My Year of Meaningful (2011)

How is it possible that November is over today?

I'm still in thanksgiving mode!?!??!

Anyway here are some photos of the last week:









Cooking - 4 hobs, all taken up by something. And of course the oven was working at full whack at the same time.





Here's what dinner looked like:






OK granted it was supposed to be at a long table full of screaming children and flatulent old people, but alas it was just me and the Mr. and CSI New York... let history show thanksgiving dinner tastes just as good at your coffee table!




Annnnnnnnnnnd the aftermath:

















Then there was last weekend, with the massive dinner party.
We played a lawn game that involved trying to hit logs with numbers painted on them, with another log. Between drinks. Fun. I think the Mr. won. For some reason there are only girls (well, all but one) in this photo?

Here's R. & B. ... R is pregnant and leaving Bots soon to go back home to Aus. B is not pregnant but is also leaving Bots soon to go back home to New Zealand. Agh... my friends.... they're droppin' like flies, man. Suck ass.















Right, so now that it's gonna be December... that means:
- 20 days til C&S get here
- 24 days til I have to make another turkey dinner again (not complaining!)
- 26 days til we head off on the lonnnnnnng drive up north to Vic Falls and Chobe and Makgadigadi Pans, etc. with those guys and Alan.

Have not been practicing Dutch enough --oops! Hope C&S have been practicing their english (yeah right)

Oh how I love fridays these days. Gym first then dinner out, and lately that's been with S&G which is cool - I need my weekly dose of latina (S) and it's great to actually feel like you've earned your delicious food after 2 hours of wrecking yourself in the land of sweat and muscle. And top that all off with sleeping late on Saturday and you've got 24 hours made in heaven.

Just recently I established 2 "favorites" as in, what you can put as answers on interviews or quizzes about your favorite things -

My favorite smell = lime.
favorite place = bed at 7 a.m. on a weekday.

1. Tuesdays are gym-during-lunch days. This is the best thing ever because tuesday nights are way too hectic & crowded there for some reason and a bee-otch can't even get her ass onto a damn treadmill or bicycle and I HATE that!!! Not to mention how cool it is when you go at lunch and then you come back to work feeling like you actually deserve that tuna sandwich. And then the evening is your oyster.

2. This weekend I cooked chicken rendang for 16 people. Hands down, my biggest hosting event yet that involved more than drinks and/or a bbq. We used every plate we had, including camping ones, and every chair in the house. Moved them all down to the lapa/pool area and set up the speakers and whammo- party time. For side dishes I made herbal fried rice and asparagus salad. (I started cooking 24 hours in advance) The Mr. was an excellent assistant-host. Everything was enjoyed, it seemed, and only 1 vegetarian showed up. I'm beginning to believe that every vegematarian that I know is a female Australian.

3. That crazy Facebook has a Scrabble application which I love. I'm currently playing against Paul and I'm pretty much gonna kick his ass.

4. It is Mary's birthday toady. We got her a big full-length mahogany-framed mirror (all she has at the moment is a broken shard the shape of Nevada, duct-taped to her bathroom wall) and when she unwrapped it she was so overjoyed I thought she was going to explode. Literally!

5. Saturday we've been landed into volunteering at the SPCA art day, doing what, I'm not sure (selling paintings? hot dogs?) but now I have to decide which of the hounds is going to accompany us. I'm thinking Reggie because he needs the special attention, but I'm also thinking Sech, because he needs the exposure for his own good and future forever-home. hmmm.

6. Speaking of Sech, he's at the vet getting his balls chopped off right now.

7. We are looking at plots, at the moment. We swore we would never even CONSIDER building a house. So why, exactly, are we looking at plots? ugh. typical - because they're there and they're cheap and.... I don't know! Because the Mr. hates our house (but loves our plot) and again... I don't know!!!

