BéBéCoralRubyStephMatt

First it was baked beans, now we scored GOLDEN GRAHAMS!!

For 1000 cfa/box. In Gabon that is practically free and they don't even expire for two more months. Some of you might note that the Batman movie release being promoted on the box was released last year, but bringing it up would just be hating, and we are on too much of a sugar high to care.

Coral ate a third of a jar of green olives this evening, saying "soour, soour" the whole time.

A weekend at the beach, we'll be picking sand out of our ears for a week.

The girls have been having fun this week since Ruby is now out of school.

We made these skirts out of banana leaves. They, also, danced in them.



Coral discovering a mouse in the back yard.
Coral getting ready for high school color guard. One of the word's she actually does say is "high school." Because Ruby discovered High School Musical and she hears her sister talk about it.
Happy 4th of July everyone!

Coral is a feisty kid. People are going to be surprised to see the sweet little baby who left New Mexico come back from Africa taking nothing from no one. She has become quite the little bruiser.

Josephine was teasing her a little bit and she was ready to fight.

Ruby, the protective older sister, taught Coral to say to Josephine "pas gentil" (not nice) when she was being teased. Of course, Coral's version is more like "PAS GENTIL!"

Coral has lately become very occupied managing the population of snails in the yard. She calls them 'scargots' and if the scargots were smart they would hightail it out of here.

With the dry season starting, the scargots are congregating near sources of moisture, in our case the air conditioning drain outlets. Like the crocodiles that wait for the gnus to come to the water holes, these scargots are sitting ducks for Coral.




Using her shovels and tweezers, she moves snails from one pasture to the next and on occasion culls a few from her herd.










Ruby was out with Coral and found a little snail nest.

The eggs look like tiny little chicken eggs, almost makes you want to crack one open to see if there is a tiny little yolk.

Ruby's last day of school was today, this afternoon she will be a Petit Section graduate of Les Coccinelles.

Here she is back in September, the day she started.


Here she is this morning, she is a little taller and a lot more tan.

Because right after purchasing your sardine sandwich, you don't want to have to walk to far to purchase your French luxury goods from the neighboring shanty. The sign reads "Armani, Givenchy, Dior" etc. If you have 4x4 your can even drive up to the window.

Today is a non-work day, related to the funeral preparations for the President of Gabon. Our housekeeper isn't here, so I guess Coral got a little frustrated with the general state of the house and decided to take things into her own hands.

Our house isn't right on the beach, but we can walk there in just a few minutes. The beach itself isn't somewhere to swim, but the girls can look for shells and crabs.

About a month ago, Matt surprised the girls with a little rabbit from the zoo. It lived in our yard for about 2 wks., then moved across the street to some apartments, where there is more lush grass and foliage than in our yard. Luckily, the rabbit has calmed down enough for the girls to where it will allow them to feed it. They like to go and feed it every evening.
They've been able to get close enough a couple of times to where it has touched their fingers.
Coral finding some food for the rabbit. We hope this rabbit will outlast all our other pets. We haven't had the best luck in pet ownership. Looks like Martha Stewart hasn't either. Read Martha Stewart's Pets--Not Living.

Tim is going to sea and Sarah, posted family photos on their blog.

This one photo of Adele, our niece, cracked us up. Her shirt reads "CHEER, team spirit!", her face reads something else ...

"Bowling pin"

Coral in serious consultation with the doctor, discussing her new sibling and the potential impact the situation may have on her access to toys, candy and parental attention.

I know some of you are curious about how things are going here in Gabon recently, after the death of the President. Some of the initial anxiety has dissipated since Monday. We've been able to get food OK, the shelves are stocked. Many people upon hearing of his death panicked on Monday.
Today, there is no school since they are bringing the President's body back to Libreville from Spain. We're doing fine and are healthy. Here is a link to some reactions to President's death that I found.

By Glenn Harlan Reynolds : BIO| 05 Nov 2003

NPR science reporter David Baron has a new book out, called The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature. Baron's book is about the return of cougars to the Boulder, Colorado area after decades of hunting-induced absence, and their eventual taste for eating human beings -- along with the various fantasy ideologies regarding wildlife and nature that this chain of events revealed.

But, in light of the book's subtitle, I don't think it will be terribly unfair if I use this story as a, er, parable. For the story it tells is, at core, an old one: Monsters are loose, and some people know it, while others pretend not to.

It's a standard theme, from old tales to modern stories like Harry Potter and Buffy. The modern twist is that some people see it as moral to take the side of the people-eaters. One suspects that this isn't so much in spite of the people-eating, but because of it.

Cougars were once regarded as timid, fearful of humans, and far more likely to flee at the sight of people than to regard us as food. Of course, there was a reason for that: for millennia, humans had attacked Cougars whenever possible, regarding them as a menace to safety and as competitors for valuable game. Showing one's face around Indians produced arrows, spears, and torches; later on, appearing around European settlers produced a faceful of lead. Aggressive cougars tended to die young, or to receive sufficient aversive conditioning to learn to leave humans alone.

