Mini Driving

Caron was invited to the launch of the new mini which she happily agreed to, I was a little reluctant but the promised drive in the new cooper-s was too tempting. We both arrived at the mini showroom at 18:30 on thursday night, tired from a day at the salt mines, expecting to have a drive and then go home by 19:30 max. This was not to be, we waited until 19:00 before there was a little bit of a ho, hum speech from the marketing director before we were given the keys to a mini along with a set of instructions how to get to somewhere. We were allocated a cooper instead of a cooper-s BUT, we were promised, we would have an opportunity to drive one later on.
The instruction led us to the newtown area of johannesburg which is not the best of areas to put it mildly and to a series of activities each of which was designed to show off a particular facet of the new mini. This must really have taken some organisation with about 35 minis driving around at break neck speed going to all the activities.
First up was the car wash where we were unceremoniously turned away for a bit of an outride before we went to the drive-in which was like the old fashioned drive-ins which were so popular her during the 60's and the 70's. We got to chomp our way through popcorn while we watched a movie extolling the virtues of the mini as the sound track blared through the cars sound system. Pretty impressive sound system by the way. Next up we were back at the car wash where we were handed an ipod to attach to the sound system before we were escorted through the carwash by suitably busty car washmaids and buff washmen. I kid you not, the one guys T-shirt even shouted "Buff" at you and several of the guys tried to dry the windows with their chests. Just for Caron I'm sure, I think ... I hope! Unfortunately I can't say that I was treated with the same behaviour by the comely washmaids.
Last but not least was the "joyride" which was where we were to get our taste of the cooper-s but due to the rain this was cancelled much to our disappointment and we were led off to a nearby restaurant for some snacks, not to be confused with dinner, before the bus came to fetch us at 22:00. So there we were, stranded in the middle of downtown johannesburg with absolutely no means of getting home except to wait the hour before the bus left. By 21:30 I was ravenous having eaten as many snacks as I thought I could get away with without appearing to be a pig. 30 minutes, I thought, ought to be enough to get a real meal and eat it before the bus left so I ordered a vegetable stir fry with instructions to make it quickly. 15 minutes later with no food in sight, it was announced that the bus was leaving within 5 minutes so there was a mad scramble to find out how far the food was which wasn't very. In fact it was still frozen to I had to abandon the order which I felt a bit bad about but I wasn't going to be hanging around for the next bus which was due to leave at between 23:00 and 24:00.
As we departed we were handed 512Mb flash drives as a present which was pretty cool and rescued the evening somewhat.
The newtown area is somewhere we just never go to. There is a big push to revive the area and a lot of money and effort has gone into it so there are these very juz restaurants and entertainment venues between the decaying buildings. Driving 1/4 million rand mini's around past marble edifices like bank city while homeless people sleep under cardboard boxes on the pavement one the other side of the street was a wild contrast of lifestyles.

Forewarned

Last Sunday Jason and I did a 60km ride around what turns out to be quite a tough course, just one respectable hill after another. Of course you do get to go downhill sometimes but you hardly notice these in relation to the uphills. I actually did 85km since I rode to the meeting place and back as well. Great ride although I was a bit tired by the time I finally finished. Glynne was meant to have joined us so that there would be two of us wanting to have a nice easy ride and only one trying to beat lance. I lucked out, glynne didn't ride so I tried to keep up with Jason trying to beat the imaginary lance. I don't think Jason understands the meaning of "nice'n easy" and to make me feel worse, he had done the same ride during the week with the other Jason who couldn't get his heart rate over 150 without dropping Jason. How demoralising.
Went home for lunch and then met Kirsten and Carl along with the little ones for a mountain bike ride at Northern Farm. Everyone brought their bicycles except Caron who brought her book. I hope she feels embarassed reading this. Nice'n Gentle ride with the family, Megan is really, really coming on and she is going to enjoy it so much more when she gets a bicycle with some gears. Having a single gear bike is no joke, especially as a child. There is a bit of a movement to ride on single geared mountain bikes which I can only think must be absolute torture.
On the way home we were driving behind a nineteen voetsek (very old) nissan bakkie which looked like it had cellulite. There wasn't a smooth panel on the bakkie and the tailgate had been replaced entirely. Written on the tailgate were the words "Fore Sale", I wondered if the current owner was forewarning any prospective owners but I think it more likely that they just couldn't spell.

Qoute of the week

I emailed Paul only to receive an "out of office" reply stating that he was on leave from the last week in february to the first week in april. A whole six weeks which is very suspicious since he hardly ever takes leave, it is one of those unfortunate thnigs about owning your own company - it makes it really difficult to take leave. I sent him an SMS asking him who signed his leave form or words to that effect, his reply was very quoteable. "Leave for Paul is like a glitch in the matrix", I spent some time chuckling.

Human Rights Day

Wednesday was a public holiday in South Africa, one of the excessively many such public holidays which we have these days. On this topic, I have figured out one genuine benefit that Religion, not that Human Rights Day as anything to do with Religion, has brought to humanity and that is public holidays. Masses and masses of them, not that I'm complaining at all. I'm still working out other benefits that Religion may bring but I at least have one that I can definitely count on.
Off the top of my head Religion doesn't seem to have a particularly good track record as far as Human Rights is concerned. Sure there are Human Rights campaigners who were religious but that is not the question. The question is what Human Rights has Religion advanced as opposed to Human Rights advance by people who happen to belong to a Religion. That ought to get someone hot under the collar and hopefully some good examples.

It was Kirsten and Carls son, Alistair's birthday party on Wednesday at the RSME which stands for the Rand Society of Model Engineers who have a scale model steam engine track out in Roodepoort. This proved to be a really big hit with the youngsters who just loved being pulled around and around on the model steam trains. Couldn't quite see the attraction but the kids certainly enjoyed it. That seems to be a common problem with adults, you need seriously expensive toys to generate some excitement.

After the childrens party which I had carefully timed to ensure that I arrived at about an hour before it finished the family remained for a braai. Almost needless to say that the token vegetarian ended up braaing the wors and my vegetarian sausages or wood chips as Carl calls them.

Bruno asked me why I was a vegetarian (hormones, anti-biotics and energy savings relative to meat in case you were wondering) and I was pleasantly surprised at his response which was that these were good reasons for going veggie. Not that I can see him changing but at least he can see the logic. Tried to foister one of my wood chips off on Carl but he wasn't biting.

Went home to my empty house, strange how one gets so used to having someone around, before I went to Hyde Park for supper on my own, Mantovanis has a really fantastic vegetable platter. Phoned Kim to see if she was interested in going to a movie which I don't think she really was but I laid it on thick about how she never goes out etc, etc. She succumbed and we went to see "Because I said so" which was a definite chic flick. A couple of humorous moments but nothing too wild. It did manage to get Kim to shed a brief tear so it couldn't have been all that poor.

End of the Human Rights Day.

Change Control ... Again

Ughh! Change control rolls around so quickly and it really does destroy a weekend although if I was honest, which I'm not on this particular topic, I would have to admit that I seriously helped to decimate this weekend. The weekend proceeded as follows:

Wake up at 04:30 to start cycling, it is totally pitch black at anytime before 06:00, and it is even starting to get a little chilly. After this summer, this is a very welcome relief from the heat. One of the reasons that I quite like Johannesburg is that by the end of summer, one has had quite enough of the hot weather and having some cold weather is rather appealing. By the end of winter, on the other hand, one is very glad to be leaving the cold behind and looking forward to some hot summer days. So we have the best of both worlds without either being really extreme.

Back to cycling, spent almost 3 hours on the mountain bike trying to keep up with Jason who just seems to get stronger and stronger. Very infuriating. We went through Northern farm and out the back and once again, I forgot my entrance ticket and had to borrow Jasons. Took a trip up some quite tough gravelly climbs to find the most fantastic views looking north over a valley with the Magaliesburg mountains in the distance. Absolutely fantastic views, it's hard to believe that they exist less than an hours drive from Johannesburg. I didn't take any pictures because I didn't have my camera with me since camera = weight = slow = dropped = teasing for being dropped. Therefore NO camera!

Met barry and helena for breakfast at fruits and roots and they've taken my favourite meal off the menu. I can't believe it, fortunately they still serve it if one asks for it so no big deal. Met a couple of friends of theirs whose names I now forget but one of them is a photographer/journalist/art critic which was pretty cool. She is about to leave on a photo holiday which is a novel concept for me and sounds like something I might be interested in doing at some stage in the distant future. A bunch of people who have a common interest, photography, get together and go somewhere which is photographically interesting and then spend their time touring and taking photographs, I can think of worse ways to spend a holiday. The other lady, whose name I also forget, was absolutely fascinating. She must be a psychologists dream client and I only spent an hour or two with her.

