The 1-20 game, 7 things tag and a few other bits and pieces…

I swear I had every intension of writing this week but it just kind of got away from me, so here I sit on a lovely peaceful Sunday again playing catch-up and not knowing quite where to begin.

I think I’ll start with the 7 things tag and get that taken care of? Rox tagged me to the 7 interesting things about me post. So here goes:

1. I am an eternal optimist. There I said it… Even when things go really really bad I usually find something to laugh at or make a joke about, and inherently I do believe that everything will not only be fine, but will in fact turn out great.
2. With a few exceptions I don’t trust people who don’t eat bacon. (How can you not like bacon?!). I realise and respect that some people give it up based of religion and maybe due to a moral obligation they feel - but on my scales that tips the balance not-in-your-favour and you then have to actually do something pretty special to make me believe that you can be trusted.
3. Not sure if you know this, but when you feel threatened it’s natural that your adrenaline kicks in and you experience stress and get in touch with your fight or flight instinct? Well, mine is always set on fight. So if we ever go somewhere together and someone tries to rob us or high-jack us you needn’t waste time wondering what my reaction will be. I’ll come out swinging or die trying - be prepared, I know I am.
4. I absolutely detest carnations. They remind me of death and funerals. Any other flower is okay by me. An ex once sent me a bouquet of spring flowers that consisted mostly of carnations and even though I couldn’t get myself to just trash them I refused to water them. The nicest “flowers” I ever got, or the most memorable anyway, was once when someone dedicated a palm tree to me that was planted in the mall where we went to see a movie (potted palm closest to Mr. Price and Boardmans in Northgate I still consider to be mine) and the other time was when someone bought a bunch of tiger-lilies for me, took one out and gave it to me and trashed the rest just to make sure that that one was special (to the shock and disbelief of the flower seller - who went to go rescue the others and resell them possibly?).
5. I’m pretty tall - 1.78m. And I’ve been this tall since I was I was 11. In that year I grew 18cm and from thereon I only grew sideways. People always used to think I was older than I really was - and I never got asked for ID anywhere (until I was 28 where it happened for the first time and I couldn’t actually believe it!). When I was about 8 I got mistaken for 12, when I was 16 I got mistaken for 26, and now that I’m knocking on the door of 30 the general feeling is that I look about 25. I’m quite happy with how this is playing out, maybe I’ll be like my gran who hardly even has any grey hair and she’s in her 70s already! That would be awesome.
6. I don’t like watching scary movies - at all. I just don’t do it, even when people tell me that it’s not that scary I still refuse.
7. When I spend some time in the sun my hair goes red(ish), and I have a temper to match. I have about a teaspoon of Scottish blood in my bloodline (mostly German, Dutch and teeny bit of French and Scottish from what I can puzzle together), but sometimes I just kind of think of myself as a closet redhead. You’ll know (or should reasonably suspect) that I am about to unleash all kinds of trouble on you when I start asking questions staring with words like “So, do you mean to say…?”. That means that I am just clarifying issues before I let rip. Be afraid…be very afraid. :-p

I think I may have overdone this tag a bit - anyhoo, there you go: 7 things. I’m not tagging anyone, if you haven’t played them please tag yourself!

Now, about the rest of this week. It’s been crap. Or let me rephrase that perhaps - some parts of it has been particularly unpleasant. The end of it was rather nice though. The UK people who run the company that I work for are making me understand the appeal of the Anglo-Boer-War to be honest, at least we have Sparrow in our corner still or who knows what would have become of us by now. The mood in general has been quite gloomy and negative, and I haven’t exactly been helping matters (for which I apologised to Sparrow because he is trying his best to keep the ship afloat and he doesn’t deserve that). He’s the best boss ever and I swear that when I hit two 7 deal weeks in a row I am taking that man out for the piss-up to end all piss-ups.

Anyway, enough shop talk - there will be plenty to tell about that in the next week or two if I have to wager a guess. I would however like to tell you about the 1 to 20 game, if I may.

The 1 to 20 game is a concept that was first explained to us in our training course to illustrate that there is a process to be followed while doing this job and that you have to start it off right and not miss one single step if you want to win. The game works as follows: There are two players (generally the one teaching - the master, and the poor fool who is being taught and who doesn’t know the rules), the teacher gives the student a chance to start (at 1) and both players get the chance to count in sequence using either one number or two numbers till they get to 20. The aim is to be the one to say 20, that means you win.

You can try this at home if you like but there is only one way to win and that is to start by saying 1, 2…the other player then gets to say 3 or 3, 4. The next important number to hit is 5, so if they said 3, 4 then you say 5, if they said 3 then you say 4, 5. The next one is 8. Then 11, 15, 17 and ultimately 20. It’s a process and you have to hit all the right numbers to get to the prize. You have to know where you’re going to get there.

Why am I telling you this now? Well, Friday night I went dancing with some friends at Guru lounge in Durbanville. I had an absolute blast and only got home Saturday morning just before 3:00am! There was a very good-looking young man who appeared to be hunting me. Good fun. I may have let him catch me too if he had hit all the right numbers, but he missed a few steps of his 1 to 20 game. Tsk-tsk…it’s too bad, because he really is a very good dancer - it would have been fun. He had a deliciously naughty streak and suggested all kinds of things that really appealed to me, but on top of missing a few important steps he also had a nasty B-word habit and I had to resist the urge to draw a big letter B on his forehead at some points of the evening *shrug* oh well… (when I say that I resisted the urge, you may read that to mean that I was looking for a pen already when my friend stopped me distracted me with a shooter).

