Sherlock Holmes has entered the chat

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The London-based, Victorian detective is famed as being one of the greatest sleuths of all time, but I think that he might finally have met his match, just 138 years after he first appeared in A Study in Scarlet.

Sure, Holmes may have worked out that The Hound Of The Baskervilles was just a dog painted with phosphorous. He might have deduced that Jefferson Hope killed Drebber and Stangerson, but he would surely have been flummoxed by some of the modern mysteries that plague us today.

Thankfully, I have found someone on Reddit. Someone who shall remain nameless: let’s call them No-Entrance4253 (because that’s their name on Reddit), who has not only asked a question, but then formed their own possible hypothesis as to what might be going on.

Look at that. Just look at it. Wow.

The human mind does not get any more brilliantly analytical than this.

Holmes might have had his:

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

but No-Entrance4253 left the impossible right out of this. No-Entrance4253 then completely disregarded the improbable and went straight for the jugular of truth. There’s no water in my house in Newlands. There is a burst water main in Newlands. Could these two things be connected? YES, THEY COULD.

You can’t be sure, though. You can’t just dive in and assume that correlation is causation. So just add the word “maybe” into that second statement. Play it safe.

The only way to really convince the audience, which is collectively fawning over your mental abilities, is to post on the Cape Town subreddit and see what people say. Sherlock Holmes never had this sort of luxury: he had to put a Classified Advertisement in The Times of London, looking for some sort of validation. It took days to get a response, maybe even weeks.

No-Entrance4253 immediately got several responses, amazingly absolutely none of them taking the piss (I was sitting on my hands).

Incredible.

Tune into 6000 miles… again tomorrow, as we watch local Reddit user LilywhiteFormat271 take on one of the biggest mathematical questions that humanity has ever faced, and come up with a shocking answer of… 4.

Helpful reviews

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I know that a lot of you out there think that it’s all invitations to film premieres, VIP seats at international music events and black tie charity auctions with foreign dignitaries – and look, a lot of it is – but there is also a mundane side to being South Africa’s favourite blogger.

You can’t simply overlook the day to day stuff.

Like buying bags for your German-made vacuum cleaner, for example. We’ve got the Kärcher WD3: a good mix of power, portability and reasonable value for money. And I need some new bags for it.

Und es ist gelb!

Weirdly, it’s proven actually quite difficult to find these things on previous occasions. They can be pricey, there always seems to be a stock and supply issue, and making sure that you get the correct bag with many similarly coded variants around is more of a pain than it should be.

So, here’s what I found initially:

OK. No stock, but that’s fine, I can wait. Fits the WD3. And 4 bags, which means that I probably don’t have to go through this rigmarole for maybe another year or so.

But this being a page from our pisspoor local Amazon wannabe, and they’re not always as trustworthy and accurate as we’d all like them to be, so – as always – I’m just going to check the reviews before I order.

And – as always – they’re absolute gold.

You know – you just know – that when anyone starts shouting at the end of a 5 sentence review, they are part mildly unhinged and part absolutely furious. There’s a guy on the Whatsapp group down in Agulhas that is FAMED FOR HIS SHOUTY RANTS, and you can always tell how outraged he is by how many he gets into a single message. I wonder if he’s related to Luke?

But look: that’s exactly what I was saying about above. You can never guarantee that what you ordered is what you’re going to get.

Elme’s a big fan of Takealot, though:

Elme’s hoping for a voucher for her groveling review. Sadly, she messed up by trying to buy her vacuum bags somewhere else first. Though quite why she needed to order from here at all when she couldn’t not find the bags at her local store is a bit beyond me.

5 stars from Tracy:

I wouldn’t love that it comes in a pack of 3 when I’ve ordered a pack of 4, but clearly Tracy doesn’t see that as a problem. I would agree that it’s the beat vacuum ever, though.

