4/28/09 Sleeping Bag Saga, continued

I woke up about 6am.

The house was dark and cold - not icy, lhumdullah, but still chilly - as I ran up onto the roof to continue fishing for my sleeping bag.

Thirty minutes of dedicated casting yielded nothing but frustration. I'm a pretty decent fisherwoman when I have an actual rod and reel (and am fishing for, y'know, fish), but the contraption of bamboo, plastic, and a cast-iron S-hook failed to meet the needs of the day. The fact that my nylon sleeping bag is even slipperier than a rainbow trout couldn't have helped, either.

I finally gave up. I had a 7am date with my fellow travelers - to wait for the earliest north-bound taxi - that I needed to prepare for.

The sleeping bag would have to wait until Friday, when my mysterious neighbor would return and, inshallah, let me climb up on his roof and retrieve my poor lost bag.

I tossed a few bricks over from my own roof, to weigh the bag down and insure that its voyages wouldn't continue beyond my neighbor's house onto the fields or valleys beyond. (We live on the edge of town.)

When the four of us got together to wait for the taxi, I told the other two the Saga of the Sleep Sack. Jamila, the only one of us not actually traveling north right away - she planned to travel east, an hour later - immediately offered to spend the hour talking to my favorite hanut guy and my neighbor/uncle to see if anything could be done before Friday. I thought it might be better if I did it myself...but the taxi pulled up right around then, making her offer all the more appealing.

I thanked her profusely, and then we headed off on our journey.

To be continued...