After the breakfast they were all going to a nearby gallery so I tagged along wondering what I was letting myself in for which was just as well because I got cornered by said neurotic and ended up discussing fine art with her, a topic I am most definitely not even vaguely qualified to do.

Standing looking at a painting and being asked questions like "what does this say to you?" just confounds me, it isn't saying anything, we are just thinking/assuming that the artist is actually trying to pass on a message. Who's to say he is?, maybe it's like some kind of in joke amongst artists to see what people think that they are trying to 'say' through their work. I find it a bit like wine tasting where there is the 'in' crowd and the others. The 'in' crowd talk in terms like flavours of berries for wine and angst and anger in terms of art and for those who don't speak the language, pity on them, they're missing out. It all seems a bit pretentious to me, why can't people just enjoy or appreciate wine or art because they do, why do they have to have a reason why they do? I re-iterate my ignorance of art so anyone reading this whose toes I have just stepped on, it's only my opinion not a fact.

I spent most of the afternoon adding labels to this blog and before I knew it, it was time to go to work and start the change control. Frigging long and complicated change control and we only left at 04:00 having worked for a full 7 hours upgrading the system while only actually taking it down for a period of 3 minutes during the time. I had to get up again at 05:30 which meant only an hour and a half of sleep and even this was interrupted by the mother of all cat fights directly outside my window at 05:00.

Met Michael at 06:30 and had a very pleasant 60km ride. Alison, his wife, has just found out that she is pregnant so they are both very happy that they are once again going to be proud parents. Can't quite share the enthusiasm but I try my best. Really pushed hard up Judges avenue hill near the end of the ride and made about 90 seconds on Michael which I was very pleased with. Michael, not so, he thought I was just rubbing it in which wasn't actually the intention. I have finally figured out how to stop my heart rate monitor from beeping when it goes over a predetermined level which I do fairly regularly so now everyone can cut out their jokes about flatlining and beep, beep, beep, beeeeeeeeeep.

Had lunch at kim and laurels with another couple who were very pleasant company. At one point in the conversation, samuel, who is being indoctrinated by his father, interjects and asks who goes to church. All hands stay firmly below the table much to samuels dismay, he is living in the company of heathens it turns out. He's going to have to come to terms with this because, outside of a monastery, it isn't going to change.

Started feeling really tired by the time laurel and I went to see "Notes on a scandal" which was great even though it can't be described as light entertainment by any stretch of the imagination. Judi Dench and Kate Blanchette were both fantastic and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a thought provoking movie to go and see.

Did you catch the subtle puns?

Anti-Punsters Unite

I have been soundly beaten (figuratively of course) for using such weak puns in one of my previous posts. I will therefore, in future, only use puns so subtle that you will never know that they are there. ;-)

Bachelordom strikes again

Every time Caron goes away we play out this little game where she does the dutiful wife thingy and makes sure that there is enough in the refrigerator to keep me hale and hearty until she returns. The problem is that I don't really know how to cook outside of braaing and even worse, after a day at work, I have absolutely no inclination to start learning. So, while I have a refrigerator full or raw ingredients, I have no skills to convert this into edible food so I tend to do what all intelligent people do when faced with something they don't know how to do - they outsource it. In this context this means that I have been out to a restaurant every night this weekend except thursday when I went for supper at Kim and Laurels. As a result of this I am feeling like I have put on a couple of kilograms, actually I have put on a couple of kilograms so I think that I need to get back to exercising. In addition to not eating very well I haven't managed to cycle or run once this week principally due to work committments.

On friday I went out for lunch to the Ocean Basket which is a chain of fish centric restaurants and when I asked what the line fish was I was told that it was a "Cardinal" which I promptly looked up on FISHMS (+27 79 499 8795) only to be told that there is no such thing as a "Cardinal" fish. When challenged on the actual origins of the fish because it could possibly be imported the waiter and then the manager got vaguer and vaguer assuring us that "it was like Kablejou" and the real clanger for the conversation was when we were told that it comes from the west coast of Mozambique. A cardinal error since Mozambique does not have a west coast. In the end the manager brought up his fish list which didn't have it on it and even a search on the internet by the manager didn't locate the elusive fish. Must be very rare, we're so lucky to actually have the opportunity of eating it. Not.

Back at the office we contacted SASSI who knew of a "Cardinal" but it is an aquarium fish which means that we would need about 20 of them to make a decent meal. It is looking highly probable that the Ocean Basket has just unilaterally renamed a fish, problably with the express purpose of avoiding awkward questions as to why they are serving fish that isn't on the approved green list of fish which can be caught in a sustainable and renewable manner. Definitely smells a bit fishy to me. :-) More on this when a response from Ocean Basket is received.

Sodwana Bay

It seems like ages since I last went diving but in reality, it isn't so long ago. I met Barry at work and cleared out some emails before we departed on the 7 hour drive down to Sodwana Bay lodge. It was a very quiet drive and it doesn't even seem so long these days. We went down in my 320d which is proving to be the ideal car for long distance travelling, we drove from Johannesburg to Sodwana Bay and back to Pongola which is about 1000km on just over 3/4 of a tank of fuel. Just absolutely amazing and extremely reasonable on the pocket. My new glasses are making such a difference to my driving since I don't get anywhere near as tired with them on as I do when I don't use them.

Saturday morning we were meant to get collected from the Dive Shop but 20 minutes after the designated time, out lift still hadn't appeared so we resigned ourselves to lugging our dive gear over the dunes and drove down in my car. Once on the beach it looked like we weren't even going to get one dive in let alone two. Apparently, the coast guard had closed the entire coast because of the cyclone just south of Madagascar and this was only lifted at about 10:00 which meant we had just enough time to dive before the wind picked up and made diving impossible. The rest of the boat was a couple of small dive schools so everyone else was on either their first or second dives which is normally a recipe for interesting things to happen.

From the shore the waves didn't look that big and there seemed to be a big gap between the swells but once we got onto the sea the swells were largeish at about 3m but they were unusual in that they were travelling much faster than normal waves so the boat skippers were having real difficulty in getting the gap. A couple of times we almost got through only to be stymied by the back line and had to turn tail and run back in and wait for another so called gap. We had to punch through a couple of waves which is like driving through a wall of water with a not so hydro-dynamic inflatable boat. We also had waves break on both the port and starboard sides, quite an experience by the end of the weekend and quite a welcome for the novices. Once we got beyone the back line the sea was actually fine but the swells were big. We heard later that Durban actually closed the port which is a highly unusual occurrence and the shops near the harbour mouth got flooded and the durban boardwalk which is normally way above the high tide mark was flooded and half the beach dumped on it. In other words, NOT small waves which didn't bode well for the dive because big waves equals big surge.
Sure enough, the surge was huge and at times one could barely see the reef for the sand in the water. This dive was unusual because by the time we had descended to depth the novices were nowhere to be seen. Normally there is a problem with one or two but at least some of them normally make it down. There was so little to photograph that I think I only took 5 pictures and we aborted the dive after about 30 minutes due to the surge and lack of visisbility. Nevertheless it was great to actually get wet again.

Spent the afternoon watching the rugby on and off and reading "tour de force" which is proving to be a very interesting book. The way that Lance Armstrong comes across I'm not sure that he should be a model for other people to follow except if they want to win at cycling. Had supper and retired early pretty exhausted. There is definitely something about diving and detox that go hand in hand.




Sunday morning the waves were no better but there wasn't much wind so we managed to get in two dives, both of which we managed the whole dive instead of having to abort it. Met a Canadian girl travelling on her own who professed to be a professional photographer. Yet another Canadian to reinforce the general stereotype that they are inordinately insecure and lost, I wonder what it is about them. It's a bit like they speak, think and act like a yank but they're definitely not and outside of speaking, thinking and acting how do they exhibit their Canadianness? They can't, hence the tortured lost soul type. Also met two guys from Venezuella, Jorge and Guillermo who were a whole bundle of fun. A bit like teenagers, always on the prowl for the next lay. Very funny to watch. After the second dive we had lunch with them and talked a bit about Hugo Chavez who, in their books, is from the pit of hades. They clearly come from the have's and Chaves is taking from them and giving to the have nots and it isn't going down very well.

We managed two dives today and surprise, surprise nobody got lost although the diving was pretty miserable. Still loads of surge and sand in the water. Didn't open my camera and I have now done 3 dives on it. Note for the future, the battery will only last one dive if I take more than 25 frames on a dive. It would be great to be able to do more but it is still such an advance on the analog camera.




