Toilet Talk

I have to get my house all fixed up before we rent it out. Today we came home and found that the toilet was going walkabout .... :-)

Gone Fishin'

While walking on the beach this afternoon, I saw the 'trek fishermen' at work hauling a huge catch of yellowtail from the ocean. I guess I'm more vegetarian than I thought because the sight of these beautiful creatures thrashing and gasping as they died was a bit too much for me ...

A Three Minute Walk

These are the sports fields of my daughter's high school, with the red-roofed hall on the right. Now look to the left. See the tall-ish building? That's where we'll be living soon. Yay! No more early morning traffic hassles .....

Oh, spooky!!

On Sunday morning, I woke up with a painful muscle in my right upper arm, and an unexplained bruise on my left forearm (see pic below.) My daughter hobbled around all day with a painful right leg muscle. But I quickly figured out what happened to us .....

.... we must have been abducted by aliens during the night, experimented on and then returned secretly to our beds ..... :-)

Wild and Windy

The hillside behind our house today ... no more summer heatwave right now, just wind and cloud and cool mist.

Left Behind

Big boys don't need their old toys ....

Moving On

And life goes on. My son packed up his room today - he's going to live with his dad for a year while he studies Art and Design at a college in the city. It seems like just the other day I held his hand and walked him into playschool ....

Grief, Loss

Picture painted by my friend Renee Gordon

"Belief in our mortality, the sense that we are eventually going to crack up and be extinguished like the flame of a candle, I say, is a gloriously fine thing. It makes us sober; it makes us a little sad; and many of us it makes poetic. But above all, it makes it possible for us to make up our mind and arrange to live sensibly, truthfully and always with a sense of our own limitations. It gives peace also, because true peace of mind comes from accepting the worst."

- Lin Yutang, The Importance Of Living

A memorial blog has been opened HERE for Heath Ledger.

Stop All The Clocks ....

Even the skies were weeping today - taken in my garden late this afternoon ...

"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum,
Bring out the coffin... let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle, moaning overhead,
Scribbling on the sky the message:

He is Dead."

W H Auden

In Loving Memory of Heath Andrew Ledger
(4th Apr 1979 - 22nd Jan 2008)

You are already sorely missed.
Peace.

Heat Wave

Another hot day in CT. This was taken at about 8AM and the cloudless skies foretell the heat to come.

Cereal Killer

My kids had a spat today. One of them got mad ..... I'm thankful that Weet-Bix doesn't bleed. Or scream and cry. Or fight back ....

Birthday Girl!

... and we celebrated with lunch for seven at Fraiche Ayres Restaurant

Bored at work ....

On days like today, when the clinic is quiet .....

...there's time for reading, eating chocolate-covered raisins, drinking tea ....

...and fooling around with the camera .....

Beautiful

This picture was done by a woman who is now in her 80s - she's one of my patients. She took black paper of some sort, lightly sketched the picture on it and then using a fine gramaphone needle, she painstakingly scratched out tiny tiny lines, thus creating the areas of light and shade that resulted in this picture. The model was a friend of hers called Lorna.

I'm just in love with it.

Groan ....

The car no longer squeals embarrassingly to a halt, but I paid dearly for the silence .... :-(

Bibliophile

I love books. This is my current pile.

Replay by Ken Grimwood (1944-2003) won the World Fantasy Award and is the one I'm actually 'reading' right now. It is awesome! *
Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett
Disgrace by JM Coetzee
The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini
The God Theory by Bernard Haisch
A Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg


* Here's the blurb on Replay:

Jeff Winston was forty-three and trapped in a tepid marriage and a dead-end job, waiting for that time when he could be truly happy, when he died. And then he woke up and he was eighteen, with all his memories of the next twenty-five years intact. He could live his life again, avoiding the mistakes, making money from his knowledge of the future, seeking happiness. Until he dies at forty-three and wakes up back in college again.

It's a very good story and explores a lot of questions about predestination, our roles in life, the choices we make, and the society we live in.

