80s Party pics

Chipmonks!!

Ranjana has a pet chipmonk, Tinkerbell.

This is lovely Ranjana:



She has raised Tinkerbell since she was just a tiny ball of naked warm pink skin.

Now fully grown (to a MASSIVE 20cm long) Tinkerbell sleeps in half a coconut shell.

She feasts on rice and papaya.

She preens her GT-striped fur.

She decadently reclines in the comfort of her coconut shell when her wild chipmonk brothers and sisters are huddling under leaves and branches to shelter from the tropical monsoon rain.

In the nesting season, Tinkerbell scurries in the night into Ranajana's long flowing thick black hair and hurriedly twirls the hair into a ball with a look in her furiously industrious little eyes as if she has just hit the "all-time-nest-building-material" jackpot. Ranjana is woken with her bum-length hair being yanked skyward, because Tinkerbell is taking it to build the comfiest nest in the corner of the ceiling. Little does Tinkerbell know its still attached to Ranjana's head..

The nesting season is over and to everyone's suprise Tinkerbell got lucky.

Ranjana now awakes in the night literally to the pitter patter of tiny little furry feet. Now there are 3 more little bundles of GT-striped fur to feed (lucky they don't eat much).

They sproing along this security fence with agility and speed:
(see how fast they are..)

They race up poles and tree trunks and leap from branch to branch.




They squeak, loudly.




They are the "Kings of the Hill".


But they aren't always very camoflagued..



Hee hee hee

Peace xx

Beatbox Chef = all time!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUKjh0ey7mc

Montage of Canoe Expedition on the Mighty Bentota River

Peace xx

Humidity and Propaganda

Today is a Thursday.

Time keeps tread-milling along here. Get up, shower, get dressed, drink a coffee, get a tuk tuk to work, sit at my desk for 8 hours, work out at the gym, come home, make dinner, shower, watch a DVD and sleep. Again and again and again. Jason picks me up everyday in The Red Baron. The security guards at my office refer to it at "your Cadillac" - even the local tuk tuk drivers wave now when they see it:

We have the occasional night out to dinner or whatever, but the days sort of melt into eachother and before you know it - it's the 5th of July!! Don't get me wrong, we are ecstatically happy and totally enjoying our time here. Its just that the days are slipping by and I can't believe its already July!!

I think the fact that the weather stays pretty much hot (30-35 degrees) and bloody humid, day in day out, its harder to distinguish the passing months. Its not like home where you have a change in seasons. Here, its either really hot and humid or really hot, raining, and humid. All the time.

Jason had an awesome mozzie net made up, and constructed the frame for it all by himself. Its awesome!!

On a sombre note, today is the anniversary of the major riot in colombo in 1983 that brought the civil war here to a head. The Sri Lankans call it "Black July", and we were all anticipating some kind of bomb or air raid or something happening in Colombo today. Luckily none of that happened, and the day sort of slipped past. Something probably happened in the north of the country though. it seems that attacks on various towns like Vavuinya, Trincomalee or Muttur, happen on a daily basis these days. The government claims that it has killed X amount of Tamil Tigers, and the Tamil Tigers totally deny that an attack even occurred. So you never really know what is truth and what is propaganda.

The tamil population has its own website called Tamilnet (http://www.tamilnet.com/) which provides counter-news to the Sri Lankan Government news portal (http://www.news.lk/). Apparently Tamilnet was temporarily disabled today. No one knows why, but its pretty obvious. No one really discusses it, not in the office or at home or amongst the neighbours. It just happens and nothing is mentioned.

I guess propaganda is not worth discussing after a while anyway, its kinda like talking about the weather..