Birthdays, burlesque, and Belgian circus tents...

So, now I am officially old…

They say that 30 is the new 20, meaning that it is an age women no longer dread to reach for fear their youth is behind them. It used to be that life…and middle age…began at 40, but the end of middle age has always been a bit blurred. At what age do you become a Senior Citizen? Can you be a Senior if you look like you are in your early 40s? Must you accept the label of Senior even when others refuse to believe you’ve even cracked the half century mark, let alone crossed over into that sixth decade or beyond?

This is particularly pertinent to me since earlier this year I had my 60th birthday. That morning Hubby rose at his accustomed time, but before he left for work, he gave me a tiny jeweller’s box and inside was a beautiful, dainty little gold band flush set with three tiny diamonds so that they looked like little twinkling stars…a ring I had been admiring at a jeweller’s more than a month ago. Before he went out the door he admonished me to be ready to go out, no later than seven, and I should dress up. Sneaky man that he is, he refused to tell me where we were going.

I spent a few hours at the salon…it was time for a haircut and a touch-up. Yes, I am a natural blonde (Swedish and German ancestry), just not naturally this blonde…well, at least not since I was a kid. My stylist informed me that there was no grey to report, which I thought was pretty good until I thought of my maternal grandfather…no more than 30% grey when he died at the age of 79. Some of us just get lucky in the gene pool, ya know?

So I came back home, played around on the computer for a while, and then he was home and it was time to get ready to go. Freshly coiffed, painted and polished, I pulled out a gold tone-on-tone, embroidered and sequinned sheer silk overblouse, some black linen pants, an understated black lace-trimmed camisole, and some prettily sequinned and beaded black sandals. In a matter minutes I was dressed and we were out the door.

Well, almost out the door…when I got to the dining room I was faced with a HUGE gift wrapped box on the dining room table. Covered in red and gold paper and tied with red and gold organza ribbon, it took up half the table (which easily seats eight!). I had to get Hubby to take the tape off the box…I was reluctant to risk breaking a fingernail just before we went out to dinner…but once I got a look inside, I was just breathless…a pair of tall crystal and silver lamps I had been eyeing in a local interior décor shop, topped with the most beautiful hand-made shades of cream-coloured silk shantung and trimmed with ribbon embroidery, hand-made ribbon roses, pearls, and crystal fringe, all in the same creamy hue. Very tony, very feminine, very Art Nouveau. I was speechless!

Finally we were out the door and in the car, but he still wouldn’t tell me where we were going. It wasn’t until I actually guessed it that Hubby confirmed we were en route toMadame Zingara’s Theatre of Dreams. For those of you who’ve never heard of this venue, let alone experienced it, please go to this website for a quick promo and some pics: http://www.dining-out.co.za/member_details-MemberID-2004.html .

It is even better in person! The tent is huge and easily seats more than 400 people. And it was sold out…a full house. Unlike your basic circus tent, however, this thing was sumptuous. The ceiling panels were a deep claret velour, the seams dressed with gold bullion fringe, the walls covered with an array of bevel-edged mirrors that reflected light in such a way that it felt like being inside a jewel. Stained glass windows encircled the tent at the junction of the walls and the top, just above the booths, and tables with crisp white linen filled the room.

In the centre of the space was a raised circular dais and above it a hook hanging from the peak of the tent from which dangled a mass of flowers. Throughout the night this hook was lowered, something new attached to the hook, and then put into use. You see, this is Dinner Theatre and all manner of Cirque du Soleil type acts go on during the course of the evening. They range from a quartet of quite excellent Doo-Wop singers to acrobats, belly dancers, and even a guy who juggles a running chainsaw!

The food was excellent. They serve banquet style…all courses are delivered to all of the tables at the same time…and you have limited entrée choices, but it was lovely, just the same. Chilli and chocolate are among the ingredients in Sonoran molé sauces, which I love, so the chilli and Belgian chocolate sauce on the fillet of beef was much better than one might have expected.

The tent, the excellent food, the fun entertainment, however, was a bit spoiled by a wholly inattentive waitress. She basically ignored us (and her other tables nearby) except at serving time and at the end of the evening when she stopped by between the entree and dessert to ask if everything was OK. She didn’t even notice that the busperson who had set the tables up for the final course had skipped our table and the one behind us. So, as everyone else sat sipping their coffee and sampling the tiny crème brulee, Hubby and I (and the poor sots at the table behind us) craned our necks to see if we could find our waitress. When Hubby finally spotted her, caught her eye, and motioned her over, she was rather irritable when he pointed out the lack of table accoutrements.

When the evening came to a close we looked around for our waitress to get our bill. She had disappeared from the floor. After asking two other servers to find a way to get our bill (to which they agreed but did not comply) I finally lost my patience (we had been sitting there with a table full of dirty dishes and no bill for more than half an hour). I stood up, intending to walk up to the front of the tent and find a management person to get our bill for us. As I shouldered my handbag and waited for Hubby to shuck his chair, who should arrive with a chipper smile pasted across her face? Our missing server. Without our bill.

Needless to say, her tip was much, much smaller than it might have otherwise been and her abandonment of her station put rather a damper on the evening, seeing that it was 23h00, we had been up since 6 and had to get up at 6 yet again.

All things considered though, it was a fabulous evening, the food was good and the entertainment first rate. It was a lovely...and quite memorable...way to begin the segue from middle age to senior citizenship!

What is it with men and technology?

As women go, I'm a bit of a nerd. I like computers, have long been the "alpha geek" in my peer group of PAs (even to the point of teaching my engineer bosses the finer points of their MicroSoft Office software), and am ever ready to nod benignly when my engineer-hubby wants to buy some new techno-gadget, like a 4gig jump drive.

I'm somewhat less enthusiastic about adopting new audio-visual stuff, but if he tells me we need it and we can afford it, as long as I don't have to give up something sparkly that I've been drooling over, it's OK with me. We generally don't quibble over the remote since there are only four channels to choose from and we are pretty much of one mind as to which of the offerings are the lesser of the evils.

Enter the PVR.

Yep, the serpent entered Paradise last month through the auspices of DSTV. In California I had cable TV...300 channels and nothing to watch...DSTV is remarkably similar, just with fewer offerings. I swear, fully 2/3 of the channels available are just dreck. But the bone of contention isn't the remote, it's the PVR itself.

This is a handy little gadget that allows you to pause live TV...even do instant replays! And, I discovered several days after the beast was installed, it will actually let you record one program while you are watching another or it can be programmed (fairly easily) to record programs in the future. Handy-dandy for recording my soapies when I have to be out or when Hubby decides we're going to eat out and we leave before 7de laan comes on. In the US we have a product called TIVO that does pretty much the same, but it was something you subscribed to in addition to the cable TV service, and apparently it's pretty popular there (it was out of my financial reach at that time so I have no first-hand experience with it).

So, the day comes that I have several appointments one morning and they are smack dab in the middle of my morning soapies. Ordinarily I would just shrug my shoulders, say "oh, well," and go on to my appointment, but this PVR thing beckoned me seductively..."record All My Children," it whispered in sultry tones. "C'mon, it's easy..." Weak-willed as I am when it comes to new technology, I succumbed and in a moment I was rooting through the "instruction manual drawer," hunting up the PVR booklet. It really was easy! I scrolled through this and paged through that and pressed a button or two and...lo! and behold!...I had All My Children scheduled for recording in my absence! But my joy was short lived.

As soon as I returned to regular programming, a banner superimposed itself over my program, announcing that there were fewer than 10 hours available on the hard disk for recording. How was that possible? Didn't this thing have like an 80gig hard drive? We'd only had it for a couple of days and this was my first program scheduled...what the heck was going on?

A quick peek at the manual informed me how to check the recording schedule and in a moment I was there, staring incredulously at screen after screen...five pages in all...set to record. Nearly 50 programs were tagged for recording...Girls of the Playboy Mansion...Top Gear...Smallville...Rides...American Chopper...and movie after movie after Grade B schlock horror or low-rent "adventure" movie. There was barely any room on the disk for a decent couple of days worth of soapies, never mind a romcom or two!

