Life lessons from doge

Today I took my dog to the vet to be spayed, and learned a valuable life lesson about the Internet.

Most important things first: Kaori is home and running around as if absolutely nothing happened, so that's cool. She's a little mini tank, NOTHING bothers her, she's like the honey badger. 

Yeah OK we get it, I hear you saying, you think your dog is so great. Well, I'll have you know, my dog is not just great, she's the greatest. She is objectively the best dog in the world. Sorry not sorry, joking not joking. The vet thinks so too. I love my vet because he loves my dog. Mostly because she stoically ignores all injections and similar indignities rather than trying to murder him, but also because she's a seriously beautiful dog. He was telling me, when I picked her up this afternoon, that "all" (direct quote), I repeat, all the people who came in to fetch their pets from the recovery area were staring at her. Because she's the best dog in the world. All right, I'll stop bragging and get to the point. They were looking at her and saying "That's a beautiful dog... what is it?"

That's also what the vet said when he first met her. And both the vet's receptionists. And the people in the waiting room. And I'm really used to it, because wherever I go with her we get the same reaction: that's a beautiful dog. What is it? And because my dog is the best dog in the world I never get tired of saying, she's a Shiba Inu. S.H.I.B.A. New word. I.N.U. It's a Japanese breed. Inu means dog. You can just call it a shiba. No, she doesn't mind the heat at all, she has a long nose. Yes, her fur is really soft. No, it wouldn't be a good idea to shave her. I LIKE people asking the same questions and making the same comments because hey, I've got an unusual dog, I chose to get an unusual dog, I love my dog, and I enjoy talking to people about her. 

I'm really used to people asking me what she is - there have been maybe two people ever who have seen her and said "is that a Shiba Inu"? - but it was only today that it actually struck me: No one knows what she is. Not one of these people in the vet's office, at the farmer's market, in the physical world I inhabit, has come up to me and "Doge! Shibe! Shiba Inu Puppy Cam! That Jezebel article saying no one should get a Shiba ever!"

Real life is not the Internet. 

Wow  

                                such profound

     so revelation

I am being a hundred per cent serious here. What I mean is not that the human interaction that occurs on the Internet is not real - it is absolutely real. And I don't mean that my online friends aren't my real friends, they are. What I mean is that I have had it brought home to me, profoundly and through the medium of Doge, that the generalised other that I have been living with lately and which has caused me a great deal of pain, is simply not representative of the people I interact with every day (online or in the physical world). And that has made me breathe one great big sigh of relief.

The Generalised Other (also known as Everybody) is a concept that I came across reading Martha Beck. There's a decently comprehensive article on the idea here. The short version is: My - and your - idea of what "everybody" thinks (and especially what they think of us) is an artificial construct that each of us forms from the stated opinions of only a very few actual people or groups - maybe about 5 or 6. My Everybody, for the last while, has been "everybody on the Internet", which means a composite of the most vocal denizens of the corners of the Internet that I choose to frequent, and this Everybody is seriously pissed off at me. 

She doesn't like me because I'm privileged (even though she falls into exactly the same group that I do). She's an extremely accomplished scientist who thinks I'm an idiot and a bad feminist for not going into an STEM field, a loser for being an artist, and a terrible oppressor for using the word "idiot". She thinks I'm rather stupid to believe in God, though she doesn't really berate me for it too often. She does berate me for having bought a dog from a breeder, because good people only have rescue dogs. She also side-eyes me for having a Japanese breed - she thinks that might just constitute cultural appropriation although she has conceded it's a borderline case. She thinks pretty much everything else in my life constitutes cultural appropriation. She lives in America. She really, really does not like me. She thinks my very existence is illegitimate and that the world would be a lot better off if I were to simply disappear. She thinks I should probably become a vegan. She says that my friends and co-workers are figments of my imagination, I am making them up, or perhaps I have intimidated them into pretending to think I am an acceptable human being. She looks exactly like me. She sadly wonders why I do not ask every new acquaintance their preferred pronouns before entering into a conversation. She thinks that maybe it is because I just don't care. 

I care, I care so much, and that's why she lives in my head, telling me that I'm a bad, bad person. Not all the time, but some of the time, my Generalised Internet Other makes my life a misery. I know very well that her opinions are not held by the majority of actual human beings. I know that I have invented her out of a combination of what I'm afraid people are thinking of me, not what they actually think of me. 

I also know that there are real people out there who do actually subscribe to those opinions. My boss, for instance, definitely thinks I should be a vegan. My sister thinks people shouldn't keep any exotic pets, like fish, and I do. But they don't yell at me, or "call me out" or think I'm an all-round rotten human being. They're just people. We have differences of opinion, and that's OK. 

What I learned today from my dog's hysterectomy is this: No one in the vet's office knows what Doge is. My co-workers do not know that I should not be wearing the geometric pattern on my T-shirt. The people I meet at an art opening do not know that I should be asking them their preferred pronouns. My husband does not know that we should never sleep together when one of us has been drinking alcohol, even though we are married - and I'm never going to tell him, either. And if they don't know these things, they are not judging me according to them. Real life is not the Internet. 

