“Jou Ma se Detour”

Standerton – detours and no road signs – recipe for getting lost. And we did get lost. Tried asking a bloke meandering down the road how to get to Vrede – he looked a bit nonplussed, waved his arms vaguely and then suggested he got in the car with us to show us. A suggestion we did not follow up on. My suggestion of following the green suv didn’t pan out either, he took us down a road to his repair shop. Fortunately nearby was a Shell garage – asked the pump attendant where Vrede was and how we get out of this flippen town. A very kind guy said he’d show us the way, which he duly did appearing to have gone out of his way to do so. But it didn’t end there just when we thought we were on the right road, another detour sign – much swearing on W’s part – lost again. Asked one of the police at a road block (just happened to be on the road we were on) – he gesticulated to a road nearby – go left there he said. More detour signs… more swearing. Yay, we found the right road by a process of elimination and careful map reading by W. I was too busy typing up the blog entry to be of much help.

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Eating out

Jeff took us out to dinner the two nights we stayed with him, the first night we tried a new Portuguese restaurant – literally around the corner from him. Nicely decorated, service was good and the food was nice. Jeff and W started with sushi, I tried a bit of W’s – yeuch. Way too fishy tasting for me, but by all accounts it was good. Main courses, I had the sole, Jeff a fish kebab and W went for the ‘if you’re brave try this’ dish. Turned out to be a glorified fish cake but according to W, very nice.

The second night we went to Nelson Mandela Square – very popular (one of those ‘you have to be seen here at least twice to be thought of as in’ places), couldn’t get into our first choice of restaurant so we tried Trumps. Once again the service was very good, nice young guy who memorised our order perfectly. We did have a few hiccups though, they brought Jeff and W’s starters, trinchado and deep fried camembert, but no caprese salad. Eventually I asked one of the manager type dudes walking around and a short while later my salad arrived. One taste of the cheese and yeuch, again. Dunno where they got the mozzarella from but it tasted worse than the really really cheap cheese one buys at the supermarkets, you know the type – has a remarkable likeness and taste to rubber. Then the poor waiter managed to spill most of the trinchado sauce over himself and Wouter when he was clearing the table away. All was not lost though – the main courses arrived, at the same time and we’d all opted for steak, 2 medium rare and one medium well. Upon eating we forgave them for their earlier sins. Very nice steak indeed. They also took the starter off the menu and at the gentle hinting from Jeff added a free round of coffees, which according to W were excellent. I don’t drink coffee.

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“Where the streets have no name”

The trip has been somewhat hectic so far – a lot of driving around – well it took us 15 hours to get to Rustenburg having left Bellville at 4 in the morning – we spent the evening chatting with friends and hit our mattresses hard.

It probably wouldn’t have taken us quite so long if we hadn’t taken a wrong turn in Klerksdorp. Everything was going well until we had a road block in the middle of town – just a routine check of driver’s licenses – quick type in of our ID number into the laptop to see if there were any outstanding fines and we were on our way again. However this stop caused us to miss a sign (or there was no sign) and we ended up on a dirt road. I’m still unsure how we managed this but we ended up going quite a bit out of our way. We were almost to the point of turning round and back tracking but fortunately came to the tarmac road just in time.

We’ve discovered that a lot of towns in the greater part of Gauteng and Mpumulanga seem to believe their streets do not need signs.

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Things that scare in the night…

I’m pretty sure that when one is sitting with one’s child on one’s lap at 2:00 am because she’s battling to sleep and her coughing is keeping her up and the only way she seems able to get some sleep is whilst sitting up that she shouldn’t stop breathing. Tamsyn literally stopped breathing for a couple of seconds, scared the bajeesus out of me. I was just about to shake the hell out of her when she kind of shook and took a  breath. Asthma has its moments let me tell you. She seems better this morning albeit really, really tired (I know how she feels). As I was sitting there losing all feeling in my legs, arms etc I thought to myself that we need a 24 hour medical help line. People that one could phone in these kinds of situations who could advise whether one should panic or not because most times one doesn’t have a friggen clue what to do.

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Catch up post

Murphy struck over the weekend, Saturday morning I was up really early – partly because I couldn’t sleep anymore and partly because I had to be off early to assist with a training course that had been arranged for some bigwigs from work. I was pottering around my scrapbook area and kept hearing this dripping type noise (I swear my life is plagued by drips). Couldn’t locate the drip and figured it was probably the shower again and the wet carpet by the bathroom must be wet footprints from taking a shower.  I was wrong. Turns out the geyser was leaking, so that pretty much dictated Wouter’s activities for Sunday, whilst I was off training bigwigs (you’d have thought the damn geyser could have held out for another month!).

Which brings me to the news of the sale of my little place in Kommetjie and the date we have to vacate, 31 October 2008.  The bloke who has bought my place seemed a tad confused by our situation and Wouter didn’t help by responding to his question in this way.

