Category: learning curve

A bit of a moan

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It hasn’t rained much in Cape Town over the last few weeks. Maybe even the last few months.

And there is a bit of “Day Zero” talk entering the chat, although to be fair, we’re a long way from that sort of scenario at the moment (but you never say never).

In fact, looking back, I can only really remember a few hours of rain over the last few months. Two of those hours were last Tuesday night, when we tried to watch the cricket. It didn’t rain all day – just for the few hours when we actually needed it to be dry, so that they could play cricket. And once the cricket (such as it was) was over (no pun intended), it stopped raining and was all hot and dry again.

And the other few hours are… well… now. Again, it’s been a scorcher of a day, but then this evening, it began to rain. Why? Well, that would be because our daughter went to an outdoor concert.

Not this morning (dry), not this afternoon (hot and dry), just this evening. And, much like the evening of the cricket, it looks like the rain will stop pretty much as the concert ends.

There will be no rain tomorrow evening, when there also won’t be a concert.

Perfect.

I once had an idea involving an iceberg, which would have solved Cape Town’s water issues forever.

I did a fair amount of maths and stuff for that, but actually, why bother with dragging a chunk of Antarctica all the way to South Africa and then filling the Franschhoek Valley with ice when I can clearly just make it rain by spending money on weather-sensitive evening activities?

If you need some rain, I’ll just buy expensive tickets for a theatre thing or some tennis (ok, not tennis), and we can all enjoy the precipitation and petrichor as the evening is ruined, the money wasted, but the dams filled up.

IN CASE YOU ARE WONDERING – and I don’t blame you for wanting to ask – no, I can’t see any more events in our diary which will be ruined by rainfall, just yet. So you’re free to go about your business safe in the knowledge that it’s not going to rain on your parade.

Only mine.

But of course, I’ll keep you informed.

It’s not as easy as it should be

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It’s not actually that easy to set up a new phone from scratch.
And maybe that’s a good thing.

As I said the other day, I got a new phone recently, and I am using the opportunity to de-clutter my handheld mobile experience. That’s all well and good, but it does mean that I can’t just press the magic Google button and transfer everything over onto my new device.

And so there has been a bit of picking and choosing, and then once there is a picked and chosen situation, you have to log in to each of those new accounts on the new device. Extra authentication is obviously enabled on everything I use, adding at least two extra steps each time, and some things just don’t want to work at all – more Sweet FA than 2FA. I can’t transfer my banking app over (the QR code just won’t scan), and I can’t log into Reddit at all, even though I’m still logged in on my laptop.
Whatsapp – as one might expect – is being an utter bastard.

But I guess that the trouble I’m having to go to is at least somewhat reassuring in that my online life seems quite well – too well? – protected.

And so I suppose that it would have made things a lot easier if I had just pressed the magic button and then let Google do its thing. But then I would have spent a lot of time deleting apps and data and things. Or would I? Would I just have been lazy and be left with a new, sparkly, but full and cluttered phone?

Mmm. Probably.

And so I’ll keep going with this new, minimalist approach and see if I can conquer the gremlins and the demons of just being able to log into an app. Jeez. It really shouldn’t be rocket surgery.

Oh – the camera on this thing, by the way – very nice.

Spotted online

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This quote:

If you think about the vastness of space, and how enormous our galaxy is, how big our planet is, and how small we are, I’m not really eating that much cheese.

Please feel free to substitute braai meat, Castle Milk Stout or chips.

I know it’s not healthy, but it’s not every day (well, it is at the moment, but…).

Holiday time. And it’s really not that much cheese.

Look at the bigger picture.

Dotting i’s

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Finally, the final instalment of my Chilli advent calendar review.

Previous reviews: 1, 2, 3.

Three to go (I thought it was two, but there was a bonus 25th box too!).

And those three were:

Jalapeno Sauce. It’s Jalapeno Sauce, but it’s SOOOO smoky with it. A delicious variation on a common sauce, and it works.

Jalapeno Slices. Much, much nicer than the shop bought ones. And you wouldn’t think that sort of thing would be very noticeable. But this is another product that I’ll be exploring further.

Craken. It’s just incredibly dangerous. Like Hydrofluoric Acid, but in Chili form.
I literally can’t manage more than the tiniest amount. And even that hurts.
Lethal.

Too much for me, but if you’re a hot sauce connoisseur, you might want to test yourself against this one.

As I mentioned before, it’s been a really interesting experience trying out these products that I would never usually dip into. The idea of one a day, and the little tester size vials and jars is a real winner.

Thanks, family.

Foolish Fortnight

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Yeah. Ke Dezemba in ZA and we all know what that means. But the revelry it brings isn’t new and it certainly isn’t exclusive to South Africa.

Kegeesh Ommidjagh – the foolish fortnight – begins (began?) on Oie’l Thomase Doo (Black Thomas’ Eve) (that was 21st December) on the Isle of Man, and well… they got up to some naughtiness, back in the day:

Rampant fun & the relaxing of moral codes(!) were the norm across the Isle of Man throughout Christmas in the past. Barns were claimed for dancing across the Kegeesh Ommidjagh, with fiddlers hired by public money, where parties apparently got so wild that youths sometimes felt compelled to go outside to continue their ‘close celebrations of the festival’ in the hedgerows…

There’s even a passage from George Waldron’s ‘A Description of the Isle of Man’ , written in 1731 that recounts the scenes – surprisingly candidly for those days:

“There is not a barn unoccupied the whole twelve days, every parish hiring fiddlers at the public charge; and all the youth, nay, sometimes people well advanced in years making no scruple to be among these nocturnal dancers.
At this time there never fails of some work being made for Kirk Jarmyns; so many young fellows and girls meeting in these diversions, nature too often prompts them to more close celebrations of the festival, than those the barn allows; and many a hedge has been witness of endearments, which fear of punishment has afterwards made both forswear at the holy altar in purgation.”

The whole thing is quite a read.

But if nocturnal copulation in the local farmers’ fields in the middle of winter wasn’t foolish enough, then you really need to click here and read some of the astonishingly bizarre traditions of the Kegeesh Ommidjagh.

Groups of young lads roamed the towns making ‘a rare din’ singing, dancing and playing homemade instruments, carrying mollags – inflated sheep’s bladders – with which they hit anyone who got too close. The aim was to make money, but they were perhaps hounding it out of people more than receiving willing donations!

Ah yes – the old sheep’s bladder boinkers. Always a giggle.

In church was the Oie’ll Verree service which took place on Christmas Eve. Here the singing of carols was accompanied by young women throwing peas at young men.

Standard religious nonsense.

Amidst the final drinking and dancing there was the Cutting off the Fiddler’s Head, where the fiddler lay his head on a woman’s lap and made prophesies of who would pair with whom over the coming year.
But these festivities were interrupted by the Laair Vane – a person hidden under a sheet controlling a horse’s head. This ‘White Mare’ would go around attacking people snapping its jaws until it was chased from the room.

Ah. Simpler times.

Look. There was no Netflix, no internet, no football around back then. I guess that you just had to make your own entertainment, and it does appear that the Manx people, having saved up all their joviality (and all their sheep’s bladders and their peas) for 50 weeks, really went to town on making their own stuff up for the Christmas period.

But honestly, who was the first to come up with any of this stuff, and why wasn’t he or she immediately stopped at the first mention of decapitation of musicians or people hiding under bedsheets pretending to be bits of an equine?

They were clearly all rather mad over there.

Not much has changed.