same old stuff...

hey guys, hope everyone's doing well. i've been pretty good. the hiv/aids conference went pretty well, although a few of the speakers were quacks, but i've come to expect these things. some of the speakers were very good, so it more than made up for the quacks. i've been really busy since i got back to koforidua, having been gone, i had a lot of stuff to catch up on.

there's going to be a solar eclipse in ghana on march 29, and it passes directly over koforidua, so a group of friends are going to come stay with me and we'll all hike up a nearby mountain and watch the eclipse from there. (with the funny paper sunglasses, of course). should be fun.

i have been reading a lot lately. my laptop broke several months ago, and my ipod broke a few weeks ago, so i have had no music and no source of entertainment at my site other than books and my hand-crank shortwave radio. so i read a lot, and i listen to the bbc a lot. not too exciting, but i have read some really good books lately and i am extremely well informed about international politics.

the other night i stayed up late finishing a book, and was getting ready to go to bed around midnight. i was sitting at my desk and picked up my messenger bag off the floor, and a huge scorpion falls out of it onto my lap. i screamed and jumped in the air, and the bag and scorpion fly into the air and onto the floor. the scorpion was at least 5 inches long, maybe more like 6, not including the tail. it was huge. i was freaked, even though i had previously been proud of myself for not being as scared of spiders anymore, and chasing them around my house trying to kill them. the spiders here are hard to kill because they're so fast. one kind of spider here jumps, and can jump really far and fast, so it's almost impossible to squash it. but if you're quick, you can spray it with raid, which slows it down, and then squash it. the same with another type of spider here, wall spiders, which are flat and really fast, so you spray them and then kill them too. so anyways, i'm standing in my living room, looking at this huge scorpion, and am absolutely petrified. i couldn't even move for some time, but the scorpion didn't move either, thankfully. so i go and get the can of raid, but then i'm looking at this huge scorpion, thinking that one can of raid is not going to kill this thing. but everyone's asleep, so i didn't quite know what to do. i wash my clothes in this big, plastic tub, so i take the tub and turn it upside down and put it over the bag and the scorpion. but i wasn't convinced that the tub was heavy enough so that the scorpion couldn't get out, so i put my big, heavy-duty water filter on top of the tub, and then went to bed. the next morning i asked my middle age, male neighbor if he could help me with a scorpion. when he saw the contraption i built to entrap the scorpion he laughed and laughed. then he proceeded to get a big stick and squash the scorpion with it. there was a rather large pool of greenish black scorpion goo on my floor. my neighbor then said that this was only a small scorpion. if that's the case, then i really hope i never encounter a big scorpion.