Had dinner with Christie last night and she semi-inspired the all but dead blogging flame in me to get back into the swing of things in preparation for the upcoming project in Africa. Which is a good thing, but one more thing on the stack of a million and two things to do between now and leaving for the opposite side of the planet. But I am going to give it a shot all the same.

One thing that I've been kicking around in my head is exactly how I'm going to blog when I am in fact there. I want to keep this blog going, but I'm seriously considering a different, trip-specific blog that can be its own entity, of sorts. Then I suppose I can just figure out how to RSS all my posts there onto this one, and add personal posts here that I don't want to share on my more at-large trip blog (which I'll be making known to colleagues, etc.). So I need to figure out how to jones that.

Also, I'm going to try to do a more feature style for that blog. Some of the features will certainly be places I go and things I see, but I also want to run features on the prominent characters I meet during my travels and what's unique about their lives / world-views / etc.. I'd also like to do regular features about how the trip is changing my pre-conceived notions and perhaps even my world-views. And lastly I'd like to of course feature my insight into the statistics and demographics and whatnot that make up the dark continent and the western (mis?)conceptions that we hold of it. I'd like to write about how I think change would be best pursued there and use it in a sense to work towards planning out my next steps after returning home.

The ADP program asks its participants to return to their home country and spend the year following the ADP project back in the paid practice, so that ADP won't be charged with your attrition should you decide to leave the company. I hope to find a local project in NYC for that year and use it to figure out whether I want to return to school or find another path into more long time international development work. Dave's got me thinking about the GRE's and a masters in International Economics. He's also got me thinking about constantly growing my stack of play chips in Full Tilt. I've pushed 500K recently. Once I hit my first mil, I'm going to throw a hundred bucks in there and see what I can do with it.

Project was down last week so I got to stay home and procrastinate training and packing that I really should have gotten done. I did get to some of the packing later in the week, and tied down a storage unit. Packing up boxes really helps the reality of things start to sink in. I am going to Africa. I am going in little over a month. It is going to happen. Wow.

Also, watched fireworks on RI with Dave and Jon and AM and Ang and Amber and Ben and other various friends. Saw Tim's fiancee's show Cigarettes and Chocolate on Tuesday and caught drinks with the kids after that. Hung out with Suin for the first time in like 4 years. Started Band of Brothers again. Read a lot. Played a lot of FT. Good week.