More rest and relaxation during the afternoon before a quiet supper and a cigar down at the bar below afterwards. Watched a bunch of teenagers vying for the attentions of the one and only blonde girl in the group while they pretended to play pool.

Monday morning the swells were still big but not huge. Unlike Saturday and Sunday when there was the dive group, today we were the only South Africans on the boat. We had Italians, Belgians, Canadian, American, Venzuelan and French diving with us. Talk about the united nations, I must say that it is really great to see so many different nationalities coming to see South Africa. The one Italian who actually works in Stockholm was particularly funny. He was huge, so big that he couldn't bend over far enough to put his fins on in the boat but besides that, he thought he was coming to the third world and having arrived in Sodwana Bay, he was still looking for it. He describes his experiences in Italian laced broken English. He says that he lands and the airport, she is beautiful. The roads, they are beautiful, the verges all trimmed just like in Germany. And his cell phone he says, it works everywhere. So where is this third world he asks only half believing our answer that it definitely exists.

While we were kitting up we happened to be standing next to the Canadian girl Laura who needed some suntan creme put onto her back. I'm sure that Guillermo and Jorge would have obliged but she looked around and found the least threatening male i.e. the oldest, grayest i.e. Barry to apply the lotion and I could't help but see the funny side. What I didn't know was that Jorge and Guillermo were keeping a beady eye on our side of the matt and just about killed themselves laughing at me suppressing my laughter. Lots of Spanish chatter and laughter.

The conditions, while hardly perfect, were much better than yesterday so I was very hopeful for the dive. My camera has been recharged and the memory stick cleared so I'm all ready for a great dive. We get out to the dive site and there are the usual sniggers as I get handed my weight belt. Most weight belts have between 5 and 8kg of lead on them, the heavier ones you need two hands to lift. Mine has 2kg on it and it looks positively anaemic. I should actually drop one or both of them but it is starting to look ridiculous to get handed a belt with a solitary kg on it so I have stopped at two. In reality I have another 2kg in my BC but nobody can see that so they think I am really only using 2kg's. As I pick up my BC and cylinder there is a loud pop and hiss of 210bar of compressed air escaping. I turn the valve off as quickly as I could and checked my O-ring. It looked okay to me but I waited for the skipper to come and check it which he did and it looked okay to him too but when he tried to pick up the bc and cylinder we had a repeat so he had to get a new O-ring for me. These two little leaks cost me 40bar of pressure so I was going down with only 170bar to last 50 minutes. I thought I would be up really early and I was pissed off that I wasn't going to have my full time down because of the O-ring.



I had an absolutely fantastic dive, it was still a bit sandy but nothing like yesterday and I saw so many things and I was just finning over to the dive master to tell him that I was low on air and going up when he signalled that everyone was to ascend. I made the entire dive on a miserable 170bar without taking any risks at all, very pleased with myself. When I get around to touching up the photographs I will put them in here but that is going to take quite a while. On the way back I was sitting next to Laura and opposite us were two of the Italians with these huge underwater cameras with twin flashes on stalks. They looked like something out of a sci-fi movie to which Laura comments that she has the same camera and casing and that she usually finds that the size of the camera and the size of the ego go hand in hand. Who was I to disagree!





Got back to the beach and washed all our kit and gave James and Ndu a tip each and said goodbye to everyone. I was walking around the outside of the tent saying cheers to Jorge and Guillermo when Laura appeared right in front of me and I almost didn't see her in time to stop. You know when someone invades your space and you have absolutely no idea why, she had scooted around the outside of the matt to find out what the tip that we had given James was but that isn't what Jorge and Guillermo thought was going on. They were hooting with laughter, chattering away and their parting sentence was an admonishment to me to "be good" to which I replied that I was always good, not that they believed me for one iota.

Drove the 7 hours back to Johannesburg and went straight off to a Cigar and Whisky evening. I can't believe what a difference these glasses make. There I was after having had an early morning, a dive and a 7 hour drive and still be wide awake up until 23:00 when I thought it best that I toddle off home. Great weekend, the last dive made up for all the other dives.

Vaal by the Weekend

We spent friday night at home mostly because we were both too tired to actually do anything at all and I honestly can't remember anything from Friday.

On Saturday morning we left for the Vaal for the weekend, packed the Mini to the roof with clutter and departed. The way that we pack one would think that we were either going for a week or that we were catering for a family, which I suppose we were in a roundabout way. Very quiet trip down, Caron driving and me reading the Mail and Guardian getting my weekly dose of bad news. It's not always bad, I think that it just seems that way.

Arrived, unpacked the caravan, set up the tent and got the boat ready to launch. Discovered that the battery was flat and that there wasn't any fuel left and since there wasn't any wind we thought we were going to need quite a lot of it. Filled up and added the two stroke oil which always, for some reason, requires some mental gymnastics even though it is about as easy an equation that one could get.
Launched the yacht and manually started the motor which proved to be relatively easy thank goodness. I desperately hoped that the battery would be enough to power the depth finder since I don't fancy navigating around the Vaal without one. Packed the yacht with the contents of the Mini and before we knew it, we were on our way for our first weekend on the other side of the Vaal dam. We had just cleared the DAC moorings when a very pleasant breeze sprang up and continued to freshen all the way around the back of the island and to Kirsten and Carls place.
Managed to get Caron to skipper a bit before the wind picked up and she started bleating about the yacht heeling over too much. One day she is going to get over this and realise that, no, the yacht is not about to tip over no matter how much it heels. Quite annoying while I wait for the realisation to dawn on her. It was actually a very nice sail and we left a much larger yacht trailing in our wake which made me feel very good even though there was no way to tell if they were or weren't racing me nor whether or not their yacht is meant to be faster or slower than mine. Since I am a below average sailor, either of these could be true. Rounded the northern tip of the island and started the beat up the channel to Kirsten and Carl's place while Caron clung onto the coach roof like a drenched cat, claws gouged into the coachroof. If I wasn't in so much trouble, it would have been quite funny. We were examining what we thought was their bay when the phone rang which was rather opportune since we could confirm the location and we proceeded to motor in and moor at their jetty. The trip took about 3 hours and I found it really nice to be sailing with a destination and a purpose, not just sailing for sailing's sake.
Met everyone and had a quick cup of tea before we headed out on Carls current pride and joy, a 21' 200hp motorboat. Definitely not going to struggle to put a skier up out of the water and we had a great time playing around on the “Scooter” and the knee board. The scooter is a bit like a floating mattress with handles and upturned ends and is great for people who aren't able to actually ski. Managed to cajole Caron to have a go and she clung on for dear life for about 5 minutes before her wrist started to give way and she asked to stop. The scooter is a bit tricksy because one has to lie quite far back to prevent the nose digging in. Having been warned of this Caron promptly forgot about it an all but went arse over kettle, much to our amusement. My own turn on the “Scooter” was quite spectacular as the photograph below shows. In the wipe out, I hurt some of my ribs which were still sore a week later. After a couple of spills on the scooter I tried the kneeboard which was rather fun, especially since, even without any skills, one can do jumps and career around behind the boat like a madman. Before we knew it, everyone had had a turn and it was time to go home and start making supper. The never-ending chore.





Even though Kirsten and Carl had a bedroom available we decide to sleep on the yacht which was great. On the way down to the yacht we went past the club pub and there was some idiot singing away at the top of his voice which we hoped was not going to keep us awake half the night. Carl remarked that it only takes a small amount of alcohol to turn the average idiot into an exceptional moron. A perspective to which I heartily agree and a quote I shall remember.
We both slept in the bows of the yacht and had a great nights sleep. Caron complained because she hadn't turned over once and woke up in exactly the same position in which she had gone to sleep and when she does that, her back seizes up and it takes a couple of hours to get flexible again.
Had breakfast up at the house before we left Caron behind and went for a couple of hours sailing with everyone else. There was great wind, just enough to heel the yacht over and get her going but not enough to be difficult to handle. I think that everyone really enjoyed it. Megan doesn't accept that the first time she went on a yacht she was absolutely terrified. Had fun letting them helm and getting them to actually steer the yacht and I think that they really enjoyed the experience. Megan said that next time we sail over she wants to come and sleep on the yacht with us which I'm sure we could organise. Back at the house caron had had a great morning, drinking coffee and reading. Nothing too stressful.

