I don’t even know where to begin!

Let’s see…

The last time I managed to get a post out was just before my last exam. Well, the last one was not much fun to write - I guess all the recent chaos just caught up with me and I was not prepared. *sigh* Oh well, maybe next time?

Saturday my parents arrived from Johannesburg for a visit…it’s been wonderful for me to have them here with me and to be able to show them “my world” down here.

We kicked it off with a braai at the house, which was a rip-roaring success. Just to give you an idea, the last guests left at 07:00am! I bought a small mountain of firewood and we made fire in both fireplaces…nice and cosy. ET brought yummy potato bake and salad, and my mom baked bread. Troep and Alexander helped with the fire-making and we played Jenga with Old Brown Sherry shooters, pool, and naughts and crosses in between just chatting and having a good time. I could tell that my dad was also having a blast and at some stages he was busy playing two different games at the same time!

Jenga, for those who don’t know is a game where you stack a whole bunch of teeny tiny wooden blocks on top of each other and then take turns to pull out a block and add it on top without making the stack collapse. It defies the laws of gravity and reason. Now with a local twist that we added when you do make the stack fall you have to drink a shooter and write an instruction or dare on the block that finally did it, if there is already something written on that block you have to do that. My dad wrote one that would have you mow the lawn (yes, yes, it’s a bit lush at the moment with all the rain), and Cookie wrote a very X-rated one “make love to the person next to you” and warned us not to play the game alone in future (something tells me that particular block will only be in circulation for very special games).

Here are some of the pics from the party. As you can see someone ended up saying the B-word as well and rules are rules.

Sunday morning after what felt like 10 minutes of actual sleep my folks picked me up to go visit family in Citrusdal. I’ve been meaning to catch up with my cousin Natasha since I moved down here but there never seems to be time and Citrusdal isn’t even on my map. What a beautiful place…talk about wide open spaces and serious farm style living. Now that I know where it is I will definitely be going again, maybe for a weekend or so?

I took a day’s leave on Monday to spend with my parents too (I know the rest of SA had a public holiday but we only get the UK ones in our office), and we did some serious sight seeing. We drove out to Melkbos to go see our old house where we used to live when I was about 4 years old and then zipped through to Houtbay, Simons Town and Muizenberg. I haven’t really had any excuse to venture out that way and who knows when I would have made time to see it so it was really nice to do that with them while they were down here.

All too soon it was time for us to say goodbye again. I hate goodbyes…

Every time I see my family I wonder what the hell I’m doing down here so far away from them? In general I am very happy and I’ve met some awesome people and learning how to really stand on my own two feet has been educational and fulfilling to say the least, but life is so short…am I doing the right thing? Anyway, these are some of the things I’ve been thinking about over the last few days. I’m not making any decisions yet though about staying or going. I promised myself a year and that’s what I’m going to stick to. Plenty of time to obsess about this till December.

On Tuesday, it was back to the salt mines for me after a great long weekend. Far from being uneventful my “Monday” took a turn for the dramatic when work was interrupted by gun shots downstairs. We share a building with ABSA and some robbers shot a 69-year old man outside the bank because he didn’t want to hand over his briefcase. Luckily it wasn’t fatal and they only shot him in the leg, and even more lucky for him that one of my colleagues is a trained paramedic and was able to administer first aid while we waited for the ambulance to arrive. I wish I could have been more surprised or shocked when it happened…is this what our country is coming too? The smell of gunshot hung about outside…do you know what smell I’m talking about? And why does it smell so familiar to me?

The office was rattled and it showed in our work for the day. We’ve also taken to locking the door while we work because we found out that another shop downstairs was burgled on Monday.

This whole week has not been super productive at work. We had all the excitement of the shooting and the burglary downstairs and on top of that our Sparrow has not been there to tell us, “May the force be with you” when we needed it. Next week the BigBoss arrives for a three week stay while Sparrow flies off to the Ukraine with his wife to go meet her family and get married again.

