Living their lives away

So I packed up and raced home on Thursday night, driving through several storms and stopping only to pick up cinnamon cola for the folks back home and a wedding present for the wedding on Saturday. It was quite fun actually, I didn’t warn anyone of my coming home a day early (there was one mega storm on its way and I didn’t want to get trapped there) and my mother got the fright of her life! The only downside (besides realising how bad this place smells) was all the construction that’s happened sine I left – the highway interchanges have all changed so I ended up taking a detour through Bedfordview, then to Midrand, then Kyalami, then Sunninghill while cringing at the fact that despite all the street-lamps and buildings that make this place so bright at night, people still have to blind me by driving with their brights on.

It was quite fortunate that I got back early, I got to go to donut-day, as well as our department’s end-of-year function where everyone made a huge fuss of me and I wanted to curl up and hide under a chair… I also had car trouble so at least there was time to sort it out pre-wedding+work+social Saturday and I was able to spend a couple of hours with La and CG and organise a proper Saturday evening.

Saturday was insane! I finished late at work (eventually just leaving the vet with the last client) changed in record time and just made it to the wedding which was really really stunning! I mean I got to see that side of the family for the first time in ages, I got a shiny new cousin who was looking so gorgeous AND they gave me bubble-mix! What a perfect wedding!

From there we planned for goth-clubbing but fate gave me a minor klap and instead I wound up as the only English girl at a sokkie club with several people trying their best to teach me to langarm, wile I had other friends calling me repeatedly from the goth club (about a kilometre down the road) to tell me how awesome it was. Did I mention that being all gothed-up at a sokkie club is not the most comfortable situation? Unfortunately La and CG had the time of their lives and refused to elave until it was too late and they didn’t want to go through to our original destination and as I wasn’t driving I had to be OK with it.

I have nothing against them having a good time, it was awesome to see CG smiling so much for once, and I felt really selfish for feeling so unhappy. I think it was just that after being considered to be totally crazy for the last couple for months I wanted to go somewhere where I’m considered to be vaguely normal. Being the only English girl (dressed in black) at the sokkie club, particularly following being so singled out everywhere else over the previous 36 hours made me very miserable. Particularly when they seemed to be enjoying my Englishness so much that they either laughed at my attempts to speak to them in Afrikaans or else refused to let me try.

It’s nice to be home though, bad smells and traffic notwithstanding! My hair straightener and I had a very emotional reunion, I nearly died at gym (lowveld to highveld altitude shift + a week of sitting around = I’m going to die at tai chi tomorrow) , I had too much coffee in the lab this morning while discussing stats and experimental design and was reduced to a gibbering wreck on my way to work this afternoon. So basically once Leia gets back from diving tomorrow it’ll all be right back to normal!

And it’s the Killers concert on Friday!

The Bathtub guy and the Leafblower Lady. Part 1

Anyway I realised that I never explained the whole leafblower-farmers wife thing. And that must be rectified! Unfortunately I have so many things to write about the people here that I will have to do it in smaller segments. Here is part one!

To start off, I’m living on a ‘farm’ inside a conservancy, which is basically a collection of little farms. Some of them are traditional farm-farms where they grow grapes or macadamia nuts or cows* and some of them are more game-farmesque. I’m on the East side of the Conservancy (it’s 30 000 hectares in total. That’s pretty big I think) which is mostly inhabited by old families that have been there for generations. They don’t like dividing the land between children so basically as soon as a son gets old enough to help run the farm and get married his wife moves in with the family and things carry on as normal. Some of the wealthier farmers even build houses right next to their homes for the eldest son and his wife.

It’s not unusual to find five generations living on the same farm. That’s the tricky part for me, because it’s very difficult to figure out who to talk to when I’m asking permission to trap lizards on their property. I’m very careful in these areas because there aren’t always fences and I can get very confused as to who owns what. And these guys are not against whipping out a shotgun at a supposed intruder (or so I’ve heard). The trick is to figure out who the oldest male family member is and ask him for permission before asking the younger guys who actually run the place. Just because Oom Piet is 94 and hasn’t got a clue about what’s going on, he’s still in charge. The easiest way to find the one ‘in charge’ is to phone the house at around 4pm, when they’d be bringing the cows in. That way you’ll be sure to get one of the wives on the line and they can be most helpful!

They are very kind people in general, although I don’t think that too much has changed in the last few centuries. Sure the veldskoen are replaced by crocs, but the two-tone khaki and kortbroek, comb-in sock sporting farmers make me feel like I’ve stepped into a Herman Charles Bosman novel sometimes. One day one of them will break out the peach brandy and pull out a pipe…

Unfortunately as charming as the old way of life may seem, there are nasty aspects. I’m fortunate in that I’m white and I speak Afrikaans which immediately makes me ‘fit in’ a little bit. I also don’t speak to any of them in formal Afrikaans, I use ‘jy’ rather than ‘u’ to put me on their level (and because I’m not very good at formal Afrikaans). Their farm workers still call them ‘Baas’ and wives obey husbands and so on. When they meet me they tend to get a bit confused. What is a 20-something girl doing driving a bakkie and running round after lizards. Shouldn’t I be married by now? They tend to get around it by deciding that I’m just a weird-looking guy. I get smacked on the back, shaken hands with, told about the rugby… and the wives look really confused.