Buyer: So when do you have to be out?

Wouter: We don’t.

He was also somewhat concerned by Wouter telling him we have a funny relationship, I suspect Wouter meant funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha – although some might say that’s debatable.

I think I cleared up the poor bloke’s confusion by explaining things in a bit more detail – brief history of our relationship, short psychological profile of Wouter etc etc.  Anyhoo, we have one cheque for the place and one more to come when we move out.

Rather exciting really although the thought of packing is a bit off putting. You’d think I’d be used to it by now having moved so much. Not that the house is at all ready for us to move in – actually I’m being a bit unkind it is almost ready for us to move in – the kitchen needs counters, our bathroom tiling is almost complete (more on this a bit later), we need carpets, bedroom cupboards and furniture. We figure the finishing off bits we can do once we’re in the place.  So the countdown begins… 39 days.

We had a bit of a disaster with the bathroom tiles, many moons back I chose border tiles – extremely pretty, perfect for the basin (of which the bathroom was modelled around) and dirt cheap (last of the batch).  We battled to find a tile to go with them and figured the final choice we made would be good enough. I took one look at the half finished tiling and realised  it wasn’t going to work – looked horrible. So we eased the tiles off the wall, fortunately the tile cement wasn’t quite dry so most of them came off easily and in one piece then it was off to the shops again.  I have now fallen madly in love with the small glass mosaic type tiles one gets and figure we *have* to have them. I’m sure Wouter will make a plan, he is after all a boer.

The salivary gland stone issue has cleared up as well, thankfully without any invasive surgery. It would seem the way to deal with it is take a course of antibiotics to counteract any potential infections and then just wait till the stones work themselves out. Very painful affliction by all accounts.

Another tip I have for you is always, and I mean *always* take your cellphone with you when  you go to the loo because you never know when you may have to phone your husband and yell at him for not warning you if you close the toilet door you’re not going to be able to open it again.

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What to do if this happens to you…

Ever been in the situation where you were entrusted to sell a motor vehicle, which you’d been driving for several years but was still registered in your mother’s name, you then lost any buyer details you might have had and got hauled over the coals by your mother because a year later she received not only the license renewal but a traffic fine to boot?

Well here is what you do if you ever do find yourself in that situation.

Get your mother to sign a sworn affidavit that she entrusted you to sell the car, ask her nicely to remove all defamatory comments about your apparent lack of responsibility, organisational skills and uselessness. Take the renewal license to your nearest traffic department (in my case a very long walk down to the bottom end of Cape Town), stand in the queue. Once you get to the counter explain the situation to the counter clerk, who will frown a little at you and ask if you first went to enquiries. Admit you did not. Leave the counter and proceed back to enquiries where the pleasant gentleman will give you a yellow form to fill in. Do not attempt to fudge any details because the counter clerk will spot them and send you packing with yet another frown. Go back the next day with an amended affidavit giving the date the car was sold which apparently needs to correspond with the date on the yellow form (don’t worry if you can’t remember the date it seems thumb sucked dates work too). Once again join the queue and end up with a different counter clerk. Wait anxiously whilst he processes the forms and disappears behind a closed door to get his supervisor to approve them. On his return practically kiss him through the glass when he hands you the acknowledgement of receipt.

Mom’s going to be really happy with me tonight, for once.

I’d also like to give a thumbs up to the staff at the traffice department – even though I had to go back twice, the atmosphere was pleasant, the queues moved at a steady pace and most people seemed happy with the service they were getting.

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Summer is almost here… yay!

Sunrise

Sunrise

 I took this picture on the way to work this morning – what a pleasure to be able to drive without the incessant rain, although the weather man tells me it is going to rain on Sunday again. *sigh*

Salivary Gland Stones ever heard of it?  I hadn’t until last night.  Wednesday evening Tamsyn started to complain that her throat was sore, Thursday morning she woke up and still had the sore throat, only now she had a swollen gland as well.  My mother took her to the doctor yesterday and he suspects it is salivary gland stones, either that or mumps.  He gave her penicillin (fortunately she isn’t allergic – the allergy tends to run in the family, my late Gran, Mom and myself are all allergic) and told her to eat lemons or sour sweets. Guess that is to stimulate the gland to produce enough saliva to wash the stone out. Tamsyn happily ate the sour jellytots I bought her, she wasn’t so keen on the lemon though, poor kid. Phoned the school this morning to tell them she won’t be in, school secretary asked what was wrong with her.  Her response “What?!”  Guess she’s never heard of it either.

On a somewhat different tack, I’m starting to sense that my comment on how the men in the family I married into have this weird habit of urinating outdoors has caused some disharmony.  My mother-in-law very kindly gave a copy of an article from the Huisgenoot to Wouter to give to me in connection with this topic. Unfortunately the article is in Afrikaans so I haven’t a clue what it’s trying to tell me.

