Slimy creepy things and a public commitment

Where does the time go? For the last fortnight the office has been frequently crammed with auditors, who have confirmed my worst suspicions of that breed - they really don't have anything better to do in the evenings than count beans. We usually end up turfing them out around 8pm, but only because we can't leave them in place overnight. They require an unreasonable amount of persuasion to move. In the meantime I've developed the habit of getting up at 4.30 to write before going to work. It makes for long and productive days, but somehow time for blog posts is hard to squeeze in.

This is a public commitment to write something longer over the weekend and post it on Monday. In the meantime, here's a photo of a display at the Museu da História Natural, to prove that I have been doing one or two things from my Rushing Through Life list. The choice of subject matter has nothing to do with auditors.


Late addition: this week, in that brief moment between dropping into bed and dozing off, my reading has been Dark Continent My Black Arse, Sihle Khumalo's account of a Cape-to-Cairo trip by public transport. It's refreshing, informative, extremely politically incorrect, and much more entertaining than Khaled Hosseini's pedestrian and predictable harangue. I've just been over to LibraryThing to update the "What I'm reading" list in the sidebar, and discovered that not one of the numerous libraries on the site - from Amazon.com to the University of Pretoria - lists the book. I'm outraged! Does Zuma know a fellow Zulu is being slighted in this unconscionable fashion? The book is published by a South African imprint of Random House, which one might expect to give it some weight internationally. It makes me wonder which other books the rest of the world might be missing. Hardly surprising the continent should seem dark from outside.