We were told at one stage to avoid a certain farm because the people there weren’t nice. I’d already had to chat to the local butcher (who is also a horse farmer) and someone who was convinced that I was after his rather mangy bull (it looked at me and I freaked out a bit) so I was rather afraid of that place. They have a lot of dogs too which isn’t unusual around here, but they were all vicious-looking.

Anyway after much  discussion with Malcolm, my favourite pig-farmer and local gossip, it became apparent that the people were not all that bad. What had happened was that two of the mega (like 6-generations at once) farming families had spent generations peacefully ignoring each other, until the daughter of one of them married the son of the other family. They weren’t banished entirely, but sent to live on a distant corner of a farm and nobody would speak to them.

Towards the outskirts of the Eastern half of the conservancy is a creepy ramshackle house. We’re not quite sure if it belongs to the people who live there or to their grandparents who own a lot of the land in that area. They run a weird stall-type thing that sells water features made out of broken pots. The weird part: they make the pots, then break them strategically and us them to make water-features.

The only people I’ve ever seen in or around the house are three or four youngish guys. If you go in they put you on their duct-taped couch, offer you French Toast and say things like “There are GIRLS in the conservancy?” (True story, fortunately it didn’t happen to me). When they get bored they take their shirts of and take turns driving up and down the a stretch of the highway on a tractor.

No you didn’t misread that.

That’s all for today, I have to be up early tomorrow!

 

*you buy those cow-hoof things from Pick & Pay and start them off on your windowsill in some damp cottonwool

Do you come here often?

I’ve decided that rather than bemoan the fact that 10 gram lizards are infinitely smarter than me, I’m going to talk about the weird people in the world who somehow stumble across this blog. I don’t mean the regular readers (and you all rock!).

I mean people who have an inexplicable urge to Google:

• is there anything to do with fish you don’t want anymore (as in Nemo, or leftover fish fingers?
• lizard bonding feet (anyone care to explain this one?)
• is there any particular hair salon in bloemfontein I can use (why? would most of them refuse to cut your hair?)
• Laryngitis complete (the abridged version just wasn’t hurting enough)
• itboom (again, care to explain?)
• miss whiplash aka helen (I have a secret identity?)
• tales of doom (fair enough)
• lizards eating spaghetti (I thought they liked penne?)
• m.e. eye and tongue
• how many days out of a week do herpetologist work (well I’m on 7 right now, in case you didn’t figure it out).
• better than ftv (why thank you!)
• what are dangers if you don’t tie your shoelaces
• lizards like to go in people’s ears (so i should make ear-shaped traps!)
• do lizards tails move when falling off? yes/no

I hope that somewhere, somehow, you find the answers to your questions. And that you can dispose of the fish before they start to smell funky.

Confusion, reunions and general weirdness

So it was an interesting weekend. I started off dutifully dragging my achingness off to the gym on Friday, and discovered that I was actually able to run! My family sat me down afterwards and told me that the TOD is psychotic and this is all rubbish and so on and so on. They were somewhat mollified by my promising to avoid exercise for the rest of the weekend as I had a lot of stuff going on...

Saturday was the vet as usual, where I was joined by the very charming seven-year old daughter of my bosses again, who was very cool this time. She made me business cards (my name is "Hellin" now) as well as making me envelopes so that I could write her letters, and a proper 3-dimensional landscape thing of children dancing around a tree next to a tent on a beach. Seriously, for a sever-year old? Impressive. She also gave me outfit advice for the evening which was seen with great amusement by her parents!

In the evening I rushed off (late as usual) to Tamara's birthday thing. I was pretty scared, particularly walking up the road in her complex. It was a beautiful night, the crickets were chirping and I had the awful feeling that it was the opening scene for a slasher-movie. As it happened I made it out alive (not just because of the flat shoes) and although I couldn't stay long, everyone was really nice, they seemed to like my entrance of "Hi, nice mullet!" and by complete coincidence one of my ex-students was there with his wife. By even creepier coincidence I had been thinking of him recently in the "I wonder if he's still alive?" kind of way.

From there it was a sprint to chief-Goth's house, where I had a mild freak-out at my general lack of makeup (as usual. Seriously, I need to start taking eyeliner with me!) I was distracted when I had to do the eyeliner and nail polish on one of the guys. To his credit he sat very still and it looked AWESOME!

