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the usual, and the unusual

Yesterday, something usual and something unusual happened. The usual thing, unfortunately, is that my car broke down. It's the one in the middle, with the mechanic, would-be mechanics, and general onlookers pondering it's open hood. :(



After much collective examination,



several attempts to push start it (Land Cruisers are HEAVY!) ending in a successful push start - which I could not photograph since I was usually in the driver's seat, and hypotheses of dead batteries and broken starter motors, the current hypothesis involves screwy wiring. I'm in Nairobi today, partly to get the car fixed - so we'll see. I'm pretty excited about having a nice long hot shower!

The unusual thing that happened is that it rained. In the morning! We hardly get rain here during July and August, normally maybe once in a season, in the late afternoon - a softly falling rain that gets soaked into the dry, thirsty ground within minutes. The other morning we saw very dark grey clouds, and lo and behold, it rained during breakfast. Luckily, we have a tarp-covered mess area, so we stayed dry.



What I most enjoyed about the rain is that southern Kenya seems to echo my sentiment on life: at the end of every rain lies a rainbow. The end of this rainbow seemed to lie right in my tent! (I hope you can see it, faintly...)



Those of you who may have noticed the little black feathery mark in the upper left-hand side of each of my photos... yes, I have some kind of dirt speck on my 35-70mm lens. *sigh* I know it's on the lens because pictures I've taken with my telephoto lens don't have it in them. Getting my lens cleaned was on my list of things to do before leaving the US, but alas, it was one of the few things that didn't get done.

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