It still really hurts

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It’s been a week, and while that’s nowhere near long enough for things to feel better, there are constant reminders of what we’re missing, which are making things even harder each time they happen.

But I said last week that you need to concentrate on the positives, and the fact that there are these constant reminders is testament to just what an important piece of the family our beagle was.

Each time the fridge is opened, each time some cheese or meat is cut, each time you grab a bit of biltong or some chips, you’re waiting for her to appear so that you can share a bit with her.

We had a braai on the weekend, which was a difficult one, because it was very much the beagle’s favourite thing. Four stages, lasting throughout the evening and into the next morning. First of all, the food prep, which, as described above, was always liable for a beagle tax. Then the cooking, because if you waited long enough and paid enough attention, something would somehow miraculously “fall” onto the floor to be quickly snaffled. Stage three: the braai dish would need thoroughly cleaning, once any leftovers had been put into the fridge. And then the following morning, when she would never come in from her morning ablutions, and you’d go out to find her sitting expectantly under the braai, waiting to have a nice long go at the – now cool enough – grid.

No-one barked at the gardener today. Not that she would ever go any further than just barking. Her bark was only just worse than her bite, in that she would never actually bite anyone, and her bark was merely enthusiastic and never more than that.

There was no-one to join us on our short walk around the neighbourhood this afternoon. Even when she was feeling rubbish, she still loved to snorf the road.

But while it’s all these little things that hurt each time you do them, because she’s not here to do them with you anymore, it’s more just the feeling of emptiness and quiet in the house that feels the most alien. I still come downstairs each morning expecting to be greeted with a smiling face and a wagging tail as I go into the kitchen, and it’s repeatedly been a completely shit start to every day when I realise that’s not going to happen, whether that’s as I wake up or as I open the kitchen door.

And while I can’t wait to feel better, I also don’t want to feel better, because it somehow seems like that means that I’m forgetting about her or letting her go. Even though I’m not ever going to forget, and I’m not ready to let go.

Ag. It’s been a week and it still really hurts.

20 Up

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Look at that. It’s 20 (twenty) whole years since Mrs 6000 and I tied the proverbial knot.

We’ve enjoyed the many good times – and endured the several hard times – and we’re still here, together, stronger than ever. And both wearing our wedding rings on our [checks hands] left hands.

That’ll be my [checks map] Estonian and her [checks map again] Portuguese roots coming through, I guess.

We got married in Kirstenbosch Gardens on a day which was slightly sunnier than today. Always a risk playing with outdoor events at this time of year in Cape Town. But we got away with it and had a great day. If we’d tried it tomorrow (in 2025, at least), it would have been a disaster.

Honestly, I can’t remember the weather on 1st May 2005. I was too busy basking in the warm glow of recent marriage, and dealing with a mild hangover.

And it was only today that I learned that we shared our special day with the end of Adolf Hitler. We just did our thing 60 years later:

Unexpected invocation of Godwin’s Law. Happy Day(s).

Happy Anniversary, Mrs 6000!

Thanks for “putting up with me for sooooooo long0” – your kind words on a reply in a mutual Whatsapp group this morning.

Well, I hope we’re together for a long0 time to come.

Sherlock Holmes has entered the chat

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The London-based, Victorian detective is famed as being one of the greatest sleuths of all time, but I think that he might finally have met his match, just 138 years after he first appeared in A Study in Scarlet.

Sure, Holmes may have worked out that The Hound Of The Baskervilles was just a dog painted with phosphorous. He might have deduced that Jefferson Hope killed Drebber and Stangerson, but he would surely have been flummoxed by some of the modern mysteries that plague us today.

Thankfully, I have found someone on Reddit. Someone who shall remain nameless: let’s call them No-Entrance4253 (because that’s their name on Reddit), who has not only asked a question, but then formed their own possible hypothesis as to what might be going on.

Look at that. Just look at it. Wow.

The human mind does not get any more brilliantly analytical than this.

Holmes might have had his:

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

but No-Entrance4253 left the impossible right out of this. No-Entrance4253 then completely disregarded the improbable and went straight for the jugular of truth. There’s no water in my house in Newlands. There is a burst water main in Newlands. Could these two things be connected? YES, THEY COULD.

You can’t be sure, though. You can’t just dive in and assume that correlation is causation. So just add the word “maybe” into that second statement. Play it safe.

The only way to really convince the audience, which is collectively fawning over your mental abilities, is to post on the Cape Town subreddit and see what people say. Sherlock Holmes never had this sort of luxury: he had to put a Classified Advertisement in The Times of London, looking for some sort of validation. It took days to get a response, maybe even weeks.