After we returned we had a quick morning tea before Caron and I had to make tracks all the way home. Great sail all the way home, the wind veering between a dead run and a broad reach which pleased Caron no end since the yacht doesn't heel over too much. Arrived back at DAC and managed to get the yacht onto the trailer without too much difficulty although steering without the keel down and a fresh cross wind was not that easy.

By the time we had packed up and were on our way home to join Pippa and Glynne for supper we were about an hour late and to make matters worse, we couldn't get through to them. Fortunately, about an hour out of Johannesburg, Glynne phoned to say that they were going to have to cancel because he could hardly walk after the mountainbike race that he did on Saturday which neatly cleared up the problem of being late.

Bought a prawn curry for supper which was absolutely delicious. I can highly recommend Ghazal in Peter Place, Sandton for a very good indian meal. Both of us were feeling quite knackered having spent just about the entire day in the 35+ heat and while I wasn't sun burnt, I certainly felt pretty tired and we retired early for a really good nights sleep.

No cuts from the yacht. A miracle weekend.

Dubious Advertising

I've just re-read some of my recent posted blogs and my English is definitely deteriorating so I'll have pick up the game and try to get into the habit of taking a bit more time over the posts. Having managed to squeak through school with an e means that it'll never be great but when even I can see that it is less than ideal, it is definitely time to make an effort. Actually, I shouldn't be blaming myself. My proof reader, Caron, didn't pick up the miserable English so really, it's all her fault. Just like in the Garden of Eden! :-)

We're having a controversy around northern suburbs because we have had a spate of strip and other clubs of ill-repute advertising on bill boards. I'll leave it to your imagination as to the pictorial matter; suffice to say that it has managed to get some sections of the population up on their soap boxes about protecting their children which is fair enough. The issue is that there really isn't anything sexually explicit or illegal i.e. no nudity so while I'm tempted to agree that they shouldn't be allowed to advertise on billboards, at the end of the day, the billboards are no more explicit (those that I have seen) than a suntan cream or exotic vacation advert so what is being objected to is not so much the material on display but the fact that it is advertising morally unacceptable businesses. If I was a strip club owner, I think that I would be morally bound to object to the advertisements for large church gatherings :-)

I would however be quite keen on banning all roadside advertising, not from some moral standpoint but simply because advertising, by definition, is meant to attract your attention. In this case it is attracting your attention away from what you should be doing which is driving. No wonder we have such poor accident statistics.

What actually started this was an article in the local newspaper which given that the headline contained the word 'evil' and a picture of one of the offending adverts with a picture of a beautiful woman on it, one could easily draw a relationship between evil and women. Now, I know that the point of the article was not to portray women of any sort as evil, it's just that that is the way it came across. So if you are a women, firstly it could be argued that you are exploited by the businesses of dubious distinction and then portrayed to be evil by those opposed to said businesses. What a conundrum to get out of.

Cycling with Graeme

Doing anything with Graeme tends to generate an inordinate number of peculiar situations and mirth.
We met at 05:30 as normal and it is now quite dark when I leave home at 05:15 so we are going to have to change the time that we ride soon. Really quite enjoying riding with Tim and Graeme at the moment because I can can easily pull away from them which means that riding with them is a doddle. I should enjoy it while I can because fundamentally, they are both about the same strength as I am, they just haven't been riding and I have.
Anyway there we were going west along witkoppen road and since there are building works at this point, a brick has strayed onto the road. As I passed the brick I wondered if I should point it out to graeme but he was quite far back (15-25m) so not much point and I faced the front again. I had no sooner done so that graeme somehow managed to miss the metre of tar on either side of the brick and collide with it. All I hear was a clatter as graeme skidded to a halt injuring his knee, top of the hip and elbow. A little blood but not really enough to get any sympathy from anyone.
The brick had punctured his tube so we spent a while putting his spare tube in which was much better than jason who didn't have a spare tube. After the puncture was fixed we didn't go more than about 2km before he became the victim of yet another puncture and this time, I got to lend him my spare. I feel like I've become a spare tube charity.

All of this made us very late so by the time we got to the stretch between Peter Place and Republic road the traffic was so bad that it was impossible to ride on the left since there was absolutely no space so we had to weave in between the traffic. Had one horrible moment, just as we were about to squeeze between them both drivers veered to the right and left respectively creating a taxi sandwich with us as the ham. A bit of shouting and hard breaking and the danger was averted, the taxi drivers apologetic as we manoevred past them.


I managed something this week which I haven't for quite a while, maybe forever. I managed to get out of bed every morning and either a cycle or a run before work. It doesn't get easier as people would have one believe but it really is great getting out in the early morning when it is fresh.

Carons Birthday

Yesterday was Caron's birthday which gives me my annual headache trying to find something to give her as a birthday present. I think I have clubbed it for another year, bought her a set of motorcycle lesssons since she can't ride at the moment and if we are going to be contemplating doing a tour through europe in 2009 she is going to have to learn. Not exactly the most romantic of presents but I think she will enjoy it.

The day wasn't especially romantic since she went to work for the majority of the day which would have left me kicking my heels at home so I organised a ride with jason out to northern farm which turned into a major expedition and one that jason didn't complete. The woes.

Started riding at 05:30 and met everyone at a low level bridge. All in all there were 4 guys and one girl going for the ride out to Northern Farm and back. Little did I know that it was actually going to be right through Northern Farm, a big loop around the back and then all the way back. We were just about to get to Northern Farm when we realised that no one had brought their tickets to get in, how daft. Fortunately jasons house was quite close so took a detour and appropriated his ticket for everyone. Finally arrived home at 12:30 having done close to 90km on a mountain bike which is a very fair days ride. Jason, the woes, as I mentioned didn't complete the ride because on the way back he got a puncture for which I lent him my one and only spare tube which he then promptly punctured as well and since we happened to be very close to his house, retired in a huff. This left 4 in the group and before we knew it, another one had dropped out taking the short route home leaving only three. Two guys and the girl, andrea who is quite a toughie. She's not particularly fast but she just seems to go and go forever. It was an absolutely fantastic ride and I made an important discovery which the rest confirmed, the more expensive your bike, the more trouble you have with it. Unfortunately the amount of trouble is inversely proportional to the weight of the bike, jason's new (second hand) bike cost just short of 20k and weighs less than my road bike notwithstanding that it is a full suspension bike. Quite amazing.

Got home and recovered in front of the TV where, for a change, the south african teams were actually doing respectably well. Caron got home at 15:30 and promptly scuppered my plans for a dinner out so we stayed at home, glued to the TV and munching woolies sandwiches. Pretty sad but we were both so tired.

Caron got up at 05:00 and left for work while I actually managed to sleep in until 06:30 which means I must have been really tired from yesterdays ride. Spent the morning tidying the house up and reading. Finally finished "Why I am not a Christian" by Bertrand Russel which, while a bit tricky to understand in places, I found to be excellent. I find it remarkable that the majority of the world has not caught up to the views which he expressed almost 100 years ago. He must have been an exceptional person.

Went off to Clare's (Tim and Emers daughter) second birthday to see just how bad life with children can get. Imagine 20 children between the ages of 2 and 5 and you get the picture. Caron went back to work before reappearing just before my entire family descended on us. My mother cousin, William, is out from Holland with his wife Nita. I thoroughly enjoyed having them over, we clearly think the same way with regards to some topics like religion but differ markedly on others like copyright and patents which led to a very interesting discussion and the whole topic is slowly starting to crystalise in my mind. More on that another time. William complimented me on my choice of books to lend my father (The God Delusion) much to the chagrin of pretty much the entire rest of the family. Anyway, it was a great evening and one which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Had my first bike whoopsy, forgot to put my reading glasses in the pannier and drove off with them on the back seat. About a kilometre down the road there was this taxi which kept on hooting at someone, me it turned out. Eventually he got out of his taxi, picked up my now flattened glasses and handed them back to me before driving off. An expensive little forget this turned out to be at R3500 for a new set of lenses and frames. Ouch!

Sex in the Cloisters

The fact that the Catholic church is opposed to the use of contraceptives has always struck me as a bit wierd. Why would they be so vehemently opposed to it? Is contraception outlawed in the bible? I can't find any specific passage which deals with this but "... be fruitful, and increase in number and fill the earth ..." deals with filling the earth with progeny which contraception could definitely prevent or at least limit. If one accepts the logic that "... be fruitful, and increase in number and fill the earth ..." speaks against contraception, surely it would speak against all forms of contraception including abstinence.

Another topic which the church tends to rail against with more or less ferocity is that of the M word. M is for Masturbation and the church is pretty quiet about it while at the same time letting you know that it is a definately not to be indulged in. Since this, once again, doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere in the bible I don't know why the church would be against it but I think I have finally figured it out. Maybe!

