Books

I’ve spent the last gazillion public holidays housesitting (my brother has a bull terrier that needs a lot of attention and a fair amount of discipline, but she is very cute) and rediscovering my love of reading.'

Everything from epic fantasy westerns:

To straight fantasy (because we were watching the series the other day):

to non-fiction:

to just plain ridiculous:

Ness and I were talking about our need for some mindless chick-lit and she lent me this:

And after about two days I was able to stop crying.

What have you been reading?

conversations at work

Client: I feel so bad, we're going down to the coast and I won't have time to wash my dogs

Me: that's ok, they look fine

Client: I can just imagine the look on my mother's face

Me: she'll be happy to see you. And them!

Client: She does love her grand-dogs... is that silly?

Me: no ways, I have god-dogs.

Client: that's lovely!

Me: mostly it involves me feeding them treats and bossing the owner around

Client: you sound like a lovely dogmother!

True story...

I have learned

I heal fast. Ridiculously fast. It’s hard to believe a week ago I had leg-innards falling out and now I’m trying to decide whether to try running tomorrow or not. Probably not, but more because I picked up a cold in the doctors waiting room and now I sound like Macy Gray.

People can be really nice. Particularly if you mess up and inconvenience them and have to phone them and apologise. It’s always awesome to have someone who says “Sure! No problem!” It makes me want to be a nicer person just because of how awesome they are.

There are a lot of antibiotics out there. I’m currently on type number 3 in 10 days. On the plus side I’m not dealing with an infected dogbite (and type three hasn’t made me sick yet), and if I get any kind of secondary infection from this cold it’s been well and truly nuked by now.

Easter makes me want chocolate. A lot.

And still no petite lap-giraffe. It makes me sad.

It was bound to happen eventually...

So, on the most inconvenient day known to man, I got attacked by a rather large dog. To be fair he had growled a couple of times, but his owner was one of those lovely people who don't know the consulting hours  pitched up early and then didn't want to go home, so I gave the dog a squeaky toy to keep it entertained. And of course it managed to send it rolling under a shelf and couldn't get it out.

 

So, figuring that he was far enough away for it to be safe I tried to kick it out and back to him. He took this as my going to ste the toy and launched himself at me, dragging his owner with him and attached himself to my leg.

 

After a brief tug-o-war where he refused to leg go and I refused to let him hold on, I spent the next ten minutes trying to calm the owner down, calling the vet and trying to stop getting blood all over the floor (by wiping it up really quickly), until I had the bright idea that maybe I should stop it pouring out of me first.

 

By that stage all kind of weird things were falling out of my leg, the vet took one look at me and decided I needed a doctor, covered me in bandages and called the other vet.

 

The next ten minutes involved my insisting I could drive myself to the hospital, selling dog food, tryng to calm people down, thanking the twenty million people who offered to take me to a doctor and finally being bundled into the vets car and off to the emergency room.

 

After an hour (you fill your name in and wait, they don't even seem to screen by seriousness of injury, only by medical aid or not), we were called up and told that as I didn't have the actual medical aid card on me, that i could be a nasty fraud and using someone else's medical aid. But pick up the phone for authorisation was too difficult so I would have to go home and email the med aid and ask for a certificate then I could go back and be treated.

 

I phoned my mother who went into a tail-spin, and insisted I leave immediately and go to my gp.

 

So about two and a half hours post-bite my GP and all his colleagues oohed and aahed over the bite, had a debate over techniques, sewed me up and gave me tetanus jabs and antibiotics and sent me on my way. I complained about my lack of camera phone (it looks so much less impressive all stitched up) and tried to get the doctor to squeeze more of the subcutaneous fat out (it was falling out already, and have you ever tried to change calf-size? it's impossible!). 

 

I went home and off to gym (local anaesthetic on leg, it felt FINE), ate some dinner, took two painkillers and passed out with an ice-pack on the leg.

 

The next morning I stood up and almost passed out. The I had an exciting shower with one leg sticking out (and almost passed out), and then fed two excited dogs who jumped up against my legs (I saw spots, but only wobbled slightly) and then managed to drive off. It's slightly more painful tha admitting, particularly when I sit for too long and it gets all stiff.

 

The main issue is that the painkillers contain codeine AND a sedative (and a tiny bit of caffeine). I fell asleep at work several times, and was pretty much brainless when awake. Finally I went to the pharmacist and got something else and it's been a big improvement. I also got a first-aid qualified friend to check it out today and have it declared clean and (so far) infection free.

