I am totally giddy...

... to discover that a friend I made in Botswana back in 2004 listed me in the acknowledgements of his dissertation.

I was looking for someone else's dissertation this afternoon, and I stumbled upon his instead. We stayed in the same guest house in Gabs for a few weeks. We've had only sporadic contact since hanging out in Gabs over that winter, when he was engaged in his dissertation research in African Studies, and I was trying to figure out where my project had run off to. He was enormously generous, cooking dinner for me my first night there (and many nights thereafter). He generally made my first confusing, overwhelming, anxious trip to Botswana far less lonely than it might have otherwise been.

But I certainly wasn't expecting to find my name in the acknowledgements. That just warms the little cockles of my heart.