Photo Credit: J.O. Smith
I’ve lived in Botswana for almost two years. What have I been doing all this time instead of getting down to business and starting a blog? Here are the things that have held me back:  
1. Aren’t blogs dead? I think you are only allowed to keep a blog now in a completely ironic fashion, composed of video clips of piano-playing kittens or photos of real people from the ’80s wearing horrible Christmas sweaters. That is all too dreadfully hipster for me, and I felt that starting a blog would be like getting out the parchment, dipping my quill in ink, and scratching out a sonnet. Then I remembered I like things that are outdated, nerdy, and vaguely Shakespearean so that reason went by the wayside.
2. Moving to Africa keeps you busy for more than a few months. I wasted lots of time gawking out the car window taking pictures of cows tromping through neat office park lawns, getting a generator hooked up so it can spew smoke over our vegetable garden during power cuts, and learning which days of the week we will be without the pleasure of running water. (Current drought conditions have put us at Monday, Thursday and Saturday. Finally I have an excuse for infrequent showering).
3. I started a new job with long hours and began that delicate plate spinning exercise of being a working mom. But that’s boring and you don’t want to hear about that. Let’s go back tothe part about how cows walk across the parking lots at the malls here and everyone pretends it’s normal.
There are always tons of reasons not to do something, along with good ones to jump in. Mine include my loyal readers of my former blog “Cheeseburgers in Pakistan,” how fun it is to share the quirks of a new country with the inhabitants of my former ones, and because you can never really remember events and details and moments unless you write them down, and life is going by too fast to miss a thing. 
Enough excuses. All I can say is…Baby, I’m back.