The journey home

Back in Cape Town, where the internet works [nervously checks – yes it does] and it was a lovely journey home. We punctuated it with a few stops along the way. Some planned, like this one to get some shots of what’s left of the shipwreck:

And some less planned, like pulling over to get some shots of the rainbows over the South Atlantic:

And then this guy, who was bothering the teals, ducks and geese in the flooded fields between Struisbaai and Bredasdorp.

We spotted him, pulled over, and we thought we’d missed him before we heard that haunting, spine-tingling call (if you don’t know, click here). Geese (x2), teal, ducks, stilts, ibises (x2) and a Fish Eagle, all within 20m of the highway. All you have to do is stop, get out and look. It’s all right there.

He even went and sat on a nearby power pole (one of the ones that burned down here, I think) for us afterwards.

Sponsored by Kodak, as they used to say.

The rest of the journey was less exciting, but the Overberg is already showing signs of spring with the canola fields starting to erupt in colour.

Just another two months of rain to get through…

A trip full of hard work, but with just a bit of leisure time at the end, and a sparklingly clean cottage to look forward to for our next trip.

Good idea

Tonight’s plan for a beer and curry night seems to have been one of the better decisions I have made of late. At the time of writing, we’re 60mm deeper in water than we were this morning, and it’s dark and grey and stormy out there, with no signs of letting up any time soon.

It’s already added 87,704,000,000 litres to our dams in the last week.
No big issue with that – I might need to water my lawn in December.

Anyway, the good news is that with a beer expert…

I didn’t know what the word for this was, so I asked Google.

Beerologist, libationist, beer devotee, wert guru, beer maven, beer expert, hophead, pisspot, a tippler, a grog artist, a boozer, a beer buff, a slops surveyor, an ale addict, a hops handler, a quaffer, and the chairman of the brewed.

I was looking for a technical, official term, but I got given this. Unhelpful.

Anyway, as I was saying, the good news is that with a beer expert a pisspot coming over this evening, I have got some different beers in to taste – mostly local, but some from Germany, and one from Belgium – and I have cooked up two moerse curries: a lentil and butternut korma and a great-smelling, masala-style chicken dish. There’s naan, there’s achtar (mango, obvs) and there’s homemade raita with fresh mint plucked from the garden before things out there got scary.

We’ll light the fire up (spoiler – it’s already lit) and play pool, listen to the latest tunes from the hit parade, and enjoy some heartwarming food and company.

Tomorrow might be a little iffy, but let’s deal with that if and when we need to, because tonight promises to be a lot of fun.

We’re coming to the conclusion…

Is it just us – and, to be fair, those surrounding us – who are coming to the conclusion that 2025 is actually a bit crap?

Of course, all years have their ups and their downs, but this one does seem to be continually choosing the crappy option each and every time it gets the chance.

I don’t want to go into details, because that wouldn’t do any good anyway, but there have been quite a lot of things that just could have gone much better. And a seemingly equal number that would have been much better if they just hadn’t happened.

Several examples of each have been mentioned on here.

I try hard to be a glass half full kind of guy, but it’s getting more and more difficult to repeatedly try and ignore the apparent vendetta that 2025 clearly has against us.

Even the simplest things seem to have it in for us.

And just when I thought that it might get better in the second half of the year: a fresh start and all that…

WWIII is about to enter the chat.

Thanks, Donald.

Still, other than those issues (which unfortunately is just about everything), we’re just about surviving.

Onward and upward…

200 up

I added a couple more tracks to my Playlist For A Chilled Braai playlist on Spotify this week, and those tracks upped the number of total tracks on said playlist to 200. Fourteen hours and forty-one minutes of musical accompaniment to your braai, and just the right mix of background and gently upbeat tracks – and just a few old skool memories thrown in – to make your braai’ing experience absolutely perfect.

And no, of course you don’t have to listen to it all at once, but the sheer amount of music on there means that you get to hear something different each time you log in and light up. So hit the save button above, click on shuffle on your device of choice, and have a great evening cooking oor die kole.

You can click through here if you can’t use the graphic above, and you can click through here to see all my other Spotify playlists, should you want to enjoy some different genres and go back in time ever so slightly*.

* Musically, I mean. I haven’t invented a time machine or anything.

About today

Right. A proper mess of weather over Cape Town today. Sunshine, wild winds, glowering clouds and heavy showers. And it looks like things are only going downhill this afternoon.

I’m catching up on jobs which have been waiting since we went away, and getting things ticked off the various lists, but I’m going to run out of time very shortly, and that means getting this post out now.

It’s all a bit rushed, and I feel quite out of touch with what’s going on in the world. But then, when I do hear about what’s going on in the world, that actually seems like quite a good way to be.

Running out of time because we’re going out to a posh dinner this evening (I actually have very little idea about just how posh the dinner thing is, and so I am only going by the price). A winery invited to a restaurant, and the chef of that restaurant cooking up a special pairing menu to go with the wines from the winery.
What’s not to like?

I’ve never heard of the winery or the restaurant before, but I have checked, and yes, both of them do exist – and the event is a sellout – so I’m sure it will be pretty good.

Yes, I may have to knock back a couple of Red Bulls or cheap local equivalents thereof in order to make it through to the starters, but once those kick in, I’ll be the life and soul of the party (T&Cs apply).

And there are calls for a lie-in tomorrow morning, which will surely assist in tomorrow night’s dinner (which I only know is “with friends”, not where or when) being an equally successful evening.
Should we braai? We might braai.

Anyway.

Right now, I’m on the dash home and then off to do the drop off at horse riding (not me) before I jump in the car down to the Deep South for tonight’s fun and games.