Saturday, September 27, 2008

Miss Congeniality

Yaaawwwwn.  I stayed up way too late last night/early this morning listening to the first debate live on the BBC.  I was itching to actually hear the candidates for the first time this entire election cycle - I've only heard soundbites up until last night. (I'm really looking forward to Joe Biden thrashing Sarah Palin next week.)  Luckily for you, though, I wrote a lot of blogs in the last ten days, so enjoy!

Favorite and Lease Favorite Books These Last Two Years

One of the usual ideas people have about PCV life is the opportunity to read a lot of books.  That has really been the case for me.  I've read a lot of stuff, and given the amount of free time I have, I've read a lot books I normally wouldn't have read.  I even recorded everything I read, increasing my nerdiness factor by at least 15% and helping me make my favorite and least favorite book lists by 100%.  The books aren't listed in any particular order.  Allons-y.

 

Favorite Fiction

 

+ One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

+ Catch-22 and Picture This, Joseph Heller

+ The Beach, Alex Garland

+ A Passage to India, E.M. Forster

+ White Teeth, Zadie Smith

+ Underworld and Libra, Don DeLillo

+ Atonement, Ian McEwan

+ The Plot Against America, Philip Roth

 

+ Honorables: Carl Hiaasen; Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis; Straight Man, Richard Russo

 

As you can see, I had to do some catching up on high school and college reading lists with the Marquez and Catch-22.  The latter, and Picture This, were hilarious.  Not included are books I've already read, so the Harry Potters I went through a second time aren't here (I've read the seventh one.).

 

Favorite Non-Fiction

 

* The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam

* Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

* King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild

* My Life, Bill Clinton

* The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson

* Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder

* DisneyWar, James B. Stewart

* Paris to the Moon, Adam Gopnik

 

* Honorables: Collapse, Jared Diamond; Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell; Cod, Mark Kurlansky

 

There are a lot of quality non-fiction books out there.  My favorite was The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam.  If you're interested in post-World War II U.S. history, this will illuminate the Vietnam/Kennedy era immensely.  The parallels to Iraq and modern politics are easy to make, not in the kind of war fought, but in the way supposed political experts ("the best and the brightest") severely misjudged the situation and refused to rectify it.  Bill Clinton's autobiography is really interesting, King Leopold's Ghost is a history of the Belgian Congo, and DisneyWar follows the drama of the Disney boardroom under Michael Eisner.  If you read any of these four books, get ready for an appalling amount of hubris.

 

Three Cups of Tea and Mountains Beyond Mountains are books about development work that aren't depressing and actually inspiring.  Paris to the Moon is about a modern ex-pat in Paris, and The Devil in the White City is about a serial killer and the construction of the Columbia Exposition in Chicago, very interesting.

 

"Honorables" mention: the author of Cod, which is a history of the fish, Mark Kurlansky also wrote a history of salt (guess what the title was?).  I only mention this because there was a point when the White House tried to have us believe that George W. Bush reads for fun, and he was reading Salt.  Another book he was reading was The Stranger by Albert Camus, which is about a guy who emotionlessly kills Arabs.  You couldn't make that up if you tried.

 

Didn't Like, Not Impressed

 

- I Am Charlotte Simmons and A Man In Full, Tom Wolfe

- Running With Scissors, Augusten Burroughs

- The Talisman, Stephen King and Peter Straub

- Dick Francis

- The Motorcycle Diaries, Ernesto "Che" Guevara

- Surfacing, Margaret Atwood

 

If I learned anything in Peace Corps, it's that Tom Wolfe is kind of a douchebag.  I'm not saying he's a bad writer; just the opposite, he's talented and has become an American highbrow icon.  He just doesn't let you forget how good he is.  Okay, Tom, I get it, you've done a crazy amount of research and can paint a detailed picture of a time and place.  But in the two books of his I read, they were just boring.  I've read Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test before PC, and I've heard good things about Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff, so maybe he peaked in 1987.

 

Running With Scissors was a vulgar David Sedaris rip-off, probably should have read another Stephen King book (it was my first), and Dick Francis was just stale.  I liked the movie version of The Motorcycle Diaries better than the book because I couldn't get a sense of what and where Che was talking about written down.  Surfacing was just strange; if you want to read a Margaret Atwood book, try The Blind Assassin.

Price Rises

One of the most important things to happen this year is the incredible rise in food prices.  It's been noted that if affects the poorest the most, mainly because the little income that people make is used almost exclusively for food.  I thought you might be curious to see how this has increased food prices and other products in Lagdo.

