hoping has not been sitting in the truck since Sat. like our box. We have most of the essentials now, and have a small list of repairs and upgrades (screen doors, a pantry or shelf to put food/spices on, a fan, extra lamp) that we want for the house and I have a few things I'd like to have here. 

Today 2 warthogs wandered through our back yard and the other day some Colobus monkeys. I heard hippos in the front yard this morning (and saw "traces" - their poo is like dirty grass when it's dry but like swamp when it's fresh - we get the smell of that all over as they wander all over the camp. There are an unfortunate number of spiders and we have a crazy dung beetle that psychotically zooms around our house as we're trying to sleep. There is a spider on the floor at my feet right now so I'm sitting using the bar stool as a desk and foot rest. The spiders are around the size of a silver dollar including legs so not so big but fast hairy and ugly. I don't know if they bite, not interested to find out. Not sure what the shiny thing is on the spider is in the picture - hopefully not it's gleaming teeth :) (Loren says it's the eyes - now that's REALLY creepy!). Have seen waterbuck on the way to work and now that I've figured out that hippos are camera shy - I carry my camera poised to take pictures when we're out at night - so we don't see them in the evening much anymore. Or maybe because the FIFA is over.

Thierry and Stephanie left this morning on break for a month. I am slowly getting to understand what I have to do but the funding isn't finalized and probably won't be until Sept so I will do what I can to get us ready but pretty much that will take me about a week and then I'll have nothing to do other than read up on different renewable energy technologies and projects. A lot of others will be on break too so I have offered to help work on the HR strategy and work with the development of the evaluation documents as well as help Loren, tho I'm sure he's not interested in my help. 

It's still cold (18 - 20 at night and gets tolerable midday at 30oC). Apparently it's a very dry rainy season so far. I think it's just trying to be nice to me. One graph I saw indicated that it rains on average 29.3 days out of 31 in July and Aug. I'm already dying from lack of sun, not sure what I would do if it actually rains that much.