We had a discussion about it and we agreed that perhaps a bit more free space on the disk should be left available for my use. We also discussed the ingeniousness of the PVR, allowing us to watch something we both enjoy, like CSI, while recording something only one of us likes...like Playboy Airheads. Since we have two TVs and they are both on the PVR, he hied himself upstairs to watch his recordings on the big TV so he could delete them from the disk and give me a little more space.

Well, the Serpent reared its ugly head tonight. I made the mistake of assuming an agreement that it was ingenious to be able to watch a mutually-enjoyed program while recording something objectionable for later viewing was the same as agreeing to actually do it. I'm a lot pickier about what I watch on TV than he is, and now with a broader range of choices, there's more kak on the tube for me to avoid. Like most men I've known, however, Hubby is mesmerized by almost anything that has colour, sound and action. If it has wheels or boobs, so much the better. If it has wheels and boobs...well, that's just hitting the jackpot. For the most part, I ignore his choices and futz with my laptop. But there are those occasions...

Tonight CSI was on MNet and Boston Legal was on another channel. Now, considering that we both like CSI and I don't care for Boston Legal, it seemed reasonable for BL to be recorded while we watched CSI. So why was Boston Legal on? I checked the TV guide and found that CSI was playing on another channel. "Why," I asked, "Are we watching this when CSI is on another channel?"

"I'm recording CSI," he responded.

"Why?" I asked again. "I don't like this show and we both like CSI."

Our arguments are rare and when they happen they are brief, quiet, and intense. It ended when I asked if the PVR was his or ours, why I didn't have more input into the decisions as to what to record and what to watch, and why he got 90% of the recording space, leaving me barely enough to record a movie and a couple of episodes of my favourite soapies.

That was about an hour ago. The TV is off. He's asleep. I'm on the computer. Knowing him the way I do, over the next week he'll reduce his backlog of recordings to give me some space on the disk, and he will be more considerate about which of our favourite shows end up being recorded in favour other things. He's really a sweet guy, but he is a guy, after all. What is it about men and technology, anyway?

Deconstructing rage

I don’t get mad much anymore. Some years ago I had this epiphany in which I realized that when I was angry, that anger was actually hiding…masking…what I was really feeling, which was mostly hurt, fear, and/or disappointment. After some heavy thinking I came to realize that my anger was actually a reaction to one of those feelings, anger being more powerful and empowering than allowing myself to experience, yet again, those emotions I had come to equate with being a victim.

What brought me to that epiphany was a think-session in which I tried to figure out why I cried when I was mad. Talk about dis-empowering! I used to be able to work up a good head of steam…a really intimidating rage…only to have its intended effect completely neutralized by the telltale red nose, watery eyes, and streams of water coursing down my cheeks. Anger…the towering rage kind of anger…used to be the “big gun” in my emotional arsenal. It was effective, it was intimidating, it got me what I wanted, right up to the moment I started to tear up. I knew the tears to be a sign of an escalation of emotion…an expression of a rage so profound I felt like I was going to explode with it, but my victims took quite an opposite view. Instead of the power of my fury, they saw a weeping woman, ineffectually spitting out blunted barbs.

Eventually I would withdraw to a place of privacy and dissolve into a storm of noisy sobs. When that was over, I would emerge and if the situation had not been resolved to my satisfaction, a cold fury would set in. This was the dangerous one, because it fuelled retaliation, rejection, or worse. There were no tears in this determined, steely-eyed rage. It was cold, calculating, and bent on getting what I wanted at all costs. It took me years to untangle this and ultimately discover that this was not my process, it actually belonged to someone else, and the tears were my own personal contribution to it…and my only clue.

By the time I reached my mid-thirties, the cumulative dramas and traumas of my life were beginning to take their toll. I fell into a deep depression and began having suicidal thoughts. When things that would formerly enrage me occurred, I would go to bed, curl into a foetal position, and wish for the dark oblivion of death. During this period I found a therapy group and began to participate twice weekly. In the group sessions, the women would expiate their rages by beating huge pillows with tennis racquets, but I simply observed, clenched and rigid, my rage returned and barely controlled. But by the time I returned home, it had returned to its hiding place beneath my depression where it lay dormant, coiled and ready for its next summons.

I’d like to say that the rage slowly seeped away, but that wouldn’t be the truth. I just got better and better at keeping it under control. A divorce and remarriage later, it still lurked beneath my surface, popping out occasionally for a snack on someone’s ego, never diminishing in strength or potency, but remaining increasingly closeted. And then my husband died.

For the next nine days I was nearly in a fugue. I was unable to eat anything, and slept only when I was falling-down exhausted…and then for only a few hours. My mind, always alert and active, seemed to be a blank. And I couldn’t cry. Finally he was buried and I skipped the family lunch, hosted by the brother-in-law who had spent his life ridiculing and belittling his now-dead brother. I just went home, took off my widow’s weeds and went to sleep. For 20 hours.

I woke up alone and suddenly realized that this was to be my new life. Oh, I had been alone before…I had been divorced, after all, and had been in a more than a few broken relationships in my life, but this time it was different. This time there was no fights and furies and break-ups and make-ups en route to my single status. No indignant “how dare he?” or “what was I thinking?” moments, no grand emotional production leading up to the apocalyptic moment of dumping or being dumped. This time there was a fragile kind of peace around me, a serenity that was not disturbed even by my numbness or sudden, unexpected moments of tears. I was alone, my heart was rent into ragged little bits, but I felt purged of rage. There was no one to be angry with, nothing to be angry about. He was gone, it was nobody’s fault, and he wasn’t coming back.

The next months of being alone were not, surprisingly, lonely. I spent a lot of time fiddling with the computer…something I do to keep my “upper” consciousness occupied with trivialities so my deeper consciousness can work things out and, eventually, kick them upstairs where I can ponder them. About five weeks after he died, my husband came to me while I slept and told me that it was all going to be okay and when I woke up, I knew.

I had a rather grim childhood and adolescence. To speak except when spoken to was to invite a backhand. Despite being a compliant and willing child, I was inept…as children are, until they have sufficient practice to master something…and so I received daily beatings from an unforgiving perfectionist of a mother. In so many ways I was a disappointment to her, and in so many brutal ways she let me know it. And yet, unlike so many children who buy the abuse and come away feeling at fault and therefore deserving of their victimization, I knew, every time that strap bit into my bare flesh, that what she was doing was wrong, that I was being unjustly assaulted…and I would get mad. By the time I was eight years old, I hated my mother with all the fervour an eight-year-old can muster. But to express that hatred was to invite further abuse, so I learned to be silent and nurture the rage, add to it with each new injustice, and eventually allow it to burst forth and defend me.

It took more than half my lifetime to learn that the rage was the mask that protected me from feeling the pain of my mother’s brutality. If I could focus myself on a rage, I would not feel the hurt. I learned to feel angry the moment I perceived any threat, for rage would not only keep me from feeling my fear, if it was big enough, it could actually drive off the threat. I soon came to realize that disappointment also provoked an angry response, too. We all have expectations of others, as well as ourselves, and I discovered that to keep myself from having to experience the pain of disappointment…or the guilt, if I was disappointing myself…all I had to do was stir up a fine rage and its fury would consume all those hurtful feelings so I would not have to experience them.

Once I had synthesized this in my head, I gave the idea to a few of my friends to see what they thought. Without exception, after some reflection on the matter, they agreed. In the throes of a break-up, if you get mad, it doesn’t hurt so much. Facing fearful situations, anger gives you strength, empowerment. And when someone tramples on your expectations, whether it is the third time the plumber has blown you off or it is some idiot who cut you off on the highway, the anger you feel is actually preventing you from feeling the disappointment of having your expectation unfulfilled: that the plumber would come at the appointed time or that the other driver would respect your right of way.