 

Corn

 

A sack of corn, 100 kilograms (200 pounds), in the summer of 2007 was 14.000 cfa.  The price is at its highest because it's the planting season, so food stocks have reached their lowest.  After the harvest, in the winter (these are temperate climate seasons I'm using) the price dropped to 8.000 cfa.  Now this year, during the planting season, a sack of corn is 22.000 cfa, an increase of 57% from last year at the same time, if my calculations are correct.

 

Diamor Cooking Oil

 

The major cooking oil people in the Grand North of Cameroon use is cottonseed oil produced by SODECOTON, the Cameroonian cotton company, called Diamor.  When I got to Cameroon in late 2006, two years ago exactly, Diamor, sold in one-liter bottles, cost about 700 cfa.  Two years later, the price in Lagdo is now sold for 1400 a bottle.  The price has gone up so much that all of the boutique owners in Lagdo have switched to a couple brands of cooking oil from Douala, palm and vegetable oils.  Still, those new brands cost 1.300 for a liter.

 

I don't really miss Diamor.  I despised it, actually.  It's pretty gross, a really thick concoction that claims to be "cholesterol free" on the bottle.  Furthermore, it's produced by Sodecoton, a disliked entity in Cameroonian life.  If there's something you don't want to be when you grow up, it's a small-time cotton farmer.  You're going to get fucked no matter what you do.

 

Fertilizer

 

I'm not sure how much fertilizer cost last year, but this year it's just too much.  A big sack of fertilizer in Lagdo cost 22.000 cfa, about the same price as corn; and given that you need a steady supply of fertilizer throughout the growing season, you'd have to sell several sacks of corn to break even.  Cotton growers working with Sodecoton receive some fertilizer for free (I'm assuming it's free), but given how rare and in demand fertilizer is around here, you can find the cotton farmers selling it at the market, not exactly helping an already weak crop. 

 

The importance of fertilizer can't be understated.  In addition to selling it out of his boutique, Yotti started using it in his cornfields, and the stalks shot up like a rocket since the picture I took in an earlier post in July or August.

 

Cement

 

According to the September 13 Jeune Afrique, a really good Francophone Africa news magazine, the price of cement in Cameroon is a little complicated.  On one hand, prices need to rise because of the increased demand in Cameroon and neighboring countries and the increase in the cost of primary materials and oil, but on the other, the government is keeping the price artificially low, which is hindering the leading cement producer, Cimencam, from increasing production to meet said demand.  JA says that the government is keeping the price low because it wants to keep construction prices down, but they also don't want people to take to the streets like they did in February.  (I believe the government is also subsidizing gas prices, which sparked the riots to begin with, because the price hasn't changed at all in the last seven months.)

 

As for concrete prices (sorry for the pun… but I'm really not) in Lagdo, it's gone up about 15-20% the last year.  For a 50 kg sack nowadays, you have to dole out 7500 cfa.

 

(Factoids: Cinencam is actually owned by a French company and has factories throughout the country.  There's one in the North province in Figuil, a town about 90 minutes/two hours north of Garoua on the highway.  Also, a Korean company is going to open a new cement factory in Limbé, which is probably causing the Cimencam folks to wonder when they're going to catch a break: while the government is screwing them, they're letting a competitor in on a growing market so they can rake in the foreign investment.)

Rainy Season - La Fin

During Sunday afternoon, the wind started picking up and dark clouds were on the horizon.  It's still the rainy season, and this brusque change in weather, it had been sunny the whole day, is pretty normal.  Only since it's late September, and the rainy season is petering out, all the build up for rain didn't happen.  Weak sauce.

 

This rainy season has been an up-and-down affair.  It started off quickly in April, and people rushed to plant their crops.  The problem was it didn't really rain again for another month, making everyone anxious.  The rain did eventually pick up by June and early July and has been steady since, but the corn and millet harvests probably won't be as big as they were last year, not helping the already inevitable price rises.  I'm not sure about cotton, but cotton production has gone down considerably in the last couple of years, at least in the Lagdo area.  Peanuts, on the other hand, are doing well this year.  It seems like if you're a farmer, if it's not one thing, than it's the other.

 

There are three nice benefits of the rainy season from a non-agricultural point of view.  First, it marks the end of all the dust and haziness that's floating around.  Second, everything becomes green and looks nice.  Third, during a storm and for the next day or two, the temperature is lowers and it feels temperate.  It gets to about 80 degrees, which makes me cold nowadays.  I wish I were joking about that.  The problem with the end of rainy season is that all three of these benefits reverse almost instantly.  There is a "mini hot season" in October before the "winter" sets in for December and January; the land and plants dry out by November; and the haziness has already crept back.  The end of the rainy season reminds you how harsh a place Northern Cameroon is sometimes.

