the corner office

Just realised today's the 3rd, meaning it's 2 months since I started blogging. I thought it was another anniversary but I just re-checked my calendar and realised that yesterday, not today, it was 3 months since Mo passed away.

I wanted to write something deep about coming to terms with losing people close to you, but I'm not sure who I'd be trying to convince. What you feel is what you feel, and that's that. What you feel and what you can change are two different things, of course, but I think that's what grieving is about. I'll make two observations: first, the phrase 'life goes on' seems heartless, but in truth it boils down to the fact that the world demands your attention and regardless of what you're going through emotionally, you have to plod on and do what you have to do. So in a way, it's true. Life goes on. Second, I still miss Mo and Safiyya. That's all that needs saying, I think.

(It's also a day and 3 months since my last cigarette and thankfully no relapses. Hrm, I almost typed 'yet' there, just to give myself an escape clause. Addiction can be a bastard).

(On another note, I'll drop this link for those to whom this is matters and mention that right now, I think I qualify. Very very very early days, but time goes by very quickly...)

Woop! Must make a quick note that I managed to find the Collector's Edition of the Extended DVD version of the Two Towers yesterday - picked it up from Phase2 Records in Cresta. After trying the 'big guns', a small out-of-they-way shop had it. Go figure.

The Gollum statue isn't the prettiest, but at least I have it! Not only does this set have the standard 4 DVDs, it also has a 'creating Gollum' DVD and booklet. Not sure if the normal extended version has it, but 5 DVDs of LoTR stuff rocks my world.

My only problem is I don't have time to watch it right now :-( - Ronwen and I started watching the extended version but didn't get very far - but so far the extra bits certainly do flesh out the story quite a bit.

Also, Ronwen & I paid our first visit to the Brightwater Commons yesterday afternoon, to meet up with friends. Brightwater Commons used to be the Randburg Waterfront (if you're not South African, I'd need to explain the outlandish notion that a 'waterfront' was built in suburban Johannesburg, to compete with Cape Town's V&A Waterfront. Locals used to refer it as the Randburg Puddle because the 'waterfront' was in essence a large shopping mall wrapped around a large, grotty-smelling man-made lake, built out of erstwhile marshland).

Its popularity declined over the past couple of years, and the investors decided to revamp. So they filled in the majority of the lake, turned it into a big grassy park, and gave all the shops & pubs & restaurants a facelift. To impart some Olde Worlde Charm, they decided to call it Brightwater Commons. koff

Anyway, Ronwen & I finally got to see the place since its relaunch. They've done a fairly decent job of revamping the place, and it has a lot more going for it sans smelly water feature, but it'll always be the Randburg Puddle to me.

I'm working from home today for the first time in weeks, and true to form Tupac the neighbour's dog heard me moving around the flat, and came scratching at the door. Haven't seen the mutt in ages, but she's come to visit, and we're back to old tradition - me at my desk working, and her wrapped up around my feet, snoozing away.

All is right with the Universe :-)

On a personal note, I dinged my gum with my toothbrush while brushing a few days ago and have a small but seriously unpleasant cut in my gum. I know this isn't the most glamorous thing to diarise but lawdy, the side of my mouth is paining. Big time.

Am I the only person weird and horrid stuff like that happens to?

Also, Ronwen and I went off to Virgin Active and signed up at the Randburg gym again. We have to head back Monday for the mugshots and the like, and then there are no excuses. I'm considering getting a personal trainer for a few sessions just to get things going. It seems extravagant, but desperate waistlines call for desperate measures.

Finally, I should jot down the fact that if nobody hears from me for a few days, it may well be because Ronwen has overdosed on Paint Thinners fumes and has gone psycho on me, and I'm carved up into little bits and hidden away in the garden. Ronwen's doing the DIY thang and painting and varnishing and finishing all of our bookshelves... the lounge floor is covered in cardboard and she merrily paints away while watching telly (Dumb and Dumber and then Basic Instinct on eTV tonight, that shot, psycho-wafflery, schlock music and all). The bookshelves are looking fantabulous, but the thinnersh shmell ish pretty intenshe. Fweeeeee.

I must admit that I don't normally pay much attention to my Google traffic, but this search referral caught my eye:

why access sucks

I don't know how this surfer found me, since one must wade through a good number of sites using that s-word in less than platonic ways before one finds much in the line of meaningful search results. And by the time you get through those sites, I must imagine there are many websites out there which deal with this prickly issue at length.

Either way, I feel your pain, buddy.

I could have slapped the smarmy assistant at Look & Listen this evening, but since I'm a pacifist kinda dude, I only briefly visualised doing it and then got over it.

In response to? I've been going back to Look & Listen at Cresta for the past few weeks to see if they have the Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers Extended DVD version with the Gollum statue and the whole toot in stock. Last week one of the assistants at least knew what I was talking about. He wasn't sure when it would be in, but he'd heard that it was due this week and couldn't wait himself. A Brother. A Fellow Tolkein Nutter.

I digress. I pop into L&L this evening, and ask one of the assistants, who does a quick check on his pretty DOS-like retail system which says there's no such thing in stock.

"It's not in stock yet", says he, "but if it does come in, it's going to be just as expensive as this one", as he highlights the Fellowship version on-screen, in its R1,200 glory.

