telophase: (Gorilla - exasperated)
And now for another round of announcing, since there's been enough new people starting to hang out here: when I was a kid from the ages of four to six, my family lived in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania* while Dad did research for his PhD in wildlife science.** Mom wrote a bunch of letters home to my grandparents, and one of my ongoing projects has been to type them all in. I'm about 3/4 of the way through right now.

Anyway, I've been posting them under filter and tagging them with africa letters (ETA: there's now over 100 letters, so the tag function won't pull up all of them - I'm changing the tags as we speak to "africa letters 1974" "africa letters 1975" and "africa letters 1976"). If you'd like to be on that filter and read them, drop a note here and let me know and I'll put you on it.




* This is why Toto's "Africa" can get me all teary-eyed and nostalgic at inopportune moments.

** He didn't study anything cool, like lions or whatnot: his dissertation had something to do with grass heights and bird species. :D
telophase: (Default)
I've just created a filter called 'Africa Letters.' You see, back in 1974-76, my dad was a grad student in wildlife science, and we lived in the Serengeti National Park for two years while he did research on his Ph.D. My mom wrote a ton of eltters homw during that time, and I'm in yet another fit of nostalgia and attempting to transcribe them. I figure if I get feedback on them, it'll make me slightly more likely to do so.

However, they're under filter just in case I get a wild hair someday to attempt a book or something like that. I've made a filter with people who I can remember commenting to my LJ recently in it (I have a bad memory for that sort of thing, so don't feel insulted if you commented and I didn't put you in there) and put a test post in it - if you didn't get it and you want to get it and see the letters as if I get them typed up (so it feels like a blog from Africa! Woo!), then drop a comment to me and I'll add ya.

Even if I never get off my duff and attempt to do anything else with the letters, I can at least get them typed in, along with a bunch of photographs of wildlife that Mom still has, and self-publish them as books for the family, who'd appreciate them, and it would keep me from being SO TOTALLY PARANOID about this flimsy airmail paper that most of them are written on - they've survived 30 years, and I'm not too sure they'll survive 30 more without crumbling. Certainly less handling will be best.

Anyway, I'm going to post them one-per-entry, so you get a nice boring telegram for the first one and another boring one for the second, but the third will be well worth it, I promise. I'm only partly through typing it up and it's a long one.

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