Reasons, BBC, Paper Planes, Obamitos

My Favorite French Phrase au moment

 

"Tu as raison."

 

Literally, "tu as raison" means "you have reason."  It's another way of saying you're right.  For example:

 

"With suspending his campaign to appear decisive during this current Wall Street crisis and choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain's campaign has been reduced to publicity stunts."

"Tu as raison."

 

Why I Love the BBC

 

When commenting on a story that a Brazilian football coach is going to fine any overweight player $160 per day per kilo, a BBC anchor said that the players will have to lose the weight or, like they say on Wall Street, face a financial "correction."  He was being a cheeky monkey after half an hour of coverage about the government bailout before the sports news.

 

Random Music Tidbits

 

I read that "Paper Planes" by M.I.A. is getting played in the States.  I'm not sure just how widespread it is – I'm only taking whatever-it-is-I-read's word for it – but I'm glad: it's a really good song, M.I.A. is intense and not someone who would usually become pop chart popular (she is popular among the hipster/indie music crowd), and it even uses a Clash sample ("Straight To Hell").  I was really surprised when I was flipping through The Essential Clash on my iPod and I heard "Paper Planes." 

 

A line from "Paper Planes" is even sampled in a new rap song called "Swagger Like Us".  I think the version I have is a remix, so I'm not sure who's the original artist, but it has Kanye, Jay Z, Lil' Wayne, and T.I.  T.I., I have to say, had the best verse, something I wouldn't usually expect when the other three dudes are better than he is.  And speaking of Kanye, I downloaded a new song called  "Love Lockdown," where he continues to love having his voice T-Pained.  He's apparently releasing a new album in December, just in time for my arrival.  Thanks, Kanye!

 

Little Obamas

 
One of the most amusing things I've heard about the elections from a Cameroonian:  Yotti has a frère that's in Germany (he's not really his brother) who's married to a white German lady.  They recently had a child, and Yotti told me that they made un petit Barack Obama.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

The Palin-Whatshisname Ticket/Making America Stupid

Frank Rich always frightens me, and he seems to be afraid that McCain is just keeping the seat warm for Palin.

Besides purely knee-jerk whatever-the-GOP-does-I'll-say-the-opposite-ness of Rich (there has to be a more concise way of saying that), here's Thomas Friedman with his head on straight as usual.

Last Few Months (continued)

The Office Quote With No Context

"So you know who turned out to be kind of a creep? Ben Franklin. And Elizabeth, the stripper, gave me great advice, which rhymed.  Really makes you wonder how Ben Franklin can become president but someone like Elizabeth can't."
    - Michael Scott


Last Few Months, continued

So I left off with a list of a couple of things that outgoing PCVs have to do, whether or not you're being replaced and the post book, and I have a couple more to add:

Description of Service

The Description of Service (DOS) is a short document (two pages maximum is recommended) each volunteer has to write that details all of the work that they've done the last two years.  In addition to the work, there are some legalistic paragraphs we have to include.  To quote the bestselling COS Handbook 2008, the DOS "is a non-evaluative statement describing your service in Peace Corps."   Furthermore, if a potential employer contacts PC Washington, the DOS "is the only official statement Peace Corps will make concerning your experience."  So, in other words, write in third person and make it good ("As a secondary project, Mr. Fisher discovered a cure for malaria and HIV/AIDS during his first month of service.").  (Peace Corps doesn't give any advice about potential employers coming across incriminating blog entries, especially if they happen to be in charge of selecting cabinet members for the McCain administration.)

Work

Besides paperwork for Yaoundé and Washington, there actually is work to be done these last three months.  As I'm not being replaced, the timing is awkward for finding things to do: we're not supposed to start new projects (no problem there) and I'm supposed to be shutting down anything I have going on (no problem there, aussi).  Malgré all that, I do have some things in the offing:

*** Girls' Education Soiree – This is a project I'm doing ensemble avec Harvard in Ngong.  It was originally planned for, um, last week, but thankfully it was postponed for the end of October/early November because of planning difficulties, mainly because myself, Harvard, and Michele in Bamé weren't in the same place at the same time for the two months leading up to the original date.  Michele has had to drop out of the project for scheduling conflicts, so it just leaves Harvard and me.