On the home front there have also been some developments recently. Troep had vamooshed off to Seekamp for 10 days and Alexander and Chere’ will be headed for Kwazulu-Natal and beyond come Monday, possible for as long as a month. I was meant to get someone to come stay with me here for the month because it’s a pretty big house and could be quite creepy to be here all by my lonesome for so long. And what do you know?! The Big Plan kicks in and my other cousin Ricardo asks if I’ve got room for him while he’s looking for a place to stay for the next month or so…and that’s how he ended up moving in too yesterday. I’m going to feel much better having him around, and it will give us a chance to catch up too.

I think that more or less wraps up what I’ve been up to since I last wrote - sorry for the MONSTER post, I won’t let it get this out of hand again. Expect normal transmission to commence at once. (that includes poems of the week which I think I must be about 3 or 4 behind on by now?).

Have a kick-ass Friday…speak to you again soon!

What a day…

I feel like I’ve just been chewed up and spat out by today.

It started of well enough I suppose. Well, work is usually fun - but my computer is possessed and won’t let me get to my work. I haven’t done a thing to it I swear, but somehow I am the ONLY one having the problem. Anyhoo, Stickleback and his band of merry men have somehow sorted it out by taking the work away and giving me other stuff to do.

Then there was the small issue of break times and boiling water. There has been some grumbling by my colleagues because the kettle is too small to boil water for everyone to have coffee at break times, and it was decided that what our kitchen needed was in fact an urn. At this point I would just like to point out that I was not involved in either the shortage of boiling water, the request of buying an urn, the decision to do so, or in any subsequent matters pertaining to the above mentioned urn…I haven’t actually had coffee at work since the 22nd February, at work I drink water (believe it or not) and I keep my coffee drinking at home.

Sparrow sent our HR guy out to go buy a toaster…and an urn. And this is what he came back with:

Is this not the ugliest thing you have ever seen?! Sparrow said that the next person who says something nasty about the bucket will have to forfeit 20 points on our weekly team scoreboard - I told him he could have all my points, the thing is f-ing ugly, and that’s all there is to it.

I got home and I decided to give my family a call, and share the bucket photo with them (I just knew they’d get a chuckle out of it too). But it turned out today was not going to be a day of chuckles after all…I hardly had time to say hi to my mom when she broke the news to me.

My great-grandmother passed away this morning - 102 is a really good run, not so? Why is it so hard to think of her as ‘not alive’ then. I seriously thought she’d have a good chance of outliving me! She would have been 103 in September… I can’t believe that she’s actually gone. I spoke to my cousin just after I got off the phone with my parents, she says that Ounooi told someone on her last birthday party that she sometimes wondered if God has forgotten her? He’s already taken almost everyone she knew and loved, why didn’t he want her too? I guess she was ready to go then. She was always very lively and feisty, even right till the end she was a fighter.

She leaves behind 2 of her 3 children, 12 grandchildren, more than 30 great-grandchildren, and 2 great-great-grandchildren. That’s quite a lot of trouble makers to leave in your wake . We’re all going to miss her - it just won’t be the same without her sharp sense of humour and unshakable sense of what’s wrong and right in our lives.

R. I. P. Ounooi, He didn’t forget you after all (as if anyone ever could).

Near “Death” Experience

I have a little confession to make. I’ve been holding out on you guys - something big - well, it would have been big if it happened to be true anyway…which it isn’t, so now it’s not. It has in actual case been reclassified from the My-Little-Secret category to a complete Non-Event.

I thought I might be dying…turns out it was a false alarm and someone just tampered with my conditioner. I can’t prove who, but I definitely have my suspicions!

That I am not completely bald for the first time in my life is a little miracle which I can only attribute to having LOTS of hair to begin with and to the fact that whoever did it could only put a little bit of Veet (or whatever) into the mix to ensure that I didn’t pick up on the very distinct smell of it.

Well done to whoever the culprit is. It’s not very often that someone outsmarts me like this since I am quite security conscious and even paranoid at times when it comes to my stuff. A well executed prank which had me silently panicking, and thinking about my life in terms of it might be over soon.

Of course I was completely f-ed off when I figured it out…but I’m all over that now. And as they say, “We live to fight another day”. Hats off to the prankster/s - you win this one, get ready though because Karma is a bitch with a backhand. (And no…revenge will not be mine… I think I’ll just let the universe and you-get-what-you-give principles of life sort this one out on my behalf).

Home alone…or am I?