Later on, a generalized revulsion against predators set in. As Baron notes (it's the source of his title, in fact), meat-eating was supposed by some to have begun with Original Sin -- "carnivores" in the Garden of Eden were said to have eaten fruits. In the post-lapsarian world, however, hunting was long seen as something manly, championed by those, like Teddy Roosevelt, who feared that excessive urbanization and industrialization would cause Americans to become too distanced from the reality of nature. But as that distancing took place in spite of Roosevelt's efforts, what is now called "fluffy bunny" syndrome appeared, and predators were regarded as inherently evil. Coupled with stockmen's continuing aversion to having their cattle and sheep eaten by predators, this produced programs of predator eradication that led to the near-extinction of cougars' only natural enemy, the gray wolf, and the removal of cougars from all but the most remote areas.

But then "fluffy bunny" syndrome extended itself to become "fluffy mountain lion syndrome." Government-sponsored cougar hunting ended, bounties were removed, and cougars started to make a comeback. Boulder's inhabitants disliked hunters, and liked the idea of living with wildlife, causing populations of deer in residential areas to explode. Meanwhile low-density housing meant that more and more people were living along the boundary between settled and unsettled areas. As cougars, their fear of humans having dissipated after years of not being hunted, moved into semiurban areas bursting with deer, they acclimated to human beings. People were no longer scary and, after a while, started to look like food.

It's at this point that Baron's book -- which is very much nonfiction -- starts to read like a thriller novel. Scientists and outdoorsmen began to warn of danger, but they were ignored by both the Boulder public -- which was sentimentally attached to the idea of free-roaming wildlife -- and state wildlife-protection bureaucrats, who downplayed first the presence, and then the danger, posed by the cougars. Dogs and cats started being eaten, cougars started threatening people, and yet meetings on the subject were dominated by people who "came to speak for the cougars."

In the end, of course, people started to be eaten, and the bureaucracy woke up to a degree. There's lots of interesting stuff in Baron's book about ecological change, and the folly of seeking "wilderness" without recognizing humanity's role in nature, but to me the most interesting behavior isn't the predatory nature of the cougars -- which are, after all, predators -- but the willful ignorance of human beings. So many were so invested in the notion that by thinking peaceful thoughts they could will into existence a state of peaceful affairs that they ignored the evidence right in front of them, which tended to suggest that cougars were quite happy to eat anything that was juicy, delicious, and unlikely to fight back.

This is, as Baron notes, something of a parable -- and not merely a parable of man and "nature." One need only look at the treatment of such other topics as crime, terrorism, and warfare to see examples of the same sort of misplaced sentimentality and willful ignorance. Tolerance of criminality leads to more crime; tolerance of terrorism leads to more terrorism; efforts to appear defenseless lead to war.

Nonetheless, the same strand of wishful thinking appears: perhaps this time, the cougars won't want to eat us. Some people, apparently, would rather be dinner than face up to the fact that nature is red in tooth and claw, and that -- in this fallen world, at least -- the lion lies down with the lamb only after the lamb's neck is broken. (Worse yet is the noxious strand of liberalism that suggests we somehow deserve to be dinner.)

In the United States, such silliness seems to have diminished in recent years, though it is still ongoing in Britain, where aggressive efforts to ban hunting (believed by some observers to be politically motivated) have produced promises of civil disobedience.

The effort to remake the world so that it is safe for predators seems rather odd to me. What sort of person would rather be prey? The sort who lives in upscale neighborhoods, and campaigns against hunting, apparently. I suspect that over the long term this isn't a viable evolutionary strategy in a world where predators abound.

Things got interesting this past weekend in Gabon. The president passed away. They have closed the borders and everyone is holding their breath to see what is going to happen.

We are particularly concerned about the expat wives and what they do if they can't get home during the school holidays. If there isn't a solution soon ...


LIBREVILLE (Reuters) -
Tue Jun 9, 2009 1:05pm GMT
By Linel Kwatsi


LIBREVILLE (Reuters) - Gabon's government will ask the country's top court to confirm Senate President Rose Francine Rogombe as interim leader after the death of veteran ruler Omar Bongo, a senior government source said Tuesday.

The cabinet met to discuss how to fill the power vacuum in the central African oil producing nation following the death on Monday of Bongo, Africa's longest-serving leader, in a Spanish clinic after more than four decades in office. The ministers voted unanimously to turn to the constitutional court, which should confirm the absence of a head of state and hand duties to the Senate president," the government source told reporters after the meeting, asking not to be named.

Read the rest here...

We took our Sunday afternoon walk on the beach yesterday. We drove up to tip of the island hoping to see some whales.





Here we are facing the open Atlantic, not the calm bay where we normally go and the water is much colder than on the bayside. The girls got caught in a wave and their expressions are priceless.

Click on the photo to enlarge.