It recently came to my attention that I had been tagged with a “photo meme”.  The rule is, you go to your photos folders, pick the sixth folder, pick the sixth image in that folder, and post that image.  Then you tag five others.

Unfortunately for this theory, I store most of my photos in context-sensitive folders (so the photos of a given project are stored with that project’s photos, etc.), so I don’t have many photo folders per se.  So in “My Pictures”, there are only seven folders and the last few don’t even contain six photos!

So I decided to go with the fourth photo folder (which is the closest-to-sixth that has six photos).  It doesn’t contain any photos itself, so I went to the sixth photo subfolder, plucked the sixth photo, and here it is:

This was from my trip to Ghana and shows the Ghanaian loom, which I thought was ultra-cool.  For more on Ghanaian weaving, see my Ghana travel page on kente weaving.

I don’t read enough blogs to tag five people, so I’ll just put up this challenge: if you’re reading this, play the game on your own blog, and leave me a comment so I know to go look.

After a long, grueling flight, we are back in San Francisco, being happily abused by the cats (who apparently missed us as much as we missed them).  I won’t go too much into the last part of the trip right now because I still intend to catch up on the travel blog, perhaps in a day or so once I get over the jet lag and this miserable cold that B. and I both seem to have brought back with us.

It was a fun trip, although I don’t think I’ll do a group tour again.  It was tremendously stressful having to travel on someone else’s schedule, and to spend 12+ hours/day touring around.  I like to travel at a slower pace, and by the end of the two week tour, was definitely feeling a bit strung out.  Fortunately, being currently unemployed, I can take a vacation from my vacation before setting back out full tilt.

I am considering what goals I want to set for the period of my unemployment.  I figure that being unemployed gives me an extra 50 or so hours a week, between commute time, lunchtime, etc.  Figure a month of unemployment, that’s about 200 hours.  If you had 200 hours of free time suddenly available, how would you invest it?

I figure I can learn more about software development, study weaving, study dyeing, play with chocolate mold-making (I bought two jade seals carved with my name in Chinese that would be fun to cast in chocolate), work on getting back into shape for cycling, and/or study patternmaking and make some AIDS Lifecycle costumes.  200 hours sounds like a lot, until I start thinking of all the things that interest me.  Life is too short.
Off to dinner, and then to bed.  Hopefully I can sleep off this cold and the jet lag simultaneously.

I’m sitting in an airport hotel near LAX, writing this entry before heading to the airport for the long slog to China. The flight will be well over 12 hours. I’m already several inches into the cuff for my first pair of travel socks, so I’m glad I’m taking two socks’ worth of yarn with me, just in case.
Feeling excited and a bit jumpy – it’s off to the road again, traveling. I love traveling, but don’t know how it will be with a group – so there’s some uncertainty, too. We’ll see what turns up!

I am now switching to my travel blog, so you won’t hear from me again on this blog until I return from China. Onward ho!