8. My new favourite white wine is Flat Roof Manor Semillion. I have been looking for a fabulous white wine to die for, ever since I had that Iona Sauv. Blanc down in Joburg and realized that you can not get it for love nor money, up here. Now I've found one and it's only P30-something at Pick & Pay. Hot diggity! I love that wine so much I wanna take it around the back of the middle school and get it pregnant!

9. I haven't even begun to think about Christmas shopping. This is surely gonna get my ass kicked by the old folks at home.

10. We went to the Ethiopian restaurant with S&G friday and it was delicious as always but I kinda realized I'm getting tired of it. It's the same thing every time and once you've had the same thing time and time again and you never even have the choice of anything different to try, well, then you end up going just for the atmosphere or because your friends want to. OK that's not a bad reason to go to a restaurant but I already have short-attention-span-disorder and MAN i'm bored with that place!! ~gasp~
(did I just say that!??!?!)

And this concludes the 10 things that randomly popped into my mind, today.

Holy SHIT did I eat a lot last night!!!

The Turkey landed alright, at my house.....

On a whim at around 11 a.m. the Mr and I decided to wing it, and so we went to our local upmarket expat-oriented boutique foodie store, and bought a small turkey (only place in town you can get a turkey). It was frozen. We tried leaving it in the car in the sun, to defrost ASAP, but unfortunately the heavens picked yesterday to open up with a big cloudy thunderstormy day and there wasn't a sunbeam to be found in the sky.

This yielded a situation whereby it was 5pm and the Mr. was standing in our kitchen, hair dryer in hand, shoved up the butt of a rock-hard turkey. We ate at approximately 9:30. That's not such a bad deal or anything, but unlike my fellow countrymen, our office did not have friday off, so things were moving a wee bit slow today.

Team W. tore up the kitchen in a whirlwind of activity throwing everything together. Seriously, it was like "Hurricane W" or "Ws on Fire" MAN we zipped through no less than 5 recipes (for 2 people... naturally... as you do....) in 3 hours and they all turned out delicious. Thank god we only bought a 5kg turkey or we would've been dining at midnight. Petra couldn't make it b/c she was under the weather, so yeah, it was an honest to goodness american pigging out session on the backs of just the 2 of us. In all actuality it was probably more "authentic" than the one we did in ireland that once with Family C. Hell I remember that dinner with a vengance - dinner was over before me or the Mr. had even had 3 bites of food! DOH!

The recipes we made were:

Turkey (duh)
(stuffed with) Sausage & Apricot bread stuffing
Gravy
Mashed potatoes with créme fraiche
Southern candied sweet potatoes
Green beans with bacon
Cranberry stuff (purchased - woo hoo!)
Pecan pie (purchased - woo hoo!)

We each drank a cider while we were cooking, then 1 glass of red wine pre-dinner, then 1 glass of white wine with dinner, then the all-important after-thanksgiving-dinner PORT. I felt wasted. After 4 drinks over 4 hours! What has become of me?

(oh wait - maybe not eating from 1pm til 9:30? just a thought)

Here's a bizarre tidbit - not one phone call from the motherland. Weird only because typically at least SOMEONE rings, even if it's just the sibling. I think I'm gettin' frozen out indeed. Oh well, we all know it only woulda driven me crazy anyway, particularly getting SOMEONE on the phone who won't let you get a word in edgewise and starts motormouthing at a billion miles an hour and then passing the phone around so everyone who actually has NOTHING to say to you can get a chance to go uhhhhhhhhhhh.... howzit!

anyway, it's all for the best.

I just agreed with Petra to cook for 14 of our closest friends this weekend. what the HELL was I thinking?

today I actually feel a wee bit sad and nostalgic, as I just realized tomorrow is thanksgiving and there will be no turkey or stuffing or mashed potatoes for me. :-(

As much as I would like to never have to endure another holiday with the majority of my family, around this time of year (particularly when I'm in the southern hemisphere for some reason) I always miss Kansas City and the Plaza lights and football and early xmas shopping and all that rot.