 

The strange this is that random people drop in at the vet now  see how I'm doing. My answer is generally along the lines of "I'm very medicated, how are you?"

 

I guess I was rpetty lucky, it might not have been the best idea for me to be driving as I wasn't making logical sentences when I got home. And my bosses and the P1 and my mother have been very long-suffering in my whining, particularly when I haven't taken pain-meds for a while (I can only take them when I'm not planning on driving soon as I tend to go off into fairyland when I'm on them).

 

Oh, and if anyone can get me one of these for my birthday I would be the happiest girl alive! I NEEEEEED one!

Dreams

It’s something that I’m relatively used to that I have a super-vivid dream life. I talk in my sleep, walk in my sleep, yell at people for stuff they’ve done in my dreams and often wake up when the phone rings and have a conversation related to my dream with the person on the other side.

Last night I had a dream that the cast of Dead Like Me (mainly Mason) hanging out in a train with Finn from Glee, discovering that there were newborn babies somehow psychically/telekinetically/voodoishly attached to them so that every time they moved the baby moved too. And i woke up with the tagline “I wanna party like a newborn” stuck in my head.

Not the point of the point of this post though. A while ago a ‘friend’ of mine treated me really really badly, and eventually told me that she would fake being half-friends with me for a while but eventually she’d lose touch on purpose and never speak to me again.

And she was in my dream and I went to her in front of a bunch of people in the train and i shouted at her. And I woke up feeling fantastic. And in traffic yesterday I realised why. In my attempt to avoid dragging our mutual friends (after we met 22 years ago most friends have been mutual) into the conflict she has basically been taking them away from me one by one. I don’t know what she tells them (although she told me to my face that she has lied to me and then accused me of being dishonest so I can imagine in her warped mind she must have invented all kinds of things).

so I think subconsciously I have been wanting to put my side of the story out there without being petty and hurting friends who shouldn’t have to choose between us. I feel like I’ve been treated unfairly and I can’t defend myself. and I feel like by being immature she’s actually winning. the high road hurts sometimes.

Who knows, all I can say is that I’m grateful for my dreams for letting me feel like I could do something about it, even if it didn’t really happen.

Stylish

yay, it’s been forever since I got an award and now bonda84 from life, love and other everyday adventures has given me this shiny one:

Which might just drag me out of blogger apathy for a while (Not sure if ‘stylish’ really applies to me considering that the best part of my year so far has been running around with pink hair, but I do like shiny things so I think I’ll keep it).  So the usual drill applies: 7 things about me, plus a bunch of people to give it to.

1. I love climbing trees but am actually not much good at it. I also tore my jeans on a tree on the weekend.
2. I love running to ridiculous music. The sillier the better. The joy of going to the gym is that I often wonder if anything ‘leaks’ out of my headphones. I never know if the funny looks are from the music they might be able to hear or from the way I giggle at certain stages while red-faced, sweaty and trying desperately to keep running.
3. I find pictures of animals doing human things (such as sitting at a computer) rather disturbing. Animals wearing clothes is even worse. I do not know how I worked at a petshop for 2 years without having a breakdown in the middle of the dog tracksuits.
4. there is a website called www.nooooooooooooooo.com . Seriously.
5. I got stung by a scorpion for the first time last weekend. It still hurts.
6. I use dog shampoo. It works fantastically well as well as being sulphate free, paraben free and soap free. It’s also a fraction of the price of the equivalent in human shampoo (and it wasn’t tested on animals either). So about that stylish award…
7. I have always been fascinated by the circus, and Cirque du Soleil was incredible enough to reawaken my old dream of running away and joining the circus. P1 said I bounced continuously for the full 2 hours.

So, who to give this to… I guess if you’re feeling more stylish than me (i.e. if you are a normal functioning human being) then feel free to take it if you’re someone who reads this and comments occasionally. just let me know please! And Vanessa, who just got her first blog and therefore requires a first award and will never take it unless it’s forced on her.

Fill in the blanks Friday!

As we all know I’m a sucker for things like this! if you want to join in link to here.

