I drove down to Atlanta a couple weeks ago to visit my friends Howard and Eileen and also witness their wedding!! It was a really wonderful time. We visited the aquarium and I ate lots of good Atlanta food which made me realize just how lacking our food here in NC is! It was really great to get away from the same routine day in and day out and also see my friends who I had been planning on visiting for a long time until COVID upended those plans [shakes fist]. When I got home, I had a letter waiting for me, written by past-me from a year ago.  

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Apologies for the sparse updating frequency. Oftentimes in the day-to-day it becomes kind of difficult to pick out what may be of interest to really mention in a blog post, and the majority of my daily American life does not feel nearly as interesting and novel as my daily Guinean life. In any case, the year has turned over and there is a lot of end-of-year reflections and new-year projections, so from some of this thinking I felt like I ought to sit down and hash some of it out myself. 

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This is a thought dump/rant on life during the Coronavirus pandemic. Feel free to read, or not. I feel like I just needed to get some thoughts down so I can move on and adapt. We live in a time where things are very hyper-focused on the pandemic situation 24/7; for some people it may be a better idea to just skip over it entirely.  

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For American Thanksgiving, my family took a trip to New Orleans, Louisiana, aka The Big Easy, aka NOLA, aka Bayou Country. New Orleans is known for its Cajun and creole food and big live music scene (especially jazz). It’s one of those places that comes alive at night with street performers and bright neon lights. Our family is big on eating and I have just been perpetually full since getting here. Maybe a little too full.

So I took nearly 300 photos on this trip. Good luck. Also sorry this post is SUPER DUPER late. I powered through the food half of the post and then got super discouraged that there was still so much activity post to write left! So I just left it in draft status for months and months before finally getting around to finishing it. So if the activity part feels a bit short and rushed it probably is. I just wanted to get this out and done. I also probably forgot things over the last four months when I’m actually finishing up this post. 

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Boy boy boy, it has been a while hasn’t it?! Apologies for a whole season’s worth of delay between postings. So much has happened! I’ve now twice been to the mountains (because autumn is upon us and it is the best time to visit the NC mountains), went to my first concert since I can remember, did some more pottery (featuring our instructor’s mom’s cute dog one week), we had a work party, the North Carolina State Fair came to town, we enjoyed some of the beautiful colors of God’s creation, and I’ve visited the cats many more times. But the main reason for the delay was… 

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So! I finally started a new job at the NC State vet hospital, just in time for me to turn 26 and become ineligible to be covered as a dependent on my mom’s health insurance. It’s been a wild ride getting here, but I can see how God’s hand has been in this whole thing this whole time. The job is a perfect fit for my needs in a workplace, and my skills and experience seem to be a perfect fit for their needs. The benefits are really great and everyone at the vet school is really wonderful and nice. The timing couldn’t have been any more perfect, and I’m learning so much with this dive into veterinary medicine. I’m already a month and a half into the job(!!) and I am finally feeling like I’m getting the hang of things and settling into the groove. Also, the number of CAT ENCOUNTERS IN MY LIFE HAS SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASED!!!! 

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WOW OKAY so I thought I published this like six weeks ago, but apparently I didn’t. Sorry! I was going in to write another post about my job and here this draft was sitting. Anyway, so six weeks ago… I went to Asheville with my parents to celebrate America’s birthday and to pre-game me starting my new job today. We got a hotel right next to where they shot off the fireworks for the city’s fireworks show on the 4th, and I managed to get some really awesome shots with my new photography know-how! It went to show that I don’t need a super fancy camera to take good photos, just a steady hand (or better yet, a tripod), and some patience. My mom and I took a rainy trip up to the Great Smoky Mountain National Park and saw some elk. Then we went to an arts festival in the city before driving back on Sunday. 

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So I took a photography class at UNC for the last couple of months, and I have to say, photography is complicated! I learned a whole lot since my understanding of photography was pretty much point-focus-exposure-shoot and that was about it. No idea about the methods or the details about what things like aperture meant or the terminology and things to consider when photographing. I got to borrow a DSLR (Canon EOS D60) from the school for the duration of the class so I also got some cool shots which I’ll put here also.  

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A lot has happened! I went to Florida for vacation and started taking a photography class that has been keeping me pretty busy. This will be the “Florida” update. I got to see a lot of really cool things and it was really great to get out of the constant lull of the house. I saw the Kennedy Space Center (and got bamboozled by SpaceX), an osteology (skeleton) museum, the aquarium, a chocolate factory, St. Augustine the oldest continuously-occupied city in America, met up with a guildie, and ate some good food, too! Things have gotten a lot better for me as well since the last update. More on that probably in the next post, this will be all about FLORIDA!! 

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It’s hard to write updates when I feel like not a whole lot is happening. But there is a whole lot happening! It’s not the same as living a novel day-to-day life in another country where you have a lot of material to share the background of cultural differences as those back home. I made beef noodle soup, got a prize in the mail, went on a swim and smelled the roses. We said goodbye to Enze as he moved back to Hawaii for medical school, and celebrated our pastor Samuel’s birthday. 

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