I would kill for SOMEONE ELSE to make me a huge ginormous feast, complete with the maternal's family martinis and mimosas, but really only for the sentiment, because in reality a huge feast might be just a wee bit unappetizing in 115 degree weather.

I am OBSESSED! At the moment I have this project on that I HATE and that I just can't bring myself to finish. Honestly, it's so god-awful terribly boring that I just
cant
do
it.

Which meeeeeeeannns that IT WON'T GO AWAY!!! And I have other things that I need to move on to, but this ONE THING is preventing me from doing so!

The Mr. would just "buckle down and suck it up and get it done". So would most people.
WITH A BRAIN

but I just sit here and procrastinate and avoid the inevitable.
BECAUSE I AM STOOPID AND LAZY AND LACK DISCIPLINE

hey, at least I can admit it!

If I was Britney Spears I would say:
"I'm gonna get some motivation, y'all!"

(but since I'm not really talking to anybody that just sounds as stupid as I've just proclaimed myself to be.) Instead, maybe I can humiliate myself into buckling down by making a list of what I WILL get done today, and until I get this list accomplished, I am going to TURN OFF MY CONNECTION TO INTERNET EXPLORER (the big guns are out). Which is drastic.

1. Fill in remainder of statistics in the report (by hand)
2. Type up corrections
3. Dump on the Mr.'s desk for review.

There. It doesn't sound like much but the sheer boringness and mind-numbing awfulness of this statistical analysis BS that I'm up against is enough to make one so crazy that they resort to taking photos of their vegetable garden, etc just so they can upload said photos onto THE OTHER BLOG as yet another tool of procrastination. That bad indeed.

So here we go. www.byebye...

I just requested my presence be added to the absentee voter list for Missouri so now I can't wait for my ballots to come rolling in. WOO HOO! Except I'm still not 100% on the candidate though, except I DO know that Barack has lost me. ~sigh~ I still think of him as a rockstar and he was almost The One there for a moment, but now all this "work to find a compromise that is more friendly to the mining industry*" BS has finally body-slammed the last straw down on the camel's back for me. Well I suppose he kinda started to slow down the golden-bricks-of-poop production when I first heard him talking up coal to liquid, but now he's just lost it all together.

I'm thinking of heading down the "3-presidents-for-the-price-of-one" route now. I mean we all (literally, THE REST OF THE PLANET) still love my boy from Arkansas, PLUS I wouldn't want to miss out on an opportunity to see my father start shopping for real estate on Mars if Bill were back in the hoosegow again, not to mention SURELY Hillary will somehow find a way to bring Al Gore back along for the ride... what, Secretary of the Interior maybe? so... why not?

The good thing is that {I dont think} we don't have to be totally scared this year, as far as I can tell (from over here - I may be wrong, I dunno, I only get EuroNews) so, just as long as we don't royally F*ck something up entirely, during the months between January and November, I've decided I'm actually for once rather looking forward to this election year.


*when arguing AGAINST the sensible reform of the ROYALLY F'ed up Mining Act of 1872... something I once wrote a ginormous college paper on and will refrain from even getting started on how ridiculous, retarded, and in desperate need of reform that thing is. I mean, Barack, I know Illinois is a big fat rich coal mining state but WTF!?!?

Boy howdy were we sick!

HOO HA! Lo and behold our first respective sick days as small business owners came on the same day (friday). Now how lucky is that. As Padraig so sweetly put it "Jesus, WTF must you do EVERYTHING together!?!?!?"

Firstly, on Thursday the Mr. started to go down around lunch time. He felt totally tired and exhausted (for no good reason - I mean after all the week DID start out with sleeping 10 Hours!) But I felt fine. I figured it was just him getting back into the swing of things after having visitors and then going through the mean ol' wife's Road to Fitness Recovery Programme. At any rate, the boy said "let's go home" at 4pm... unheard of! So I said "hell yeah!" but I was thinking "uh oh, this isn't good... he must be on death's door".