1.  The phrase or punctuation I overuse most is   ellipses… definitely… I can irritate myself sometimes when I can’t stop using the little dots…

2.  Today I am thankful for coffee. and for my dad who took one look at me this morning and brought me a cup.

3.  My best friend is: well I don’t believe in the concept of best friends, people have different reasons that make me love them and they all fulfil very important roles in my life. In terms of the first person I call when something exciting happens, then it would be the P1.

4.  A quirky thing about me is that I can only really exercise after 9pm, generally not too long after dinner. I actually like cold showers.

5.  This weekend I am doing as little as possible. It’s my last weekend here for a while though so I can foresee it getting hectic. So far all I have scheduled is a birthday party.

6.  Something that worries me is the way that everything is changing all the time but at the same time nothing seems to change at all. I worry that with everything moving around so much there won’t be anywhere for me anymore.

7.  On my night stand you would find my glasses, a box crammed full of earrings, my antibiotics (2 days to go!), nail polish (always gravitates there), a lamp and enough things that I have to be careful rolling over during the night as that can start an avalanche is my duvet is at the wrong angle.

As some people have problems with uneven bullet points, I will add in another one:

8. The most awesome thing I have found today is:

The return of the camera

So I took my camera out the other day for the first time in ages. the reason? Well when my super-awesome cousin brought me a present from Morocco and it looked like this:

I figured that not documenting it before opening would be some kind of travesty.

So without further ado I give you my collection of potentially (but not actually) illicit substances from overseas:

On the left is white powder from Thailand (it’s pure MSG, in case you were wondering) and on the right we have peppermint tea from Morocco.

I LOVE peppermint tea. I’m quite a tea nut anyway (tea is soup between meals, what’s not to love?) and I love anything minty, so to find peppermint tea is pretty much as good as it gets.

Plus the adventure of making loose-leaf tea:

(not to mention getting the leaves out of the spout afterwards)

and of course hunting through the cupboards for a glass cup, because half of the joy of interesting teas is the colour:

Mmmmm, tea!

Of course I felt that I should use the opportunity to photograph my dogs – the violent vicious one who bites vets (and boyfriends, but that’s another story)

(do you feel the rage?!)

And the timid fluffy one who I had shaved so that she looks like a gremlin/Gollum:

She refuses to stand still as she’s terrified of the camera shutter, so I had to sneak up to her while the other one was posing like a champion and wondering why she got all the attention

(once again, look at the scary scary puppy…)

Oh, and while I’m at it, I should show you all the reason why I whined about my feet hurting for most of Friday evening (to be fair they didn’t really hurt, but wooden-slat floors + heels = deathtrap)

Developments

So I’ve spent the last few days driving the long way to Pretoria to do labwork, which went fantastically well until… it didn’t. I’m facing a 6-week/indefinite delay and it feels like I’m never going to graduate sometimes. This time there’s nobody to blame, it was just incredibly unlucky, and I’ve been fortunate in that I emailed the wrong person about fixing it and he has been incredible in pulling out special contacts to get things moving faster (almost a-la-mafia-esque).

In the meantime I’m working on the write-up, which as a friend of mine says ‘steals your sanity, one penguin at a time.’

Therapy/counselling/sitting-in-a-small-room-with-a-captive-audience is going pretty well (I think). I’m getting used to the whole idea of talking about my feelings and she is very good at putting things into perspective or re-explaining what I’ve said in a slightly different way which makes me re-think it and figure things out.

On a personal note, my friends keep getting engaged! Seriously, three engagements in the last week – that’s a little bit excessive isn’t it? It makes me feel some weird kind of mix between very old and very young. I am very happy for them all though, particularly Joey who finally got her fairytale proposal.

And that’s basically all I can talk about right now, it’s back to work! Another evening in the lab, woooo!

My apologies

I don’t deal well with being angry and I’m feeling quite badly treated right now.

In an attempt to calm down I bring you:

And I finally saw Horton Hears a Hoo the other day (sorry Candice, I couldn’t wait any longer) and

not to mention the cuteness:

(image from here)

and with more cute kittens:

I learned today

That some people don’t fix things because they don’t want to.

That some people are unable to move on.

That some people don’t believe in friendship being more important than being right.

That some people aren’t worth knowing.

This is for you

Cute things

Kids trying to figure out old technology (to be fair I didn’t know some of the things). And the fact that they’re French just makes it cuter for some reason.