Duh. Perhaps he was trying to be helpful, but from his tone of voice I had the sense he was trying to tell me I was nuts to spend my money on something so expensive. It was one of those moments when you want to "Dude" someone. Which in the vernacular, would be a preamble to tuning someone the odds.

Dude. (very brief but heavy pause, for the import of the interjection to sink in and the pressure to build) ... I already own that one and the reason it's so damned expensive is because it has four DVDs and two Argonnath statues, and even if it didn't I'd still have payed that much to get it. And now I want the second one too. I could try to justify why I want to buy an overpriced box of DVDs and Gollum statue, but any attempts at explaining the significance and desirability of this collector's edition with 43 extra bloody minutes of screen time and commentaries and a frigging Gollum statue to boot to a non-fan would probably fail. You either get it or you don't. Clearly you don't, so just stfu and tell me when you think it will be in stock.

... (at which point you stand back and look really the moer in) ...

But since I'm as much a wuss as I am a pacifist, I belatedly expressed my disappointment and left.

Anyhooo, I'm now in a quandry. Do I wait it out at Look & Listen and/or CD Wherehouse, or do I go ahead and order thru Amazon or the like? I don't trust a Gollum statue to our postal service, but the fact that I don't have this DVD set is now seriously messing with my karma.

It's kinda complicated. I was googling for koeksusters when I stumbled across Will van der Leij's blog, with the coolest domain name a South African could nab.

Given much of the fun we-sez-they-sez cross-cultural discussion that's been sweeping the Domino community the last couple of days, I absolutely had to quote this from his review of the movie Stander (which I still have to go see).

Big sloppy wet Kudos to the language coaches. This is honestly the first movie I have seen in which foreigner actors pass themselves off as South Africans with some credibility. There is nothing worse for a Sefrican than to listen to Val Kilmer say he's a "Sef Efrikin" as though a ferret had crawled up his nose. Admittedly, our accent appears to be hard to master. It takes years of slurring bilingual obscenities with a mouth full of droewors for most of us. The rest of the world doesn't exactly have much exposure to our unique accent so you can't blame them either (and no, we don't sound like the Dutch. At all.) Of course this does not explain in any way the culturo-geographic anomaly we call Natal, but I guess it's because they still hold a grudge against the Vaalies for thwarting the Jameson Raid.

Sure Ronwen will love the Natal reference... ;-)

(and Sandy, and any other Sefrikans who read this, go read that review if you want to be taken back a decade or two)

It made it into the news, but I won't mention names.

One of my colleague's dad and brother were in an armed robbery last night, as gunmen held up colleague's dad's shop. The gunmen started getting violent, and colleague's brother who was (thankfully) visiting, and who's an ex-policeman, and was armed, fought back.

Despite being shot in the leg, he shot and killed 2 of the robbers and the third was critically wounded, and will probably die if he hasn't yet.

As South Africans, this kind of stuff always happens to other people, then it happens to people we know, and we pray it never happens to us, but too often it does. On the one hand I'm not a big fan of armed citizenry for a host of reasons, but in a situation like last night we all know that if Brother hadn't fought back, it's very likely things would have gotten much nastier. He saved a number of people's lives.

As it is, our common reaction is to rejoice that 3 criminals are dead and off the streets, because no sane South African believes that prison would actually do much to help, assuming the robbers were ever apprehended, tried, or convicted. As it was, they were caught in the act, and got what they deserved right there and then.

And thankfully our colleague's family got out alive. That's always something to be very grateful for.

Any South African living in the 80s and (I think) early 90s remembers Scott Scott (that was his name, I sh*t you not) who was the action man in a South African game show called 'Treasure Hunt' or something similar. He was the eager-beaver chipper and cheerful man in the red overalls and headset and map & clipboard, who'd fly in a helicopter and run around trying to find 'treasure' while a contestant in the studio was chasing the clock and had to solve clues using reference books and often blind luck, it seemed. They told Scott where to go and at each 'treasure' point he found a new clue or prize, and in so doing Scott and his pilot-man would traipse the countryside and teach us about our beautiful country with its wide and interesting history. Lekker.

I mention this because I see old Scott Scott is now doing a crappy Auto & General infomercial called 'Policy Files' (another South African in-joke, I guess. First you have the insurance company advertising theft insurance with Policy Files then perhaps if you're really lucky the criminals will be mentioned on Police File. Hur hur). At least he's no longer wearing the Red Overalls.

I did a quick Google and found no reference to the man or the show. Bonus questions for the ZAers in the audience: a) what was the name of the show? b) what was the name of the blonde tannie who eventually took over from Scott Scott? Melanie someone or the other?

I wonder whether our technology is getting away from us. I know modern cars have onboard computers but things are getting out of hand.

I was driving to work this afternoon and I noticed the little engine-shaped warning light on my dashboard came on. Being the paranoid car-owner I am, I turned right around and drove straight to my local Volvo dealer for them to check it out.

They ran diagnostics (ie. plugged the car into a PC), which checked the hundreds of things (apparently) that can cause the engine-shaped warning light to report a problem, and soon thereafter the diagnostics system produced a nice report saying that there was a problem with a rear oxygen sensor; intermittent fault.

(My car has an oxygen sensor? And not just one, enough for there to be a rear one? And the system knew it was only intermittently faulty? But anway...)

My first reaction to the service chap was "ok, so do you need to replace the sensor?"

His response? "No, we downloaded a software update from Sweden that sorted it out."

They fixed my car by giving it a software upgrade.