The project's goal is to stress the importance of girls' education to male authority figures.  It'll be two afternoons, one in Lagdo and one in Ngong, and will be discussion-based and will try to convince all these dudes that an educated daughter or wife isn't necessarily a bad thing.  (I'll personally try to avoid mentioning that women in Southern Cameroon are more educated than nordistes because those Southerners got some 'tude, which would upset the men's delicate egos.)

Besides schedule problems, there were problems with Peace Corps Partnership, which is how this project will be funded, but those seem to be resolved.  So, full steam ahead.

*** ACMS – Remember way back when, last November, when I went around Lagdo's "aire de santé" with an NGO, Yotti, and a couple other folks from Lagdo?  Probably not, but ACMS, the NGO, is finally back to follow up… ten months later

The thing at the end of 2007 was the start of ACMS's "stratégie de base communitaire" or something like that (I'm not sure if "communitaire" is an actual French word), which is basically a grassroots initiative that has the NGO working through local, already established community groups.  Not exactly an original or trailblazing idea (Peace Corps' been doing that for 45 years now), but it is a good one.

During the original activities last November, we went to around to several villages and presented ACMS's products, which are all health-related, including condoms, mosquito nets, and oral rehydration salts.  All good stuff, and with the ACMS plan, the community groups would sell the products, make a little profit, and be able to buy more products to sell from ACMS.  The project is basically an income-generating activity where the product is supplied by an NGO instead of resources the community has.  So, the one crucial link in this supply chain is the NGO.

The follow-up on the project, which was promised, has been slow in coming.  The results/report of the activities by ACMS-Garoua to its leadership/donors happened six months after the original tour around Lagdo, and then they didn't come back to Lagdo for another few months.  This isn't completely the fault of the Garoua office; they have to wait on their bosses before doing anything, and they're really understaffed, especially given the amount of area they cover.  It's just another example of good intentions and big ambitions in Yaoundé that's hard to realize in the field.

When ACMS finally came back a few weeks ago to Lagdo, it wasn't without hiccups.  They were of course late, and while they were hoping to meet Yotti, they got there during the standard "siesta" (if you want to call it that) between the afternoon prayers at 13h30 and 15h30, so he wasn't at his boutique and the Cameroonian chauffeur didn't want to bother him at his house, which I offered to do.  (It's l'Afrique, show up at someone's door whenever you want.)  So I chatted with a new Cameroonian woman that works for them that I think will be replacing Viktoria, the German lady who works with ACMS (She plays a Peace Corps-like role with ACMS, except she's a qualified professional with a nice salary.) whenever her contract ends, while the chauffeur drove Viktoria to the Lagon Bleu to get a room for herself.  (The other two were staying at a seedier auberge in town.)

I said screw it – it was only two in the afternoon, with another two hours to go before Yotti would be around, they were late, Viktoria is going to the white man hotel, and they weren't being clear at all about why they were there.  It was also a little disconcerting speaking to the new woman, Dominique, because she didn't have the strong personality that the other ACMS employees have and the work she'll be expected to do is to make sales pitches for their products.  It was just frustrating because I was expecting them to show up and tell Yotti and I what their plan was for the next couple of months, when it just seemed like they were wasting time, and their hard-to-come-by money, on hanging out in Lagdo.  They decided to shut-'er-down for the day and do things in the morning, but I was going to Garoua for the day, so I just talked to Yotti when I got back, and he said the same things that I was thinking: he was waiting for them all day the day before, as well, and all they ended up doing was doing protocol with some officials; they didn't even bring products with them so Yotti could restock, kind of shocking when ACMS has "marketing" in its name.

To sum up: bureaucratic hassles, lack of follow-up, and poor rendezvous etiquette.  However, I still have to figure out what's up because ACMS's presence, no matter the difficulties, is still important, even though they have to get their act together.

(I think what was most ticking me off about the ACMS visit is that they seem to be relying too much on local counterparts, myself included.  Instead of worrying about what Yotti's doing, they need to be setting up a better reseau of sellers of their products.  Theoretically, ACMS is supposed to be supplying their stuff to a couple wholesalers, and these wholesalers are supposed to supply the rest of the chain all the way down the line.  So, a wholesaler in Garoua sells their stuff to a guy in Ngong, then Yotti in Lagdo goes to the guy in Ngong, then the community groups around Lagdo go to Yotti – or whomever.  These suppliers haven't been developed enough.  The different sellers of the products don't know each other, so Yotti, when he wants to restock ACMS stuff, goes to the ACMS office in Garoua or waits on ACMS to come to Lagdo instead of going through a hypothetical commerçant ACMS works with.  ACMS has even asked me a couple times to be a middleman, which I refused, because it's not sustainable for me to be involved and I can't be involved with commercial activities as a PCV.)

