Category: life

Dysfunctional Appliance

I have a larny chrome kettle. It’s shiny. It’s spiffy. It goes well with the other brushed steel appliances and containers in part of my kitchen.

It broke.

Dada-esque Kettle

Now, I’d like to say it was due to a design flaw, but that would probably be unfair to Mellaware. They do have a mark inside the kettle that indicates maximum water level. This guideline may have been ignored on several occasions by those in the family who embrace entropy, and all it’s associated chaotic effects, wholeheartedly.

Dada-esque Kettle

I suppose I should try to fix it. I’m uncertain though: does it need welding or soldering? And what effect will the heat have on the nice shiny bits. Will they be permanently tarnished? Will the kettle get all bent out of shape (literally).
At any rate, I don’t have the required equipment, nor the desire to own it. Suggestions on a permanent fix to this problem are welcome, but in no way urgent. I’m using the kettle as a kind of performance art piece now.

Dada-esque Kettle, with gloves

Metal kettles full of recently boiled water get hot. One cannot pick them up to fill the teapot without insulation. Perhaps I’ll get Angie to help me take an action shot of the Dadaesque performance art kettle in use.

Return to Goblin’s Cove

Easter weekend. Angie and I booked two nights (Saturday and Sunday) at Goblin’s Cove. We’ve been there before. It was weird then. It’s still weird. But we like weird.
(I also note that imageshack has eaten the photos on the page that links to. Stupid imageshack).

This time, however, there was a freaky crazy psycho woman running the psychedelic coffee-shop. She didn’t like bees.
The way she pulled her raven-black hair back made her look very severe.
The way she carried around a can of insecticide and a lighter made her seem a little crazed.
The way she used the flame from the lighter and the spray from the compressed can of insecticide made her seem a little pyromanic.
The way she incinerated the bees dispassionately made her seem evil.

Then she closed in on the table near us, where bees were happily investigating the sticky tablecloth. They weren’t bothering us. Psycho-woman was, especially as she waved the can and lighter about.
Angie asked her to please leave the bees alone. She replied that she wouldn’t possibly think of setting them alight near us. She went away, and at least those bees were spared — for the meantime.
As we sat at the table in the open-air coffee shop, situated in a pleasant, tranquil forest, we were unsettled by the just noticeable, slightly sweet, slightly charcoal smell of heavily crisped bees. That smell, and the occasional sound of localised pressure changes in the distance as the oxygen was sucked from the air to help form a bee-apocalyptic fireball.

Everything else was pleasant though.

One of the waiters at the main restaurant (not the coffee-shop) took quite a liking to us. We rather liked him too. There was an instantaneous rapport between us. After lunch (which ended relatively late) he suggested we come visit. After all, he lived on the property, just next door to the restaurant.
So a little later we wandered over and visited our new friend Wikus. He was staying in a house that was designed and built by the same guy who’d put the insane architecture together for the Goblin’s Cove restaurant. We had a look around. Up the spiral stairway. On the creaky, uneven wooden floorboards. Holding onto ropes, because there were no railings where there should’ve been. Incredible place to live.
Wikus told us he was a little paranoid about living there because it had massive windows and no burglar bars, and a not entirely secure front-door. Wikus is originally from Joburg. That should explain it all.
We spent quite a while sitting there, drinking with him, chatting, smoking. Talking politics, talking religion, talking history, talking relationships, talking shit. The restaurant’s cook came over for a little too. Jaco was his name, I think. Wikus and Jaco are both of the age where the big bad old apartheid government conscripted them. Wikus did his national service and then 6 months later, they scrapped it. He never went any place too intense. Nothing too crazy happened. He thinks Afrikaaner nationalism is a little ridiculous, and they kicked him out of F.W. de Klerk’s office (where he was going to be a staff clerk) because he’d been bust possessing marijuana.
Jaco went to Angola. Jaco fought in a war, for something he thought was justified. Jaco seemed like a really pleasant guy (he joined us for about 20 minutes or so, before going to bed). I quite liked him, and I really liked his cooking, but one could see a level of distress underlying the surface. Demons lurking there.
It made me think about who was helping these people. On both sides of the struggle. People who fought in wars and did things they’d never dream of doing today. Who is helping these souls? Or are they just left in torment for the rest of their lives, forgotten by society. The dirty laundry that no-one wants to face up to, let alone clean.

Getting intense. Unintentional. Still, it was an excellent weekend and we met interesting people and experienced interesting things. We exchanged contact details with Wikus. I really hope we don’t let inertia stop us connecting again.

Bring on the Gautrain! (but have it stop in every suburb in Joburg)

There is one major drawback of owning one car — you only have one car. This is, of course, also the major strength of owning one car.

This week, it’s proving to be a weakness.

While driving home via the N1 highway on Tuesday afternoon, the engine stopped working. I don’t really have the full details since Angie was driving. She really should be the one sharing this story, but we all know that is unlikely to happen. I’ll do my best.