Upon arrival in the house, he got fits of shivers. I wrapped him up in a winter duvet of like 300 Togs, and he was STILL shivering. This later turned into the sweats and then back to shivers. I made it through til about 8pm before it hit me. We spent the worst night of our life in night swimming in sweat and shivering at the same time. Up and down to the toilet (thank god for that en suite!) about a hundred times each, including a stint with me face down on the bathroom tiles. Niiice.

Friday = incapacitated on the couch(es).
Saturday = semi-incapacitated on the couch(es)
Sunday = feeling human again, still best friends with the toilet though
Today = both back at work, nearly 90%. Whew.

Thank god for satellite TV. And for the fact that South Africa was playing New Zealand in the cricket which made for several hours over 2 whole days of good, solid, zone-in, zone-out t.v. watching.

Oh yeah, and we also finally joined the rest of the entire civilization of Planet Earth by catching "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" or whatever that first one was called, movie, while we were immobile. Both of us actually thought it was satisfyingly entertaining, but then again with the delirium of 3 days worth of empty stomach and dehydration, I probably would've thought anything was cute that didn't necessitate the actual process of pressing.... down.... remote control....button.... ouch.....

(NB: Now so many of those halloween photos from my friends' kids & the internet all of a sudden make sense!)

ugh. 3 days of nothing but Sprite and dry toast and packet chicken noodle soup. Yet being tortured continually by Food TV! A paradox from hell!

Upshot = I lost 3kg in the process!! WOO HOO! Man if I could always look like my "post-sick-weight", I'd never have another diet/exercise worry again. (but it always comes back if it's from being sick. doesn't it. ~sigh~)

At any rate, I'm using the 3kg head start to my advantage, and making sure that starting from this point, the Wayward Child's Road to Fitness regimen is going to include the following new amended measures:
- the "no over-eating strategy" complete with water drinking
- the "less wheat" caveat.
- no beer until xmas (hello gin and red wine)

Hopefully this strategy will ensure that I don't just piss away the 3kg of grace. This is the year of the Me_Getting_Hella_Fit.

In non-health-related issues, it appears that S&M are safely back in Aus, and soon we'll be looking at his (Steve's) Round 2 of magnificent photos on his blog. I know I'm checking it every day b/c I just can't wait to re-live the moments. Cheesey, but true. Not even gonna backspace that and edit it for posterity. Nope! I'm looking forward to seeing what they saw in Cape Town.

In finance news, today, the Wayward Children have decided to commit to opening a RothIRA account. Just so happens my bank back in the old hometown has a magnificent website instructing and advising of just how these mysterious things work, and thanks to our friends with finance-brains, we are inspired. The vision is to get a nice, cliché combo of property + funds going. Property is already sorted, so now we just need to get the funds. That's where Mr. Ira Roth is going to come in. So today we decided to hop on the ship o' inspiration and chuck in the first $2,000. To be added to in yearly chunks of $3,000. We see that we're gonna need to up that $3,000 to a higher number, soon, but for now we just need to get SOMETHING in there. Last year we saved $2000 and just have it sitting around, so that's where the initial bit is coming from. the $3000 monthly will be coming out of salary.

That's my story and I'm stickin to it.
MAN that was one boring-ass paragraph! I can't even believe it came from my fingers!

Now I gotta play catch up and do some serious work, after I eat this divine (not) packet of chicken noodle soup. Whilst la Bella A. has been inspiring me with financial advice goodness, Brandon has been inspiring me with life strategies: "....only do the things that will make you happy tomorrow. Obvious example for this is...if you eat the whole chocolate cake you'll be happy right now...but...tomorrow you'll kick yourself for it." For me, that translates into: "get the damn institutional survey shit written up into your report instead of just procrastinating and ignoring it. you'll be happy tomorrow rather than pissed off with yourself for being such a slack-ass loser"!!

mmm, powdered chicken noodle soup time.

