We have little Brits.

Yeah, I spelled it right. I meant to say Brits, not Brats. They love the British show Kipper and have picked up a few British intonations. Watch this short video for an example.

Everett can’t find his horse. He can’t find it.

Now instead of saying “let me have a turn” they say “let me have a go".” And instead of “Ready. Set. Go.” It’s “Ready. Steady Go.”

If you’re unfamiliar with Kipper, here’s one of my more favorite episodes:

Safari–Journey to the Serengeti

The most idyllic moment of my life occurred on this morning.  It makes me sad that my limited narrative skills will rob the recounting.  But, for the sake of memory, I’ll do my best.
I think it rather fortuitous that I woke up early that morning.  Nick was still asleep, the vents on the tent were rolled back, and I could see Africa all around.  The night before gave no hint that we had such a fantastic view.  I quietly crept out to the deck and saw this:

I love showering.  It’s probably my favorite thing to do.  One of my favorite things at least.  And sometimes I feel weird to say that I went all the way to Africa and went on Safari and my favorite memory is this outdoor shower.  But it’s just the truth and I can’t deny it. 

While I showered the sun came up, the mists rolled away, and wowza.  I’m just not doing it justice.  Chelsea?  Amy?  Want to tackle this one for me?  Could you write it out all pretty like?

A nice guy brought us hot cocoa and cookies so we sat and looked at the view.

Here we are at breakfast.  I wrote this note in my journal:

8:04 am  Out of the corner of my eye I notice Mark discreetly spit his coffee back into his cup.  It was salt, not sugar, he added.

This is a random picture to include in a safari journal, but Angie french braided my hair for me, and it was the first time I’d had that done since I was like, 10 or something.  That’s 18 years french-braidless ended, just like that.
I remember at breakfast I kept raving about the fantastic shower, and asking everyone if they had had such a fantastic shower, and my goodness, did you shower this morning? Wasn’t it the best shower ever conceived?  I noticed Jeanette didn’t look as thrilled as I thought one should look after a shower experience like that, and Martin quietly informed me that their shower hadn’t had any hot water.  Poor, poor, poor Jeanette.  It really was the shower of a lifetime.
We said goodbye to Oliver’s camp, piled in our Land Cruisers, and set off back thru Tarangire. 

Today I got to be in Mama Empey’s car.  I was excited. 







There are a lot of pretty birds in Tanzania.  All these amazing bird photos are from Martin.







We ate lunch on the road since we had a bit of a trip to our tented camp in the Serengeti.  Here is my delicious boxed lunch.  Sometimes I still think about this lunch and wish I could have it again.  It was sooooooooooo (repeat for 15 seconds) nice to have all my meals prepared.  I mean, yeah.  Nice.  So savory.  I ate it all.  And then I ate the parts that other people didn’t want to eat.

Okay, I’ma have to stop here for today.  I really wanted to get all of this day finished, but I might go blogging crazy.  So it ends here folks.  I’ll pick up after lunch next time. 

Now you see him

 

Now you don’t.  It took me about 15 seconds to make it happen.

I just got Adobe Photoshop CS5.  Let me know if you need anyone taken out of a photo. Content aware is a beast.

nick writing 1st person for nicole:  since I’ve become a freelance designer in my spare time away from being a full-time mom and part-time design assistant (where I win $1000 faucets in raffles—another story for another post), I’ve needed some decent software to make my doodleicious compositions in a legitimate way.  so, nick went to ebay and peeped the merchandise.  MSRP is $599 for Adobe Illustrator CS5, and I wasn’t interested in anything but the best.  $599 is too much.  Nick scored a decent deal, and it came in the mail a week later. 

While nick was being super diligent in his classes—paying attention and stuff—he paused to send me a skype message that read, “Do not open the Illustrator package, whatever you do.”  He left me a voicemail, too, with similar sentiments.

