Category: positive thoughts

SA Xmas

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While many may say that there’s nothing like a traditional UK Christmas – dark nights, snow on the ground, roasted chestnuts and a local pub or seven – I’m very much getting used to Christmas in summer. We spent most of yesterday sitting around the pool, braaiing crayfish and drinking beer. And as today seems to be turning into an absolute scorcher as well, I would imagine that more of the same is in order.

Christmas means many things to many people, but since becoming a dad, it’s really all about the kids for me. Not that that means I don’t enjoy giving and receiving gifts as well. After last year’s amazing present from my wife (and even though it all ended in tears), I had high hopes for something extraordinary and had been dropping hints about viticulture for the past few months: I have always dreamed of owning my own vineyard. Things seemed to be going well, as Mrs 6000 kept dropping hints about my dropping hints – a sure sign that my hint droppage had not gone unnoticed.

It was only when I opened the gifts on Christmas morning that I realised that there had been a breakdown in communication somewhere along the line. I had said “viticulture”, she had heard “vermiculture”. And as those of you well versed in Latin will already have realised, that means that I now own my own little worm farm. It does produce a liquid product, but you really don’t want to be drinking it. However, my veggies will love it and I can always get a wine farm next year, can’t I darling? Darling?

Hello?

Anyway, the kids loved their presents – a motorised crane for the boy, a stereotypically intricate German doll’s house for the girl – and the wife will be running and gymming to her new mp3 player.
While I’m not tending to my worms, I will be mostly reading this gift from my parents. Bittersweet stuff.

But for now, it’s back to the original plan: pool, beer, braai.

Fish & Dragons

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Sorry, the missus has just waved her fingernails under my nose, having just painted them with a range of volatile compounds, and I now find myself ducking to avoid the salmon leaping across the sofa and the dragons which are picking them off in mid air, in a style not unreminiscent of a cross between a eagle and a grizzly bear. But with scales and flames.

Actually, it’s good that she did (although perhaps not for you) as the depression of my disappointing attempted and aborted trip to Oslo is still responsible for the metaphorical grey cloud which hangs over me and I wasn’t even going to bother blogging this evening. Now I need to tell you about the dragons. I know there are always post-holiday blues post a holiday, but they can usually be tempered with the wonderful memories of the break. Not so in this case (sorry Mum, yes it was nice to see you but you know what I mean).

While Sheffield and most of the rest of the UK remains under wintery skies and freezing temperatures, here in Cape Town we have been enjoying (and I put the the word “enjoying” in inverted commas) (I know I didn’t actually do that, but I was thinking it) the 35°C temperatures thrown at us by Mrs Nature (Snr). I find the best way to deal with these conditions is to don a mask, gloves and a large super thick lab coat and play with infected sputum all day. With a promise of equally (if not more) unpleasant conditions tomorrow, I might take some of my wife’s nail polish to work to make the day pass more quickly entertainingly.

In other news, I discovered the fact that I had a new skill this evening. That skill is mending televisions.
I would usually never attempt to mend a television, but while we were round at the mother-in-law’s, my son decided to knock her TV off its stand and onto the floor – killing it instantly (the TV, the floor was already dead, you idiot) – and I don’t have the money to buy her a new TV set.
So, having opened it up and found nothing obviously broken within, I brought it home, poked at it a bit and then gave up. Imagine my surprise when it suddenly started working again. Obviously the bringing it home and poking it had some effect.
To be fair, I should have known that this experimental poking would work: after all, experimental poking has worked before with equally surprising results, one of which was responsible for the TV being broken in the first place.

And now, back to the imaginary flying reptiles…

Grow your own

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Every muscle, every fibre of my being is screaming out in agony. If you listen carefully, you can probably hear them. It’s not as bad as Sicky Dion, but it’s still definitely not a pleasant sound – especially if it’s coming from within you.

The reason for that screaming is the new vegetable patch that I installed chez 6000 this morning. As you can see from the photos below, before work began, the area in question was covered with mutant, cyborg ivy.
Oh yes, it might just look like ordinary ivy to the untrained eye, but having gone in there armed with only a spade and a massive flamethrower, I can assure you there there was something distinctly “otherworldly” about that stuff: for a start, normal earth ivy doesn’t have tungsten roots, does it?


Before, during and after.

And that’s the reason I now sit here with a nice Marlon (for medicinal purposes) and a dread of what fresh pain tomorrow morning will bring. On the up side, we are now growing spinach, beetroot, baby cabbage and… something else which escapes my memory (Eggplant?).

The kids like it, I like it and next door’s cat (a big fan of digging stuff up in our other veggie patch) has already put in an appearance, which I enjoyably curtailed with a handful of gravel.

And then – a little later this evening: this.

Out of it

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But not in a bad way.

We took the time out this weekend to head out into the beautiful Southern Cape,which has rapidly become a firm family favourite for weekend getaways. White sands, turquoise seas and deserted beaches where the kids can play safely and happily, Mum can read her latest crime thriller and Dad can wander about taking pictures and helping with the rockpooling – it refreshes the soul.
Less refreshing were the queues down Sir Lowry’s Pass on the way home, but even they might be a thing of the past once PAWC has mended Somerset West.

Such is the attraction of the place and the difference it makes to our family life that we’ve pooled together all we have and invested in a little plot on which will soon sit a tiny fisherman’s cottage. It won’t be much, but it will be ours (once we’ve given the bank a lot of money) and we went to have a look at the foundations this weekend. It’s surrounded by fynbos, beach and National Park and there is wildlife galore. There is electricity and water, but there’s no phone line and certainly no cellphone signal. It’s a far cry from busy city life and it really is going to be the perfect place to get away from it all.

This weekend was a good example of that – the only issue was the sunburn from Sunday morning’s shoreline quest – who knew that several billion tonnes of super-hot exploding helium could hurt so much? Even the SPF40 wasn’t enough to protect my unweathered and pale English skin. I’ll be ok in a few weeks though.

Probably.

More photos here.