From there we went off to Goth-world, which had a surprising number of normal people there, including one of my students of course. Here I am with La trying to pull emo-faces. Well I tried, La is always smiling! I believe we took this photo shortly after the eyelinered-guy tried to set me up with the bouncer (who was gorgeous!) and we had swapped phone numbers. As I said it was interesting...

And of course we had to find people with hats... This guy was quite into the whole photo things... I had just jumped off the dance floor having gone totally ballistic for about 5 songs in a row (including headbanging to Song 2, fending off some dodgy guy and laughing at someone trying to dance with La who didn't even notice he was there) and so I was exhausted and my hair had decided to remodel itself...

Hat-guy had a scary friend who was actually really nice, but had a weird tendency to appear in the bathroom whenever I was there. hence the panic-face...

I also got to spend a lot of time with one of the people in the social circle who I've never got to know before (beyond the obligatory re-naming and laughing at us when we got a bunch of random strangers to yell at the TV with us one night). The problem is that eyeliner-guy and his girlfriend are trying very hard to be puppet-masters in the whole situation. Seriously, if I want to get to know someone I will do it on MY terms. Don't mess with me, I can make my own decisions! AAARGH!

From there I went to La's house and had hot chocolate and a great discussion about life before crashing until the next morning where we had a great breakfast at MacDonald's (don't tell the TOD!). Then I went home and slept before I went to work with La in the afternoon and Chief Goth brought us milkshakes and we had a great time dissecting the previous evening a La Girl of course...

After all that... Things I learned this weekend:

• I know a lot more about music than I'd realised.
• I really suck at being out of my comfort zone. It's amazing how I can be the life and soul of the party and do crazy stuff as soon as 'My Girls' are with me. On my own it's just plain scary.
• Getting to know the quiet people is immensely rewarding
• sometimes eating burgers in the parking lot with a close friend is the best kind of hanging out.
• People are generally nice
• I should avoid a certain lip-gloss in future (thanks for pointing that out NOW Leia...)
• I don't like being a puppet
• I don't speak Girl. Or Guy. How the heck do people read so much into things? I just don't see the fine print. Seriously, I need a sign around my neck that says "Mind Games Prohibited" It would make life so much easier.
• People really DO say "I can like to" In my case it was a dodgy old guy who said "I can like to chat you up!" while looking down my shirt.
• Shy people are really good human shields.

Anyway that's enough for today, I'm off to have lunch with Leia as I think we have a significant amount of news to catch up on!

Tales of doom (or it it Boom?)

vs


(Yes, more LOLcats. So sue me.)

I'm kind of fluttering between attitudes at the moment. On the one hand I am in severe pain - after the two hour-long torture session yesterday morning, followed by an hour of tai chi (with extra stretching - ouch!) last night (it was AWESOME! They let me play with a sword and I only hit myself in the head with it once!) I was pretty much unable to move this morning.

Of course I had a 9am session with the trainer of doom (from now I will call him TOD) so I managed to sort of fall out of bed (I'm ok as long as I don't bend my knees, so getting up from sitting, or sitting from standing hurts. A lot. Walking up stairs is slow but ok, downstairs not ok at all...), eat breakfast (not wanting to risk a repeat of yesterday's lunch-inhale), play with my dogs (slowly) and get myself there.

I met the TOD who was WAY too chirpy and I told him that I was in pain and it was all his fault. He laughed, lead me to a treadmill and blamed the tai chi. And then he made me run.

Here I must mention something. I have "one of those faces." you know, the face that says "I care! I love to listen. Tell me all your troubles oh random stranger and I will listen and sympathise and agree with everything you say." And generally I like the way that I meet very interesting people through their tendency to meet me and spill out their troubles. Of course trying to pass my drivers test while the examiner went on about her divorce and subsequent relationships was a bonus (I don't think she watched me too closely), while working at a vet, it is generally a bad thing (where you end up listening to things like: "And then he stroked the dog and it vomited and he just knew... and that was my fifteenth pet. My sixteenth was a kitten named Fluffy..."

Once people get to know me they tend to notice my total lack of tact and ability to give usable advice and then they can confide in me and I will not repeat what they tell me and I will sympathise because I actually do care.

But when I am trying to run on rather achy legs and not die, I am not particularly sympathetic about anything other than my own unhappiness. so when TOD decided to tell me about his girl-troubles I was most bemused. I mean I'm all for small-talk as long as I can breathe, but when you refer to your sex life as "doing the Boom-Boom" and discuss all four girlfriends in detail... I just want to fall off the treadmill. On the plus side my gasping at the effort stopped my natural response which would be to giggle uncontrollably and leave the room with tears streaming down my face.