Quote from the book during Jeff's first return to 1963:

"The future: hideous plagues, a revolution in sexual attitudes achieved and then reversed, triumph and tragedy in space, city streets haunted by null-eyed punks in leather and chains an spiked pink hair, death-beams in orbit around the polluted, choking earth ... Christ, Jeff thought with a shudder, from this viewpoint his world sounded like the most nightmarish of science fiction. In many ways, the reality he'd grown used to had more in common with movies like Blade Runner than it did with the sunny naivete of early 1963. "

Rolling Blackouts ... again!!

The national electricity supplier, Eskom, euphemistically calls it 'load shedding'. Basically it means Eskom can't cope so just when you least expect it, the house is plunged into darkness. Tonight, I ended up doing my dishes by candlelight!

Test Post

Testing again

Scorcher!

When I took this shot at 1pm today, it was HOT! Not a cloud in the sky, not a breath of wind and inside my car, the temperature felt like it was somewhere around 40 C - you don't get aircon in small, cheap cars ...

ETA: Max temp today was in fact 34 C in our area.

She's The Man!

Happy 16th birthday to my darling daughter whose been waiting for this DVD since forever .....

Not blogger but my laptop!

I finally got yesterday's picture uploaded using the other computer. Seems like it's my machine that is at fault which is disturbing and alarming. Tried all the tricks I know to no avail, including Restore System which, most alarmingly of all, wouldn't work. 'Unable to Restore System.'

Ugh.

Edited to add: Rebooted in Safe Mode, tried to restore, failed again ... but now I can upload pics again, so I'm like WTFE? :-))

Bob Joplin

Most days along our main road you'll find posters tied to lamp poles promoting the latest edition of either a local paper, or more often, a dreadful tabloid called The Sun, which specializes in stories of ghoulish, bloodthirsty, inhumane behaviour - Man Eaten By Rabid Dog - and so on. But lately, somebody calling him/herself 'Bob Joplin' has been waging an anti-tabloid campaign of sorts. This is an example of his work .....

Tradition!

My kids have their birthdays exactly two weeks apart. Several years ago, to celebrate two-for-one, we went for breakfast at a local eatery called Francois. We've been back every year since and today was Francois Day. Except we got there a bit late so breakfast became delicious brunch ....

Yes? No? Move? Stay?

I hate making decisions and I have far too many of them facing me right now .... these are a few shots of a flat we looked at today.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

Some days ...

... it seems as if all you do is get out of bed and just keep walking .....

Early Morning Feet

Boyes Drive, Lakeside ...

... twists and turns and swings low and high and has the most beautiful ocean views in all the world

Bird at Work

Actually, there were about five of 'em and a baby perched up there, but the others scattered when I showed up with my camera. This guy obviously isn't fazed by paps ....

Weeds

I'm not much of a gardener but I've perfected the art of cultivating great weeds in between slabs of what would otherwise be dead boring concrete.

Exhausted

Last night, despite going to bed at 11pm, I only fell asleep somewhere round 3 am - for no discernible reason. Then had to wake up at 5.30 am for a 12 hour shift at work. So that means that there's only one possible choice for dinner: instant BBQ chicken dinner!

Old friends

... are precious indeed. Deb and me.

Eureka!!

No, I'm not getting married again. :)))

A few years ago, I stupidly 'lost' my engagement and wedding rings - didn't know whether I had put them away in a 'safe' place, or whether my daughter had failed to put them back after trying them on, or whether a cleaner I later dismissed for theft had 'lifted' them while cleaning the house ... I only missed them after quite some time seeing as they generally live in a box with other jewellery I never wear.

Today I found them again, tucked away on the back shelf of a bathroom cabinet. Slightly tarnished but safe and sound. Good omen, maybe?

A terrible cliche but ....

The dawning of a new year.

I worked night shift last night and this pic was taken at 05.20 am, standing on the patio of the healthcare centre (see below).

This is one of the nicest places I've ever worked in - very upmarket, set in a rural area, shadowed by mountains and overlooking the distant ocean.

Happy New Year!! Welcome, 2008!