My directive was clear.  At this point I thought the thing might blow up if I opened it, so I steered clear.  When Nick arrived home he enlightened my mind with his stunning good looks and a sweet deal from Adobe direct.  What was this?  80% off the already student discount??  This, my dear readers, was a revelation indeed.  For 1/4 the cost of the Illustrator we had purchased earlier we could have the Design Premium Suite CS5.5.  Oh yes, the bounty of content aware at my legally commercial-use ready fingertips.  Vector power, with the power to make…vectors!  Oh the scalable grandeur.  And all the other programs you’ll see listed here: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/design.html.

this is from our trip to the west coast down the PCH a few years back.

once there was

a snowman, small, small, small.

It’s amazing what you can do with 1/4’’ of snow on a deck and a couple of toddlers.

Update

Recently I bought my dream shoes, dyed my hair red (auburn, really), and got a part time job.  The shoes finally went on clearance and are amazing -- like butter.  This is the first time in my 28 years that I’ve ever dyed my hair – it was nice’n’easy.  And my job is just 5 hours a week at emma delon kitchen and bath.  We’ve worked it out so that Nick is home with the kids while I’m dressed up and being a ‘design assistant.’

Safari in Tarangire

When you last left us we were here:

Which is near the base of Mount Kilimanjaro on the border of Kenya.

We met our drivers Liza and Eddie, piled in our Safari cars and immediately took pictures, like good tourists do:

Then we headed off to Tarangire National Park. On our way we drove through scenery like this:

This is the Masai market in Arusha.

And believe it or not, Nick fell asleep.
We entered Tarangire Park where we stopped while Eddie and Liza popped the tops of the Safari cars up, I took a picture with this elephant skull, we got back in the cars,
and within minutes of being there and hours from the time we landed in Kilimanjaro saw this:
Tembo! (That’s Swahili for elephant)




Don’t we all look like we’re on Safari? Yeah, we are.


Those are baobab trees, which I know about thanks to the Little Prince.

“…Now there were some terrible seeds on the planet that was the home of the little prince; and these were the seeds of the baobab. The soil of that planet was infested with them. A baobab is something you will never, never be able to get rid of if you attend to it too late. It spreads over the entire planet. It bores clear through it with its roots. And if the planet is too small, and the baobabs are too many, they split it in pieces . . .”

Antoine de Saint-Exupery from his story "The Little Prince"

There were hundreds of Elephants. It was amazing.


Luckily for us, Martin and Dad had some impressive cameras. Doesn’t Martin look totally rad there using his camera? Yeah, he’s a Dane. Papa Empey had a 600 mm lens. While we were oohhing and ahhhing how close all the animals were, he was taking pictures of warthog nose hair.
Pumba! Swahili for warthog.
Impala
Here are some guinea fowl in the road:
Toward the end of the day we met this Bull on the side of the road. He didn’t give us his name, so I can’t refer to him by name, but we were close enough that we could have become best friends. We happened upon him having a mud party of some sorts, but he got a little upset with all the picture taking and chased us off. Before this experience I could say “I’ve never been charged by an elephant before” and now I can’t say that.

Isn’t he nice looking? Here’s a video of him telling us off:



Evidently the drivers were nervous that we weren’t going to make it back to camp before sun down so we raced the sun to the horizon. It was sooooo much fun. I mean, all of it was fun, but the end of my first day of Safari was settling in and I can’t be poetic enough to do it justice.


That night we stayed at Oliver’s Camp. As we pulled up to the camp there were men there with hot scented towels for us to wipe our faces with.
I highly recommend that you look at the gallery of this place. I mean, the place is so darn beautiful it makes me want to cry. Have you looked at that gallery I linked to yet? You simply must.


We met our hosts, and chatted in the lodge while the sunset. Oliver’s camp isn’t a fenced camp, so they made us sign a form that said we might die and we understood that. That’s not really what the form said, but that’s what they meant by it. Then we were escorted to our tents, thank goodness. Here is what our ‘tent’ looked like.

We were told to radio back up to camp when we were ready to come back up to dinner. On the way we asked our guide if they ever saw animals while they escorted folks to and from. He said “oh yes.” I asked, what kind of animals they saw “oh, elephant, hyena, lion,” real casual like. The fact that he was casual about it and not trembling in fear made me feel like we would survive. And we did.
We sat around a fire before dinner and sipped mango and pineapple juice, then the chef came and announced dinner and we sat down in the lodge to eat some of the most wonderful food I have ever had.

Goodnight!