I have come to think of anger as a secondary emotion, an emotion that cannot exist in a pure state, as can fear, for example. Anger is a reaction or mask for certain primary emotions like fear or pain…disappointment being a form of emotional pain, after all. What all of these emotions have in common is that when we feel them, we feel vulnerable, victimized, powerless, at risk. Anger, however, is an empowering, pro-active emotion and the moment we shift from fear to anger, we no longer feel vulnerable, but powered by the adrenaline surge that comes with the advent of rage.

For me, crying through my rages was always a curious thing that neutralized the power of my anger. One cries when hurt or frightened, and it was those tears that eventually put me onto the track that lead me to figuring it out. Today, when I feel anger welling up inside me, I immediately analyze it…fear? pain? disappointment? Did that reckless BMW driver scare me when he passed on a blind curve? Did a person’s remark hurt my feelings? Did I really expect that woman to control her child?

I find that I am more prone to mild annoyance today than anything that approaches anger. I have found I can be outraged by something without being angry about it. I have discovered that there is very little worth working myself into a lather about anymore, not even in my marriage. Hubby and I have a very peaceful life…we hardly ever fight…I just state my case and then shut up until he comes around. Even if it takes him days…

Fish Stu

My husband has suddenly taken a huge liking to fish.

Not fish to eat…he’s always been very fond of seafood, especially things I find either overpoweringly strong or disgusting to contemplate putting into my mouth…but fish as pets.

It sort of started when we bought this house back in October of 2004. In the entry courtyard were two lovely urns with water cascading over the sides, and on the patio wall was a lion’s head with water spouting out of its mouth and into a long, rectangular basin. Pretty…but when we moved into the house in December, the electrical connections to the water features had been removed, as they had not been installed according to code.

For the next two years we struggled with the empty basins that filled with each rain, encouraging the growth of mosquitoes…as if we didn’t have enough, living just a short jaunt from the vlei! Finally, this year, I told Hubby to get the bloody things running again or I was going to fill them up with dirt and plant peonies…anything to get rid of the mossies! And, good man that he is, he called in an electrician to sort out the pumps and wiring and get the fountains flowing again.

So, within the span of a few days (and the cost of more than a few rands) we had our water features running. And they were lovely, sending the joyful sounds of burbling water into the house. But, as lovely as they were, something seemed to be missing. The moving water in the water features is pretty good proof against mosquitoes…they tend to breed in still, stagnant water…but the basins seemed a trifle sterile with nothing in them but water and rocks.

Back in California I had a few horses and at the ranch where I boarded them, we kept goldfish in the watering troughs because they very happily eat mosquito larvae. They also provided a little entertainment, watching them swim around and come to the surface looking for handouts. So I asked Hubby if we could get a few fish for the basins, just in case the mossies found some turgid little corner where the pump didn’t circulate the water so well. That Saturday we presented ourselves to the local aquarium and fish store and came away with four of their cheapest, hardiest goldfish and a little jar of fish food.

Now, I expected that I would be the one responsible for feeding or new finny little friends, but to my surprise, Hubby was immediately fascinated with them! Every morning, he got up, opened the front door, and went out to the urns to check on his fish and give them breakfast. Then, he would go out onto the patio and hunt up the two in the lion’s head basin and feed them. Same thing in the evening…a cup of coffee in one hand, the fish food in the other, he would stand in front of one of the basins and commune with his fish.

After a week or so, he looked at me as we were driving somewhere and asked “Do you think those fish out in the courtyard get lonely all by themselves?” Now, personally, I’m not too convinced that fish have a highly evolved emotional life, but who knows? And what harm could it do to get a couple of more fish? These seemed to be thriving, the basins were large, and goldfish aren’t particularly expensive. Before the day was over, we were back at the fish store, this time buying four Black Mollies, fat little bug-eyed black goldfish with graceful, long tri-lobed tails. It was quickly apparent that our basins weren’t the best place for the Black Mollies, as they were difficult to see. But at feeding time they came to the surface, greedily sucking down the tiny pellets of fish food.

Soon Valentine’s Day arrived and Hubby had taken the whole day off so we could spend it together. “Let’s go to the fish store!” I said and, once there, bought him a desktop aquarium and all the accessories, promising to return to finish the gift with fish and plants once he had the aquarium set up at work and ready to receive some finny occupants. He agreed and took the tank to work on Thursday and set it up, and on Saturday he was back at the fish store buying four fantail goldfish and two “bubble eye” goldfish, odd little creatures with huge translucent pouches of air around their bulging eyes. Into the basins went his new fish where they were supposed to hang out until Monday, when he would take them to work.

The first thing we noticed was that the bubble-eyes were absolutely fearless. When a shadow crossed the top of the basins, their roomies would dive for cover deep in the water or under the water plants, but the bubble-eyes would come to the surface to greet their visitor. Cute for fish-infatuated husband who was just delighted at the greeting and being allowed to actually touch the fish, but not such a good idea when the next shadow cast could be from a fish-hungry bird! Late on Saturday I wandered out to the courtyard and did a headcount in both basins and was alarmed to find one of the bubble-eyes missing! Frantically casting my eyes about in the rock-filled catch basin at the base of the urns, I found him just half-submerged in a little pocket of water! Alarmed, I scooped him up and popped him back into the urn where he seemed to recover quickly. How long he had been there and how he survived going over the side of the urn into the rocks below…and how he managed to find a puddle with enough water in it to keep him alive…is truly anyone’s guess!

Monday morning arrived and after breakfast, Hubby headed out to the basins with a container of water, ready to collect his finny babies and take them to their new home. Although he had originally intended for the bubble-eyes to remain at home, their propensity for getting into trouble in an open-air environment quickly convinced him that they would be much safer in the tank at the office. We didn’t know if that fish’s tumble into the rocks was an attempt at suicide, the result of wanton recklessness, or if it was simply too stupid to swim down in the face of danger, but at R40 per fish, Hubby wasn’t taking any chances with the irresponsible little creatures! He quickly netted the Mollies, two fantails and the two bubble-eyes and took them off to work with him.

At last bulletin, they are happily scooting about the tank, testing and tasting everything (including the gravel at the bottom of the tank!) and generally acclimating themselves to the new environment. Traffic through the office has increased as people pop in to check out their new office-mates, and Hubby, who is now managing his own department, has issued a challenge to name the fish, prize to be a round of drinks on him. In the spirit of his request for punny names, the first suggestion was “Stu.”

Looks like we have an amusing new hobby in the household!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Today is Valentine’s Day.

So far my day has consisted of sleeping late, getting a pretty pair of yellow gold hoop earrings with tiny white gold filigreed hearts suspended in them, brunch at my favourite café, shoe shopping (nope…didn’t find any I liked), and a trip to the spa where both Hubby and I had a massage and champagne in the Jacuzzi. While all this has been going on, the workmen are busy demolishing my kitchen and putting in some new cupboards, sink, taps, and granite tops. This evening we have reservations at the Five Flies…a Cape Town institution and a restaurant that most certainly deserves its 5-star rating. Life is good…and my husband is a superstar!

On the other side of the coin, however, today I have also endured such dismal service that we left less than a 10% tip (we usually tip much better than that, been nearly run down by people who think their sense of urgency gives them a right to be rude to others who are proceeding at a merely normal pace, got half the spa treatment hubby had planned because somebody wrote down the wrong package and therefore didn’t book enough time for us (waaaah! no pedicure!), and I watched a completely uncontrolled two year old dash through the café, ignoring his mother’s whiney, wimpy pleas for him to return to her side, and cringed when he crashed into the side of a server who was carrying two plates of hot food…thank goodness she was nimble, or she would have spilled scalding soup all over that kid!