When I walk down the road with Kaori people say 

"That's such a beautiful dog, what is it?"

They don't say 

"Doge! Shiba Inu Puppy-Cam!"

They don't say

"I read a Jezebel article saying that no one should get a Shiba"

They don't say 

"You are bad for buying and not adopting"

They don't say

"You are culturally appropriating from Japan, you are a racist"

They don't say

"I don't like you and you are a bad person"

They don't say 

"Be grateful for the callout"

I have a Shiba Inu. She's the best dog in the world. I bought her from a breeder because I wanted a Shiba Inu and not any other dog. She's a Japanese breed of dog and I named her "Kaori" which means "perfume" or "smell" in Japanese. That's funny because she looks like a fox and foxes are smelly, but I chose the name mostly because it sounds nice. I don't speak Japanese. I am not Japanese, but I have a purebred Shiba Inu named Kaori, and she is the best dog in the world, and I am not ashamed. 

Pink hair - success!

Well, it worked! Not without a couple of scares though. First, my husband looked at me like I was crazy when I said I was going to sleep with the dye in. He said, isn't that going to damage your hair? I said, who knows? It's only the ends, right? He said, it's like half your hair. Look on the internet to see what they say.

So I looked on the internet, and everyone was like HALF AN HOUR AT MOST OR YOUR HAIR WILL DISINTEGRATE LIKE THE BAD GUY IN INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE! All right, they didn't actually use the Indy reference, and thus their advice was not worthy of being listened to. So instead I took it out of the plastic bag and tugged on the ends, and they were kind of crispy but it was a "you have sugary cooldrink in your hair" kind of crispy and not a "your hair is turning into powder" kind of crispy. So I put the plastic bag back on and went to sleep.

The second scare was when I was sleeping, I dreamed I woke up and washed my hair and all the dye came out and it was no different from before, and I was all AAARGH THAT SUCKS and then I woke up again and realised it had just been a dream, so then I went and washed it out for real this time, and conditioned it, and dried it in the sun, and now it looks like this:



I am exceedingly happy with the way it's turned out. My husband likes it, my mother is amused/shocked, my father amused/indifferent, and I've got one non-family compliment so far. Can't wait to see what people think at the gallery, since I am in possibly the only field where pink hair will enhance my professional image.

Action shot (I can't model):



Oh, by the way, what do you guys (anyone out there!) think of the etiquette of posting photos? Narcissistic to show my face? Creepy not to? Are outfit posts irredeemably shallow, as I've been thinking of starting to do them occasionally?  Help me out here, please!

Pink hair! In which I destroy my hair in several ways so you don't have to.

I've been thinking about this for a long, long time, and today is the day that I'm finally going to try it. I want to dye the ends of my hair pink. And I'm going to do it myself, using only random household materials like hydrogen peroxide, food colouring, powder cooldrink and, um, swimming pool chlorine.

Please note that I have really long and healthy hair, because I never do anything to it. I'm going to be dyeing the ends only, so if anything goes horribly wrong then I can just cut them off. I wouldn't be messing around with unknown chemical processes if they were going to go anywhere near my actual scalp, or if I couldn't afford to lose a bit of length if I decide that I hate it and the only remedy is to cut my losses and run.

Why do I want to dye my hair pink? Well, I have really long hair (did I tell you that yet?) And I want to do something really dramatic to it. But cutting it all off is just out. Like, I really don't like those makeover TV shows, and I really don't like the fact that whenever they come across some poor unfortunate soul with long hair, they immediately leap on her and chop it all off, usually making it sound as if long hair is some kind of dreadful psychological issue that she needs to overcome.

And don't get me started on the freaky compulsion to straighten people's hair, they seriously act like curls are some sort of mark of Cain. I've literally seen someone write that you have to have straight hair to look "professional". Professional? Seriously? I smell a rat, and it smells like racism. I mean, have you noticed that with any female character in a TV series - if she makes it to the second season, her hair always mysteriously goes dead straight.

...Ahem. Pardon the digression. I just have a lot of feelings about that issue. Getting back to the matter at hand, why pink? I actually think that a sort of blue-green or turquoise will be a better long-term colour for me, but I'm doing this to punctuate my life and tell myself that things are looking up! and pink feels to me like the ultimate feel-good, statement-making, optimistic, exclamation-markish colour. Besides, Art Student Owl says Must Have Pink Hair.