If one was to condone the use of contraception, one would in effect be condoning the fact that sex is indulged in purely for the pleasure of it because it clearly isn't for procreation. Since sex would now be for one's and one's partners mutual pleasure, it is only a small jump to describe sex as being a form of mutual masturbation. And then it is only a small jump to self masturbation while fantasising about one's partner and voila, you have just justified masturbation all within the confines of church doctrine. This can't be allowed to happen, there would be far too many people having far too much pleasure and not enough guilt with which to work.

QED

Back from Banishment

At last, I'm back online. My ISP has been giving me the runaround for almost 3 weeks and being offline for that long made if feel even longer. In the end I can't even point to a definitive issue that needed to be resolved. I have to phone my ISP quite regularly to get them to terminate what they call "hanging connections" which to my mind, ought to be automatically terminated as soon as there hasn't been any data for a set amount of time. They don't and they definitely don't let you log in twice so I periodically (about once a month or two) have to phone the support desk and get them to reset the connection which takes about 30 minutes of arguing on the phone before they believe me and trot off to do it.
This time there were no hanging connections so then we had the windows vs linux argument, they wanted the diagnostic messages from their windows dialer but of course I don't have it and there is one long silence on the other end of the phone (along with an 'eish!!!') when I tell them I'm using linux. They make it sound like I'm the only user of linux in the world and why don't I just go and buy windows so that their life can be easier. They generally give this direction up when I tell them I'd happily use windows but they need to pay for it as well as all the applications which I am going to need in order to do what I do for nothing on linux. Another silence when I ask them where their software for linux is. Eventually they ask me to take the modem into one of their shops which I do and they upgraded the firmware and showed it working on one of their laptops. The shop, can you believe it, doesn't have a decent signal. The attendant has to stick the modem into his display cabinet in order to get any kind of signal, a bit ludicrous but that is what happened. Came back home but still nothing, next possibility was the network card so I took the firewall to work and reconfigured the ip settings and eventually proved that the network card was in fact working. While I was there I took the opportunity to clean the dust out of the casing with a blower. A day later I still couldn't walk into the room without my feeling the effects of the dust in the air. Came home, reconfigured the the IP setting to what they were and voila, it worketh.
I've been reading up on patents and such like and it is decidely the most confusing topic. I've just finished a book called "A Patented World" which started out on patents and copyright but by the end of the book it was discussing gender politics. How does one get from patents to gender politics one might ask, well read the book and you will see. Some of the chapter are a bit difficult to digest but mostly it is quite well written and understandable.

Tough weekend

I've been dreading the arrival of this weekend for a while because I knew it was going to be tough weekend. Saturday morning Caron and I met Jason and a couple of his mates, actually about a dozen of them out at Northern Farm for a mountain bike ride. They had started the ride at morningside which is about 25-30km away from Northern Farm and ridden there. Took my leave from Caron who was going to potter around and then go back home while I joined everyone for the ride all the way back to morningside which would make my ride about 60km and theirs about 90km. Very pleased that Caron appears to be enjoying the mountainbiking so I want to encourage it as much as possible. They guys with Jason are clearly in a very different league to what I am used to, for starters, no less than three of them had bicycles in the R40-50k range which is avery different kettle of fish from my R4k bicycle or Jasons 'will pay you to take my bike' range. Jason still hasn't settled on a new mountain bike and the Sani to C draws very near. He has high hopes of buying one of the expensive ones second hand but he clearly isn't listening to the guy that owns it's wife who firmly rejected the idea. At least until she gets a nice brand new, very expensive bicycle herself. Going around Northern Farm with this bunch was educational, we were going up quite a tough hill, Jason and I (more me) struggling to keep up and we hear from the front. "Ok guys, time to pick up the pace!" "How?" I wonder to myself but fortunately some of the other guys aren't in much of a better place than I am so I manage to hang on. On the way back I was cycling next to Jason (another one) my heart rate monitor reads 165, his reads 106. How is that possible, it's not like I'm really that unfit. Ok, he has been known to actually win the odd race and everyone seems to know him. I lost count of how many times he stopped to greet people and then catch up to us, apparently with ease. Fell off four times on the way back, twice because Jason stopped at a crucial point in a tricky section which I would have made if it wasn't for the obstacle in the way. The other two, one was me attempting the impossible. Everyone else just dismounted and walked over the sand and the last I should have managed but didn't. Very glad to get home, I hadn't taken food for such a long ride so I ended bumming food of Jason and others who kindly gave me enough to make it home. Lay on the concrete in the shade for about 5 minutes before I tried to move. Serious energy depletion. Washed the bikes and oiled the chains before putting them away for next weekend. There is quite a lot of effort that goes into mountain biking but once you get your head around the fact that it is just part of it and absolutely has to be done, it isn't such a chore. Cleaned my roadbike as well which was looking decidedly neglected.
Went to Sandon with Caron for lunch and to buy Carls birthday present before coming home to a much needed afternoon nap. About 18:00 a friend popped over, he was feeling that life was just getting a bit much between work, family and financial problems and he just needed a safe place where he could vent a bit without offending or creating more problems which we were happy to be able to give to him. I think he left feeling much lighter when I had to go off to work for the first change control for 2007. We have been working on some technology which will mean that in future we won't have to bring the system down for anything, we will be able to upgrade hardware, operating systems, applications and as far as I can think, anything, without stopping the service to customers. We're quite pleased with ourselves, the traditional way to give this level of performance is to throw an awful lot of money at it and I think we have managed it by purely doing it with software. Time will tell but I have a really good feeling. We also installed our automated installation software which means that the tagging, compilation, installation/patch creation is all completely automated as well as taking the installation/patch and deploying it onto the production servers. It's such a win, what used to take us hours manually we can now do in minutes.
Finally crawled home at 02:00 feeling a bit wasted only to wake up at 05:00. Why is it that the later one goes to bed, the earlier one wakes up? It just isn't right.
Went off to the motorcycle course which was extremely worthwhile, so much so that every motorist should do it as well. Not so much to impress on them that they ought to be mindful of motorcyclists but it would really help them in driving their own cars safely. It really helped that it didn't only consist of lectures but on the road tuition as well. Very enjoyable, I think I should make a point of taking it every year or two. Made it home safe but very tired but only finally went to sleep at about 22:30, go figure. Normally, nothing will keep my eyes open after a change control and I have to go our to see a movie but this evening, not a problem.
I must have been quite tired because I was seriously grumpy the whole of monday but by tuesday I was much better and with the change control and all the little issues that it creates sorting or sorted out, life was looking up.