Grant is all about the savings:

I wouldn’t know where to go to buy an individual vacuum cleaner bag. I didn’t know that was a thing. And given the stress of trying find these things each time I need them, I’m already thinking that they need to be sold in a 20-pack.

But it’s Gabrielle that nails it for the “most helpful comment on the page” award.

What… what on earth was anyone planning to do with them aside from replacing the old bags? Use them as some sort of humane rodent trapping device? An avant-garde handbag for an upcoming trip overseas? A lamp shade for a troublesome pendant light fitting in the garage? Or a cheap (not that cheap) alternative to a beekeeper’s hat and veil?

Gabrielle has opened a can of worms here in hinting that there may be some other use for vacume bags for her vacume cleaner. Thankfully, with (hopefully) 4 in the pack, maybe I can try out some alternatives while not compromising on the housekeeping.

I’m going to order now, and experiment in 5-7 work days. Watch this space.

Tough (stuff?) times

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What with one thing and another, the last few weeks have been rather difficult and disrupted. I’m equally ready and absolutely not ready at all to get back into some sort of new normality, but with (at least) another two weeks of bathroom renovations to go, I can’t see it being a smooth transition.

Still, I’m really not in the mood to let my mind idle for too long, and so I’ve been throwing myself into doing stuff as much as possible. I’ve got plans for sprucing up the spare room and the kids’ bathroom, but I can’t do that at the moment because they’re two of the most important rooms in the house with the ongoing renovations.

We spent yesterday afternoon rebuilding part of the garden. I’ve been repotting plants and tidying up out there again this morning, fighting – and comprehensively being defeated by – the bergwind and the autumnal leaves. And now, after this blog post and before the afternoon’s footy and this evening’s braai, I intend to hit the Geoguessr website for the first time in over a month.

And should I run out of other stuff to do (unlikely), I do still have about a million photos that need cataloguing. That would likely be a plan for later in the week, though. It might be (and it is) 35oC today, but we’re due for a maximum of 12oC on Thursday.

There’s even talk of lighting a fire simply to keep warm, and not to cook food on. Crazy, crazy times.

Or “Autumn”, as we usually call it.

Sleep well, Beagle dog

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We had to say goodbye to our beagle last night. It was horrible. It still is. But the scan she had yesterday morning showed an aggressive spinal tumour, which wasn’t even visible 5 weeks ago, but which had grown and already spread to her lungs, and there was clearly no option of treatment or recovery. She’d not been well for a while with other stuff, but this was very sudden and unexpected.

We brought her back from the vet, and spent a last afternoon together at home. She lay on her favourite couch, she snorfed all around the back garden, she enjoyed copious amounts of chicken, biltong, and a lot of cheese. A lot of cheese. We all stayed with her all afternoon and gave her all the fuss she could have wanted.

And then we had to let her go. An absolutely devastating experience, but she deserved that respect and she deserved not to struggle or suffer.

It’s always so hard to deal with these things, and it’s important to concentrate on all the happy times we had together. Amongst many other things, I’ll always remember our long weekend walks on the beach in Agulhas – she was the best listener sitting on the rocks by the lagoon – and her ever-willing assistance with the crusts of my Butler’s pizzas.

It’s also worth pointing out that those few hours yesterday afternoon were merely a concentrated version of the life and the love that we had given her. And it wasn’t a one-way street (ok, to be fair, the cheese was): she was the most loving, understanding companion; incredibly gentle and endlessly patient, especially with the kids and their friends. Never judgmental, just always there with unconditional love and a little nuzzle as she slipped her head under your arm and onto your lap.

It was almost eleven years ago that Project Colin began. I wasn’t sure then, but she quickly worked her way into our hearts and lives (and the fridge whenever possible), and the house already feels incredibly empty without her. We’re devasted.

Of course, we have millions of photos and videos of her, but the one above is the one that hangs in the bar, and reminds us to take some time out once in a while, step back from the real world and just relax.

Live life like Colin.