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Is it ever going to stop raining?

I am so heartily sick of the rain, it just keeps on coming – day after day after day. Enough now!

There is one thing I will not miss when we move into the Fish Hoek house (okay apart from Spikey that is) the noises my park home makes, 2:30 this morning I was woken up by a ‘tap tap’.  Lay in bed listening, sure enough about 20 seconds later another ‘tap tap’, then 20 seconds later ‘tap tap tap’. For one wild moment I thought it might be Spikey tapping on the door asking to be let in out of the rain, but no – turns out it was the shower. Only discovered that this morning when I moved around the place trying to locate the noise. Suffice to say – I’m tired and just a little bit grumpy, naturally, Wouter slept through the whole thing *grumble*.

I’m also starting to feel a little like Snow White…

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Got home yesterday to find a rabbit on my front lawn, not the black rabbit of a few weeks back but a brown and beige one. Looked not unlike Peter Rabbit (Jessica’s rabbit I rather rashly bought for her many years ago, damn thing only ate apples and made a helluva mess).

I haven’t been writing any house news lately, mainly because there isn’t much to write about at the moment. Wouter has ordered the kitchen counter tops, we should get them Friday (yay!) and the tiling of our bathroom should commence today (again Yay!), other than a cupboard which Wouter is making – there really isn’t anything else going on.  We did talk about my room a little bit last night – my scrapbook room that is. Currently I am using a corner of what was the dining room in the park home and things can get rather cluttered.

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Understatement of the year :)

This is what it’s meant to look like (spent last Sunday clearing things up).

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I was trying to explain to Wouter what I envisage my room to look like, which is a bit difficult when I’m not entirely sure how I actually envisage it to look like. What we have decided is that there is nothing stopping me from moving all my stuff through there and seeing how it will all fit in. Should be fun :)

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Blogs…. & the pressure to perform

On the side of my blog there is this nifty little widget (hang on lemme quickly google to make sure I’m using the word correctly)

Amazing what you learn…. did you know that a widget amongst other things is….

  • Widget (beer), a coil-like device placed in the bottom of cans and bottles of beer to aid in the generation of froth
  • Most probably you did, but I didn’t….. anyway I’m digressing, I have FEEDJIT on my blog and I happened to be looking at it this morning to see who had been to visit me when I saw someone had just popped onto my page a minute ago, and I  had nothing new for them to read!!!!

    Is it slightly ridiculous that I then felt guilty about not writing for them and in order to assuage my guilt I then proceeded to post an entry about nothing at all really?

    Probably.

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    Some days are more *red bull* days than others

    Today is one of those days.

    It all started last night at precisely 20:46 when I checked my phone during a lull in proceedings at the Simon’s Town Choir Festival (primary school choirs in the local area getting together to sing their hearts out). Jessica sings in the senior choir at Kommetjie Primary School.

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    sms from Mom – “Tamsyn has a cake sale tomorrow she said she told you thirty kids”

    Initial reaction “Oh F…” (some days require more profanity than others, today was one of those days).

    I do have some recollection of her mentioning a cake sale awhile back, but somehow wires got crossed, memory recall went on a go-slow and cake sale thoughts got relegated to a part of my brain which is very seldom accessed. [No that particular part of my brain is not particularly full!]

    The festival finished at 21:20 (the local cafe closes at 21:00, this we found out when I sms’d W to buy cake sale stuff and he got there at 21:02). Fortunately there are a number of Seven Eleven shops in Fish Hoek, unfortunately the one I went to had an ‘out of order’ atm machine, so I had to rush off to the bank’s atm machine to draw sufficient funds for the frenzied last minute purchases (I’m a good deal poorer for it too). Back to the shop, paid for the goodies, got stuck behind every slow driver in the greater Southern Suburbs area and finally Jessica and I got home around 22:00.

    In the meanwhile, W had been tasked with finishing off J’s boat project for submission on Friday. His task… ‘make the boat move in water’. This project has been a real joint effort with the construction being done by J and her Father’s side and the automation by our side.

    So there was Wouter and Jessica putting the finishing touches to her boat

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    whilst yours truly was in the kitchen frenetically making 30 of what I call Tanya’s Marie Sandwich Surprises.

    p1090159.JPGInstructions:

    Sandwich two marie biscuits together with margarine, add a third with a layer of condensed milk caramel. Top with a thin layer of Marshmallow Fluff (newly discovered in a local grocery store) and neatly arrange five Astro’s plus a jelly tot on top. Voila… another triumph on my road to becoming Super Mom of the cake sale goodies.

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    A road I might add I’m quite happy to let other moms drive down.

    We finally got to bed just before midnight (managing to get an inaugeral launch of the boat in).

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    And that is the reason why I had a red bull this morning.

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