Body and Mind

Well, there are a few new developments in that would fall under the "Health" department.  My sunburn is virtually gone and I have quite the nice base tan, which is good.  By my arms seem to have developed some sort of rash?  It's not itchy, nor does it hurt--it's just there.  I am almost positive they aren't bug bites.  Without knowing exactly what it is, I have been applying some aloe (Solarcaine aloe!) to it as the bottle says that it "temporarily relieves pain and itching due to: minor skin irritations (check), sunburn (...sort of check), minor cuts, minor burns, scrapes, and insect bites (highly unlikely check), so it sounds like my bases should be covered.  I am unsure if I had this during the day or not as I wore longer sleeves yesterday, but tt has improved quite a bit since my shower last night. 

Since I have stayed away from beef products since Monday, my stomach has seemed to calm down quite a bit and the nausea has subsided.  Yay!

Perhaps of more pressing concern is my second toe on my left foot.  I was sweeping the floor last night with a shoe brush (haha details to come later), and so I was squatting down sweeping, and all of a sudden my toe started hurting, and it hurts to put any weight on it.  I think I have had something similar in the past, but it always went away the next day.  No such luck today.  I tried walking to work on either side of my left food (avoiding putting pressure on my toe), but that didn't work so well, so I tried curling my toes in, and that seemed to work a bit better.  Hopefully this improves because it's quite a pain walking anywhere--and we do quite a bit of that around here!

Amanda and I haven't done laundry since we arrived here (me two weeks ago, Amanda three) and it's too far to take our laundry someplace and have someone wash them for us.  So last night we went to the Mall and bought a bucket and some laundry detergent and we are going to try our hand at it tonight!  We also picked up some AfricaN cider called Savannah Dry and we are excited to try that as well. 

Our floor in our dorm is very difficult to keep clean due to the red dust that keeps blowing into our room throughout the day.  We once tried sweeping the floors with the sides of our feet with shoes on, and it worked out fairly well, but it was not up to Stacy-clean-standards.  When we were at the mall yesteray, our intentions were to buy a broom, but we knew we didnt want a full-size broom because that would be slightly awkward to take on the taxi, and we already had to carry a large bucket.  So we were looking at one of the smaller brooms that usually come with dustpans.  They were 11 Cedis and we didn't feel as if we wanted our floor cleaned for that type of cost.  Then we saw the shoe brushes....1.98 Cedis.  It was soft and the bristles moved much like a regular broom's bristles, so we thought we would try it.  It actually worked out surprisingly well!!  Despite my toe problem, the room was fairly well swept.  We were happy with our bargain purchase.

There are also these beverages which seem at first glance to pass as flavored milk (Strawberry, chocolate, and banana) and they always seemed to look so tasty.  So we each bought one yesterday (I bought strawberry and Amanda bought banana), and when we got home, we realized it wasn't milk....but Strawberry Drink and Banana Drink.  They were not good.

The Balme Library where I work

In other news, the Balme Library is looking at starting an Institutional Repository so that their students and staff can submit their papers and theses to it (among other document types) which will not only provide permanent and safe storage for the files, but will promote greater access to them for not only members of the University, but for researchers around the world.  U of M has their own similar repository called Deep Blue and Amanda actually mentioned it in our seminar we gave last week. 

Anyway, in order to establish an institutional repository, a policy needs to be written which outlines not only the mission and goals of the repository, but all the information pertaining to submission requirements, instances of withdrawal from the repository, privacy, copyright, etc needs to be layed out so that the library and the community are aware of such policies and can follow them. 

There was a draft version that was written up, and over the past two days, Henry had asked me to look over it, edit it, make improvements and suggestions, etc.  So that is what I have been doing and it's not only been really educational, but it has been fun too.  Another great thing to add to my resume!