Where is my shadow?

I am starting this blog early because Tuesday's got too long. Just for fun I looked up the sun's position in the sky from here in Tanzania. We are one month past the equinox (Sept 21) and the sun is now south of the equator.. In fact, it is directly overhead (like straight up - dude) at 12:06 PM here in Iringa. I took some pictures of shadows just for fun.

My shadow.

Shadow of a bush at Tumaini

Thus, only one part of your body gets sun burned at noon. And this really only affects certain of the males who are follicle challenged! The highest the sun gets in the sky in Minnesota is about 68 degrees (our latitude 45 plus the 23 degrees the sun is north of equator at Summer Solstice (June 21). The lowest the sun is at noon in Minnesota is 22 degrees (our latitude minus the 23 degrees the sun is south of the equator at Winter Solstice (Dec 22). You now have an interesting view of shadows. Next time you watch "Lion King", see if they have the shadows correct!

I got up to write the blog on Wednesday morning early because the barking dogs, car alarms, and call to prayer all start about 5 AM. Since the sun sets at 6:30 it is easy to go to sleep early and the neighbors don't really want to let us sleep so long. That is so considerate of them to save us from having to wait for the alarm clock. My Internet worked until exactly 6 AM and then quit. I can post all of this when I get to the University, but I suspect that the Internet provider has hosed up their system to reset at 6 AM and throw legitimate users off.

Today Dale has two classes and I will work on assignments for the classes and try to figure out why my "Bachelor Project" class hasn't started on their projects! There are still a significant number of mysteries at the University so we are still trying to work our way thru them. I must admit that we found the faculty cafe very nice. It has real hamburgers and hot dogs. The interesting thing is that the ketchup is really a sweet tomato sauce and in the yellow squeeze bottle and a spicy mustard like stuff is in the red squeeze bottle. Hmmmm!

In addition, Dale and I solved one of mankind's millennial challenges yesterday. These are challenges like cataloging the human DNA, solving Fermat's last problem, conquering all disease but our solution was far more significant. We saw the chicken cross the road. In the middle of traffic near Kihesa, a chicken scampered across the main highway--dodging the mini-buses, push carts and cars passing each other 3 abreast across the entire pavement. We didn't figure out why, but we suppose the chicken felt the urge to live life on the edge and cross that road. We will interview that chicken if we get a chance -- I am sure that will get us the Nobel Prize for animal behavior! But we may have to share the prize with the chicken if we ever can find it again.

This evening's treat was papaya and mango crisp. Two deserts in two nights (last night we had Greg Triplet's birthday cake). We had a surprisingly normal day. None of Dale's students showed up for class after he was guaranteed that 20 would show up. I went to the computer lab. It is called the "Thin Client Lab I" in the schedule. Believe it or not (and I am sure you won't believe this) there are no thin clients in the "Thin Client Lab I". There are a dozen PC's running windows XP professional. Two don't work at all and one cannot see the Microsoft network so you cannot log into it. In the corner is hidden an Apple Imac with the big screen. You guessed it! I pushed the power button and a small cloud of smoke came out of the back with a few appropriate sparks. At least there are some computers that students can use. Now we have to download the latest Java and see if we can get them working with a real language.

The rest of the day was spent trying to figure out how to get my computer back on the internet. I bought 3 Gigabytes of service for 25,000 TSH on September 25th and apparently that was enough to last until October 13th. I kept checking the BALANCE on my 3G card and it said 1.3G 8K Balance. Well I took the 3G modem to town and checked with the Airtel sales folks and they said you had to have some 500 TSH on the phone part of the SIM to use the Internet part. I bought 1,000 TSH worth and it worked for about an hour and stopped. So I looked at the BALANCE again and it said 1.3G 8K Balance. I thought that I had 1.3 Gigabytes left of my 3 Gigabytes that I bought last month. I decided that I really should just buy another 3 Gigabytes. So, I logged on and it offerd a whole month for 30,000 TSH (about $20). That offer was not available before and there was some confusion when we looked at their web site. Anyway I went to the little store on the corner (and I do mean little, these are just a box that holds one guy who sells cell phone time. I bought 35,000 TSH worth of scratch off cards and went back to the apartment and entered them in my Airtel account. I signed up for 30 days of Internet for 30,000 TSH and voila the Internet came back to life. I am using it now. I checked my balance and it said "Dear Customer Your Bundle Balance is: 1. 3GB : 8KB, expiry-time 2012-Oct-25 00:00 2. MONTHLY : 2012-Nov-16 18:25" what they meant was I now have two contracts #1 is a 3GB contract with 8KB left in it and it expires on October 25th. #2 is a MONTHLY contract that expires on November 16th. I kept interpreting it as 1.3 GB left. Obviously, Airtel never tested this with real customers. But, I now have internet. We also had to reinstall the MagicJack and had to get the login name and password re-entered for that. It is also working now. A lot of work to get right back to where we started.

We also made a shopping trip to find a new coffee pot for the Stiles. Theirs failed on low water. We found one at the first shop for 25,000 TSH and the same one down the street for 12,000 TSH. We have typically found wide ranges in costs for items in the many shops. We now are a little more sophisticated and will shop around or ask folks what typical costs may be. I also found 4" shower drain strainers. Apparently, even though the country is metric, some things are just not part of the metric system.