I came home tonight and although I theoretically live with 3 other people I was…alone…

Under “normal” circumstances this would be a very cool way to spend an evening when you’re busy studying for an exam, not so? Gmf! Just goes to show that the term “normal” is very subjective.

There I was, nose in the books as per usual when the stupid alarm went off. Not even sure why I switched it on anyway, we usually just switch it on when we all turn it for the night, but for some reason it was on. My first reaction (when anything suspect and potentially threatening happens) was to grab my hockey stick and run through the house to see where they were coming from so I could introduce them to the business end of my Gunn&Moore. (In matters of fight or flight instinct I lean heavily towards fight).

I found nothing so I thought it might have been the wind that set it off again. I shut it up…and then on second thought armed it again. Then spent some time just patrolling the house and being on alert. I heard voices in the garden, but I’m not quite brazen enough to go outside on my own to face how many ever people so…I waited…with my stick…if they wanted to see me in action they would have to come inside.

This is how Alexander and Chere’ found me when they came home. Sitting with my stick ready to pounce. Meanwhile all hell had broken lose in our street! Some guy had tried to break in at two of our neighbours’ houses, and the whole road was overrun with cops and trauma counsellors when I got outside. “Fun”.

Seems I wasn’t the only person with the stick idea though. It’s quite a sight seeing all my (mostly) retired Table View neighbours in their pajamas and slippers wielding hockey sticks, pix axes and hammers (no, I’m not kidding). I think there might be some good potential for putting together a lynch mob amongst these people! All hope is not lost.

I wish I could say that the perp probably got the fright of his life seeing so much stick in one night and setting of so many alarms, but popular opinion of the neighbourhood watchdogs reckon that the root of all evil lives across the road from us in the form of a potential drug house, and that these thugs that we’re being pestered with of late are probably potential customers?

Anyway…I’m off too bed kids. Sorry there’s no piccie to go with this, I’m just kind of too exhausted to look for a nice one and I need to get up again in 4 hours. *yawn* night night…

Burgled…again

Yesterday started out pretty crap since almost everyone at my work has now got the flu in varying degrees. I’ve been trying to keep my head down hoping to miss it, but I guess I’m just not THAT lucky.

So I’m sitting at work, trying to keep up even though it feels as if my head is filled with cotton wool, I can’t breathe through my nose and my whole body is aching and burning, and all I keep thinking of is throwing up and passing out…when I get two panic stricken messages from my housemates: We’ve been burgled!

Fantastic…

I asked Sparrow if I could leave because there was no way that I could focus without knowing what happened and what’s been taken.

The long and short of it is that Troep (the mostly missing housemate) briefly stumbled through the house with his girlfriend - both extremely drunk! I think they were going to sleep over the night but unexpectedly ran into some sort of wee domestic argument (after I went to bed - sometimes sleeping like a rock really comes in handy), they then left in the middle of the night again but left his bedroom window open. The next day when Alexander and Chere’ left the house unmanned for a grand total of 30 minutes some vigilant criminal type crawled in through Troep’s open window and started helping him/her/itself to our stuff.

He (Troep) is not very popular at the moment as you can imagine. Burglar proofing, gates and additional locks are being fitted all round and Alexander has done some extreme gardening so that the security beams round the house could be activated again. Feels almost like Jo’burg now. *sigh* Home sweet home…dammit.

Still, it’s not all doom and gloom. It seems that I am well suited for outsmarting criminals when it comes to stashing stuff, because even though this filthy scum of the earth piece of shit thief had his/her/its grubby little paws on almost everything I own he/she/it failed to locate my laptop, jewellery, spare cell phone, passport or portable hard drive in a room that is roughly 10 square metres, if not less. That, or I’m just very lucky!

At the moment I am too paranoid to leave my laptop here, and when I sit here studying alone at night I have my hockey stick within arms reach wherever I go. Troep almost got brained tonight because he didn’t switch the alarm off when he got home and I came flying at him (stick in hand) when he opened the front door.

I stand to be corrected - but I do believe this is the 14th or 15th burglary for me now…I can’t remember how many exactly any more. That’s not a good sign, is it? Anyway, you’ll have to excuse me now because I’m going to go curl up with some med lemon and a hockey stick. Night-night…

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