Right so back to this whole "I know what I want to do with my life" thing.

First, some background. Let's start with the vital stats of moi, just to make it all a bit more understandable.

Since 1994 (13 yrs ago) there have been 10 moves. And that doesn't include "moving back to the parents' house for summer breaks from college". That's just regular old pack-up-your-life-and-start-it-over-again-somewhere-new type of moving. It included 4 continents, 5 countries, 6 time zones, appx 11 houses, and I think that's a good enough buildup to establishing an obvious pattern. Effectively, I like change, and I have a short attention span. Or of course one could say I use fleeing as a means of dealing, depends on how you look at it. Whatever!

Since hitting 30 I've been struggling with the inevitable question: when/where will we "stop"? Man if I had a Pula or a Rand or a whatever for every time we have to field that question, then my retirement plan would be coming together ever so neatly. More on that to come. At any rate, I just don't know. I *kinda* see myself as a bit of a clairvoyant and normally I can conjure up, in my mind's eye, visions of exactly where or what kind of thing or place I'll be in, for a few years into the future. But more than 5 years, no way! It's like there's a big brick wall at the 3/4/5 year mark and no matter how much I try to revert into my instinct and gut feelings and all that malarkey (which I totally believe in BTW), it's like I just don't have access to it. So many of my friends and family do, they know, they really know where they're going to be living and dying and all the rest and exactly how many benefactors will be on their estate or will. I just have a 3-to-5-year-brick-wall to look at! That bastard! But honestly, I think I put that brick wall there myself. As a kind of madey-uppy barrier that keeps me from being able to know. I'm pretty sure it's there because deep down, I don't want to know.

I mean, there's lots of things I'd like to do between now and death, but if I had to pick one thing and say "I want to do _this_ and remain _there_ until I die", then I would probably get some sort of nut-allergy reaction where my throat closes up and I can't breathe and my eyes bug out of my head and panic ensues.

So to re-cap, the gist of this crap is that:
1) I think I'm just a wee bit transient
2) I just really can't see my future (well except for stating the obvious which is that it's "somewhere with the Mr.")
3) The thought of growing old in one place and spending "the rest of my life there" could well and truly necessitate a trip to the Accident & Emergency Room.

Then along came Dave. Our subcontractor/colleague who's (similar to me) an American masquerading as a Namibian, with gypsy blood and about 99 countries on his list of both living and working. Dave has a plan. Well, he better, he's like 52 or something.

Basically, without trying to keep up the well-formulated-paragraph-thing up, I'll just lay it out there:

• There are these cruise ships that exist. Some are American, some are Norwegian. I'm sure there's a lot more than that too, I just don't know yet. At any rate, they are massive mother f*ckers.
• You can buy a "retirement home" on these ships. You can buy a 1-bedroom jobby, a 3-bedroom apartment, or a huge f-off penthouse.
• Dave is going to buy one on the Magellan. It has 200 properties on board, on-call housekeeping staff, a world-class spa and marketplace, a 24-hour concierge staff, indoor and outdoor pools, six restaurants, a 450-seat theatre featuring Broadway-quality entertainment, a casino worthy of Monte Carlo and a 8,000 square foot greenhouse with onsite horticulturists, even a frickin on-board observatory with onsite astronomer!!
• One would buy a property on said ship (Dave's going for a big fat 3-bedroom one with veranda and balcony), and (for lack of a better descriptive term) live there!! It would be your condo/apartment/home on the great blue sea!
• The boat circumnavigates the globe once a year. They plan out the routes 2 years in advance. As an example, the 2007-2008 route goes all the way around the coast of North America, through the Panama canal, all the way around the coastline of Europe and the Mediterranean, and down the east coast of South America. Then the 2008-2009 season, on the other hand, does the far east (Asia), Australia, New Zealand, then 'round the back to the east coast of South America, back up the west coast of North America, and around Alaska, Siberia, etc, etc.
• Any way you shake it, you'd be touching base with massive long Ports of Call in the good old U.S. of A. at least once a year, for all those friends and family (of mine) who'd be likely to use the "but wouldn't you miss HOME?" line, not to mention all the other places we love such as Aus, Africa, Europe, and not to mention all the amazing other new places that we otherwise would probably consider ourselves too "old" to up roots and run off to...
• Yes indeedy, you'd have a guest room available for visitors!
• You'd own the property, meaning it could be either re-sold for a profit, or you could leave it to your beneficiaries in your will thereby keeping it in the family or what have you.
• Of course it's set up with all the elderly-centric medical facilities that a big pack of globetrotting old bags would ever need.
• You're not "on the water" the whole time- only when moving from port of call to port of call. the rest of the time you're just doing the normal land-lubber holiday thing... or not, if you don't want to! You'd be totally flexible! it's just that your "house" would be in a port or harbour.
• All of the travel, none of the moving!