New years revolution

I mean resolution. I have accomplished a new years resolution, ok it was last years resolution and I had to break one of this years resolutions but I think it was worth it. I resolved, last year, to try and get Carl onto a bicycle, preferably his own, out of genuine concern for his state of health as well as to create a supply of amusing anecdotes which inevitable accompany cycling. He responded by declaring his new years resolution to be NOT to get a bicycle which stumped me for a year. This years resolution was to keep him off a bicycle, prompting him to ... buy a bicycle. Mission accomplished.
Not knowing an awful lot about bicycles they asked me to accompany them to a couple of bicycle shops to try and pick a couple of bikes suitable for them as well as all the accesories they would need which, since they had nothing, was a considerable list. We started off a Cajees Cycles which has a reputation (unjustified as I found out) of being the cheapest place. Typical of Indian shops, the price is never the price but even after discounted "Best Price" and a nod of the head, it was still the same or more as Linden cycles which is where we eventually purchased the lot. The lot being two cheapish mountain bikes, bike rack, pumps, saddle bags, gloves, shorts, bottles, toolkits, puncture repair kits, you get the picture. In the end the accessories cost almost the same as the two bicycles which really surprised me although a substantial portion of the accessories was the bicycle rack. It was great being out shopping, buying all sorts of goodies and leaving the wallet pain in someone else's wallet. Carl was looking decidedly stricken by the end of it.
Shopping should be added to my list of addictions since it definately does seem to give one a slight state of euphoria which some people find addictive.
I have recently completed reading "Unintelligent Design" by Robyn Williams which I found to be ok, not great, but ok and I would hesitate to recommend it even though I agree with most of the contents. The author quotes another author Susan Greenfield as follows:
"Professor Susan Greenfield likes to refer to two general ways of getting the most from life: being 'in the moment' on the one hand, and working for more distant ambitions for yourself, your family or even your society. Orchestrating the appetites of the moment is one of life's skills. Those not good at it turn to 'in your face' turn-ons like drugs, violence and crime. Those of us with greater hedonistic experience and skill cannot understand how anyone can want to choose crack cocaine and oblivion over chocolate, Mozart and beaches. (I am being glib - I should remember the lessons of Matthew Chapman in Dayton and the way poverty obliterates choice.) Long-term goals provide the satisfactions of service and achievement. Both ingredients, immediate and far-reaching, provide plenty of point and meaning for the average life."
Hope I'm not breaking copyright here but an interesting point of view as to why people get addicted. Talking about addiction, someone I recently met, met a real drug dealer and posed the "So why do you do it?" as in sell drugs question to the dealer and his answer was fascinating. The dealer drew a paralled to the natural world where predators for instance, a hyena, will prey on the old and/or weak of a herd and he saw himself as the human equivalent, sniffing out the weak in human society and consuming them. I don't believe him for a second but interesting point of view and it just goes to show that people can justify just about anything. If a drug dealer can find it within his conscience to morally justify the damage he is doing, I can't see anyone not being able to do so.
After spending the whole morning, we finally emerged from the cycle shop fully kitted out and ready to roll. Carl managed to destroy his bike within a day so it had to be returned to the bike shop. He says is was an assembly defect, I'm not so sure.
Sunday morning, Jason and I did a 100km in about 4 hours and for a change I felt that I was really pushing him right up until the last big hill at about 96km when he started to creep away. He just doesn't give up, it is very frustrating. Absolutely fantastic ride out in the country, beautiful views, fresh cool air and good climbs. I hadn't brought any energy gel with me and as luck would have it, at about 40km there was this PERC promotion table in the middle of nowhere handing out complimentary sachets of energy gel and cramp stop which I was very grateful to help myself to. I wouldn't buy the energy gel, not because it doesn't work but because it is so sweet that in any race more than 80km, it is going to be unpalatable. I took my GPS with me to measure the climbs but the ride looks so flat even though there are a couple of quite nice climbs.
Had supper with Pippa and Glynne which was very enjoyable. Glynne wanted me to join him on a 2km swim. Last time I checked, I didn't resemble a fish so I politely declined. Maybe not so politely. Glynne was a bit pissed off that I hadn't contacted him to join us for the mornings ride and that I had said that I was going to be away. That was before I got the opportunity to fulfill last years new years resolution and I just couldn't let that get away from me. Can't really blame him, I should've invited him so I felt duly chastised.

Mr Fixit

It's a new year but some things don't change. If you have a house, you have to fix it continually and in my particular case, if your sisters in law have a house, you get to fix it - continually. And so it was that I found myself at Kim & Laurels putting up shelves in the girls room, setting up climbing rings in a tree and adjusting a dangling cricket ball so that it is a better height to have a good swing at with the bat. While I was there someone was talking about putting some steps up the pin oak and into the branches which sounded pretty cool to me so I got some spare wood from home, shaped the top edge to give a good grip and a bunch of 6" nails and nailed the steps onto the tree. I definately work too much with a keyboard because after driving in 6 nails my forearm was aching, this is not good. I shudder to think what it is like to use a hammer all day. We now have a set of steps up to the first set of branches about 4m off the ground. Had a lesson showing Samuel and Hannah how to climb safely and making sure that they understood that falling out of the tree was going to be a hospital affair not just a couple of bruises. I think they got the point. Made Samuel go up so that I could check that he had actually listened to what I had to say about climbing and he more or less got up to where the branches started before he bailed out, clearly unhappy about the height. Next it was Hannahs turn who went straight past and right up to the branches. I think they are going to really enjoy this, I will wait for the request for a tree house before I start thinking about how to build it. A couple of days afterwards Hannah and a friend climbed right up into the branches and were talking to passers by and having a great time. Sage, who can only just reach the first step was obviously feeling left out told Kim that I must come over with my car and build her a ladder too. I offered to build a 6m Sage ladder but it was politely declined. Sorry for you, Sage.

Went over to my folks for supper on Saturday night and only left just before 23:00 which must be something of a record. Quite an enjoyable evening, my mother has actually been reading this blog and true to form continues to complain about my habit of missing out on commas and full stops so here they are :
.,..,,....,..,,....,..,,... .,..,,....,..,,... .,..,,... .,..,,...
that ought to suffice for a couple of months of writing. She continues to be amazed that I can actually write, actually, so am I.

Sunday morning Caron and I put our moutain bikes on the back of the car and headed out to Northern Farm where we had a fabulous ride. Caron on her own and myself on my own. I had my GPS with me so I was going up and down every road that I could. I normally just go around the perimeter but there are so many roads that I only managed to map about 1/3 of the area in the 2 hours I was there. Had an absolute ball whizzing down some of the roads, there are these large bumps to direct water away from the road and at speed you take off over these. Gotta be a little careful about landing in the same path as one took off from otherwise there would be a pretty spectacular moment. Found some really nice shady routes through some pine forests as well as a whole bunch of dams which I didn't know about. It sounds like my sister and brother in law are readying themselves to buy mountain bikes for the family so I am going to have to bring them out here.

Lapalala

It has taken precisely two days of work to completely obliterate any R&R I might have had at Lapalala and there wasn't that much there in the first place.
Lapalala is a wilderness area about 2 hours north west of Johannesburg in what is normally a very dry and hot area. The last time we went there was about 7 years ago when it was described as a wilderness area and not a game reserve and true to the name at that time, we didn't see a single head of game. Not one of the blighters stuck their heads out of the dense bush for us to have a peek at. Things have certainly changed, they've cut down or rather "thinned" sections of the bush so that people like us can actually see the game. This is decidely tourist friendly but is not so flora friendly. Caron and I were expecting the temperatures to be 35 deg. C or above and we knew that there isn't any airconditioning so we were very pleasantly surprised when it rained just about every day and was overcast to boot.
We drove up with Caron's two sisters, Laurel and Kim and their offspring Samuel (11), Hannah (9) and Sage (2) a.k.a. "The Savage" pictured below.

Sage, of course, provided the entertainment as well as the torture for the trip, she was particularly worried that the worms under the ground were going to get her if she went barefoot.

Thursday: arrived safely and followed the signs up ever narrowing roads, the thinner the road the thicker the sand got. The accomodation was comfortable but rustic, it must have been a proper lodge at one stage and we pretty much had it to ourselves. There was one couple already there but they were very quiet, probably intimidated by Sage. On the way in I was just rounding a corner when I spotted a snake lying in the road which we managed to miss after some heavy braking. Not knowing my snakes very well and having to rely on memory, I think it was an African Rock Python. Whatever it was, it was over a metre in length and about the thickness of my wrist. Very pretty indeed. Just after we arrived back Samuel found a stunned pygmy kingfisher, the smallest of the kingfishers. It had flown into one of the glass windows and all but knocked itself out. After about 30 minutes of recovery, firstly on Hannah's hand and then on a branch it flew off to a more secure perch and spent another 30 minutes recovering before disappearing.


On Friday we had a power failure. There must be something about me and power failures, they seem to follow me around. In the afternoon we drove out of the reserve to the nearby Rhino park which is operated by the Walkers who really put Lapalala on the map but who are no longer involved there. At the Rhino park we were lucky to see a young female being fed with pellets and even managed to hand feed the Rhino. Quite remarkable, the Black Rhino has a top lip a bit like an elephants trunk but obviously a whole lot shorter and no nostrils. If you hold out a hand of pellets it will clean the pellets out. Here we have firstly Samuel and then Hannah feeding the Rhino.


When we returned from the Rhino's the power was still out and things weren't looking so good, our food had survived one day but any longer and we were going to be in dire straits, possible diahorrea straits. Elias organised some gas fridges which worked a treat until the power was restored mid Saturday morning.