No-Entrance4253 immediately got several responses, amazingly absolutely none of them taking the piss (I was sitting on my hands).

Incredible.

Tune into 6000 miles… again tomorrow, as we watch local Reddit user LilywhiteFormat271 take on one of the biggest mathematical questions that humanity has ever faced, and come up with a shocking answer of… 4.

Helpful reviews

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I know that a lot of you out there think that it’s all invitations to film premieres, VIP seats at international music events and black tie charity auctions with foreign dignitaries – and look, a lot of it is – but there is also a mundane side to being South Africa’s favourite blogger.

You can’t simply overlook the day to day stuff.

Like buying bags for your German-made vacuum cleaner, for example. We’ve got the Kärcher WD3: a good mix of power, portability and reasonable value for money. And I need some new bags for it.

Und es ist gelb!

Weirdly, it’s proven actually quite difficult to find these things on previous occasions. They can be pricey, there always seems to be a stock and supply issue, and making sure that you get the correct bag with many similarly coded variants around is more of a pain than it should be.

So, here’s what I found initially:

OK. No stock, but that’s fine, I can wait. Fits the WD3. And 4 bags, which means that I probably don’t have to go through this rigmarole for maybe another year or so.

But this being a page from our pisspoor local Amazon wannabe, and they’re not always as trustworthy and accurate as we’d all like them to be, so – as always – I’m just going to check the reviews before I order.

And – as always – they’re absolute gold.

You know – you just know – that when anyone starts shouting at the end of a 5 sentence review, they are part mildly unhinged and part absolutely furious. There’s a guy on the Whatsapp group down in Agulhas that is FAMED FOR HIS SHOUTY RANTS, and you can always tell how outraged he is by how many he gets into a single message. I wonder if he’s related to Luke?

But look: that’s exactly what I was saying about above. You can never guarantee that what you ordered is what you’re going to get.

Elme’s a big fan of Takealot, though:

Elme’s hoping for a voucher for her groveling review. Sadly, she messed up by trying to buy her vacuum bags somewhere else first. Though quite why she needed to order from here at all when she couldn’t not find the bags at her local store is a bit beyond me.

5 stars from Tracy:

I wouldn’t love that it comes in a pack of 3 when I’ve ordered a pack of 4, but clearly Tracy doesn’t see that as a problem. I would agree that it’s the beat vacuum ever, though.

Grant is all about the savings:

I wouldn’t know where to go to buy an individual vacuum cleaner bag. I didn’t know that was a thing. And given the stress of trying find these things each time I need them, I’m already thinking that they need to be sold in a 20-pack.

But it’s Gabrielle that nails it for the “most helpful comment on the page” award.

What… what on earth was anyone planning to do with them aside from replacing the old bags? Use them as some sort of humane rodent trapping device? An avant-garde handbag for an upcoming trip overseas? A lamp shade for a troublesome pendant light fitting in the garage? Or a cheap (not that cheap) alternative to a beekeeper’s hat and veil?

Gabrielle has opened a can of worms here in hinting that there may be some other use for vacume bags for her vacume cleaner. Thankfully, with (hopefully) 4 in the pack, maybe I can try out some alternatives while not compromising on the housekeeping.

I’m going to order now, and experiment in 5-7 work days. Watch this space.

Tough (stuff?) times

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What with one thing and another, the last few weeks have been rather difficult and disrupted. I’m equally ready and absolutely not ready at all to get back into some sort of new normality, but with (at least) another two weeks of bathroom renovations to go, I can’t see it being a smooth transition.

Still, I’m really not in the mood to let my mind idle for too long, and so I’ve been throwing myself into doing stuff as much as possible. I’ve got plans for sprucing up the spare room and the kids’ bathroom, but I can’t do that at the moment because they’re two of the most important rooms in the house with the ongoing renovations.

We spent yesterday afternoon rebuilding part of the garden. I’ve been repotting plants and tidying up out there again this morning, fighting – and comprehensively being defeated by – the bergwind and the autumnal leaves. And now, after this blog post and before the afternoon’s footy and this evening’s braai, I intend to hit the Geoguessr website for the first time in over a month.

And should I run out of other stuff to do (unlikely), I do still have about a million photos that need cataloguing. That would likely be a plan for later in the week, though. It might be (and it is) 35oC today, but we’re due for a maximum of 12oC on Thursday.

There’s even talk of lighting a fire simply to keep warm, and not to cook food on. Crazy, crazy times.

Or “Autumn”, as we usually call it.