OK now for the minor glitches:

• Cost (upwards of 1million US dollars for basic apartments). Adela, I need help on how I'm going to grow up that dosh over the next 25-30 years. We have about €200,000 capital sitting in the Ireland house right now... is that enough to start with???
• If you buy into the american ship, you've got a butt load of those perplexing american property taxes (that I simply can't wrap my head around because they're so confusing) to deal with, not to mention annual maintenence fees. So as the Mr. puts it "you're gonna have to have one hell of a pension!" So I guess, yeah, that's also part of "Cost".
• It's expensive.

I just found out that according to the website you can also buy a 1-month or 2-week annual timeshare in the "Magellan" too. So you wouldn't necessarily have to live there 365, but if you got 12 of your best mates together (who could kick up the $300,000 for the 1 month timeshare price!) a joint-ownership thing could even be possible. But the Magellan is super duper expensive. I'm thinking there's gotta be cheaper out there - and who knows, maybe in 20 years they'll be so run-of-the-mill that we really CAN afford it? I just don't know. But for once in my life, I'm already conceptually SOLD!

:-D

Have I totally lost it?

HEY I'm pretty sure I've decided what I want to do with my retirement.

It could literally tick all the boxes. ALL THE BOXES....

The best thing is that the Mr. is just as keen on the idea as I am.

Now can someone please advise how I'm going to come up with over 1 million U.S. dollars in order to realize The Dream?

Once we get that sorted, my universe will be complete.

I would launch into a wordy explanation but it's time to go to the gym now. Not to mention the fact that I just don't know how I'm going to put such awesomeness down into words. How does one verbalize the epiphany that you know what you want to do with your life... not just your career but the remainder of your LIFE!!!!????

So it's monday morning and after I've gotten the 100000 emails cleared out I realize it's actually not all bad. There's only a couple little easy jobs I have to do here (nice for a monday) plus my yoga class was cancelled today which means we can go running after work (which will make me feel better about getting back on the road to fitness), plus it's not bad to start a monday after getting...

10 hours of sleep last night!!!!!!!!!

That's just unheard of. On a school night. At my house.

What happened was we got back from a great time out in the bush with S&M, J, A and the lions. And when I say the lions I mean they were back again, keeping people awake at night with their carrying's on. Notwithstanding this, copious amounts of booze had been drunk by all (well, except for Alan of course) and naturally that makes for sleepy heads at 7 in the a.m. when the blazing hot central Kalahari sun boils you out of your tent. The concluding thought of this paragraph is that we were damn tired. And dirty.

