Week 3

The Week in review....

I drove.  A little.  Decided I dislike it as much as driving in Chitown.  My car is still at work.  Tracy has graciously been chauffeuring me around.  Also the hijack training instructor told me that someone might bite my finger off to get my ring.  Engagement ring now lives in the safe. I like my fingers.

The summer storms started this week, which is good... There's a pretty serious drought here.   They seem to happen at night and are pretty bad ass.

I did my first plant trial.   I "tested" too much product.  I'm going to gain a million pounds.  Related to work and unrelated to the trial, I also "tested" a bunch of our current products.   This is my new favorite:

Offsite at the Johannesburg Zoo-team building scavenger hunt type game. Our team name was Versatole  cameleons.  Yes, we spelled it wrong.  As much as I liked to say we did it on purpose to be some kind of clever, we didn't.  I think that set the tone...  we didn't win.  I didn't know many of the SA questions, but I did get to see a lot of friendly animals... They come right up to the fence.  And a couple of birds took a walk with us (but the video is too big to upload.  sniff sniff).

The Versatole Cameleons

Cheetah!

Meerkat!

Hello! Hello!

There was also ALOT of peacocks:

Bryanston Organic Market-  Saturday craft and food market about 30m away.  Plenty of good excuses to spend my money and food and music.  At least I got a lot of Christmas shopping done (and bought a pretty bad ass bracelet for myself). Woot!  And market Dosas from Meera's.  Not quite the same as New Deli, but still yum.

Market view.

Delicious Dosas

Retail Therapy

Cradle of Humankind- where the whole evolution thing went down and our monkey ancestors lived.

The home of my great great great great great great... great  monkey grandparents.

Hangin' out in the homeland.

Sterkfontein Caves -still active excavation sites, where two of the oldest fossils were found, Little Foot ( he had really little feet, for realz) and Mrs. Pleas, which was most likely really a Mr. Pleas.

Decked out in our mining gear, ready to go.

Cave entrance... yes those are a lot of steep stairs.

Inside the caves.

Active Excavation Site run by students at Wits University...where either Mrs. Pleas or Little Foot was unearthed.

 We also paid a visit to the Tumulus Building,  the underground visitor center to learn more about Darwin, evolution and our ancestors.  It was pretty awesome to see evolution in action.  Go science and paleoanthropology (which I didn't know was an actual thing until today)!

Maropeng Visitor's Center

 The Lion and Rhino Nature Reserve-  kind of a shit show, because it was not well run and we had to drive ourselves around the reserve which we didn't realize until after we had paid and the gate was swinging down behind our car.   Despite there being almost no signage and us off-roading in the lowest end VW ever made.. we only *almost* broke the car a handful of times, scuffed the hubcap only once, did not run over a wart hog and did not get eaten by a lion... although we did witness an Asian tourist jump OUT of his car.   Oh and I met my giraffe.  Yay.  It only took 3 weeks.

So Giraffes!!

And other stuff...

And just because some Black Coffee and dudes in a truck:

I hope all my Midwest peeps are  enjoying your snow.   I'm feeling your pain.  I really am.

Dreamin' of a white Christmas... not.