The battle of the bulge...

Over the last month I've been eating a lot of ice cream and pretty much not exercising since it is too hot for Badminton and push-ups now (or at least in my mind it is). I kept looking in the mirror and thinking I was gaining back some of that weight I had lost. That thought was kind of sad because I can't say that I missed it. Then I came to Dhaka yesterday and all the Bengali's at the office were commenting on how I had lost weight. I was so confused but just figured they hadn't really seen me in two months so they just were misjudging. As I'm sure you figured out by now, they weren't. I'm now down to 205 lbs. Apparently, since I stopped doing push-ups I've just transitioned back to a little more fat but have continued to lose weight. I'm still not complaining, it just would have been nice to know this when I was feeling slightly guilty for having ice cream 4 times that one week.

Hank, Jake, and Gary...

I made some new friends this week. At first I didn't know how to treat them. They're just so different from what I'm used to. After a few awkward moments I decided to like them. Hank is the coolest of the three. He is warm and friendly but still aloof in a way that all the cool ones are. Gary is really shy. He fades away very quickly when you address him. I hope to bring him out of his shell a little over time. Jake though, Jake is special. Jake is curious. I was fine with how Jake stared at me in wonder but when he started to walk towards me to check me out, I warned him. At first, he got the warning and it was all ok but eventually the curiosity got the best of him. So I killed him. Now, some might say to let it go and make the argument that he was just a cockroach. I named him, called him friend, and all he wanted to do was check me out while I brushed my teeth. Fortunately for me, this possible guilt trip was stopped the next day when I walked in the bathroom to see a younger cockroach staring at me in the same old way Jake used to, except this this time he stayed his distance while I brushed my teeth. "Welcome back Jake," I said, "I'm glad you learned your lesson."

Have you ever attended a goat training in a language you don't really know? I have now. I spent the better part of two days observing a goat training this week. It was entirely in Bangla. I didn't understand much, but that wasn't what I was there for. I was there to observe.

I did some more work on the spreadsheet this week. I'm hoping to be mostly done with it this weekend.

It looks like I might start spending a lot more time out in the field. A lot of the next phase of my job is observation so that I can know what questions to ask and what problems might exist. It looks like this might be starting tomorrow. I was debating all week long whether to go to Dhaka this weekend and finally decided against it about two days ago. Then tonight at about 8:30 my boss calls me and says that there are people heading to Dimla for 4 days starting tomorrow at 6 a.m. He says that there is no pressure to go and that I don't have to but I knew right away deep down inside that I will be going. I spent a good while debating it trying to come up with good excuses to not go but upon finding a lack of truly good ones, I'm just going to go. The sad thing is that as much as I know I don't want to go, I also know that I'm going to love it and that it is the right choice.

That said, don't expect to hear much from me for the next couple of days.

Dear World

Dear world,

Nothing is wrong with me. Lol, I have gotten lots of comments from friends and family wondering about my silence lately. Sometimes, I just feel like being quiet and sometimes I just don't feel like responding to emails because of how much time and thought they require. The reason I didn't blog last week has nothing to do with this though. That actually has more to do with being angry and stubborn. You see, I tried posting, but it wouldn't let me. Then the internet died. By the time I got done dealing with all of that it was Monday and I just thought, forget it!

So what's new? I have some more friends. We met a group of Koreans here in Bogra. They are all pretty cool and two of the three of them have joined our worship group. We have also hung out with them a couple of times because like us, they often stay in Bogra on the weekends. The British girls (who we also just met recently) on the other hand don't stay the weekends. As a result we've only hung out with them once. They seem nice enough too.

What have I been up to? I read a very good book called "Two Ears of Corn" which was a tremendous help when thinking about the big picture of my job. It did a great job of giving me a concept of a people centered agriculture development program. I immediately gave it to my boss to read when I got done. Then I had a couple of frustrating days in which I couldn't do the work I wanted to do because the person who I needed to get me access to some stuff was on vacation. Upon his return though I went into a storm of what finally has felt like "real" work. I've been pouring over excel spreadsheets for the past several days. Unfortunately, one very important one wasn't finished, so I set out to finish it so I could continue my work. Also unfortunately, in the process of finishing that spreadsheet I found all sorts of frustrating things about it and the way all the spreadsheets are set up. Let's just say I've never been so annoyed with eggs and bananas in my life. On the whole I felt really good about how that work is going. I even got a chance to use some of the knowledge gained in the one computer programming class I took in college!

So life is pretty good.