Saturday, September 06, 2008

Rainy Season 2008

Republican Convention

 

"They never came right out and said it, but I could see they were uncomfortable at the prospect of all three network TV cameras looking down on their spontaneous Nixon Youth demonstration and zeroing in – for their own perverse reasons – on a weird-looking, 35-year-old speed freak with half his hair burned off from overindulgence, wearing a big blue McGovern button on his chest, carrying a tall cup of Old Milwaukee and shaking his fist at John Chancellor up in the NBC booth – screaming: 'You dirty bastard! You'll pay for this, by God!  We'll rip your goddamn teeth out!  KILL!  KILL!  Your number just came up, you communist son of a bitch!'"

            - Hunter S. Thompson, joining a Nixon Youth rally at the 1972 Republican convention

 

Well, it's that start of the Republican National Convention when I'm writing this, so you know what that means: I'll be yelling at my blue shortwave radio shouting, "Lies! Lies!"  Luckily, the BBC has its head on straight and doesn't carpet-bomb us with convention coverage, but it's still enough to make me roll my eyes when some tool tries to pretend that they're not the party that produced the George W. Bush presidency.  Case in point: tastefully curtailing festivities given the impeccable timing of another hurricane coming for Louisiana.  Yeah, like that'll really make up for fucking up the first time, assholes.  Dropping fewer balloons on television while appearing Decisive seems to be the Republican strategy for pulling the wool over peoples' eyes these next two months.

 

The nerve of these people is just remarkable: Katrina, Iraq, and a woman more conservative than McCain with her own Jamie Lynn Spears.  What a farce.  No wonder HST couldn't get through the Nixon convention sober… well, he couldn't get through anything sober, but you know what I mean.

 

 

Rainy Season 2008

 

Like my last posts have mentioned, my twenty-seven months in Cameroon are rapidly coming to a close.  By the time I post this, I'll have been here for almost two years exactly, leaving only three months to go.  My stage-mates and I have come an incredibly long way, it's remarkable.  I'll use future posts to reflect more on the experience, but for the time being, I'll talk about what exactly there is to do these last 100 days.

 

Being Replaced Na?

 

The most important factor, I think, that affects your post-COS Conference work is whether or not you're being replaced by another volunteer in your program (health, agro, etc.).  In both cases, the PCV has to sew up any financial loose ends and prepare friends and co-workers for their departure.  If you're being replaced, the outgoing volunteer has to prepare people for the imminent arrival of a new nasaara and needs to organize any on-going projects so that the PCV can step right in and continue them effortlessly, or at least with less than or equal the amount of difficulty the old PCV faced.  To help aid this process, there is a counterpart workshop during training, where all the newbies' official counterparts come to a two-day session on what Peace Corps is, followed immediately by a site visit where the replacement will spend a couple days with the departing PCV to meet co-workers and a get a feel of the village.  (This counterpart workshop is also the most awkward event during all of training.  For me, and others as well, it demonstrated just how bad our French was despite almost two months of never-ending French classes.  The workshop, plus the site visit week, is the beginning of the end of training, our first taste of freedom from the training site, and the realization that This will be our lives for the next two years, so it's a crazy week.)

 

I've known for a while that I didn't want to be replaced, so I'll explain why.  If you've been reading this blog religiously – and I know you have – my work-related experience in Lagdo hasn't been ideal.  The health post in Lagdo was originally created as a partnership between CARE and Peace Corps.  I was the third health PCV on the project, which ended seven months into my service, leaving me without the reason there was a health volunteer to begin with.  No worries, however, because I'd wanted to get out of the CARE yoke since I got there and the PCV I replaced left me with a decent starting off point (she was more optimistic about non-CARE work than actual work with them).  However, the main problem with them leaving is that it left me with a vacuum when it came to work counterparts.  Although I was officially transferred to the Lagdo hospital, I never felt that the hospital cared I was there – not that surprising since they never asked for a PCV to begin with – so I never took the time to cultivate counterparts, abetted by me finding work outside of the hospital relatively easily.

