It’s been a scorcher of a day, and it’s far from over.
Two meetings – one at school and one in the neighbourhood – will keep us out until after 9, and honestly, I could really do with being in bed already. The heat is manageable in the short-term, but draining overall.
It seems likely (and sensible) that I head to bed early this evening, what with the 18 (eighteen) simultaneous Champions League ties to look forward(?) to tomorrow evening. It’ll surely be a late one.
Currently, I’m in a car park (not that one), waiting for Art Class to finish, and going through some photos looking for one to put on my office wall. Something big and colourful. I’ve found a lot of big, and a lot of colourful, but the circles apparently only just overlap. And you can’t have something second-rate on a wall you see each and every day. It needs to be good and it needs to mean something. I’m struggling with the brief.
And so maybe I’ll wander over to the far side of the field and watch a bit of cricket.
The last bit of relaxation before a hectic evening.
I decided to be sensible and not to. But then circumstances took over anyway. Because sadly, our son’s car was broken into while he was dodgeballing, and stuff – a lot of stuff – was stolen. Parked outside, in a private car park, under a very bright floodlight and behind security-manned barriers and with only one way onto (and off) the site, 50 whole metres of direct sight from the security booth. His was one of about ten cars that got done.
So those two security guys are at best, utterly useless, and at worst, actually just complicit. As a TikkiTokker would say: “Let me know what you think in the comments”.
As is the way with these things, we’re not sure exactly when it happened. But for police and insurance purposes, we’re saying about 8pm.
Reporting it all to the police took quite a while, and then there was the drive home, and so actually, I was still wandering about at half past midnight, and yes, I was absolutely right, my body did not appreciate the 6am wake up call in the morning.
Not one bit.
Yesterday was all about paperwork and glass vacuuming. But can I just shout out our insurance?
Because the working day begins at 8:30am.
The claim form arrived at 8:50am and we had Glassfit in touch with us before 9am*.
I submitted the claim form yesterday afternoon, the claim was settled by close of business yesterday and the money was paid into our account at 10:30am today. That’s only 38½ hours from the incident. And only 26 hours since we told them about the incident.
Bloody hell.
Here in SA, we – quite rightly – complain about the poor service we get (and there’s plenty of it to choose from), but it’s only right that we praise the good service as well. And this is more than good. It’s unbelievable. (But it is also true.)
So. Despite all the ads you see for that green and purple company, can I recommend that if you are looking for a decent insurer, then maybe you should give RBS a go? If you want, you can tell them that I sent you, but I doubt that it’ll make any difference either way.
Absolutely mindblowing stuff.
.
*There’s no window glass in stock in Cape Town, so we have to wait until Friday or Monday before it can be fitted, depending on transport, but I don’t think that I can blame anyone in particular for that.
Warning: Juvenile post ahead! (As if you hadn’t guessed from the title.)
But seriously, Little Miss 6000 recently did her Grade 7 vocal exam. And the natural progression is now to Grade 8, although there’s a consensus that there’s not going to be too much hard work towards that in the remainder of this year.
Just a look.
And so the books were brought home last week. And… well… I was honestly expecting something a little more grown-up and challenging than this:
The rest of the piece (and this bit too, I suppose) is in German.
And I’m sure that it’s going to sound beautiful. But if you can read music, then you’ll note (no pun intended) just how bars 29 and 30 are going to sound, and you’ll understand that I’m going to struggle to keep a straight face.
I’ve had a whole email about Claude, basically asking for an update. And there is some news, but it’s not great.
Claude was not hand-reared and he was not as young as we had been led to believe when we got him.
And those facts mean that he was untrainable. We made virtually no progress in the 6 weeks that we had him, and the bigger problem with that was that if we couldn’t train him, we couldn’t allow him out of his cage, because we would have no way of getting him back in. And consequently, he wouldn’t be able to fly freely at all, and that’s not right.
We made a few calls and found a local aviary that already has some lovebirds (and a plethora of other birds) who was more than willing to take him in. They won’t be able to train him either, but that doesn’t matter because he won’t have to be kept in a small cage and will have a nice big aviary to fly around in and some other friends to do it with.
So we made the decision to let him go (not like that), and he went to his new home yesterday.
It will take a while for him to settle in, but early indications are that he’ll be very happy there.
