More on my house

This computer or this blog site is acting really weirdly today.  Problems downloading pictures and with alignment but at least something's coming up here.  I was just reading about the earthquake in Japan and tsunami in the Pacificas I was waiting for these pictures to download.  Scary photos.  I hope the damage is not too bad.  This is a photo of some plants in my backyard.  It is ringed by the green spikey plant which kind of looks like an amaryllis (the leaves do) but the flowers are those skinny white stars in the middle - kind of neat.  I find that nobody here knows what any kind of plant is - when I've tried to find out what a tree is, etc. I get a blank look.  I'll have to get my own botanical guidebook, I guess.

This is a view from my backyard towards the house at dusk.  Sometimes I sit out in the back on those chairs but often (you won't be surprised to hear this), it's too hot.  But when it isn't it can be very pleasant.  I was out there one Sunday morning a few weeks ago and was very comfortable.  The leaves on the big tree towards the middle of the photo recently changed color to red and then fell off in a big pile.  You can't tell from the photo but the leaves are really big - about 9 or 10 inches in diameter so a few leaves made a big pile.  There's a vine growing up the trunk that looks kind of like a fancy philodendron with lacy leaves.

This is a photo of my living room taken from the stairs that lead up towards the bedrooms.  The dining room is on the left and the kitchen straight ahead.  It does look kind of lived in, doesn't it?  I keep a lot of stuff in the living room cause I know that it's not going to be moved around at all.  A big plus of having a house to oneself.  It looks nice and bright during the day and it is very pleasant but it's so dark at night.

A picture of me in my living room looking towards the dining room.

A lizard in my backyard.  It's about a foot long from nose to tail tip and you can see it has an orange head and a tail with a big orange stripe on it.  They're quite striking looking.  A few weeks ago when I went swimming in the ambassador's pool there was one floating on its back in the pool.  I thought it was dead but when I scooped it out with a skimmer it flipped over and ran away.

So that's all the photos for now and I know they're worth a thousand words each so I won't go on too long.  I'm leaving on Monday for Dapaong which is the northernmost city in Togo, right up near the Burkina Faso border.  I'll be making site visits mostly just in that area which should be less exhausting than my last trip which was a lot of traveling and spending every night somewhere else.  I'll have 3 straight nights in 1 hotel which should be nice.  It is reputedly very hot in the northern part as you get closer to the deserty part of northern Africa but at least it's a dry heat unlike Lome which is a humid heat.  I'll be going alone this time (but with a driver) so I'll have to do some fending for myself and I'm sure I'll need to drag out my sad French.  I'm going to spend the weekend reading French to get myself in the right mindset.