Here are my materials:



Honestly, I wasn't planning to use the chlorine after every search I did for it came up with a lot of people screaming DON'T YOU DARE! The aim was to lighten the hair first with peroxide, and then to dye it with a mixture of more peroxide and food colouring. But after I doused my ends in peroxide and it dried off after half an hour and did precisely nothing, I decided to break out the big guns. As it seemed that the peroxide didn't work so well because my hair is too healthy (#firstworldproblems #humblebrag) I figured that the chlorine might at least damage it enough to absorb the peroxide later. I used about a tablespoon of chlorine in a glass bowl of water (between a half and one litre, I suppose) and didn't put my hands in it, just dipped the ends of my hair. I did it outdoors and made sure the bowl was downwind from my face. I did this twice, and still I don't think the colour is much changed. I dumped the rest of the mixture in the pool after I was done (recycling, guys!) Again, note that all this is going on about 80 centimetres from my scalp. And here's the result:



It doesn't look particularly different from before, but I asked two people and they say it's definitely lighter. Now I could keep on bleaching it and drying it over and over, but that would require patience.

So instead I decide to move right on to the colouring stage. Now, apparently if you are right and virtuous on the internet you only use products designed and marketed at great cost for your specific purpose, and the product that everyone recommends for this purpose is something called Manic Panic. However, if I just started ordering and importing everything I wanted, I would be living in a nest of art materials while not eating anything. Which would not be good. So instead I decided to go the kludge route, and found that this tutorial was very helpful.

I'd also heard that Kool-Aid is supposed to be better than food colouring. Unfortunately, Kool-Aid, like Manic Panic, is not available where I live. So I went and bought a random packet of powder cooldrink called Amila in the hope that it would be similarly virulently coloured. I got the "mixed berries" flavour 'cause I figured it would be sort of purplish.

I mixed some of the Amila powder with two brands of "Rose Pink" food colouring (liquid and gel) and some of the peroxide (That's what "developer" is, when talking about hair colouring) in the glass bowl and squished the ends of my hair about in it. Then I worked the sticky, sugary, peroxidey, red mixture up a bit into the rest of my hair, hoping that it would create a sort of ombre effect. I looked like an advert for Dexter.



After that I tied my hair in a knot, put a plastic bag over it and secured the whole thing with a hair elastic.



And I'm planning to keep it on like that as long as my patience holds out. My hands are currently bright pink and the sensitive bits under the nails hurt from the peroxide, so definitely use gloves if you do the same thing. And tomorrow we'll see how it turns out!

Pictures of perfection

"...as you know," said Jane Austen, "make me sick and wicked", and I suspect that Holly Hilgenberg would agree with her. I've been thinking an awful lot lately about the recent article she wrote for Bitch magazine, entitled "Better homes and bloggers" (As well, of course, as all the comments). And a lot of those thoughts have been, I have to admit, kinda bitchy.

Disclaimer: Not everything I say here refers to Holly's article. This is a response to many, many articles and discussions of the same kind, many of which were much less balanced than hers. This one just happened to be around when I finally snapped.*

The thing is, I have a bit of a problem with criticism. And while Hilgenberg's article is directed at "lifestyle blogs", not "art blogs with occasional road signs and plants that look like illegal drugs", my problem with criticism is more all-encompassing than that.  What I mean is that I don't dislike only criticism directed at me, but any criticism. I get all antsy and defensive, like Leave Britney Alone Guy, of people I don't know, of people I don't even like.

OK, let me qualify that. Please, go ahead and criticise governments, court decisions, laws, politicians. Oh, right, politicians. They illustrate my point beautifully. Here it is: Criticise Julius Malema for his blatant opportunism and lack of any principles or sense of loyalty. For crying out loud stop going on about that woodwork thing. All that proves is that he's no Jesus, and we already knew that.  And criticise Sarah Palin for being so bloody Republican, but please leave her dress sense, family and face alone. See what I mean?** That's it, it's personal criticism that I hate. And talking about Sarah Palin's face, why is it always women we attack more often, and more personally? And by we, I mean other women. Liberal women. (Wasn't liberalism once meant to involve tolerance?) Feminist women.

That's the basic point of Hilgenberg's article: that women who write sweet, whimsical lifestyle blogs are anti-feminist. Why? Because they portray "pictures of perfection" - an old-timey, rustic type of "perfection" - that other women compare themselves to and, inevitably, come up short. Her argument, or the parts of it I took in through my defensiveness-glasses, boils down to two main points:
- Bloggers present idealised and edited versions of their lives. This makes other women feel bad about themselves.
- These bloggers are too rich, white, straight and middle-class, and they spend too much time doing crafty things at home and too little making money in offices. This promotes patriarchy as well as racism, sexism, homophobia and... classism, I suppose?

I'll come back to the first point later, but the second point is the one that bugs me, because while I agree with it on a societal level (it would be wonderful to see more blogs from people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and blogs that showcase a variety of lifestyles), it becomes problematic on an individual level. What is Jo, or Elsie or Abbey or Anja, to do about it? I once saw an astonishingly honest reply by a black (female) writer to a white (female) writer who had asked her what she, personally, could do about the fact that her voice (white, female) was overrepresented. Stop writing, said the black writer, and instead work to support writers of colour. Harsh, hurtful, honest as hell, it was her opinion and she had the courage to state it.