Pon & Zi

 

The Official Vuvuzela-song music video (10 points for recognising the location)

And of course, some random guy in Brazil playing it on his keyboard…

Moving on

I often wonder whether the university offering free therapy is creepy or reassuring. What I can say is that it’s useful. There are times when you want or need to talk to someone and there are no friends who you want to burden with that information. and sometimes the issues are private.

A lot of things happened over the weekend. I had a fun Friday night with the girls, a fun Saturday afternoon playing the drums and learning to read guitar tabs for bass guitar. And then I headed off to two different birthday parties.

So anyway I was standing in Goth-world late on Saturday night, struggling to blink through the weight of my eyeliner, having just discovered that my usual leaping around on the dance floor is nearly impossible while wearing 4-inch heels (logic I know, but I can run in them so I figured I could dance in them…) when I saw a friend of mine giving the barman a lesson.

The friend in question is a bartender, and in general he’s pretty good. He’s the type who remembers your name, gets you ‘the usual’ after about two orders and has listened to me whining about the latest drama in my life often enough. He’s a nice guy.

But seeing him bossing around someone twice his age, with instructions that were actually a load of rubbish just to impress the latest in his adoring legion of female followers really got on my nerves.

And I thought: I don’t want this anymore.

I’m tired of going out all weekend and being exhausted on Mondays. I’m tired of going to places that only open after 10pm. I’m tired of dressing up and being the life and soul of the party when all I really want to do is sit on the couch and watch a movie.

Other stuff happened too. The weekend went steadily downhill and I ended up spending Sunday evening crying on La’s shoulder while she was amazingly patient and more open-minded than me.

I have a lot to think about at the moment, and a lot of pretty big decisions to make. The scary thing is that if it wasn’t my situation I’d have all the answers. I know what I should do, but not what I want to  do. And I need to figure out how to get the two to combine and result in what I will  do.

Bring on the therapy.

The lives that we’ll save…

I don’t want to talk about the joys of studying in an institution that seems determined to keep me from graduating by charging exorbitant amounts of money just so that I can register to be tied here for the next year. Not to mention their not paying/underpaying/ not refunding money I spend on work means that I end up teaching for nothing and spending a lot of time doing things that won’t help me to graduate. AAAARGH.

So on a lighter note

I was looking for something in my old emails and found this on an old chat-log:

Oracle: we make such a great team: the Oracle and the Super-enlightened
we should go save the world.
i cover the world in fairy dust and you can give people music taste ;)
just think of the lives we would save- and the cool outfits
you already have the sparkles!

me: I do! we can sparkle-dust the world!
while playing cool music
with hats...

You rock! And when you submit your masters and I have a few hapter drafts sent off we will have a celebratory Glee marathon!

The Hustle just got overtaken

It’s not secret that I find cheesy choreographed dance routines adorable and this is totally my new favourite!

It even overtakes the hustle (I love you headless-hustle-man!)

And that is bearing in mind the hustle scene in Vampires Suck.

And that is all.

Making a story…

I remember on my 21st birthday (not the party, the actual birthday) my grandparents and aunt came for lunch and each of them told the stories of what they’d been doing the day I was born. The reactions, the mundane tasks. My parents had thought I would be a boy (they hadn’t asked the doctor but both suspected for some reason) so when I was a girl my dad ran out and got me a pink dress. My aunt told my brother about me, my mother was relieved that she’d changed her mind about my name (I’m pretty sure I was gripping the sides of the birth canal until she changed her mind) and so on.

So while I was attempting to stumble along the treadmill last night (darned festive season got me again) I thought about what I could tell little A when she gets old enough to ask about the day she came along.

Do I tell her:

• I was so nervous all day my brain was mush and I was useless until I went home, where I read Steven King’s Dark Tower series until I ran out of books.
• I got the message before my mother and she got all offended.
• I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone until I’d been given the all clear (people have to be informed in a certain order to avoid offense and stuff, and leaking something before time can mess up a carefully constructed social network)
• I broke the security boom at the hospital. Well not broke as much as I was the one that pushed the button as it began beeping long screeches and not going up. I got to park in visiting doctors parking for free!
• After all that stress I forgot the word for ‘maternity ward’ and went to the front desk where I demanded that the young man on duty ‘show me the babies’ – he was somewhat alarmed, but did help me once I explained that my brother had just given birth and that I had to go and see him. In retrospect I’m still surprised that he didn’t casually misdirect me to the local psychiatrist for a straight-jacket fitting.
• That that little girl is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and my brother and his wife just… fit. They’re the right parents for her, and she’s just completely and absolutely perfect.

update

So I just met my niece for the first time.