Our first game walk was on Saturday morning with Elias the guide who was nothing short of fantastic, he has a really good general knowledge and the odd thing he didn't know he would look up and come back to us like the gregarious spotted cockroaches which were quite amusing, a bit like a herd of sheep but small and insectivorous. The destination of the walk was a small dam which had canoes so I took all the children including Sage paddling and startled a water monitor lizard, just a baby one but boy could it move. The place where the canoes were stored had an old canoe to the one side and the termites had built a mound directly underneath and into the canoe which destroyed the canoe because, in picking it up, they had to use so much force to break the termite mound that they broke the back of the canoe as well. Seeing into the mound was fascinating, I always thought the passageways were small, like the size of the termites but they aren't, they're about the size of a wrist and the actual termite nest is a few metres away from the mound. The mound acts like an air conditioner and collects cool air which is fed through to the actual nest. Neat hey! Spent most of the rest of the day reading and writing which was very pleasant. I was reading next to the pool and Caron was swimming and throwing a ball to Samuel and a couple of times when Caron was distracted by Sage, Samuel took the opportunity to hit Caron on the head with the ball. She obviously wanted to get even but trying to hit someone on land when you're in the water is near impossible so she asked me to catch Samuel which I proceeded to do but he very cleverly jumped in the water out of my reach since I was in normal clothes. Unluckily for him I don't mind wet clothes and jumped in on top of him, clothes and glasses 'n all. He got such a shock that he sucked some water in, either up his nose or into his lungs and promptly burst into tears so I had two women looking at me accusingly so I spent the rest of the afternoon being grumpy because there was absolutely no reason to believe that I had done anything wrong and yet I was the first one accused.

Sunday we spent most of the day relaxing, swimming in the pool and reading and writing until our game drive which was pretty awesome. We saw blue wildebeest, rhino, impala, tsessebe, nyala, kudu, warthog, giraffe and the inevitable baboon but over and above the game, the bush we drove through was just absolutely beautiful. We saw a giraffe trying to mate and I was happy to see that it isn't only human females which give the males a hard (no pun intended) time, it seems to be a law of nature. Just before sundown we saw a golden orb spider which was really worth a photograph as shown below but the bastard went and expectorated/defecated all over my hand and camera. Perhaps the fact that I was lobbing small stones and twigs into his web to see him scuttle about had something to do with it ... maybe.

We only got back from the game drive at about 19:30 so Sage went straight to bed and left the rest of us in peace to see the new year in which was a pleasant if quiet affair.

Monday dawned way too early. It felt like we had only just gone to sleep. The walk was to a section of the Palala river where there are some bum slides. We had only just go there and of course Samuel has to wade into the middle of the river which is only about thigh deep, needless to say that he was swept off his feet which sent Elias running down the river to a point where he would be able to catch him, there being hippo and crocodiles in this river after all. Samuel managed to swim to the side and came out making light of it but his face when he fell in was totally at odds with his bravado afterwards. Simply put, he shat himself. Hannah, quite uncharacteristically, was very hesitant getting in but she eventually did and enjoyed it, I think. I took Sage down the bum slide and things were going pretty well until she saw some vegetation under the water which was when the wheels came off. Uppie, Uppie, UPPIE is Sage speak for I'm terrified, pick me up. Very nice place to walk to.




Not much to Tuesday, we went home. As usual, Kim made (or should have) the rest of us feel bad about how much work she does cooking and generally organising everything. One day we're going to have to do something about this, maybe tie her hands together, I'll have to think about it.

Christmas weekend

We have survived the Christmas rush once again, this is the time of year that we (Caron and I) normally overdose on family. We now have a one day break to gather our wits and our strength before heading off to another family filled weekend with the 'other' side.
Officially, I am on holiday, but that really just means that work takes a back seat rather than disappearing altogether. Unfortunate but true. I have tried previously to just leave my email until I get back but after receiving 45 000 emails on my return the one time, I now try and at least deal with a few to prevent a repeat of the tidal wave that assaulted me that time. I don't always manage it but I try.
Saturday was the last shopping day before christmas so I took the opportunity to get a fluorescent jacket for my brother, bruce, since he too has bought a 650cc motorbike although his is a kawasaki. My mother is in a state! I also purchased a very interesting book on riding a motorcycle safely, although this is a rather relative term since it can never be as safe as a car.
Spent the afternoon making the penultimate bookshelf for caron. I am desperately hoping that once she has filled these up, and she will although it may take some time, she will start throwing out books because I have now made enough bookshelves (10 to be precise). Besides, we would have to add onto the house in order to fit any more in and that is not something to be undertaken lightly. Also spent some time modifying my motorcycle jacket so that all the pockets have decent tags on them that one can use, even if one has gloves on.
Sunday morning, we were up at 05:15 to go and meet Jason and his brother in law, Vaughn at Northern Farm for a mountain bike ride. It has been raining pretty much every day for the last week so the course was really muddy which was great fun. A couple of nervous moments in ruts where one couldn't get out so one had to just peddle in a straight line and hope for the best. Fell back on the hills a bit, I think that maybe I'm just not that good on the hills. At the one river crossing instead of the normal 3" of water ther was about 12", if you kept you pedals at the 3h00 and 9h00 postitions your feet were just skimming over the water but you would have stopped midstream so there was no choice but to pedal in the water. Great fun! Jason and Vaughn had to leave before me so I did about an extra 30 minutes which was just fantastic. Starting to trust the front wheel a bit on the gravel around corners which is making the whole experience much better. Got back to the car completely covered in mud but for a change, I had some dry of clothes and a towel. It used to be white. Caron is not going to be happy!
Got home, washed the bike and myself before we had to make the house presentable for the family invasion which duly arrived at midday. Not sure what has gotten into me but I am just perpetually tired so I wasn't much fun, caron kept on asking me if I was ok which I was. Just really, really tired. After everyone left, we packed up and cleaned up since there is no maid to do it for us at the moment which is really bad timing. Got lots of really nice comments on my photo gallery which made me feel pretty good. You might say that they were family so they were just being polite but my experience with family is that they are even more likely to tell you the truth than friends. Friends you can disassociate yourself from, family on the other hand: only death provides relief.
Went to my parents for supper with the usual suspects, still feeling really tired so once again, I was just a bystander in the conversation. When we left, I couldn't drive I was so tired. Caron had to drive.
Woke up this morning and went for a jog. My knees are taking strain even though I am taking it really, really, really easy. I think I am going to have to go and see a doctor about it.
Opened our presents to each other. Very pleased with my present to Caron, an iPod adapter for the hifi which sounds great. I received the remaining DVD's for the Adams Family series as well as the Star Wars series which I am very happy to have. Started the final bookshelf but had to break and get ready for the Christmas lunch with, you guessed it, the family.
The Family in this case consists of 10 children and 12 adults although two of the adults and two of the children can't really be considered family, more like family once removed. One of the children was twelve years old and has a very noticeable, and I mean really noticeable, moustache. At twelve! poor bloke he's going to be shaving by the time he hits teenagerdom. Opening the chrismas presents was chaos with 10 children and a couple of additional elderly children forgetting their age. I think I want to be a child again, I'm sure the quantity of presents has increased since I was a child. Caron gave all of the children, in addition to a christmas present, a 'gross' toy. It has engendered near universal dislike by mothers and near universal fascination from children. There are whole lot of types, all variants of a theme, but to describe one would give you the idea. It is a rubber ball filled with blood and plastic maggots and what I think are entrails. You can't normally see anything but by squeezing the ball suddenly the maggots and entrails can be seen through the rubber. Gross hey but the children love them! By 16:30 I had had enough so we retired to our cave and I finished off the last bookself and retired to write my blog.

As I am writing this, I can see the lightning out of the window and hear the roll of the thunder. I have gotta admit that I just love it and if we were to go overseas it would definitely be one of the things which I would especially miss.

The book, the book, hit 'em with The Book!

The Book in this instance is any holy book (bible, koran, atkins diet, the god delusion etc) but the point is that arguing from a viewpoint which is based on the premise that the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is contained in said book, is a poor place to start from. Since the body of knowledge is expanding every day, this newfound knowledge has to be reconciled with the truth contained in a very finite book and if it either isn't there or worse, contradicts it, a crisis ensues while the hapless slave to the book works on the reconciliation. So, for me, while there are a great many truths to be found in all sorts of books, the thought of regarding any one book to be infallible defies logic.
Some might say that this is where faith comes in, one should just suspend logic in the face of the much more important faith. That would be fine up until the point that the contents of The Book are demonstrably internally inconsistent or contradict what has become known to be true. At this point, having forsaken logic, one is left with earnest faith in a falsehood. Not a good place to be. If on the other hand one takes a more pragmatic approach and just ignores the portions of the Holy Book that are inconvenient, prejudiced, pick your own criteria, etc what is one left with? the Holy Book according to the individual which is what I think most people actually do. Maybe unconsciously, but they do.

