wegenering

First!
Oh Darn!:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19099 676
The way it is
I kinda liked Koffi
Can't remember the name of the UN bonehead that embargoed Liberia when I was going in but whoever the suit&tie was he has my "gratitude".
I had to deal with folks that honestly feared the UN and ECOMOG for good reason.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it

I'm workin' on that Ylee:
Felt is basically sheep's wool pounded or rolled or pummeled into a flat thingy like a scarf or a Ger. I know Gers are not totally flat - they might be called Yurts in some places but the process is fairly common:
Shear a bunch of sheep and lay the pelts on something like grass and then stomp it about for a while with whatever mechanism - flails seem to work for the folks in Mongolia. Then you roll it all up and drag it about for a day or so behind your horse (we used the Ridem Mower 'cause Tloml is allergic to horse dandruff)
et voila:
Felt!
What the ladies in the picture are up to is quite different. They are busy putting decorations on smaller pieces and then pounding and rolling them into submission. You get a scarf at best.
http://www.bluepeak.net/mongolia/ger.html

Ylee: have I got sandstone pictures? There are some formations along the cliffs there I have not visited lately but with folks coming in from London we will likely get some good images 'cause the fellow works as a cooking show videographer and the lady is a movie set designer. Did I mention their two young boys who are full of vinegar?

Saturday morning:
I'm thinking about what Pros said on her blog.
Took a Creative Writing course by correspondence (paper in the mail) and the take away was: "Write from your own experience."
So that is what I try to do here. In fact I realized back then I did not really have much experience to write from so I went out to get what I could. It's been a lot of good times and I still don't think I'm qualified but here we go anyway:
Computers were still warehoused when I ran into them. I key punched my share of simple programs and waited for the results the next morning because they were still building the "Student Compiler" and would only run our stacks of cards at quiet times. Mostly this experience consisted of checking the printout and finding a misspelled command or a coma lacking or present where it should or should not be. I think I got a passing grade in these courses but could not discern a meaning there.
Went "Ludite" for a number of years and built some houses including this one. '83 we were in a noticable "recession" around here so Tloml got a job in the Big Smoke and I went back to school there.
Some of the profs had terminals in their offices but I think they were hard wire connections to the mainframe. I chose a course called "The Philosophy of Computers" and I'm glad I did - no programming. We read Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of the New Machine" and looked at the beginnings of E.F.T. (electronic funds transfer) and little did we know then what we would see now.