 

And basically fell in love in less than a second.

 

Shes incredible!

Why I should never be hired as a house-sitter

I am currently babysitting a house and five dogs.

I have already:

• locked myself out the house (to be fair, I had the keys, but the lock was jammed)
• set the burglar alarm off about 8 times, had the security company call the owners every time the alarm went off (which means they call me, and I apologise a lot)
• Broke into the house by borrowing my bosses small children and sending one of them in through a window
• Had a dog climb into my car and refuse to get out, including growling and snarling when I tried to coax her out before she drooled on my iPod too much
• Had flu and spent a weekend on their couch in front of the TV.
• Watched soccer for half an hour before I realised that it wasn’t cricket
• left the dog beds out in a hailstorm (again to be fair, the summer storms here do come up pretty darn quickly, and I was on the couch with the flu at the time).
• And had one of the dogs decide that chewing on the carpets is a fun pastime.

Ela-Ela!

This is the awesomest song ever! I can’t believe it’s taken this long to find it… And I don’t care if it’s so last-July, the vuvu still ahs a special place for me. Plus if I’m thinking round-up thoughts, then the 2010 thing needs some reminiscing.

My dog is at the vet today, probably trying to attack my bosses (again), but he’s actually got some vaguely worrying symptoms and I’m hoping they can fix him.

To apologise for his impending day of stress (on Tuesday I took him to work with me and he scraped the top of his nose off on the cage and generally freaked out until he had an upset stomach, the P1 and I took him and my other dog for a long walk along the river yesterday. It’s insane, after two days of torrential rain the river was higher than I’d ever seen it, including little waterfalls and rapids!

Besides being all virtuous and walking dogs, we also went for breakfast, worked on a puzzle and ate a scary amount of macaroni cheese. My kind of public holiday!

On another note, these things are why I don’t have a credit card…

huggable sushi!

 

ninjabread men!

Rainbow showers!

Cleaning-slippers (and they’re pink!)

 

And the Schrodinger’s cat is dead/alive shirt just got beaten by this!

Onesies for adults!

OK enough random rubbish for today, I must go and rescue my puppy.

Magnet-envy

I am entirely aware that this is a very bad idea. A set of those rattler-magnets (the two bean-shaped magnets that you separate and throw up in the air and they rattle) nearly destroyed my third-year academic results.

But I WANT one!

In related news I went to the doctor today and he gave me a rather scary regimen of various antihistamines/antibiotics and all kind of fun things. As someone who has never been able to finish as much as a tub of multivitamins before their expiry date I’m kind of terrified of being stuck with a very long course of antibiotics. And hints on how to remember them? I’m thinking I might be forced to get one of these:

but they scare me.

Thing's I've learned

• Being busy and being productive are two very different things.
• Photographing weddings is exhausting
• exercising too much after a couple of weeks of couch-potatoeness is fine, until you overdo it on the core exercises. do you know how much you use your core muscles? Particularly the lower-back region...
• threatening Paris Hilton moviesd Twilight is a good way of making people make movie-choices quickly ("the Hottie & the Nottie" anyone?)
• How I Met Your Mother is hilarious. Suit up!
• Driving in fog is scary. How do Capetonians manage it all the time?
• Plants vs zombies is evil.
• I'm officially c25k doomed. Getting past week 4 is an impossibility.
• turns out that when you need to leave the house just before 6am, setting the alarm clock for 5:45 doesn't really work. Odd...
• It took me 4 days to figure out why I was always late in the mornings.
• Being friendly to crazy-cat ladies is the worst idea ever.
• Woolworths makes amazing malva pudding. Now to try and find a recipe to make it at home...

The cutenessnessness!

Why marketing sucks (or rather I am such a sucker for it…)

Note: this was written under the influence of antihistamines and should not be taken seriously. Or should it? I don’t know, I’m still taking them.

I hate marketing. Not so much the adverts and shiny sparkling things that make me buy things that I don’t need and generally shouldn’t be able to find a way to afford (and then leaves me scrabbling around my car for small change by the end of the month so that I can buy petrol). sparkly things are my kryptonite, right up there with blue things, yellow things, things that make a noise with you poke them (this includes people), hats and anything cute (including things so ugly that they are adorable).