Going home was a completely different adventure altogether. I was being followed by a red Uno with four drunk hooligans in it and since I live at the end of a cul de sac street I wasn’t going to lead them to my home and hope for the best when we got there, nu-uh! I drove past the police station instead and luckily they decided that they didn’t want to follow me that badly after all.

Other than that my weekend’s been filled with loads of “glamorous” stuff like laundry, washing dishes and taking long well-deserved naps. And getting my head ready for what promises to be an action packed week ahead.

I’m either going to have to write more often or learn to condense my thoughts a bit - this ramble is enormous!

Welcome to June

Can you believe it’s June?! Wow…feels like I should start thinking about Christmas soon (okay not quite, but you know what I mean?). Yesterday was Palm Day - the day that we celebrate my brother’s survival after falling asleep behind the wheel and taking on two huge palm trees. Every year on the 31st of May I give him a small palm tree with a ball of foil in it (he used to drive a silver car), and this year Wanette was kind enough to keep up the tradition on my behalf! Here is the little man with his latest palm tree! (A million thank you’s Wanette!).

You may have noticed that the winter header for this year is up (ta-dah! :-D) and I can honestly say, I’m starting to feel it. It’s getting quite chilly at night now.

News on the home front: We still don’t know when we need to move, or if. And the Vox phone/router/wireless-wonder-if-it-will-ever-work has finally arrived. Only it doesn’t work properly. I have to admit, I am not blown away by it. I have internet at home but I have to plug in with a cable instead of wirelessly (as I’m supposed to) because even though my laptop can “see” the router and the router can “see” my laptop I can’t get them to connect wirelessly and the Vox helpdesk is something that you should only approach if you have extreme patience and roughly half a day to waste. Yesterday I was on hold for 20 minutes and I never actually got to speak to anyone other than the switchboard lady - who was keeping me on hold for the engineer and who later confirmed my suspicion that there was only one actual engineer on duty. “Fantastic”. Allegedly you can schedule a callback for when it suits you, but don’t bother - that doesn’t work like it should either. Anyway, still works by cable so fine then for now. It was put the phone down or learn how to travel through the line so I can go biatch-slap someone.

*breathe in*…*breathe out*… right, moving on.

I’ve had a look at the special events calendar for June, not as funny as the one for May - but there are still some gems in there.

1. Children’s Day
2. Praise Yourself Day
3. Repeat Day
4. International Innocent Child Abuse Victim Day
5. World Environment Day
6. D-Day landings (Europe)
7. National Chocolate Ice Cream Day (US) …brr…Wanette says it’s never to cold for ice cream, but I really hope this is a slightly warmer day that the ones were having at the moment
8. World Ocean Day
9. Donald Duck Day
10. Mat Hatter Day…Uhuh, I could do something with this I’m sure, I think the hamster hat will see the light of day again!
11. YoYo Day
12. Machine Day
13. Juggling Day…This could get messy…where can I track down some flare barmen to watch for technique?
14. International Weblogger’s Day…Like every day?
15. Elder Abuse Awareness Day
16. Youth Day
17. Eat Your Vegetables Day…must be someone’s mom that came up with this one
18. International Panic Day
19. World Sauntering Day
20. World Refugee Day
21. International Surfing Day
22. Redemption Day
23. Pink Day
24. Glory Day
25. Play With Yourself Day…it seems every month on this calendar has at least one of these on it, I am starting to wonder about the creators of this list
26. The United Nations’ Day In Support Of Victims Of Torture
27. Stonewall Day
28. Handshake Day
29. Camera Day
30. Go For The Underdog Day…when they say “go for” does that mean support or attack?

There you go, keep up to date on reasons to celebrate.

Ill write again a bit later, but for now there is also the small matter of an outstanding tag by Wipneus for baby pics and a few up to the age of 10 to take care of. Here you go - a few random pics of me from way back when. (The first one is the first photo of me ever at 4 days, second one is me crawling at 6 months, third one is me having second beer that I stole from my dad 14 months, and the last one is me in primary school looking all innocent and so on at 10.). Now, this has been fun…but on a slightly serious note - I am not doing any more tags about the past.

As before if you feel like playing along, please be so kind as to tag yourself.

Memory Lane

Right…

I can’t chat for long today because I’m writing again tomorrow morning and I’m up to my ears in revisions and old exam papers at the moment, but I couldn’t resist playing along on this tag by Pikkelik.

As requested - here is a photo of my Matric Farewell dress. Sorry, it’s really rubbish quality photos but I don’t have it in digital and I don’t have a scanner so this is in fact a photo of a photo. Behold! I have been spotted wearing a dress on occasion (rarely) and this midnight blue velvet creation and accompanying cloak was lovingly made by my very own mother. She’s really quite a genius when it comes to these kind of things, unlike myself who would rather staple together a seam that’s unravelled than whip out a needle and thread to sort it out.

Secondly, I was supposed to add a music video of the year that I was born…thank you kindly YouTube for having all the answers when I needed them. This song was apparently from that year - Dire Straits : Sultans of Swing (1978).

I tag anyone who hasn’t played yet!

Desktop Tagging…

I was recently tagged by Chris, so click on the thumbnail below to see my desktop.

I’m tagging Graham, Gnome and Marius…