However, hardly any of the writers of this sort of article would be able to say the same thing, because it would make them massively hypocritical, since mostly (in line with the whole overrepresentation thing they're critiquing) they themselves are as white (straight, cis, etc) as the women they're criticising. Pointing fingers at other white (etc) women is their way of atoning for their own whiteness (etc); allowing their own voices to be valid while calling for other white (etc) voices to be silenced.

Because that's really what you're doing, when you say to anyone, however privileged and sugary, "There are too many of you, there should be fewer of you": You should either change, shut up or go away. Some things we can change - I'll get back to the charge of apparent perfection. But some we can't: I could sit in the sun every day and I wouldn't become any less white - I'd just die of skin cancer. (OK, this is where the criticism really hits home.) And that's where my mind goes when someone says there are too many of me: They want me to die. Silly, of course. Overdramatic, of course.

No one really wants me to go away, or even keep quiet for ever; they just want me to go around all day meditating on my sins privileges. But would the world really be made that much better if Jane Aldridge and Ree Drummond swapped their "lifestyle" blogging for feminist critiques of everything? Surely it's better for people to write about what they know, what they like, what they do best? Surely if someone is as incredibly privileged (and I mean that strictly descriptively, not perjoratively) as these women, it's good for them to turn that into a bit of entertainment, a bit of pleasure, for others? I'll be honest: I really enjoy reading these blogs. And I think there are other people who do too. I like looking at pretty pictures, and I don't think there can ever be too many "Instagram shots of early-morning trips to the flower market".

Ah, I think I see it! The weird subconscious reason why this particular article bothers me. It's the "Instagram", the "quirky", the "authentic", the "sewing machine tattoos" and most of all the article's illustration - she's invoking the bogey of the hipster! In almost exactly the same way as white women criticise white women for being white women, hipsters criticise hipsters for being hipsters. And the word gets ever closer to being meaningless. (I'll save that rant for another time!)

All right. Let's get back to the original point: the "pictures of perfection". Now, I don't personally have any problem with people who want to showcase only the pretty parts of their lives. I don't feel inferior when I read those blogs, and I don't resent their good fortune - mine is good enough, and we all know that no one can be untouched by tragedy; some people just choose not to blog about it. In fact it's comforting to me, when stuff isn't all that great, to retreat into the candy-floss world of bloggers who don't write about the bad things. But it seems that some people don't feel that way. They want "real", they want vicarious tragedy, they want angst. Do they really want all that with their daily dose of whimsical outfit posts? Oh well. It's easy for me: there's no way I'm going to post about my own personal issues because I'm not the only person in my life, because the innocent need to be protected. But maybe I'll have a rant now and again. Just to keep it real.

* Snooping around doing "research" for this post, I found Holly's own blogs. She has lots of serious stuff, but also clothes. And her writing is really good. And the subheader of one of her blogs is:
" independent. vintage. resale. thrifted. fashion writing ". One of us! One of us! "Hipsters", I mean. And whimsical she-bloggers.

** The exception is Hitler. You're allowed to do anything to Hitler's face and I won't bat an eyelid.

A white impala in the Kruger Park

Well, there we all are on our way to this year's dig, travelling up from Croc Bridge towards Lower Sabie, when we see some cars stopped up ahead.

Now sometimes of course you are the first to spot some amazing creature, or it steps out into the road with no one else around, just you and him. But for the most part, the first sign that you're going to see something exciting isn't a footprint or a sound, it's a traffic jam. You see cars stopped, your heart starts beating faster, you make haste slowly and as quietly as possible to where everyone's looking at... something. Then you try to decipher their body language. From which window are the camera lenses and binoculars pointing? Close to the road or hunkered down in the grass way off in the distance? Sometimes you wonder how the first person to stop ever figured out how that darker bit of bush, that flick of an ear, was in fact part of an animal. And most importantly, what is it?

There's a definite hierarchy. Massive philosophical divide between those who stop for birds and those who get annoyed at them. You won't get a traffic jam for any of the more common herbivores: impala, warthog, wildebeest, zebra, kudu. Impala are the default setting, so common they don't count when you're taking bets on what you're going to see first. They're so beautiful though, when you really look at them. The most elegant antelope. You stop if they're right in the road, a nice photo op, or if you're Communing with Nature and Appreciating the Ordinary. Some old Kruger hands who think they're too cool won't even slow down. Giraffes, maybe a few cars if they're nice and close. Likewise for buffalo, simply because they're Big 5. Hippo. They're not so common, but they look it because you always see them in water.  Traffic jams form for elephants, if only out of necessity. Rhino, definitely, because they're so rare. And they're a cause at the moment, a war.

And then the apex, the predators. Lions, leopards, cheetah, wild dogs. Everyone wants to see a predator. When we stop to see what the cars are looking at, I'm disappointed when I see the herd of impala calmly grazing all over the place, on both sides of the road, because that means it, the thing they're all looking at, can't be a predator. And that means it's got to be something less exciting, because what's better than a predator, right?