I’m trying very hard to focus on the positive aspects of the day, but today seems to be an extension of yesterday’s equally frustrating experiences in having to deal with the inexplicable idiocy of others. Woolies, for some odd reason, has chosen to display racks of clothing in the middle of the walkways, reducing space to barely one person wide. So, as I passed by one of these racks and neared the end, why did this woman with a trolley full of food look me straight in the eye and enter the same narrow corridor I am in? Does she think she can pass right through me? Does she think I can step aside (and through a glass display case) to allow her to pass? Or maybe she thinks I will walk backwards to the end of the rack of clothes, allow her to pass, and then make another assault on the inner sanctum? (not bloody likely!) I stood my ground, looked her directly in the eye, and eventually she backed her trolley out (a distance of a meter or less) and permitted me to exit that very narrow space that she should not have entered until I had exited.

Why do people behave like this? Why did a woman try to crowd onto the lift yesterday when it was clear that at least two people (one with a trolley) wanted to get off? Just how much IQ is necessary to comprehend that if you let someone out of a confined space, there will be more space for you to get in?

Then there are people who seem to think they are being put upon when you expect them to do their job. I’m sorry, but when I tell a waiter I need “a few more minutes” to peruse a menu (because he just gave it to me 37.6 seconds ago), I don’t mean the guy should go on a hike through the Andes before he gets back to me to take my order! And what is with having to hoist a flag and wave it vigorously in order to get your bill? And why, why, why do so few waiters bother to bring you a pen with your credit card slip? Am I supposed to prick my finger with the dirty table knife he neglected to clear away and sign it in blood??

It’s been a stressful couple of days, I’m afraid. I am currently collecting a subscription (weekly issues) from CNA, but they cannot seem to keep their stories/rules straight. First they told me it was every two weeks, and they were sending back my every second issue because I wasn’t coming to collect them. Then, when I back ordered the missing issues, they told me they would call me when they came in…which they did not…which meant some of them went missing. Then they put up a rule (and posted it on the wall) that they would keep the issue for two weeks, then return it to stock. HAH! I went in yesterday (having missed one…and only one…week due to having houseguests) and guess what? They had returned last week’s issue and now I have to backorder it…and wait four to six weeks for it! (Interestingly, the two-week sign is missing from the wall now.) This, after having just caught up and waiting twelve weeks for an issue I missed when I was laid up with my sprained ankle. They have done this to me so many times, I’m just about ready to give up the subscription and assuage my collecting fever some other way.

Still steaming about CNA and hungry (bad combination…my normally long fuse shortens as my blood sugar drops), I decided to soothe my grumpy soul with the ultimate balm…shoe shopping. Since I am currently looking for a pair of simple black leather shoes with mid-height heels, suitable for wearing with a skirted suit, my first thought was Green Cross. My grumpy-meter spiked several points when we found them closed for stock taking in the middle of the evening shopping hours. Canal Walk was packed…crowds surging in and out of stores like shoals of fish swooping through the water…and some dimbulb decides to close the store for inventory? What’s wrong with doing it when the mall is quiet (i.e., while most of the shoppers are at their own jobs?)…what’s wrong with doing it after hours? Why close early while swarms of shoppers…people who just might spend a wad of cash in your store (I spent more than R900 the last time I was in there!)…are jamming the mall?

So, today I’m trying block out the irritations and stresses that seem to be finding me lately like a heat-seeking missile and to focus on Valentine’s Day…the brunch was tasty, even if I did have to wait nearly an hour for it because the waiter’s mind (and body) were missing in action. And while the spa visit wasn’t entirely what we had anticipated, my masseuse was really, really skilled and my back feels more like rubber than wood now! The mess in my kitchen…well, I’ve chose to view it as the harbinger of better things…you can’t make an omelette without breaking an egg, and you can’t transform a kitchen full of water-damaged cupboards and rotting melamine tops into a showplace with a Franke sink and taps and beautiful Rustenberg granite tops without first making one helluva mess!

And my new earrings are beautiful and match a heart-shaped silver filigree necklace Hubby gave me a few years back…and he actually took the whole day off from work in order to spend time with me today…

Yup…the day isn’t over yet, but I’ve no doubt that, on balance, it’s gonna be a terrific day and tonight I’ll climb into my bed with yet another smile on my face…and in my heart.

Coffee mugs and global commerce...

My husband really likes his coffee. So much so that, as a Christmas gift from me, he picked out one of those whiz-bang super-duper fancy-schmancy coffee machines that, if it had a set of wings, surely it could fly!

Six weeks after Christmas he seems happy with his coffee maker. He’s a mechanical engineer, after all, and he seems to be rather pleased with his new toy, fiddling with this control or that, visiting all manner of specialty coffee shops, buying tiny sample bags of this exotic coffee or that, all for trying out in his new…it grinds its own beans!...coffee machine.

One of the more interesting side effects of his new coffee obsession is his attention to coffee cups and mugs. Like most people, we have an eclectic collection of odd mugs, mostly broken sets, but a few strange souvenir mugs from various venues. They come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, some tall and narrow, some short and stout, all of them holding differing amounts of liquid. Hubby likes a big cup of coffee, but one of the unfortunate things about his fancy-schmancy coffee machine is that, while the spout height is adjustable, it is only adjustable to accommodate mugs of the short, shorter, shortest variety. A tall mug that will accommodate a man-sized serving of coffee just will not fit. Alas, my man’s hero-sized Tigger mug from Disneyland has had to be shelved!

So, the other day we were wandering through our local Pick ‘n’ Pay (South Africa’s answer to Safeway, for American readers) and happened upon some mugs that seemed to be the answer to his prayers…just tall enough to slip under the spout and wide enough…in a pleasingly tapered shape…to accommodate a healthy helping of coffee. And, to make them downright serendipitous, they were blue and white, which is the colour scheme of my kitchen accessories. We bought four, but only after searching through a dozen or more to find four relatively perfect ones…the rest having nicks, chips, kiln-marks, sloppy paint, or other such imperfections.

Hubby was overjoyed…we got home and he slipped one under the coffee machine’s spout and it was one of those millimetre-close fits. “Super,” I said. “Give me the mugs and I’ll wash them for you and you can make yourself a cup of coffee.”

Did I mention that they cost less than R7 each…less than a dollar? A peculiarly low price, considering that they seemed to be well made out of quality materials. They had a soft matte glaze that I recognized from more high-end crockery in the States, and while they were obviously seconds, they were nicely designed and made. It hadn’t seemed particularly odd in the store…just a really good buy…but at the sink I had to give them a second thought. The bottom of each mug was covered with a bar coded paper sticker and as I removed the first one I saw the words “The Cellar.” Odd, I thought, continuing to work the sticker off…wasn’t “The Cellar” the name Macy’s uses for its housewares section (which is ordinarily larger than an entire Boardman’s store and more fully stocked with higher quality merchandise)?

I continued to scrub at the sticker until it finally rolled up into a little gummy ball in my fingers and what did I find beneath it? “Made in China Expressly for Macy’s”! I let out a hoot of laughter, distracting Hubby from communing with his Beautiful Machine. “Macy’s!” I crowed. “These were made for Macy’s!” He looked momentarily non-plussed, then wondered aloud if Macy’s knew that merchandise made expressly for them was being sold by other retailers. Ordinarily, when seconds of this nature are released through other outlets, the identifying labels/marks are removed or obliterated…there should have been a big blob of black paint obscuring Macy’s name before this went on the shelf.

Other questions are brought to bear? Did the Chinese manufacturer have Macy’s permission to wholesale Macy’s QC rejects to other vendors? Did the Pick ‘n’ Pay buyer recognize that s/he may have been buying goods that the commissioning retailer may have ordered destroyed (a common practice for seconds in the ceramics industry)? Does Macy’s know that substandard merchandise bearing its name is being sold overseas? Is Macy’s earning anything from the sales of its goods here in South Africa?

My husband is happy with his new mugs, but this whole thing brings up some hard questions for me in relation to South Africa’s newest trading ventures with China. Will my next trip to America find me looking at South African goods that the commissioning manufacturer never intended for sale in the US…and for which he receives no earnings? Somehow, I don’t think that’s such a far-fetched idea anymore.