No, I HATE special offers.

Exhibit A:

So I stopped on my way out the other night to buy petrol and a bottle of water. I can’t drive without sipping water at every robot along the way, but lately with the warm weather I keep leaving the current bottle in my car and coming back to find it inflated to roughly the shape of a rugby ball and then I start having BPA-induced paranoia. I bet BPAs are more marketing tools to get me to buy more water. anyway, not the story I was planning on telling.

Ahem. Anyway… they have a special promotion where every time you spend over a certain amount (like R15 or something) they give you  sticker. Once you have 40 stickers you get to pay a ridiculous sum of money for a kind of ugly stuffed-toy of a dog. BUT if you get 75 of the stickers they give you one for free.

Despite all my weaknesses, I’m really not into stuffed toys. I have the sheep I got in Ireland, Elvis the travelling penguin, the teddy my dad gave me when I was born and the Jersey cow my mother got in Jersey (it’s kind of disturbing, with a MASSIVE hand the size of its head giving the thumbs up, and a normal hand on the other arm. Do cows even have hands? criticism aside I appreciate that on the last overseas trip she got me frog earrings and that documentary so she is learning and the effort much be appreciated and encouraging by proudly keeping the cow in my cupboard and hoping I don’t find it during one of my sleepwalks because I could go all Carrie on the world from shock). I used to work at a place that had one of those claw-machines and we played it enough for me to have a sizeable heap of them, which I have been giving away to random charities and stuff ever since (except for Elvis, he stays).

So I decided that it couldn’t hurt, I’d keep the sticker-book thingy in my car and if I happened to go to one of those outlets I’d get the sticker and one day if I ever get to 75 I’ll get the toy and give it to a charity or use it to distract a scary kid or something.

Which made sense until I drove about 5km out of my way to go to a garage that would have stickers yesterday. WTF?

Exhibit 2:

I bought airtime for my phone a while ago and got an sms to tell me that I got however many free minutes between midnight and 5am. Great. Thanks. Way to encourage drunk dialling? So is that why I organised to drive myself around on Saturday night, while keeping in constant phone-contact with a friend who could give the police details if anything happened? (and for you sticklers for safety, I had the phone in my lap, on speaker-phone).

I’m beginning to think that my weakness for ‘free’ stuff is getting out of hand. I bought an sms bundle today as I seem to be flying trough my phone credit far too quickly, and now I’m sitting and twitching, wondering who I can send messages to…

So if anyone wants to get me to go to an event? Make sure there’s free stuff. it doesn’t seem to matter if I like it or not, I’d probably go to a polka-revival event for a free decapitated barbie doll.

Because I NEEEEED it.

Which is why I should never have children.

Heads-up!

So I got an email from my parents today. It was the standard: WOMEN WATCH OUT THE GANGS ARE OUT THERE AND WILL JUMP IN YOUR CAR AT PETROL STATIONS! PARANOIA IS BETTER THAN CARELESSNESS, THIS IS THE NEW GANG INITIATION, IT’S A TRUE STORY WATCHOUTWATCHOUTWATCHOUT and so on.

Scary stuff. Well it was 6 months ago when I got the same email. And two months before that. And a few months before THAT.

The thing that confuses me is that it’s not like one of the LOLcat emails that people have sitting in their inboxes and then randomly see and decide to ‘brighten my day.’

And if it was so scary you’d think it would be sent out quickly so that we were all aware and then it would stop.

So are the gangs copycatting each other so it all starts again? Or are some people just really slack with their forwarding?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to send out the occasional message to say “OK ladies, the crime stats are still pretty scary and Joburg is a pretty nasty place to be stuck alone on the side of the road at night. Please be careful.”

On a serious note, be careful and keep safe, or you might end up having your story repeated on email indefinitely.

I tried to find a picture of a lot of tissues ‘exploded’ over a room, but then I ended up seeing a lot of sad photos of people with injuries and now I feel like a bad person for being so overdramatic about my hayfever.

That said, do they make tissues out of sandpaper? I may need to skin-graft my nose and it’s only day 3…

I think I am in love

With Werner Herzog

Since Grizzly man introduced me to the joy of meeting the love of your life at a mediaeval-themed diner, and the song of the coyote:

if you didn’t get that far, listen to the song here instead:

I want to sing along in a helicopter too!