The car cut out in the middle lane, and Angie came to a stop. Soon afterwards, I received a frantic phone-call from her, pleading with me to please help her. The car has stopped dead! People are hooting! I can’t get out of the car! Help me!
I wasn’t really sure what I was meant to do, considering that a) I was far from the scene, b) I had no way of easily reaching the scene, c) Even if I could get there quickly, I still wouldn’t be able to do anything.
I should’ve told her to phone the insurance people, but I faltered. Under pressure, I couldn’t really think of what to tell her to do. In the end I told her to phone 112 — the cellphone emergency number.
The problem was further exacerbated by the fact that I couldn’t keep Angie on the phone and try to calm her down because her cellphone battery was almost kaput. This left us with SMS communication. Clumsy and difficult. And confusing at times.

On the bright side, Angie had 15 seconds of fame as she made the 5FM traffic news (and probably other radio stations’ news too) for causing an obstruction on the N1, and slowing traffic.

Ultimately, a tow-truck arrived to transport Angie and the car home. The confusion of the SMSs played a part here. From our texted communication, I thought that the tow-truck had picked up the car and left Angie on the side of the road. Panicked, I phoned Quinn to ask him to give me a lift to fetch Angie (who I believed, was flapping at the side of the road — using words like “desperate” can give that impression).
By the time Quinn arrived, Angie texted me to say that the tow-truck had arrived and would be bringing her home soon.
Why I thought it had already made an appearance isn’t entirely clear to me now.

The truck brought the car home, to my slight dismay. Because we’d need to tow it somewhere else the next day — at additional expense. At which point Quinn brought to my attention that the insurance people should do it. At which point I felt foolish for having paid R500.00 to get it towed home.

The fun of the night was not yet complete.

By this point, it was about 18h30. Angie and I had intended to have pizza that night, and we were not intending on changing our plans. Kindly, Quinn dropped us off at the pizza place in our suburb. We ate the pizza, cursed our dismal luck with automobiles, and drank wine.
Then we walked home. At night. In Johannesburg. That’s right kids. It’s not really that scary. The pizza place is only about 1.5 kilometres from home.
Except…
As we got to the last corner before turning into our town-house complex, we encountered many agitated people on the road outside a house. And then one of the ADT security vehicles came flying by. We overheard the word “hijack.” The people looked at us as if we were strange circus beasts, or a rare species of bird — a breeding pair of the lesser-known white-skinned nocturnal pedestrian.

The fun of the night concluded there, but the fun of the car continues! Read on!

The truck was towed on Wednesday morning to a service station, where I was cheerfully informed that the cam-belt had snapped, bending all valves.
People with cars dread this happening. Fixing it involves replacing a bunch of stuff, and taking engines apart and so on. It apparently costs a lot because it takes a while to get everything done. I don’t really know for sure because I’m more of a geek than a mechanic. Which is why I get ripped-off by mechanics and not by PC sales-people. In hindsight, given the relative expense of purchasing and maintaining PCs versus motorcars, I should’ve taken more interest in mechanical operating systems, than in computer operating systems. At least from a financial perspective.
Further adding to my grief is the fact that the service station couldn’t source one of the spare parts before the end of today. It’s now the Easter weekend, which means I have no car until Tuesday.
We booked two nights at Goblin’s cove over the weekend.
Fortunately, Angie can abuse her position at her NGO and borrow the organisation’s car for the weekend. So, at least we are vaguely mobile once again.

These, and other unmentioned things, led me to return to get my hit of Buddhism on Wednesday. Something I’d been missing lately. One needs to attend classes regularly otherwise one forgets to keep doing those useful things that keeps one calm.

I’m keeping calm again, which is much better than the grumpiness I had been returning to.

Enough waffle — for now.

Tammy’s Wedding

I haven’t seen Tammy for ages. Distances separate us, and neither of us seem to try hard enough to bridge those gaps. She did invite me to her wedding though, but it’s telling that I hadn’t met the groom until the big day — 10 March, 2007.

Tammy looked exceptional, as brides generally do. It’s something about the whole energy of the event of a wedding. People are happy and excited and thrilled for the couple, and they just soak up all that positive energy and radiate it back out at everyone.

Tammy and Nic leaving the church

Tammy lives in Polokwane, in the Limpopo Province. I’m not entirely sure I’ve been to Limpopo before, but I really think I should’ve made an effort to get there before. It really is beautiful.

Limpopo had this whole marketing thing going down in Gauteng about “Limpopo — Africa’s Eden.” Sounds like the usual exaggerated marketing in your pants. Well, where we went for the wedding and reception, it seemed a reasonable assessment of the situation.

Africa’s Eden

Of course, the thing about a wedding is that you never really get an opportunity to speak at much length with the bride and groom. Things were no different in this case.