Ho Hum

Not a lot to report for this weekend, nor last week for that matter. Went out with caron and some of her work colleagues on thursday night with a customer of theirs from the U.K to moyo's which is an up market african chic kinda restaurant. Quite good food although I am probably not the best judge of that pretty much anywhere, had the lentil bobotie which was nice enough. The customer from the U.K had a couple of interesting observations like that it's quite expensive here with a few obvious exceptions (food and accommodation) and he was totally taken aback that johannesburg and sandton are just like the UK (no lions in the streets or backyards) which I guess is true. It is pretty much the same as any first world metropolis but it doesn't take much to pierce the veneer and discover the 3rd world lurking just beneath it. Mind you after the race riots in france last year or the los angeles riots a decade or two ago maybe the third world is everywhere and we just convince ourselves that we are living in the first world. Ever wondered what exactly first world and third world actually mean? Quite a pleasant guy but there was a certain kind of smugness which many 1st world inhabitants seem to exude, probably unconsciously (I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt), which just gets under my skin and irritates me.
On Saturday morning Caron buggered off to the krugersdorp lion park with the client and a whole bunch of other work colleagues, I just could't face an entire day with them so I bowed out and spent the day on my own trying to find an xmas present for caron. This is not an easy task since anything she really wants she just buys herself so you're left with everything she doesn't want, which is a bit of a conundrum. Also printed about 6 pictures in 10"x15" format to take for framing next week. I've been doing a project for the last year or so of printing and framing photographs which I have taken on my various wanderings around the world. I work on the premise that if you take enough photographs, some of them have to be good even if one has no skill with a camera.
Spent some time sitting in a coffe shop waiting for the pictures to be printed doing my favourite thing of watching the passers by. This guy came sauntering past with a very overdeveloped physique and a tiny head like he's been to borneo recently and I couldn't help but laugh to myself which invited some comments mirroring my thoughts from a mother and daughter sitting at the table next to me.
Laurel phoned so I went over and put up the two clothes hooks on the back of the bathroom door, we'll see how long they remain on the door this time. Back to sandton city to go and watch eragon which was reasonably good and really fitted my mood. Didn't want to actually do anything but didn't want to be doing nothing either. Home for supper, caron arrived home at 21:30 so I could at least retire for the night.
Sunday started at 05:30 with me waking up to an SMS to ask where I was, I was meant to meet Jason to go mountain biking but sleep got the better of me.
Spent the morning fixing the house, in particular the lounge ceiling which due to poor workmanship has been sagging on the one wall. Eventually attached some threaded rod to chains and the chains to the roof rafters so I could adjust the height of the ceiling to be flat. I doubt if there is a straight, square or 90 deg. wall in this entire house. It all looks like it is fine but get out the square and it is way off. Fixed a few other things like the circuit breaker next to the geyser which for god alone knows what reason, the plumber wired around. On checking the isolator I found it to be faulty which might hav been the reason that at one stage we had an electric current running around the water reticulation system. Hmmm! good time to fix this although it did make showering kinda exciting. Went back to laurels (kim is never there so for the time being, it's laurels) to put up some hooks to hang mosquito netting from.
Off to the DVD store to get "the long way around" which has been recommended by my sister. Crit to follow.

Virgin no more

Well, it had to happen sometime! My bike is a virgin no more, yes, that's right, I have dropped my brand new bike within the first two weeks. In my defence I was trying to ride offroad, diagonally up a steep grassy embankment and the rear wheel just slid out from underneath me on the grass. This encounter with the dirt proved two things, one that the foot brake is super malleable since it was really easy to bend it back into shape and secondly that I really can lift the 200kg bike relatively easily. I've been dreading the moment of truth when I find out if I can lift it, I had nightmares of struggling to get it back on its two wheels in a busy intersection with cars all around waiting and sniggering at my efforts to right the iron beast.
I have also filled up with my first tank of petrol. R75.00 for a full tank of fuel, ok my range may not be quite what a car would get on a full tank but 300km is pretty good going I think.
Every day when I get to work I have a look at my car which is looking a bit neglected. I think I had better take it for a drive this weekend and get it cleaned just so that it knows that it is still loved.
Why, you may ask, was I driving diagonally up a grassy embankment? The answer can be found at http://www.openstreetmap.org and what I was doing was trying to map my suburb with my GPS.

Tame Wildlife

As I mentioned before, part of the company function last week was the "Bird Show" at Monte Casino which, if you ever have the opportunity, is well worth the effort to go and see. The most remarkable thing about the show, as Barry pointed out, was that these are wild birds that have the opportunity to fly away (the show is entirely outdoors) but that don't. I'm not sure if their wings are clipped but they get to fly at least 60m in a single flight so I would guess that there is plenty of opportunity to escape. The spotted eagle owl was very reluctant to come out of his hole in the tower since the last show (yesterday) he was mobbed by a whole bunch of smaller birds. The smaller birds often gang up on a lone predator and mob them, hopefully intimidating the predator and chasing it away. Anyway, the eagle owl was reluctant to say the least but when it did fly it was totally silent, even though it flew within half a meter of one's head one couldn't hear it at all. Great to see these large predator birds up close since one only normally sees them at a distance. Another interesting tit bit was the fact that the owls are the dumbest of the bird predators since their eyes take up something like 2/3 of their brain cavity. If humans were to have eyes in the same proportion as owls, our eyes would be the size of grapefruit. Next time someone of the opposite sex makes eyes at you with their big beautiful eyes, just remember the tale of the owl.

To be an addict or not!

Went out yesterday for the end of year party which, since we are actually such a small company, is quite a low key affair. On top of that, most of the personalities are not exactly what one would call extroverted, mine included.

The whole company, all fourteen of us less two absentees, went to Montecasino for breakfast and thereafter to the bird show which was quite amazing and about which I will post in a couple of days time. While we were having breakfast we were looking over the fake stream, past the fake trees into the, anything but fake, casino and the conversation got going about how gamblers are addicts in the same way as smokers are. They just can't stop themselves. In light of "The God Delusion" which explains religion as a sort of a disease I started thinking along the lines that religion may more closely resemble an addiction than a disease and would explain quite nicely why people can't give it up and will sacrifice everything for it including their families and on occasion, themselves.

For purposes of this discussion, an addiction is anything that one just can't give up and includes some commonly acknowledged addictions as well as some which are not and it is definitely debatable as to whether they really are addictions at all.

By connotation, addictions are generally deemed to be 'bad' but since we, as people, seem to suffer from an awful lot of them, is it possible that some are actually good even if they are addictions? Furthermore some behaviour, in moderation, is typically deemed to be good and beneficial whereas the same behaviour in excess is typically deemed to be bad.

So far my list of possibly addictive endeavours, and yes, the definition of addiction is purposefully vague, are:

Substance Addictions : Where the body is addicted to something which is ingested into ones' body.
Drugs
Cigarettes
Sugar (just you try and give it up!)
Alcohol

Activity Addictions : Where the addict performs some kind of physical endeavour which results in the body itself producing chemicals to which the body becomes addicted.
Exercise
Extreme Sports (Adrenalin)
Sex
Gambling

Mind Addictions : Where the addicts' mind indulges in thought patterns, once again producing chemicals to which the body becomes addicted.
Love
Porn
Religion
Altruism
Nationalism

I doubt anyone would argue too hard on the Substance and Activity Addictions not being addictions but the Mind Addictions needs some explaining. Basically what I am trying to do is look at illogical behaviour that results from some kind of mind set and posing the question, is this actually an addiction that determines the behaviour so here goes.
Love - Ever done anything really stupid or embarassing because you were 'in love'? What is this feeling of 'in love', could it be a bunch of chemicals which your body likes and the thought of the object of your desire generates these chemicals, hence Love.
Porn - I don't think I need to explain or provide examples, pretty self evident.
Religion - People have excommunicated parents, children or siblings for not believing the same way. They have even sacrificed themselves for what they believe in. Could this be because religion provides the addict with some kind of assurance of acceptance by a god and the mere thought of this creates an addiction? People who challenge this assurance by not believing the same way need to be excommunicated just in case they influence the addict and he/she loses the assurance of acceptance.
Altruism - Same as Religion except that the acceptance is by the addict themselves.
Nationalism - What posseses a soldier to jump out of a trench and run straight at the enemy who is trying to shoot him. Death is near certain and yet people do. Could this be the same desire for acceptance but this time by the Nation? The 'For king and country' saying comes to mind.

Interesting!

Tip for the mercenary capitalists out there, create products for people with addictions, it is a guaranteed market, the consumers just can't help themselves.

Bike Ahoy

My days and weeks of waiting are finally over and I am now the proud owner (well the bank is in reality) of one shiny new BMW 650GS motorcycle. Purchased to commute to and from work although I have to admit to having entertained ideas of touring through southern europe on it. Going to have to work on Caron so that she will ride as well, she hasn't said no which is a good start.

This is what she looks like.



and again here ...