Anyway the point of all of this (besides sharing the total awesomeness of being completely random), my folks were overseas recently, and my mother got me a documentary by Werner Herzog called ‘Encounters at the end of the world’ –

basically he goes to Antarctica and interviews some rather interesting characters.

P1 says as much as they were all crazy, I’d totally fit in down there. I might have been offended if I didn’t agree.

Can I go and find interesting people now please?

ah, the joy of filling eager(?) young minds with knowledge

Ok, so I may not be the most passionate, but I do try. and teaching, as much as I whine about it, is one of the very important parts of my life. After all, education is the only thing that can make things right in this country, and as a kid who had the best education that money could buy I figure that it’s my duty to pass that on and help where I can.

So when I’m not in the lab helping the kiddies build models out of plasticine (they won a contest and one of them rushed up and said “But we weren’t even competing! We were just being ourselves!” I was sad at the lack of hollywood-inspirational music at the time), or trying to convince them that drawing out of a textbook rather than using a microscope is a bad thing (you want to be a doctor? So what, you’ll take an appendix out of a dummy and ignore the sick person because it’s easier?) I am in a classroom with 16 of them, trying to shut them up and get them to concentrate.

When I’m not seething at the attitude-problems (they ARE teenagers after all) where they act as though their attendance is a favour to me, or trying to keep them quiet so that they don’t bother the class next door, we have had some interesting discussions.

• We all know the famous one: “if you are not a virgin and you have to go to the doctor, you can fool them but shoving chicken livers and skin up-“ *ahem*, right…. I told them that if they were uncomfortable with talking about sex then they most definitely shouldn’t be having it.
• “If Adam and Even were the first humans then their children would have interbred and left them disfigured. why aren’t we weird-looking?” “Well did you ever see Adam and Eve? Maybe we are. Now please do your assignment”
• “If there is a green mamba in the toilet you should leave it there because it is an ancestor.” Sure, leave it there. Just run like hell while doing it, K?
• “Poor people don’t sort their recycling”
• “Poor people don’t cause global warming”
• “It’s not fair that cars cause global warming because not everyone has a car so it’s not our fault. If we have cars we’ll deal with global climate change.”
• “We don’t have the right proportion of genes in our group because our parents weren’t all purebred.”
• “We should cull half the people on the planet. No! We should make it a sport and have people hunt people and if they get caught then the government should give money to their family.” (one of the other students stopped gasping in shock and pointed out that they’d already seen that movie).
• “If I’m from a rural area and I become a doctor can I skip community service? I don’t want to work for poor people.”

To be fair, they’re good kids (mostly), if a bit lazy and looking a bit far ahead to the ferrari’s in their futures. They generally speak pretty good English and they don’t really show as much entitlement-mindset as a few of the previously-underprivileged kiddies I’ve taught before.

And, I’m finished with them now, so I can safely say that I will miss them – as long as I don’t get them back!

You know when something seems like a good idea at the time?

Like finishing a power-boxing class and deciding to stick around afterwards and try out Capoeira…

This is what its supposed to look like:

Me? Not so much.

Although I desperately want to learn to do cartwheels again, but I told them I’d only attempt handstands and walking on my hands if we were practising somewhere squishy. And I’m in a significant amount of pain today so I’m guessing it’s good for you… although I’m sure it’s not as much pain as the terrified old lady who was repeatedly kicked in the head…

In other news: I have officially bought a dress, but might have to go and swap it because I think it’s too big (and this makes the neckline somewhat inappropriate). CG took me shopping and it was much easier to make decisions, plus she has magic powers (if she is there everything you touch is on sale, it’s WEIRD).

And P1 took me to the cricket on Sunday (my first real live sports event) and I had a blast! I’m so glad my first sports thing was for a game I actually understand. On the downside I have a farmer-tan, but avoided bad sunburn by liberal reapplications of spf-40 and P1’s gift of a massive white hat (that combined with my sunglasses made me look like I was headed to a day at the races).

The guy he got it from said something like “Try it on darling, oh yes you look like a queen, quite fabulous, let me get my camera, we must get some shots of this!” which for a side-of road hawker was enough to keep me entertained for most of the walk to the stadium.

Just so you know…

I give up.

Who killed the music?

