Brett on a day in his life .....

Alright. Its been a short while since I have checked in. I have surely done a lot within that time frame. My mind is busy with thoughts of work and school and activities and the book that I am finishing, so let us just dive in. I am at the office right now. I am waiting to talk to Christina or Anell, two of my superiors, about implementing my activist project. I am hoping to implement two small changes. One, I wrote a list of healthy affordable foods, and other unhealthy foods to avoid that we can hopefully give to refugees with their food stamp vouchers. The other is that I hope to give away writing journals, for the refugees to document their stories.

I suppose it has been a long day and I am a bit tired. By lunch time each day I am always a bit tired, from seeing clients in the morning. Every week I get between eight and twelve new clients, whom I interview for an initial social work assessment, and then make recommendations regarding their situations, for my supervisors to approve. It is not a bad tired, or a sad tired, just more of a mentally drained tired, time for a nap. 

I'm reading a book, by Bill Bryson called 'a short history of everything'. So, most of the thoughts in my mind at present concern the migration of early humans throughout the world. In Africa, there are stone tools that are approximately 1 million years old, hand axes, from a species of intelligent primates. For the time period of, if I remember correctly, 800,000 years, in a location in the Great Rift valley in Africa, hominoids worked in a sort of cooperative venture where they would harvest the stones from a mountain 10 kilometers from a site, where they would be made into axes, and sharpened. I forget the name of the species, maybe homo erectus or australepithecus or something. 

It just brings to mind that the history of human history in which we now live is so very small, this idea of civilization, which we frequently understand to be the length and breadth of the world, is so small. Nothing to keep things in perspective like the history of the natural world.

I'm not sure what I'm going to make for dinner tonight, maybe a pumpkin leaf stew. Buying spinach from the market yesterday on my way home from work, I asked the vendor what the prickly leaves next to it were. 'Pumpkin leaves' she replied. I nodded, newly informed. 'how do you cook them?' I asked. 'You peal them like this' (splitting the ends) 'and then you boil them in tomatoe sauce. And then you put soda in it' I nodded my head. She went on, 'You can also put peanut butter, it tastes very good'. I let out a laugh, to which she looked at me a bit confused, but then joined in and started to laugh as well. I told her I would have to come back to try it another time. Maybe today...