We stop behind the last car in line and slowly edge forward. Everyone in the minibus is craning their necks and peering between blades of grass to try and figure out what everyone else is looking at. And then I see it, something that looks a little different, right in the middle of the herd of impala. It is not a normal impala colour.




It resolves into something like the picture in the last post. "Um," I say. "Um. I think it's -" I didn't want to sound stupid, but I was pretty certain of what I had just seen. "A white. Impala." I can't tell you for sure if anyone went "Nah, can't be" or if that was just what I was expecting them to say, but then we moved forward a little more and-




It is a white impala - and it's a young male. That makes him the African equivalent of that legendary creature, the white stag. Technically a boy impala is called a ram, as it's an antelope rather than a deer. (Deer have branched antlers and lose them every year, while antelope have unbranched, permanent horns. There are no native deer around here.)



He also seems to be a true albino, with no pigment at all. His eyes are pink. There has been another white impala reported in the park, a female with black eyes.



Here he is with a normal-coloured female.



And here he is pretending to be a unicorn. I swear that was what it felt like. Like we'd spotted a freaking unicorn. 

A legendary beast

I still don't quite believe this.

 

Here's a hint: What do thousands upon thousands of drunk students have in common with a couple of saints, Arthurian legend, Narnia, Harry Potter and... me!?

Chrissiesmeer photos, part one

Even if you live in these parts, I think, it's quite likely that you've never heard of Chrissiesmeer. Here's how to find it. Grab a map, and look just left of Swaziland. If you're on Google maps you'll start zooming in and there will suddenly appear, or coalesce, a scattering of lakes like a little blue rash - or perhaps, more poetically, like the Pleiades. West of Mbabane, north-east of Ermelo, south-east of Carolina.

It's very... countryside. Most of the time if you head off into the wild blue yonder, you're going to the bush, but this could never in a hundred years be called bush. It's grassland, wetland, pine plantations, farms. Countryside.

Rode on those horses around that lake at what felt to me like a flat-out gallop, although it was probably only a brisk canter. There were seven horses and although only four had riders, the others kept up with us anyway so it felt exhilaratingly like riding with a herd of wild horses, thundering through the long grass and reeds at the water's edge.

In the foresty area we saw a few shy duiker and a pair of new-to-me buck which I think were possibly reedbuck. It's such a treat to see an animal you've never seen before! All of them were too quick for my camera, sadly. But Chrissiesmeer is mainly about flowers and frogs. Oh, the flowers!

Why, yes, that is a couple of the fattest, healthiest Agapanthus inapertus you have ever seen, with a Eulophia leontoglossa orchid (yellow) and Brunsvigia natalensis in the background just for good measure.

And yes, that is a frackin' great field of the same agapanthus. What is this I don't even.

More botanical madness to come, but I'll leave you with this picture of the sweet pups belonging to the guest farm where we stayed (I highly recommend it). The border collie is my favourite, as he has heterochromia and can keep up with a herd of wild horses, but the pointer reminds me of Nosy in this book so I adore him (her?) too.

Malachite kingfisher

Things about this painting:

* I sold it a few weekends ago (yay!)

* It was painted on top of another picture I'd done earlier. I have a great fear of pristine surfaces. Go and look at this comic by Gingerhaze. And then go and read her entire tumblr, which to me is basically one great dramatic pileup of this:

* The style of this painting was inspired in part by the first Black Orchid graphic novel - the early scenes in the greenhouse are some of the most gorgeous images I have ever seen.

* Malachite kingfishers are among my favourite things. The second thing I drew when I began taking art classes, aged 9 or so, was a malachite kingfisher. (The first was a green pepper, halved.)

* They are much smaller than they look in pictures (malachite kingfishers, not green peppers). I've never seen a live one, sadly, but I saw a skin in the museum at the University of the Witwatersrand, and it was no bigger than a sparrow.

* Oh yeah, I've been working on and off in the museum at Wits, and if you're a fan of snakes, spiders, bugs, axolotls, or giant green iguanas that like hanging out on logs and watching people do aerobics (seriously) and if you'll be in Jo'burg any time between tomorrow and Sunday, you should attend this event.

* I know the last point has exactly nothing to do with my picture. But, the iguana! It really happened. I was coming in from lunch, and what appeared to be most of the museum staff were doing some sort of dance routine, and the iguana was on a log, sommer there on the floor, watching them. It was one of those great moments in life, the ones you know you'll treasure forever. And there was an enormous hi-fi, and an instructor, and I think some people had belly-dancing belts, the ones with the coins. And... and... the iguana. It was beautiful.

P.S. In case you're one of the 17 people in the world who haven't seen this clip yet, may I present another of those beautiful moments. I don't feel bad saying that, because the kid wasn't hurt. Just don't read the comments on YouTube. They are exactly as you would expect.

