Gimme the good news...

This week has been unbearably hot! It feels like my brain is in a slow cooker (my skul- my slow cooking skul…mmmm…there might be a poem in that somewhere?). I don’t know if the weather buro is just trying to make us feel better or what, but when they say 30’C the car’s thermometer indicated 38’C after about 5 minutes in the sun. This is not my car that we’re talking about by the way – some days it feels like I am the only person in AFRICA who doesn’t have aircon in my car! Anyway, when I get into that car it is of little to no consolation to me to hear that it’s just because the car was standing…a moving target apparently gathers less sun? It’s 38’C – deal with it. The car feels it, I certainly feel it, and we don’t know why you can’t just admit it and move on…

In an effort to entice thunder and lightning and a reprieve from global warming and heat waves – I will attempt to wash my own car this week – by hand! If it doesn’t rain then I have no idea what I will do…be warned that it might actually snow, or hell might freeze over.

A progress report on project proper swimming pool: It has been established that the pool is too deep and after thinking that the worst of it was behind us now, we were once more visited by our “friendly and efficient” construction team yesterday for the pouring of another layer of concrete to rectify this problem. Now it will have to stand another week being watered three times a day. At that point they will return to put the last layer and the water in. Rumour has it that the pool will have to stand for three weeks before we can swim in it after that. And my dad plans to empty the temporary pool into the new pool because it will halfway fill it up and save on water. So I see plenty of cold showers or hosing down in my future.

I should be happy to report that I now have access to my dad’s uncapped ADSL for free (the little pleasures of unemployment), however – I can not download my Gmail to outlook with it or access IRC with it for some reason only known to Telkom. And to be honest that’s basically where I use most of my data anyway so I’m not getting as much joy from it as I had hoped. It seems that intentionally or unintentionally every telecommunications network in SA is out to get me…yes…you guessed it! I am still not at peace with Vodacom either. I will be investigating the training and maintenance needs of messenger doves in weeks to come. ;-)

Other news this week: I managed to see Freddy for a visit. Initially we were going to re-inact a pancake day that the people in the UK had on Tuesday which we only found about afterwards – but it didn’t work out that way exactly because Freddy also helped me restore some stuff on my PC which didn’t make it through the re-install after Trojan, and we never got round to the pancakes – although we did have some excellent coffee. Thanks Freddy!

Also I saw Louelle on Friday and again on Saturday because it was the food collection week for the Lions. Every month they collect non-persihables at the Pick ‘n Pay at Heathway Shopping centre for soup kitchens and impoverished families in the area. Louelle is such a ray of sunshine when it comes to this. She smiles and works the kids and it’s clear to see that people find it hard to resist her request. We collected an astonishing 4 trolleys between 8:00 and 13:00. I saw with my own eyes how a guy walked out with a bag containing a loaf of bread and a liter of milk while leaving us with half a trolley of canned goods. When you see genorousity like that how can you help but be positive?

I was also invited to a couple of braais over the weekend. Yesterday our family went over to our neighbours house and today I attended another one at Tanya’s house. It was all very nice but I think I should keep a low profile at places without pools until the end of the heat wave at least! Sitting outside in this blistering heat for 5 hours will take it right out of you!

Some sad news: an old friend Desire’s brother died in a car accident this week and the funeral will be held on Friday. It’s a terrible shame - and my thoughts and prayers are with her family in this time of need. He was such a friendly little guy with so much potential when I saw him. We met on a Voortrekker camp that I used to help organize (many moons ago), he was a junior (std.6) and it was his first Seekamp ever. Des was also one of the organisers and so her brother tended to tag along quite a bit. One day he injured his wrist with some careless horseplay on the beach and as luck would have it both his big sister and the lady in charge of first aid was out on overnight trips with other groups. First aid was my baby for the day and after doing a thorough examination on his hand I came to the conclusion that he was just craving a little attention. It was a sprain but not very serious in my opinion – not even any swelling and the injury seemed to flare up whenever he needed to do something or wanted to chat a bit. So I played a little trick on him. I bandaged his arm all the way to his shoulder and put it in a sling for him. And I told him that if it didn’t feel better soon we’d have to take him to hospital! He got such a fright that the arm was miraculously cured within the hour. We had some good giggles about that afterwards when he realized what I had done… he was a sweet kid and it’s a shame that his life was cut short so suddenly. I want to go to the funeral so I will have to figure out where Springs is before Friday. GPS, don’t fail me now…

That’s about it for this week – I hope you all will have a good week. Keep a lookout for that rain!