Trees, SUVs and Chainsaws

Yah...so what do they have in common, trees, SUVs and chainsaws?

I couldn't have answered that question either until Thursday of this past week rolled around. Hubby, who has been rather jaunty since his promotion last November, cheerily ambled into our newly air-conditioned bedroom on Thursday afternoon and smilingly inquired of me "Did you know that a tree limb fell on your car?"

Given his cheerful and smiling disposition, it was clear that he was pulling my leg. I think I answered him with something like "Uh huh, yeah, right," and went right back to my computer. But he persisted. "No, really, come see," he urged. But I know his puckish sense of humour, so I naturally assumed that he actually wanted me to "discover" something new or amusing that he brought home...and so I went along with him and padded barefoot behind him out to the garage.

Imagine my surprise when he opened the garage door and in the driveway I saw a huge tree limb, with all its associated leaves, twigs, branches, bits and bobs, astraddle the bonnet of my Mercedes ML! He was not kidding!

Upon examination (after my heart was returned to its normal position in my chest), it wasn't as bad as it looked. Although the entire bonnet was buried under a heap of green, the limb hadn't fully separated from the tree and it was tenuously suspended just inches above the paint. Slowly, carefully, Hubby backed the car down the driveway until it had cleared the Limb of Damocles. Miraculously, the car was unscathed, but now we were faced with the problem of getting a humungous tree limb down without squashing anybody or sending someone into heatstroke...our little bow saw was going to take a lot of sweat to get through those broken limbs.

So today we took ourselves off to De La Rey, Cape Town's answer to Home Depot or Lowe's, and ended up bringing home a 2000W Ryobi electric chain saw. A rather pricey alternative to the bow saw, to be sure, but it cut through those tree limbs like a hot knife through butter. Hubby, an engineer and not one of those super-macho lumberjack wanna-be types, seemed to enjoy the experience tremendously. Bzzzzzzzzzzt! Before I knew it, the offending limbs were in the driveway and in only a few minutes more, those limbs were cut into manageable pieces and stowed away. Only a dearth of chain oil slowed his hack and slash enjoyment of his new toy.

Next Saturday promises to be an interesting day. By then Hubby will have secured a supply of chain oil and it's a sure bet that no woody plant in either the front or the back garden will be safe!

Alone

The older I get, the more I find I value my solitude. Not as a retreat from a stressful world or for any grand purpose, but for its inherent restorative value.

I love my husband. He’s a great guy and ordinarily easy to live with. I enjoy his company, even when it consists of the two of us doing separate activities while sharing proximal space. But even this companionable pairing needs the occasional break…sometimes I just want to be alone.

It isn’t that I want the alone time for any particular purpose…I’m not planning to go on a shopping spree or a binge of one kind or another. In fact, that’s the whole of it…I’m not planning anything. I don’t need to consider cleaning the house, cooking a meal, making sure there is enough of this, that or the other…none of the ordinary considerations of my ordinary life need be considered. I have a pass to be mentally and physically lazy, to let go the reins of the household and my responsibilities for a day or so. Rather like being on holiday without any of the hassle of planning, packing, and making sure I get my money’s worth of sights, sounds, and tastes. Just permission from myself to veg.

Sometimes I crave the restorative virtues of solitude. Sometimes it’s good to be alone.

Sweet (African) Violet

My mother wasn’t particularly domestically-inclined so I learned many of the womanly arts from my grandmothers. As a result of their patient instruction, I can cook, bake, clean, launder, mend, and can do a credible job of most common forms of needlework. I can even keep a vegetable garden (and preserve its produce), and do a fair-to-middling job of keeping some nice houseplants. But, despite my moniker, I’ve never been able to grow African Violets.

Now this is kind of an embarrassing admission, considering that one of my grandmothers was actually named Violet and the other one collected Occupied Japan porcelain in the “Sweet Violets” motif…and grew African Violets by the hundred. It’s not that I don’t understand their basic needs…filtered light, “wet feet,” and no water on the leaves…it’s just that once their original hothouse blooms have faded, I am left with a shelf full of identical pots full of identical flat hairy leaves. They never, ever bloom again.

Oh, I’ve probably tried all of the tricks and remedies you can think of…changing the watering schedule…“African violet food” in liquid, sticks, and tablets…soil specifically formulated for African violets…changing the light exposure…nothing helped. Eventually, getting no reward (blooms) from the plants for all my ministrations, I would begin to neglect them and one day sadly find their dried and shrivelled corpses where once fat hairy green leaves had flourished.

After several fruitless forays into African violet cultivation, I pretty much gave up and bought fake ones for the pretty pots, but still, they beckoned me. In the supermarket thick emerald leaves crowned with a topknot of beautiful blooms called to me. A beautiful white…a frilled white with lavender edges…a robust traditional violet…”Buy me!” they called out “Only R14! ($2)” “Take me home!”

Seductive little buggers that they are, I am soon hopelessly plunking three new African Violet plants in the bathroom…actually, our toilet is in a separate room of its own, with a tall opaque window, and I put them in there. The shelf over the commode is just the right width for three of them, but within a few days some of the larger leaf stems are becoming soggy. Alarmed that they might actually die before even the hothouse blooms have finished, I move them to the window sill, careful to open it no more than an inch, lest the blazing Cape Town summer sun burn them to a cinder. Within days they have recovered (although I did lose those leaves) and their pretty little blooms liven up the tiny loo.

But all good things must come to an end, and eventually I found myself picking the shrivelled brown petals out of the leaves and resigning myself to three pretty plants on the window. They seemed to like the window, after all, with new leaves bursting out and the old ones growing thick and sturdy and crisp. When I would wash my hands I would check their saucers and refill them as necessary, taking comfort in the knowledge that even if they never blossom again, at least I am cultivating the healthiest crop of African violet leaves I’ve ever seen!

And then one morning, it happened. Looking up from the local gossip rag (we keep a rack of them in the loo), I thought I saw something suspiciously round nestled in the middle of one of the violets…not a new leaf, but something I hadn’t seen before. When I washed my hands I took a close look and, to my great amazement, saw buds! Buds! The plant was planning to bloom for me! But which one was it? After months of watering and moving them on the shelf according to who needed more light (based on leaf sturdiness and size), I had no idea which violet was about to burst forth into bloom!

Within a few days it became apparent that it was the white one and about the time it began blooming, the purple one started showing buds. And after a lag of a couple of weeks, the ruffled one began setting buds, ready to flower. I was amazed! Delighted! Enthralled! For the very first time in my life, my African violets were blooming for me!

Seems all I needed to do to grow African violets was to move to Africa…

Cast suddenly back into Hell…

Sixteen days ago I took my lunch and plopped down in front of the TV at noon and clicked on Dr. Phil to watch a show originally aired in the States in May. Here in South Africa, our Dr. Phil broadcasts are delayed by about six months.

Some things never leave us, even when we are sure they are dead, buried, and gone. Within minutes of the show’s start, I found myself catapulted more than fifty years backwards, horrified and helpless in the middle of an emotional firestorm.

You have to see the show or read the archive, which includes transcripts and photos from the taped footage, to begin to understand. http://drphil.com/shows/show/725/. Karen, a stay-at-home mother of five, rages at them constantly, and reserves a particularly large helping of scorn…including physical assault…for her oldest child. I felt chilled watching her and listening to the child plead for surcease…but here is where it gets weird: as that woman hit her ten-year-old son and chased him into his bedroom and assaulted him again…as the gooseflesh of recognition and empathy erupted on my arms and as my gorge rose…at the that very same time I found myself detach from the entire event. I felt as if I were viewing it through a long telescope. Some of the visuals even had a kind of dark yellowish tint in my eyes, as if viewing it through a filter. And as I heard the boy sob and beg his mother to stop hurting him, my mother’s voice echoed in my head “oh, that’s not so bad.” And then I heard the woman on tape speak my mother’s own words: the boy complained his knee was hurting and he could not walk and his mother said, her voice dripping contempt, “oh, bullshit!”