Happy St. Helena

On Saturday afternoon I returned from An Expedition. An Excavation. In fact, An Adventure. The reason why I put off posting about it until today is that on the way home the question came up of who, exactly, the patron saint of archaeologists is, and one of the awesome people I met on the trip later found out that the answer is Saint Helena. To our great joy we discovered that her feast day (in the Roman Catholic Church) was the 18th of August, just around the corner. So in her honour I decided to wait until today to publish my archaeological post.

Somehow, I managed to come back from the trip with lots of pretty pictures of birds and flowers, but none of people actually digging. Instead of posting my photos from previous years (which feels vaguely as if it should break some sort of Bloggers' Code of Ethics), I'll give you links. Go and look at this page for all the background on the dig and who we went with. Also take a look at this archaeology blog, which belongs to Lu, another of the awesome people I met on the trip. (Hi Lu!)

Here's our camp at night. What I'll miss most from this time is lying in my tent, listening to the night sounds: the hippos gronking in the river (that's my coinage for the noise they make, not some kind of obscure swear word), the Egyptian geese cackling, the haunting whoops of the hyaenas, and, every now and again and the best of all, the distant roars of the lions.

Isn't he gorgeous? I'm excessively pleased with the misty, hipstermatic effect in this photo. It comes from the golden light of early morning shining through the dust on our windscreen. I had to confess.

Elephants are the most photogenic of animals. Also the only ones you still need to be afraid of when you're in a car.

This is a Longbilled Crombec. He was so curious and unafraid.

Impala lilies! (Adenium multiflorum). I have them (only just) growing in pots at home. Here it's warmer and they grow wild, and all the camps have them planted in their gardens.

Nymphaea capensis, or Nymphaea nouchali var. capensis. People can't make up their minds. Either way it's our indigenous blue waterlily, closely related to the sacred blue waterlily of Egypt.

Look in the river for more elephants. Archaeology and Africa are similar in this: Traditionally, both have been wildly romanticised. Now, more often, you see people try very hard to dissociate from the traditional stereotypes of romance and adventure. It's not really like that, we say. It's actually boring to live here, to do this. I'm a serious person, take me seriously. And yet the romance, the adventure, are still there.

I mean, just look at it!

Stakeout!

So... the other evening I was sitting at the computer when my husband came home, said hello, wandered off to the kitchen, made himself tea, came back, and said "There are literally 11 police cars parked outside."

.

.

.

I think this particularly dramatic story needs to be told in the form of a, well, drama, and so from this point it will be.

ME: Literally as in "I literally died laughing" or as in literally literally?
HUSBAND: Literally. I counted.
ME: What?

ME peers out of the window. There is a police car. ME walks over to MOTHER.

ME: Mother, Husband says there are 11 police cars in the road outside. He counted.
MOTHER: Let's go outside and look!
ME: Are you mad?

We walk all around the house, peering out of windows.

ME: Let's go outside and look!
MOTHER: OK!

We open the back door, making sure that the dog doesn't get out, and creep round the side of the house. There are indeed a lot of police cars in the road. There are also heavily armed silhouettes standing in the bushes in front of the house.

HEAVILY ARMED SILHOUETTE: Hello?
MOTHER AND ME: Hello?
HEAVILY ARMED SILHOUETTE: Hello?
ME: Sorry, can you tell us what's going on?
HEAVILY ARMED SILHOUETTE: We're the police.
ME: Yes, um... what's happening?
COP: We're looking for a suspect.

Points towards a house. Happily, not our house.

ME: Thanks. Well... erm... I guess we'll go back inside now...
COP: I think that would be a good idea.

We slink back indoors.

And that was basically it. The cop cars stayed where they were for a couple of hours while we tiptoed around our house with most of the lights off, trying to get hold of my father and tell him to come home by the other road, and then they quietly drove away. We have no idea what happened, whether they got the suspect, who it was, what they did, or anything else. I just need to add two important things:

One, this is mainly for my international readers: Nothing like this has ever happened to me before! It was a really dramatic occurrence, particularly because it was so unusual.

And two, dear polite cop silhouetted in the bushes: Thank you for not shooting at my mom and me when we loomed out at you from the darkness. I would totally have shot me if I had been you. And much gratitude and support to all our police officers - your job is dangerous, difficult and disgustingly underpaid. And all the cops I've interacted with have been sweet, lovely people (see above). So yeah, thanks!

Out of the attic: That thing you did in primary school

No, not the time you caught an outsized locust and kept it in your uniform dress pocket, so that when you had to say goodbye to the deputy principal who was moving to another school, you tried to shake hands with him using your left hand, because your right hand was fully occupied preventing the monster insect from escaping and jumping all over him. Oh wait, that wasn't you.
That was me...

No, I'm talking about that thing with the wax crayons, where you fill in the whole page with brightly coloured crayons, then cover it in black crayon and scratch through the layers to make your picture. Well, you know what?

Crayons suck.