The cool thing was that a bunch of people who I knew from university travelled up from Cape Town for the wedding. Did some catching up with the UCT, predominantly chemical engineering, crowd.

Surprising things were discovered — Lisa is married. Sam is in a serious (I think) relationship he didn’t appear to be in the last time I saw him (which was quite a while back when I was torturing myself with post-graduate studies). Mareike is back in the country!

Egads!

Everyone — except MareikeAngie and Mareike

If only the first picture had Mareike in it! I really need to try to be a little less adverse to orchestrating the occasional posed, group photograph.

Sad

I have a happy exciting post to put up about Tammy’s wedding, but I think the bad news should come first, even though we found out about it second.

Angie’s granny (her father’s mother) suffered a stroke and was hospitalised on Sunday night.

Understandably, Angie is quite distressed about it. I’m trying to keep her from getting completely depressed. She’s doing okayish. She could be better, but she really could be a lot worse.

My information on Granny’s status is a little vague, so what I say here might be a little inaccurate. She has been moved from the high-intensive-care wards to the less-serious-but-not-good-condition wards. Indications at this point are that she’s probably going to get through this, but isn’t going to fully recover. She’s probably going to need a full-time nurse from now on.

I must reiterate that the details I have are a little fuzzy, and I haven’t been to visit her so all my info is 2nd hand. If you happen to be family, rather speak to Bill or Angie for more accurate information.

Here’s my wish for the best outcome for Angie’s granny — a proud and independent woman.

Angie and Granny

Bean’s Great Adventure


Yesterday the Bean dog went for her usual run about the common grounds.

She ventured out in to the dam area (as is usual), and was gone for quite some time.
I began to get vaguely concerned when she returned, looking more brown and wet than I’d remembered her.

She was temporarily banished to the balcony until the bath was ready for her, much to her dismay.

27 on the 27th — Selected pics

There were other photos and other people at the party, but I’m tired, don’t have a web gallery, don’t have much bandwidth, and will not be finishing NanoWrimo in time. You’re lucky you’re getting anything at all you ungrateful lot.

Dave — looking magestic. At least, that’s what I told him to do before I took the photo. Apparently he wants a copy of this to put on his online dating profile.
Help yourself.

The definitive 27 on the 27th photo. If you weren’t in this photo, then you aren’t cool enough to be on the blog unless you were magestic, like Dave, or…

… willing to have your ear photographed — like Jaco.

Thanks everyone who could make it. For those of you who couldn’t, you missed out on the tale of the “hutbacked whale” and it’s sea-cabbage hunting expeditions.

Peugeot 206 — she is broken

If you read this here, and you feel I should have contacted you personally about these events, keep in mind that phoning a lot of people may not have been high on my priority list.

You may phone me, if you feel so inclined, but it isn’t really necessary. Everyone is well and relatively unharmed. No hospitalisation was necessary, although airbags did deploy.

Angie would seem to be quite accident prone. On Friday night I let her go off on her own again, and on her way back from visiting Jaco, she drove the Peugeot into a lamppost.

Admittedly, this omits some of the details regarding the accident. The details appear to be:

  • Angie brakes to avoid abruptly stopped vehicle.
    • Braking will clearly fail to prevent a collision.
  • Angie swerves around the stopped vehicle, but overcompensates and mounts the curb in the middle of the dual carriageway that is Beyers Naude.
    • Mounting the curb throws her upward in her seat, causing an impact with the ceiling of the Peugeot she was driving.
      • Head impacting car ceiling causes mild concussion
  • Not really remembering what happens next, Angie takes the car:
    • ploughing through a small billboard
    • smacking into a lamppost
  • Hitting the lamppost causes:
    • Airbags to deploy
    • Crumple-zones to crumple
    • Engine block to go away
  • Angie regains consciousness, and gets out of the car, unscathed, except for:
    • Cut on her thumb
    • Whiplash
    • Lower-back pain

I’m not certain whether I ever complained about the plastic dipstick these Peugeots come with, and how they tend to break off and fall into the engine block.
The French, although incompetent in designing the simpler parts of the vehicle, do seem to have got the safety features sorted out.

As a result, her physical injuries are practically negligible. Of this I am very thankful .
The assessor seems to believe that the car is likely to be written off — a result of combining the effect of the mileage and the engine damage.
Meditating on impermanence is pretty easy with respect to French cars. I’m thinking that I’d have more trouble applying these handy Buddhist principles if Angie’s impermanence had suddenly become more real that night.

Angie took herself to the doctor who has fitted her out with a neck-brace. Two week sentence. Angie has already started complaining about it. It’s itchy and scratchy, and hot and sticky. I think by the end of the two weeks, it will also be stinky.

At one time I had a bucket-bean dog. Now I have a bucket-angie wife. Perhaps I’ll post a picture, of both so that my loyal readers can make a comparison. I’ll probably need to get permission for that, though.