And now I hurt. Leia and I were doing our twice-daily stretches in the lab (I will beat these silly short hamstrings of mine!) and I couldn't even get into the stretching poses without using my arms to push my legs into position. I had my legs crossed earlier and I only managed that by literally picking up one leg and pushing it over the other...

And poor Leia has had to put up with me. Because guess what:

And I whine. A lot. Now more than ever. And the poor girl has had to put up with my random ramblings on the awesomeness of tai chi, the pain of whatever TOD has made me do this time, the fact that the guy I really have a thing for went to her high school and a great deal of whining about the pain...

Yesterday she finally caved and told me to suck it up and shut up.

Sorry Leia, you rock. And thanks for knowing all the weird muscle groups and stretches that stop it hurting quite so much... And for listening to all my rubbish!

And of course I apologise in advance for my attitude tomorrow after I go and finish off this morning's exercises this evening and then have another session with TOD tomorrow!

If I ever get around to getting a sword I'll let you try it out!

Let the torture begin!

I know I promised myself to avoid LOLcats on here but I couldn't resist this little guy!

Anyway, on wiith the story... I was happily pushing and pulling random things at the gym last night, trying to avoid eye-contact (as you do) and watching some little kid helping some old guy to figure out the machines. The kid tried to help me too, but I refused (I mean if I wanted a personal trainer I'd ask for one, right?) And so I was finishing up when I was approached by a random guy who introduced himself as a personal trainer and offered me a free session.

To be honest I have been plateauing a bit lately and I've been considering asking someone to help me write a program that I can follow, particularly when I go off on fieldwork and there's no gym or tai chi (sob) or anything besides hills and lizards and heavy buckets.

So anyway I accepted and he started interrogating me about my routines and what I do and my goals (apparently wanting to be able to squat with my heels on the floor, run for twenty minutes without dying and manage those nasty kicks in tai chi are not good goals. Wanting a nice butt and to lose 10 kg IS a good goal. Whatever!), and he basically told me that I have no clue what I'm doing (true) and that "it's not going to be effective unless you figure out a routine based on real knowledge and understanding and hey are you south african? You sound American!" Yes, born and bred.

Next thing I know I'm' being lead off to the contraption of death which measured my BMI and body fat percentage (kill me now) and then, once he'd berated me for having rather a significant portion of me being padding and not enough being biltong (to be fair, he was really nice and I didn't flinch as much as I'd expected, except when I mentioned how unfit I used to be and he wanted to know why on earth I would let myself go so badly... well you know, I started a degree and then whoops, a few years vanished and none of my clothes would fit...), and then I got lead off to an "assessment room" where I was poked and squeezed by callipers and demonstrated exactly how ticklish I am (i.e. very) and we discussed my goals.

So tomorrow morning I am going to go and meet him at the gym to begin a series of assessments where he can see how tough I am and plan a programme. I'm excited about it - it'll be nice to have some direction, and he's promised to try and help me to squat properly with my heels on the floor which will make tai chi easier. But at the same time I'm quite terrified of having someone keeping an eye on my progress.

Which is why you should never talk to strangers. They might try and help you.

If we were supposed to kick our own ears we would have been born with spaghetti-bones!

So lately I've been having an ugly few days. You know when you wake up in the morning and your skin is bleeeuh and your hair stands on end and you have that LOVELY pillow-crease down one cheek? This was all exacerbated by the fact that I've been feeling a bit sick for the past few days. Why?

Well lately I've been getting healthier and healthier. Without realising it I'd stopped eating junk food, exercised more and yadda yadda yadda... And so when having an ugly day I did what every other girl (I hope) does. I got chocolate. Which quickly turned into me eating more junk food in 3 days than I have in the last month. Stomach ache much? And of course trying to use said stomach muscles to support me in tai chi... not so much.

Tuesday was awesome, I kind of just ignored the nausea brought on by having bought lunch instead of packing it in the morning, as well as having ice-cream with someone I'd rather forget... and it was so much fun! So much so when the class ended we thanked the teacher and ran back to our spot to carry on practising! Then having had a mega-bucket of popcorn on Wednesday (and skipping gym in order to go to a girl's night movie evening) and going through a lot of chocolate and biltong-flavoured crackers (which rock) yesterday, I went off to tai chi to find out that they expected me to do this:

And this:

This morning I kind of hobbled in to the lab with legs of jelly... (the jelly flavoured like pain) and resolved to eat properly, stop skipping gym to eat popcorn and try and find someone who will sell me an IV filled with coffee. And start pilates again so that I can build up some kind of core strength. Mine is gone (I had some! I promise!).

On a happier note four of the searches that have found my bog lately are (drum roll...)

horst kleinschmidt
parents and pocket money uk
how to make shoelace don't drop off when running
lizards eat beef

Which I think is far funnier than the previous ones (of which my favourite was "If something happens to me, I got people" or "What do you do if a lizard on head while sleeping")

Makes me want to start an advice column...