With few exceptions, this woman could have been my own mother. My mother had only two children and thankfully she was not a stay-at-home mother, but what I saw on that tape was still like peeling back the years and standing alone and vulnerable in the face of a vicious hurricane. Mercifully, the bits of tape were short and Dr. Phil immediately called the mother on the carpet for her behaviour, which she tried to blame on the kids. With her confession that she has convinced herself that her abuse is really their fault…that they provoke it with their own behaviours…I started having a creepy déjà vu sense. Wasn’t this, after all, how my mother excused her own conduct? “Don’t make me hurt you!” echoed around in my head.

But the kicker came...I found myself sitting there, mouth agape, heart racing, shudders wracking me…when one of the most terrifying experiences of my early childhood showed up on the tape: in the middle of a terrifying, towering rage, the telephone rang and the mother picked it up and spoke normally…even cheerfully…to her caller. To this day I find people who can turn a consuming fury on and off, as if they were flipping a light switch, absolutely terrifying.

This has taken 16 days to write and I’m still struggling to write it. She told me not to tell, that she would beat me within an inch of my life if I blabbed, that I was not to air our dirty linen in public. It’s not that I’ve been silent over the decades, for I haven’t. But it took a distancing, a detachment from the reality of events, to loosen my tongue. Fifty-plus years after the fact, five years of intense therapy under my belt, and my normally nimble brain becomes sludge when I try to talk…or write…about it without first donning the filter of detachment and distance to blunt the pain.

Have you ever seen something so horrible that you can only look at it in little peeks? So awful that simply looking at it full on is more than you can bear? Without the cushioning effect of distancing myself, that is how I find myself viewing my early years. Five years of excellent therapy brought me to a kind of truce with the past, a realization that the past is back there and that I control whether or not it taints my present and my future. Most days I don’t think about it or if I do, the protective filters are firmly in place. But on rare occasion something strikes that responsive chord and I am cast suddenly back into Hell. My reasoning brain tells me it was not so bad…that’s what she told me, too. She never broke any bones or drew much blood, I was sufficiently fed. I had clothes and shoes. I even had toys. How bad could it have been?

But I lived in fear. And I knew hatred at a much-too-young age. I had no security…her mercurial nature terrified me, for I could not know from one day to the next what would displease her. And to displease her was the worst sin I could commit. My very existence seemed to displease her at times, a circumstance that could only be mitigated by servitude. At seven I cooked breakfast for myself and my younger brother, standing on a chair at the stove. At ten I baked a cake twice a week after school, peeled potatoes for supper, mopped the kitchen floor every Saturday morning, and dusted and cleaned the house daily after school. But, lacking instruction in how to do these things, I often made errors…the floor wasn’t clean enough in the corner, the cake frosting was too thin, I missed a spot on the dishes…I did the best I could, but it was seldom good enough.

It has taken days to get this all written down and arranged in some semblance of order. The memories come out in disconnected jumbles, each one sharp and dark and haunting, and I don’t want to look at any of them very closely or for very long. The writing is easier now, I have been pulling away, detaching, trying to remember the facts and emotions without actually feeling them. The dark, shadowy edges are clearing from the memories, and the vignettes are clearer, less difficult to look at. I am starting to see events now, without becoming emotionally engaged by them…

Mother and I are standing in the bathroom, the water running from the tap, me stifling my sobs, she is screaming at me, her face puffed-up and suffused with blood, her carmined lips large and terrifying. “Don’t you ever tell me that you can’t again!” she is shrieking at me. I want to cringe away, but I know that will earn me a slap or yank of my hair. I can feel tears leaking from my eyes and running down my face and my lower lip is trembling, and I can only pray that she is too wrapped up in her rage to notice. “When I tell you to do something, you’d damn well better do it, and do it tout de suite,” only she mispronounces it “toot sweet.” I am nodding my head mindlessly, knowing that my only possible salvation lies in agreement with her. The water is still streaming from the tap and she points to it, her diatribe continuing unabated, my agreement ignored. “If I tell you to tie a ribbon around this stream of water, I don’t want any excuses, I don’t want any whiney ‘I can’ts’ from you, I want you to just do it and do it fast! Do you understand?” That last is delivered in a bellow so forceful it makes my ears ring. “And stop that blubbering,” she commands me. “If you want to bawl, I can give you something worth bawling about.” My face immediately goes blank, my tears stop, my throat grows a lump the size of Kansas. I wait silently until she exits the little bathroom, then turn off the tap and creep to my room, shutting the door as quietly as possible so that nothing draws her attention back to me.

She’s dead now, she has been for several years. She can no longer lie to the family about me, manipulate my children, or beat me for blabbing. But still, when I force myself to fully look at my early years, without flinching or changing the subject in my mind, without the numbing effects of detachment, my brain slows, my normally articulate self disappears, my fingers stumble on the keyboard. My words come out choppy and slow, hesitant and clumsy…my eloquence deserts me and I find myself staring at the words on the screen, motionless for long periods while snippets of the past race darkly through my brain.

Some things never leave us.

Murphy’s Law in action

South Africa has a number of large supermarket chains and, like in America, there is often one or two of them anchoring certain of the local malls. Here in Cape Town, Pick ‘n’ Pay is one of the dominant chains (where I do a lot of my shopping), Checkers is another (which I perceive as being a bit downmarket), and Woolworth’s is the premier “luxury” food shop, the place you go for the best quality produce and exotic cheeses. This morning I planned a trip to Woolies, with a stop at the nearby Checkers for some packaged goods. It did not go well.

I drive an SUV. Clearly aware of the prejudices against the vehicles and those of us who drive them, I try to be particularly circumspect when I drive and park, taking particular care to align my behemoth properly in the space. So, can anyone explain to me why, when I emerged from the supermarket this muggy, sweltering morning with a trolley full of perishables and a miserably aching ankle, the space available to open my car door was slim enough to give Nicole Richie pause? And, since I’m built more along the lines of the “before” pics of Kirstie Alley, getting into the car was a bit of a challenge, particularly with that sore ankle. And the cause of this inconvenience? Another gargantuan example of the automaker’s art? Would you believe, a VW Citi Golf, parked catawampus in its space, making ingress to my car…and egress from the parking space…an exercise in white-knuckled creativity?

The sore ankle was a large part of the problem, since the car is right hand drive and I must support my not inconsiderable weight on it as I fling my left leg and haunch up into the driver’s seat. Having my manoeuvring space compromised by the Piggy Parker next door made it all the worse. So why did I come out shopping if my foot is still so sore, you ask? Well, it wasn’t particularly tender when I left the house and, had my experience at Checkers gone according to plan, it would have been fine at the end of my excursion. But things at Checkers did not go well…and I never even made it to Woolies.

One of the things my husband says he loves about me is my practicality. I tend to plan things out…even such mundane things as shopping trips. My plan was to arrive at Checkers at opening time, dash in and pick up a few things, and get out before the store got crowded and the lines at the cashiers got long. From there to Woolies for a few things only Woolies carries, and then home in time to catch the latest instalment of All My Children (several years delayed from the US). But you know what Murphy said…

I hadn’t planned to buy produce from Checkers, but on entering the store, I saw a terrific display of white seedless table grapes (Hubby will only eat seedless grapes), so I grabbed a bunch and bagged them. I’m planning stuffed peppers for dinner this week, and the peppers looked to be in good nick…and there were fresh apricots, loose so I could choose my own (the pre-packaged punnets always contain about 50% unripe and sour!). Now, one of the ways that South African supermarkets are different from American is that loose produce must be weighed and the bags sealed shut and tagged in the produce department…the fruit is not weighed by the cashier at check out. To this end, there are scales and employees manning those scales at every produce department in every major market in South Africa. Or at least that’s the way it is supposed to be.