While for the most part growing up tends not to be as great as we think it'll be (mainly, I think, because kids are never really taught to make meaningful choices, so as adults we just kind of drift into things), we do learn certain liberating truths, and this is one of the best: The art materials they give to kids are really horrible. The paints, the brushes, the coloured pencils, the crayons, all might as well have been specially designed to make us think we were no good at art. Those of us who persevered, learned something wonderful: out there, in the non-kid world, are proper paints. Proper brushes. Coloured pencils that actually leave a mark on the paper. And... no, not crayons. As far as I know, crayons pretty much always suck. But there's something much, much better - oil pastels!

So, if you're an adult and you don't think you're any good at art, try this: Go to an art supply store. Buy a box of oil pastels, or coloured pencils, or watercolour or oil paints and a brush or two. But here's the difficult part: get the most expensive brand of whatever medium you choose. Your well-behaved self will try to tell you that you simply can't. Don't listen to it. You're all grown up, you've probably blown more money than this on a haircut or a restaurant meal. You have no idea what difference quality makes, and here's the thing: it probably makes a bigger difference to a learning artist than to an experienced one. Picasso could create a masterpiece with one scratchy pencil, but bad materials quite likely taught you, way too young, that you're not an artist. Treat yourself to one box of really good oil pastels.

Now go home and play with them.

Post-apocalyptic

So, I had this cardigan coat thing. I bought it about two years ago because I loved the buttons. Sadly, after hardly wearing it that winter, I realised that much as I loved the buttons, they made it look a little bit like a clown coat. Also, it wasn't that great for wearing open as it didn't have buttonholes, actually closing with giant press-studs that showed when not fastened. And if you can't wear a coat open around here, it's not likely you'll be wearing it very much. Plus, it was just a touch too big for me and the sleeves hung down over my hands. So I decided I'd have to do something to make it more interesting.

Here it is with the brand censored out (I'm sure they wouldn't like the clown comment). When I took this picture I had already removed the buttons and studs - I just balanced them in place here to show you what it used to look like. It sat in my pile of stuff-to-be-mended for a whole year, while I imagined learning to crochet and making sweet flowery edgings... but then I changed my mind.

You see, I'll buy with glee and wear to pieces anything that looks like it comes from one of my favourite movies, and a lot of my favourite movies tend to involve fighting, running, aliens, zombies, fighting aliens, running from zombies, vice-versa, etcetera. Which means that I'm guaranteed to fall for anything that's full of buckles and belts and pockets, and looks as if it were cobbled together some time after the apocalypse from an old pair of cargo pants and anything else that was unwise enough to wander past at the time.

So that's exactly what I did. The day after what some people thought would be the end of the world, I chopped up a pair of cargoes that had finally given up being pants (I haven't shown you the pants as they were because I know you'd know I was still actually wearing them right up to that point) and cut out the pockets, the waistband, and all the double seams with a bit of fabric on each side. Then I hemmed all the bits on a sewing machine and stitched them onto the cardigan by hand. I had to be careful, especially with the turned-up sleeves and the waistband, to bunch the knitted fabric together as I sewed. Otherwise the wool wanted to stretch out and go all curly at the edges. You can see it's still a little like that at the cuffs. So after much sewing and diligence....

Yay! I've been wearing the heck out of it since then. My mother thinks I'm odd. And the buttons? I'll just have to think of something to do with them...

For Science!

I've been really busy lately. This, when one's income is directly linked to one's busyness level, is unquestionably a good thing. What's odd, though, is that this type of drawing, my main business really when I come to think about it, is seriously underrepresented on this blog.

This sort of thing. Let me introduce you - probably for the very first time - to Commiphora otjihipana. It's a new species in the genus of plants that includes myrrh, and it comes from the Kaokoveld in northern Namibia.

Shades of primary school. These are peas, beans and mealies that I'm sprouting in order to illustrate the germination process for a textbook/set of class notes/thing. That project involves over 200 drawings.

I adore scientific illustration, because I get to sit in a lab and use a microscope, and run around in the veld looking for things, and draw things that no one has drawn before, and feel all science-y. It also caters directly to my inability to stick to one thing. My university professors must have hated me for it. I was always trying to combine, compare, or mash together things that have never before been mashed. It's great. You avoid being bored, because you keep adding information from different fields. And when someone's better than you, you have the infallible comfort of going "Oh well, she can draw better than me, but can she analyse Hebrew verbs?" And the star ancient languages student can't dissect Commiphora flowers, and the botanist can't ride horses, and my horse-riding instructor... oh dear, I think she can do anything. Seriously.

But anyway, it's fun to dance around the edges of things - art/science, science/religion, all three at once. Even though people who prefer to stick firmly in the middle of their own patch and mistrust all others will likely think you flaky, dangerous, and possibly even quite dim, the edges are where the magic happens. (And how flaky did that just sound?)

!

What's your favourite road sign?

I bet you don't get asked that question very often. I have a very definite favourite, and on my way to Verlorenkloof, I had the pleasure - nay, the privilege - of spotting it in its natural habitat.

Isn't it beautiful? Such purity of emotion. Such endless possibilities.

