What? Oh, ISTOTBIDMPD? That’s:
I Shared This On Twitter But It Deserves More Permanently Documenting
I did it yesterday with this.
And now I’m doing it today with this:
Ouch. Someone’s taking the P.
More on the twitter vs blog thing at some other point (I promise).
Right now, let’s just give that typo all the attention it so richly deserves.
Suffice to say, while we watched the Women’s T20 get abadoned, my fears for last night’s cricket being a washout were thankfully unfounded.
Newlands was cool, but picture perfect for the evening.
Although this image was a far cry from scenes just a couple of hours earlier.
It was a good night for the kids’ first cricket match, and it was topped off by a last ball win for SA which has obviously set the expectation bar far too high for any future visits to Newlands or any other sporting venue. (It’s worth noting that Alex’s first ever football match finished 7-0.)
Cricket’s very laid back, even when it’s very exciting.
There was plenty of opportunity to take photos. Go look.
While water restrictions continue to make little or no difference to our water situation (mainly because no-one takes any notice of them), I may have come up with a plan to sort out our water crisis.
Those readers who have stuck with 6000 miles… through thick and thin (mainly thin) may recall that I also came up with a plan to sort the country’s electricity crisis way back in 2008. Yikes.
Sod the Government, the captains of industry and the so-called experts countrywide who all say that there is no quick fix. I think they’re blinkered. If everyone builds their own little power station, we’ll be sorted.
As far as I can remember from my physics lessons at school, all you have to do is make steam (water + heat), turn a turbine and Bob’s your uncle.
For your average Southern Suburber, with a pool (water) and a braai (heat), that’s surely not such a big ask.
Apart from the turbine bit.
That actually worked for a while. Until my wife found out.
There are easier ways to solve the drought. Just let me buy tickets for a cricket match.
I’m not a huge fan of cricket (sidenote to self: huge fan = potential wind shortage solution), but I do like live sport and so I thought I’d make a plan waaaaay in advance of… well… of today, and buy some cricket tickets for the kids and I. Mrs 6000 had other plans for this weekend, so I only needed three. And that was a good thing, because tickets for cricket are not cheap. They’re between 5 and 10 times the price of going and watching a football match.
But then, this is an international cricket match.
But then, they’re more than twice the price of watching an international football match.
I digress. Often.
I bought the expensive tickets, for a cricket match in the middle of February, in the middle of summer, in the middle of a drought.
Can you guess what the weather was like this week in Cape Town? Yep. It was lovely. Temperatures in the mid-thirties. Cloudless skies.
And can you guess what the weather is going to be like in Cape Town next week? Yep. You’re not wrong. Gorgeous. Temperatures in the high twenties. Wall to wall sunshine.
And, dear reader, can you guess what the weather is like in Cape Town today? The day of the expensive cricket match. The first cricket match I’ve ever bought tickets for. The first cricket match my kids have ever been to?
Grey. Wet. Chilly. Miserable.
FML.
On the positive side, it did rain today, meaning that there will be no need for anyone to water their gardens tomorrow (Saturday being one of the days you’re allowed an hour of watering). And that gave me an idea.
If you can donate enough money for me to buy expensive tickets to expensive international cricket matches on a regular basis, I think that we can basically guarantee enough rain to replenish our currently understocked local dams (42% full this week).
You can try this crazy scheme by donating some money to my cause. Just leave me a comment below and I’ll be in touch to give you payment details.
Give it a go. But give it a go soon, remembering that there’s a T20 match between SA and Australia on Wednesday 9th March. Yet another opportunity to sit on a damp grass slope and watch an empty field standing in the rain.
I went to pick up the boy from school today. It was while I was waiting, perched on a drystone wall in the car park that I realised I wasn’t alone.
There were other people also waiting for children in the car park.
But no, I mean that I had a skink sitting next to me.
Without moving too much, I swiped my Xperia phone on to camera mode, surreptitiously pointed – and shot.
Considering the clandestine and hurried nature of the photographing process, I think I did alright. A second shot was impossible, as the camera shy fellow had retreated into deeper bush. That advice to “get a shot first, then get a good shot if you can” when it comes to wildlife, still remains good and true.
Then I uploaded the image to my Instagram.
I’m no expert on skinky things, so I consulted Google and found out that, brilliantly, the animal I had seen was a… Cape Skink (Trachylepis capensis). Of course it was:
Cape skinks are common, gentle creatures that hunt large insects. Sometimes they dig in loose sand around the base of bushes or boulders, and they also favor dead trees and old aloe stems. These useful creatures tame easily (with a tendency to become obese), and would be much more common in gardens if they were not hunted by domestic cats. You can find them in gardens, strategically positioned in the sun, from where they catch their preferred prey, such as beetles, flies and grasshoppers. They are completely harmless and shed their tails when they feel threatened.
Frankly, I’m getting fed up of the apparent laziness shown by early biological taxonomists when exploring this region. All they seem to have done was to find local species which resembled a previously known and classified organism, and then added “Cape” to the original name.
The list runs through plants, mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and trees and is near infinite:
Cape Cobra, Cape Sparrow, Cape Gull, Cape Olive, Cape Skink, Cape Cormorant, Cape Gorse, Cape Clawless Otter, Cape Hare, Cape Wagtail, Cape Fox, Cape Sole, Cape Rain Frog, Cape Gannet, Cape Buffalo… I could go on.
“Hey Steve! I’ve found a snake in this sand.”
“Is it one we’ve seen before?
“Nope.”
“Call it the ‘Cape Sand Snake’ then. Pub?”
“Pub.”
*sigh* It’s too late to do anything about it now.
I quite like my Cape Skink. I shall call him ‘Kinky’, because ‘Fluffy’ doesn’t seem to fit.
Incoming email reply from local restaurant manager begins:
You are, unless I am much mistaken, Mr @6000 on Twitter. I follow you via our [local restaurant] account and I am a fan of your twitter persona and your most entertaining and informative website. We shall see to it that [another local restaurant] and several others become so as well. That way, they may all learn something from you.
Oh blimey. My reputation precedes me. Although it’s a bit of stretch to just think “microbiologist” and “6000.co.za email address”, and assume that we are one, the same, and have a numerical pseudnym on a popular social media platform (although we are, and we do).
To be honest, it’s an even bigger stretch to call this blog “most entertaining and informative”, but hey, I’ll take it.
More customer service like this, please.