 

As I chugged along post-CARE, I realized that doing work in Lagdo is difficult.  The town is very political (it's the head of its arrondissement, like a county) and developed enough that the basic health work that we were trained to do – presentations on this and that – has never seemed to me to be enough in the eyes of people here.  Lagdo needs (wants more than needs, perhaps) more development of its infrastructure, and the development of that infrastructure has to go through the proper channels, i.e., the mayor has to get his cut.  There's always work at the schools, and also a lot of things to do in the villages surrounding Lagdo, like all the things I've done with my Bamé colleague, but it is completely necessary to have a local counterpart to help you do that to the fullest extent possible, not just rely on another PCV. 

 

So you can see the problem for a health volunteer that would replace me: A strong counterpart at the local hospital is needed, but that strong counterpart doesn't exist, and I don't want to be responsible for putting a new PCV into the same situation I was put in, this time without seven months in Lagdo under their belt like I had. 

 

In addition to the lack of a counterpart and difficulty of doing work in Lagdo in general, Lagdo has seen a lot of development projects come and go: CARE, a European Union project, the Chinese of course, and various PCVs and other nasaaras rolling through.  In addition to all of that, another huge NGO, Plan International, is starting to do work in Lagdo for the next year or two, with a budget and resources that a PCV can't even come close to competing with, so that's another reason I don't want to throw a future PCV into the snake pit.

 

Post Book

 

There are really only two forms of proof in Peace Corps that you were actually living and working at your post for two years: the quarterly report and the post book.  The funny thing about both of these documents is that there is absolutely no way to prove that anything in them is true. 

 

This is especially true for quarterly reports.  A quarterly report is something we turn into our APCD once every three months that documents every work-related thing we've done, so that five-day tour of the Extreme North I took last April wouldn't be put down.  (I think education volunteers only turn in two reports per year given the fact all they're supposed to do is teach.)  While a good idea, given the lack of administrative follow-up and site visits, Peace Corps just has to take our word for it.  Everything that I've written in my quarterly reports can theoretically be a lie.

 

The post book is a different animal.  It's basically an overview of your post, acts as a guidebook, and can include just about everything about it; most importantly, it's given to future PCVs at your post.  Under Peace Corps guidelines, the post book can have maps, random facts, a guide to people you should(n't) know, what tailor to avoid, etc.  Also, each PC program has their own post book, so a health PCV will only get a post book from past health PCVs at that post and an agro would only get an agro post book.  If you're opening a post, you have to start from scratch.

 

The post book I received from Rachel and Danielle has been really helpful.  It's been about 100% more helpful than some post books other PCVs have left at their posts: a couple pages of a Word document or something hastily written the night before leaving village.  I've tweaked it a little bit:  I've made my own comments on people that are mentioned, added my own, and updated different developments about various things: Lagdo politics, Lagon Bleu, prices for transportation.  No matter what, though, it's impossible to capture everything about your village in a post book.

 

You're supposed to work on your post book throughout your service so you won't forget to put things in, and I've done an okay job of that.  I was pretty diligent about it through April of this year – which coincides to when I stopped having things to do – and the most significant change I've made is to make an electronic copy of it.  I'll be spending my next couple months putting the final touches on it.

 

… There are a few more things that'll be happening these next couple months that I'll add on a later post.  Du courage.

Rainy Season Playlist

Time for the big budget sequel to "Hot Season 2008 Mix."  Some of these songs are actually new, some are new to me, and others – I'm looking at you, Led Zeppelin – I just never paid attention to until the last couple months.  You'll notice a new obsession, Lil' Wayne, makes several appearances, mostly because he's all over music blogs (that's where I've been downloading music), and he seems to have made a Leap, at least commercially, this year.  (I never really paid attention to him until his verse on "Hollywood Divorce" on the Idlewild soundtrack, the Outkast movie, about Katrina.  He's from New Orleans, and the hurricane has seemed to give him a spark.)  Voici la liste:

 

1.  "Hello Brooklyn 2.0," Jay-Z feat. Lil' Wayne

2.  "Put On" (remix), Young Jeezy feat. Jay-Z

3.  "Sex on Fire," Kings of Leon

4.  "Viva La Vida," Coldplay

5.  "Portions for Foxes," Rilo Kiley

6.  "Lovin' U A Long Time," Mariah Carey

7.  "Driving Me Wild," Common feat. Lily Allen

8.  "Lollipop" (remix), Lil' Wayne feat. Kanye West

9.  "My British Tour Diary," Of Montreal

10.  "Piano Magnet," Ghostland Observatory

11.  "Mr. Carter," Lil' Wayne feat. Jay-Z

12.  "Australia," The Shins

13.  "Like I Needed," Rogue Wave

14.  "Gallows Pole," Led Zeppelin