I confess, I am a music-killer. I find a song I like and put it on repeat until I reach a stage where merely hearing the opening bars makes me want to punch something and then I put the ipod back onto shuffle until I find the next song.

This week it’s this one:

Before that we had:

The one I always pick on the jukebox:

The one that makes me think of being a little kid again:

this one still makes me smile:

And this one (my one and only itunes purchase was this album):

Apparently I’m in ‘sad phase’ at the moment. all I know is that I wish I knew where I was going to be this weekend. I need to find a rock to sit on and think about life, and I’m just hoping that I find out soon so that I can go and see my other home for a couple of days.

Random thoughts in traffic

Forget early edition, the coolest thing ever would be to get
tomorrow's TRAFFIC report!

I really hate traffic in Joburg sometimes. People get really
aggressive. I refuse to be intimidated.

my dreams have been weirder than usual lately. Last night the labmates
and I went for lots of testdrives and then took a random Subaru for a
testdrive, going at 230km/hr. In a parking lot.

if driving at speed with your window open uses more fuel than using
the airconditioner, how is this affected by the degree of openness of
said window? Is a half-open window causing more drag than a totally
open one or not?

my students asked me to 'be a parent' to them and give them life
advice today. It was awkward. And ageist.

why does a truck carrying a gigantic pile of peanuts have to travel at
20km/h on the highway?

at least I can keep my window open :)

Thump!

The whole family spent the weekend in the Drakensberg to celebrate my sister-in-law’s birthday. It was an awesome weekend, with the perfect hiking weather and enough of a mix of people that everyone had people to hang out with – the toddlers had the kids activities, the pregnant ladies had the toddlers, and the older folks had the pregnant ladies and the toddlers.

Me? I dragged my father up a mountain. And the next day I dragged him up a different mountain and made my brother come along too. It was quite odd – I spent most of my childhood holidays in the Drakensberg struggling to keep up with them as they sprinted along hiking trails, and this time I left them behind repeatedly until they organised someone to walk in front of me and slow things down. I wasn’t hurrying! i guess growing up is weird like that.

Unfortunately as much as my father and I bonded a lot, my mother and I are still really not seeing eye-to-eye. I think she struggles with her idea off what family relationships are and what she actually has – my father and I aren’t the most demonstrative people and seeing my brother and his new family who are all so close must be difficult for her. That said, she can’t hike and I refused to go all the way to the mountains to sit around, particularly when she was all difficult and snappish. I tend to respond by snapping back (I’m generally laid-back but my mother has a way of pushing buttons…)

We rushed back form the weekend away to get to my cousin’s baby-shower which was interesting. The scariest point being the number of times I was asked if I had any kids. People get offended when you aren’t flattered by the idea of having offspring floating around.

But I got thumped back to reality when I went to the salaries office today to find out why the university hasn’t paid me for teaching this year. Turns out they switched my forms with someone else’s, so my ‘salary’ has been paid to a stranger. And to make it trickier they lost all the original paperwork too. and they ‘don’t feel like going to the office’ – can’t I just call the guy and ask him to give me the money they paid him by mistake?

Can I go on holiday again please?

On the plus side, although our SA vs Ghana tickets fell through, we’re going ice-skating tonight! On the coldest day EVER! Yay!

Inspiring

• This story. It makes me happy to think that normal people out there really can make a difference. It makes me kind of teary, but in the best possible way.
• Having fun when you don’t expect it: last night I was exhausted, but dragged P1 out to have sushi with the labmates and had the most awesome time! Between the awful CD of cheesy ballads, sending stuff around on the conveyor-belt, my actually enjoying sushi for the first time (the totally did something different to the seaweed) and the dance-dance-revolution and bowling afterwards (there are videos, they’re not pretty) was just fantastic. And totally worth today’s zombiedom.
• Working at the vet. Yes we have crazy cat ladies and all the rest, but we’ve also got a bunch of clients who have rescued dogs from appalling situations and do whatever is necessary to look after them. It makes me all warm and fuzzy :)
• The kiddies: OK, so they whine and mope whenever I make them work, but I’m really enjoying my new group of student, who are quite vibrant people with interesting ideas and philosophies. While we do get their work done, we also end up in weird philosophical debates – which is what university is all about!
• This guy:

I hope I am as energetic and uninhibited at that age!

• This website… makes me all happy!

Have a good Tuesday!

And stuff…