Right, so the electricity was out when we arrived back home with the posse. This situation wasn't all that welcome after a long drive through the corrugated sand traps of the Kweneng District, bouncing our brains out and shouting at the top of our lungs over the general noise of 4x4 + trailer + A/C + all that noise from some foreign iPod. ha! Basically spirits were somewhat disheveled and the general sentiment seemed to be "I just want to be clean" and "someone please just feed me some vegetables and fibre". But alas, no electricity + the fact that everyone (except for the Mr. and I) needed to quick-quick-quick get back to Joburg ASAP because Jéan had an 8:30pm flight. So there really was no time for electricity anyway now was there.

At any rate, we managed to get the BPC out (on a sunday afternoon, not bad, guys) to investigate and unfortunately it appears that the house electricity cable has a fault in it, which was causing the main box to trip. Unfortunately they couldn't help us, but they threw the main breaker anyway and we had power (for awhile) long enough to take baths (WOO HOO!) and do a few things around the house before it tripped again. I really couldn't have cared less though. The bathing got done and that was all that mattered. aaaaaahhhhhh!

The bonus was that without electricity all night, it meant that we were in the perfect position to read our books by candlelight and fall asleep at (get this) 9:15!!!!!!! couldnt believe it. I don't even know if I've gone to bed at 9:15 without being sick as a dog. Also, thankfully the evening wasn't too hot so we slept with the windows open and didn't die of heat stroke given that the A/C and or ceiling fan would've needed electricity to run!

I made potato and carrot korma on the gas (cooking doesn't stop for electricity failure!) for dinner because even me, the queen of the carne, was all meat-ed out after a weekend of braai-ing. And I have about 200 carrots in my garden that need to find something to do with themselves because actually I'm not even that carrot-y of a person so I don't have a whole hell of a lot in my repertoire for the long orange stick... so I'm trying new things. Having the kind-hearted vega-ma-tarian here has inspired me to learn more veggie-centric recipes.

George the super-electrician is in Francistown. Naturally. So we called in his No. 2. According to Mary that guy (named "Killa", by the by) showed up drunk and totally clueless. So we sent him packing. George's No. 3 guy is on his way now, reportedly. Whew.

Anyway, if all goes well, the electricity should be back on this evening. Sure that means the whole freezer will be defrosted by then. Isn't it bad to freeze meat and then let it defrost and freeze it again? Or is that all just one big fat old wives' tale? Either way, it's just one of those situations where I have to decide to bring in my old mantra of "if there's nothing you can do, then do nothing" and get on with life. And so it is thus.

Being refreshed is definitely good for a monday. I even note that the Mr. is seeming awfully relaxed and is juggling his rush-job coursework with coming back to the office quite well. Also you're always nicer to each other when you're not exhausted, which is a perk on both our sides.

I'm soooooooooo stoked that we got to see Wild Dogs in Khutse this weekend. Haven't seen them for nearly 8 years now AND that they were so big and healthy and seemed totally happy (I think we saw around 6 or 7 of them) and totally un-bothered by the truck. We also saw Eland (also rare) and lion and the old stand-bys i.e. heaps of giraffe, oryx, steenbok, springbok, vultures, jackal (or was it a fox? the jury's still out) and kudu. There was a magnificent lightning storm (with no rain - woo hoo!) just behind the pan where we camped the 2nd night which livened things up there for the photographer in our group. I'm really looking forward to seeing the results of that in photographic form.... AHEM! Steve...



(wild dogs pictured above.)


(Steve, the man of many photos but very few of him, being a leopard)


The truck's first ever time with 6 passengers in it, and as the resident rider of the back-back seat, I can say it actually went pretty damn well and the trailer was a good idea. We were all comfy and happy as far as I could tell.
(view from the back-back, pictured here)



So alas, here we go with our latest case of empty nest syndrome ("it just seems so quiet..." "do you think they're getting on ok in cape town...?" "So that bastard J is actually moving..." and so on) but at least I'm looking forward to the next month of nazi-like exercise and healthy eating, before C&S get here at xmas and we fatten ourselves up into oblivion all over again!!!

Alan, wicked fire starter:

(view of the 8 yr old hand-me-down tent that has served us so well and just won't die!)