Usually, this sign is qualified by a sort of subheading affixed to the pole beneath it: !Falling rocks. !Pedestrians. !Potholes. A sighting of it in its pure form gives me intense joy. Look out! Look out for what? I don't know! But look out! With an exclamation mark!

The best thing about my favourite sign is the images it conjures up in one's head. Images like this:

Or this:

Or this:

I say we have a meme. Is anyone with me?

This is sooooo not what it looks like.

We have fleas.

The whole country has fleas, I think. I mean it: if you have a conversation right now, on any topic, with anyone who lives in my general vicinity, and that person has a dog, the conversation will at some point turn to fleas. Because of the hot, muggy, and unusually wet (blame those rain-dances of mine) summer this year, we are having a wave, a veritable Pharaoh-grade plague of fleas. They are on our cats, on us, but mostly on my poor little dog. And they're immune to all the normal remedies, it seems. In any case, none of the tablets, powders and spot-ons I've been encasing her in all summer have prevented her from becoming progressively more moth-eaten-looking from scratching them.

So, in desperation, and convinced that if I were to add one more chemical to the cocktail currently covering Kaori (phew!) she might actually keel over and die, I decided to research an old boereraat (folk remedy). Don't worry, I'm not under the fond delusion that "natural" necessarily means "safe, good and harmless". I did my homework on this remedy, and that's what inspired me to post about it. I was shocked, utterly appalled, at my previous level of ignorance about the marvellous plant known as khakibos (translatable as either khaki weed or frickin'-British-soldiers-weed).

update: a police van just drove past my window. I'm getting nervous.

Things I have always known about khakibos:

*It is named khakibos either because of its colour or because it was
brought over from South America in British soldiers' horse feed during the second Anglo-Boer war.
*It stinks.
*It's a weed.
*Everyone hates it.
*It is reputed to repel fleas.

That was enough for me to determine to rethink my relationship with the stinky stuff, and I turned to Google to help me ensure that it was safe.

Things I know about khakibos since googling it:

*It's actually a type of marigold, Tagetes minuta.

*People voluntarily eat it.

*People voluntarily farm it.

*You can use it to deworm horses.

*You can buy khakibos products online.

*According to the Wikipedia page on the genus Tagetes, khakibos
is the source of an essential oil used in perfume, called tagette, and is also
used as a flavourant in the food and tobacco industries.

By this point my mind was reeling. I was having a khakibos epiphany, and I immediately put on my hiking boots and went out, armed with a large pair of secateurs, to find some. There was none at all in the first place I tried, a plot where a house is currently being built, but after a lot of searching I found two fat, healthy plants in an open veld near my house. It was as I was bearing them home in triumph that I had another epiphany.

Things I know about khakibos since going out to find some:

*It is much less common around here than it used to be.

*It looks a heckuvalot like dagga (marijuana).

So, my triumph rapidly turning into acute fear that someone would call the cops to say they had seen someone carrying large bundles of illegal drugs around the neighbourhood, I slunk back into my house. I chopped it up. It looked even more like dagga. I felt guilty. I put it in a large pot. I thought "pot" and giggled, pathetically, to myself. Then I boiled it up, cooled it down, and rinsed Kaori with it.

It turned her fur a bright greenish-yellow. This is not too obvious on her usually orangey coat, but I'd really, really love to see it on a white dog...

Things I still don't know about khakibos:

*Will it truly defeat The Fleas That Were The Real Reason For Hosni Mubarak's Resignation?

Watch this space.

An expedition

So, for the past week I've been at the most wonderful place called Verlorenkloof. It's an annual thing where a few BAASA members from the Pretoria region get together and rent one of the crofts. I'm not really sure why they call them crofts. I think maybe it's because the people who go there tend to be into either hill walking or trout fishing, and that people who go to Scotland to stay in crofts tend to be into the same things...

Anyway, we go there to paint the plants, and there are always gorgeous things to be found. Look at these photos of the beautiful riverine forest:

The last one is the most beautiful little orchid, Stenoglottis fimbriata, that I'm working on right now. You need to rotate it to the right to see how it actually grows, but I liked the composition of the photo this way.

Sun halo!

So I wanted rain - and I got it, and more! Yesterday evening there was a semi-decent storm that had me running around outside trying to take pictures of lightning. That didn't work but I got this double rainbow. No, I'm not going to say it!

Then, this morning...

A friend of my husband's called him to tell him to look outside. The radio station that my mother was listening to was getting calls from all sorts of mad people saying that the world was ending and the aliens were coming. It was even on the national TV news this evening. It was a sun halo, and I've never seen one before in my life. Neither, it seems, had anyone else around here. We don't usually get the very high cirrus clouds filled with ice crystals that are needed for this to happen. In this case, it was caused by a storm system over Botswana. Has anyone else out there seen one?

I was trying to protect the camera as if it were my eyes. Only later did I think that I should have just snapped away madly without looking. Hooray for strange weather!