Once I had my fruit bagged, I headed for the scale. A young man in a red T-shirt with a Checkers logo on it was busy hefting a huge plastic bag onto the scale…and I mean huge…the size you’d ordinarily need a small wheelbarrow to move about. The bag was leaking copious amounts of sticky wetness all over the scale, the stand, the floor…and it stank something awful. It was easy to deduce from the smell that the bag contained decaying produce, most particularly rotting grapes. When he had hefted the nasty goo-dripping bag onto a nearby trolley, he turned to me expectantly…and I looked pointedly at the disgusting mess on the scale.

Correctly interpreting my glance, he looked for something to clean the surface of the scale with and grabbed a plastic bag from one of the rolls of bags in the produce department. Of course, his efforts to wipe it clean succeeded in only smearing it around so he tried another tactic…a larger wad of plastic bags. I looked around for a “regular” produce department employee…they usually wear turquoise blue uniforms and aprons…but nobody was around. I did, however, spot a different scale. Unfortunately, the young man couldn’t make this scale work at all. My foot was starting to get tired, for I had been on my feet nearly 15 minutes by this time, and had barely begun my shopping.

To my left was the produce department, brimming over with employees, but not a produce department worker in sight. I asked a deli worker if she could help me, and she grabbed a “cleaner” (grocery stores have regular employees whose only job is to roam the store and make sure it is clean, mopping here, collecting refuse there, etc) and asked the cleaner to find someone to help me. Eventually she found someone, but she could not make the scale work either. She beckoned me to the other scale but I balked. “It’s filthy,” I told her. “I don’t want to put my bags on that thing.”

Sure enough, she found the scale in the same sticky, stinky condition as before. She dashed off to find something to clean it with while I, hobbling now on my sore foot, crept over to the scale…only to find, by the time I got there, that a line had formed! By the time I got to the scale, I was third in the queue and she was weighing the produce of another customer! Eventually I got the bags weighed and tagged and I headed off to the packaged goods section of the store for some things I knew Woolies didn’t carry.

By the time I was finished with my shopping, I was weighing whether or not my foot would stand the trek down to the Woolies at the far end of the mall or not. I had to stand in a queue to get a cashier (something I had hoped to avoid by arriving at the store early…my plan thwarted by the fiasco in the produce department), but finally it was my turn and when she rang up the total, I handed her my Visa card. She put the card through and a message came up on her terminal screen: “verifying transaction”…machine-speak for verifying my credit card had enough headroom to charge a few hundred rand worth of groceries. Problem is, two minutes later (an eternity in nano-second driven machine time), it hadn’t verified…or rejected…my card. The cashier pushed a button to resubmit the transaction for approval and a little blue window popped up on her screen: her credit card terminal was off line. So what does she do? She keeps me standing there for fully another five minutes (while the queue behind me grows and grows and grows…) as she repeated tries to resubmit my transaction on a machine no long functioning. Just as I figure out what she is doing, she rings for a supervisor who comes over, reads the “off line” message on the screen and tries to submit my transaction for approval on a machine she knows is off line and non-functioning!

To give her credit, she didn’t make multiple attempts, she just wrote down the total of my purchase on her hand, grabbed my credit card and said she had to use a different terminal, then walked away. With my credit card. And so I had to hobble after her…in a direction away from the exit where my car was parked…to complete my transaction.

By the time it was done and I had my credit card back and my groceries bagged, my foot had started to swell. I checked the time and All My Children had already started…I was woefully behind schedule, every step on my right foot was like a sabre stabbing me from the heel to the knee, and I hadn’t even been to Woolie’s yet. Hobbling out the door, pushing my trolley in front of me, I headed for the parking lot, only to find the little VW snuggled up to my driver’s door like a lover.

Murphy was right.

On the road again…

No, not travelling…sprawled face first on it.

Well, it was a driveway, actually…and a gravelled driveway, at that. And for the past ten days or so I have been dosed with pain killers and confined to anyplace where I can keep my right foot elevated, preferably higher than my heart. So I’ve been spending a lot of time in bed. With my foot up. Stoned.

This isn’t the first time I’ve bunged up an ankle and ended up on painkillers with my foot strapped up and propped up. Early in 2001 I managed to fall off my porch (don’t ask…I haven’t quite figured out how yet, myself) and landed butt-first in a big geranium bush. Unfortunately, as I plummeted the entire metre from porch step to geranium-cushioned earth, I heard a sickening crack in the region of my left ankle…a breaking bone has its own distinct, stomach-turning sound. Alone and in excruciating pain…thank goodness one of the cars had an automatic transmission…I drove myself to the emergency room and emerged several hours later, one hand clutching a shocking hospital bill, one foot encased from toes to knee in Velcro-strapped black plastic.

It took months for it to heal, despite its being a fairly mild break, as breaks go. Of course the doctor put the Fear of Surgery in my heart by warning me that if I didn’t keep my Darth Vader boot on at all times, they’d have to go in and “pin” the bone together, a fate I emphatically wished to avoid after seeing him demonstrate the procedure on my x-ray. So I hobbled around on the ugly, clumsy thing for the prescribed three months and emerged, eventually, almost as good as new.

Fast forward five years and a Monday morning in Cape Town. I went out to pick up the mail and found the neighbours’ little bulldog, Xander, peering up at me through the bars of my front gate. Xander’s predecessor, Lexie, wandered away from home and ended up dog-napped, never to return, much to the heartache of the two little boys who live across the street. So, being a good neighbour sort of person, I took it upon myself to escort Xander home and close the gate that someone had carelessly left open.

This is another one of those “I dunno exactly what happened” deals. I closed the gate and turned to walk down the gravelled driveway, as I have done dozens of times in the past, and after only a few steps my right foot struck something hard and I suddenly went flying. Instinctively, I stuck out my other foot to steady myself, and struck something else! The next thing I know, I’m skidding on my hands and knees on a driveway full of sharp gravel, a sharp pain shooting through my right foot…thankfully without cracking sound effects.

Pumped full of adrenaline from the fall, I picked myself up and limped across the street to my house, looking back to determine that I had fallen over a large white stone that had somehow become detached from the driveway’s border. It didn’t take long, however, for the throbbing and swelling to begin, and so I called Hubby… “I’ve either broken or badly sprained my right ankle,” I told him over the phone. “I’ll be right there,” was all he said. And he was.

By the time we reached the hospital, I couldn’t bear any weight on it at all. X-rays, however, revealed no broken bones, just lots of blood in the spaces between all the little bones in my foot. A bad sprain, the doctor told me, along with instructions to stay off it and to keep it propped up, preferably higher than my heart.

It was two days before I had the courage to remove the elastic bandage, but I was desperate for a shower, so I took it off and, with the help of a wheeled office chair, rolled into the bathroom. Once the bandage was off, I was horrified at the sight of my foot! Fat as a purple and blue balloon, with five plump little sausages sticking out of one end, it was alarming! I quickly showered and wrapped in up again…the compression helped keep the pain down to a dull ache…and rolled back to bed, where I’ve pretty much been confined ever since.

Two days ago I discovered I could put enough weight on it to hobble to the loo and back, and last night, fortified with painkillers and Hubby’s strong arm to lean on, I managed to make it to a dinner out, but today I’m back on the bed with my now purple, blue, green and yellow foot propped up and mildly throbbing.

But next week is our third wedding anniversary and Hubby has booked a getaway in the winelands, a few days and nights at a lavender farm in Franschoek, and you can bet I’ll have this foot thing under control, one way or another!

Hubby moves up the corporate ladder!

It's been a while since I've blogged and I won't make any excuses except to say that I've been rather tied up with things that sort keep me from ruminating...which is necessary before a good blog can form itself up. But Hubby has recently had a event of which I am inordinately proud...

The Western Cape has suffered from electricity supply problems for just about a year now. Not only has the unprecedented (and unexpected) migration to the Cape from other regions of the country caused unanticipated demand to the existing infrastructure, the local power plant suffered a shut down of several months for repairs, throwing us into months of rolling blackouts and unplanned interruptions.

Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, Africa’s only nuke, provides about half of Cape Town’s power needs, the rest coming overland from upcountry coal-fired stations. Cape Town, being the most outlying location on the national grid, continued to suffer from unplanned outages whenever there was a disruption on the grid. In addition to seeing to the repair of the damaged Koeberg generator, Eskom, South Africa’s national power utility, responded to Cape town’s travails by embarking upon an ambitious plan to increase generating capacity in the Western Cape, a plan that could eventually end Cape Town's virtual dependence on the national grid.

First, however, Eskom had to replace the damaged rotor in one of Koeberg’s two generators…and they had to do it fast. The reactor powering the undamaged generator was scheduled to be taken down for refuelling in just a few months, and there was no way that Cape Town could enjoy an adequate electrical supply with both generators out of service. A replacement was located in France, but the massive 200 ton behemoth defied conventional methods of transport. My husband was appointed Logistics Manager on the “Generator Recovery Project,” and tasked with finding a way to transport the rotor not only to Cape Town harbour, but up the 30+ miles of urban and suburban roadways to the power station as well. The generator went down on Christmas Day, 2005, and on 5 April, 2006, after weeks at sea on a South African naval vessel, the rotor arrived. Hubby arranged the loan of the naval vessel and crew, a 12-axle trailer and two tractors to transport the rotor from the harbour to the power station, and a pair of massive mobile cranes to offload the rotor from the ship and onto the trailer, and later from the trailer to the generator housing. It was a Herculean undertaking, but ultimately successful. By the time the second reactor had to be taken off line for refuelling, the rotor had been installed and the damaged generator was repaired and on line. And Hubby returned to his regular job as a Senior Engineer for the PBMR project. http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/eng/sector/energy/?show=84289

Eskom, however, was determined not to get caught with its pants down again. Construction of two gas-fired power plants near Cape Town were fast-tracked and nebulous plans for a second nuke at the Koeberg location were firmed up. Cape Town, the fastest growing location in South Africa, was no longer going to be a poor step-sister on the grid: the Mother City was slated to have enough locally generated power to at least meet her needs, and possibly enough excess power capacity to meet peak seasonal demands without depending on the national grid.

Ground was broken in Mossel Bay, a small town on the other side of the Cape Peninsula, and at Atlantis, an economically depressed settlement only a few kilometres from the Koeberg power station, for the construction of the two gas-fired plants. Hubby was restless after his success with the rotor project, and his present assignment was moving ahead at a snail’s pace, affording him little professional satisfaction and precious little opportunity for advancement. Looking at the company intranet one afternoon, he found a division that was seeking to fill four Chief Engineer openings. With his rotor project success recently tucked under his belt, he applied and, just a month ago, flew up to Johannesburg for an interview.

Most new job offers are anything but instantaneous. Usually you interview, you come back for at least one more interview, then you wait interminably until either you get a card saying “thanks, but no thanks” or The Phone Call. Less than an hour after Hubby left the Johannesburg offices, while he was still in the car en route to his hotel, his cell phone rang and the division had an even better offer for him than Chief Engineer (in a location that would not require us to leave our idyllic Cape Town home). Seems the Atlantis gas plant, which is presently half built, needs a Site Engineering Manager…and once that site is up and running, there will be a promotion available, 12 to 18 months out, on the new nuke that will be going up on the Koeberg site…was he interested? They faxed the formal offer to him at home the very next day.

Requesting a transfer, offer in hand, turned out to be a bigger drama than going to Joburg and interviewing for the new job. The whole of Eskom has less than two dozen turbine specialist engineers, and of those, only two are nuclear qualified…Hubby being one of them. When he presented the offer and the transfer request to his boss, all hell broke loose! Not only did the boss refuse to sign the transfer request, he tried to turn the meeting into an impromptu criticism of Hubby’s performance. Strangely, his boss claimed that the project really needed Hubby’s rather rare skill set, but when Hubby said he would consider staying for a salary increase and promotion (there are three open management slots in the department), the boss turned him down…and heaped a bit more character assassination on him. Great way to keep the talent, eh?

The new organization, however, was keen to have him and, once the transfer was signed (the boss wasn’t allowed to refuse…the transfer request was just kicked upstairs until someone in authority signed it) Hubby discovered that his new boss was someone he knew and had successfully worked with for five years at another location. Because the gas plant was only half built, Hubby was concerned about offices and local infrastructure, and didn’t even know if he was going to be the sole engineer on site or if he would be assembling a staff. Imagine his surprise when his new boss chatted with him a couple of days ago and revealed that there was already an engineering department of 10 on site! Last Friday his present department gave him a going away party and he has been accosted half a dozen times since by engineers in his old department volunteering to come to work for him at the new location.

So, at the tender age of 34, he’s broken into the engineering management ranks, his first assignment giving him a staff of ten in a brand new facility. He tries hard not to show it, but I can see that he’s proud of himself, and with good reason. Here’s hoping he finds management everything he has hoped it would be!

I used to have very nice neighbours...

When we moved into this house in December of 2004, we were pleased to find ourselves living next door to a very nice family. Two clean-cut, wholesome teens and a puckish, energetic 6-year-old, parents and a sleep-in maid. We didn’t establish any kind of a friendship, mind you…simply introduced ourselves and continued living our own private lives, but they were very nice people and, with the exception of the occasional security gate slam that reverberated through our house, quiet.

A few months back we noticed they were cleaning out their garage and then, in a casual conversation with the teen aged son, it was revealed that they were planning to move in a few months. Nothing more was said, but the big black sacks of discards kept showing up on trash day, and finally one morning we saw a “To Let” sign in the front garden.

We braced ourselves for new neighbours…you can never tell what you are going to get when the house next door changes hands, and we hoped for the best. We live just a stone’s throw from the high school, so teen-aged kids next door was almost a given: we could only hope that the incoming family would make as comfortable a set of neighbours as the outgoing.

After a few days the board disappeared and we naturally presumed that new tenants had been procured and would be moving in shortly. One morning we awoke to the sound of slamming doors next door, chaos in their back garden, and other various and sundry noises. Sounded like moving day. The problem was, moving day seemed to go on forever. Although we never seemed to hear fighting or deafening music, the sounds of slamming doors and other disturbing noises continued—even escalated—and they got earlier and earlier in the morning…and later and later at night. I began watching for the new neighbours to arrive home so I might stop over and introduce myself and have a chat with them, but they were elusive: never did I hear their car enter the driveway or see it leave.

The racket continued unabated. One morning, before the early sun had cracked the hard shell of darkness surrounding the city, banging, shuddering noises came from the house next door, as if someone was beating on the security bars. Inured to their noises now, I did not call the police, but listened carefully for a few minutes, in case any sounds of distress might come over the wall. Quiet soon reigned, but it was not to last. Before I knew it afternoon had crept upon me and the private bus engaged to transport the youngest child to and from school had arrived. From my vantage point at my office window, I could see the curly headed moppet emerge from the bus and bounce his way towards the gate in the front wall, out of my line of sight. He looked amazingly like the kid who had moved away!

It took only a few days of careful listening to the next door noises (as opposed to intentionally tuning them out) to discover that, indeed, it was the same child. In fact, it was the same family! Apparently they had renewed their lease with their landlord and remained in the house.

But something obviously had changed for, the quiet neighbours who occupied the house next door during my first 18 months here have unaccountably changed into a houseful of noisy, door-slamming, window-rattling, pot-banging, peace-fracturing characters who make my bedroom, the windows of which face their house, something less than the sanctuary it once was.

I miss my old neighbours. I wonder where they went.

Winter's Embrace

Winter…7 am and still as dark as the inside of George Bush’s brain.

With the seasons reversed down here at the nether end of the globe, the shortest day of our year falls in June. June 22, to be exact, nearly a fortnight distant. Although the recent days have been bright and clear, there is an unmistakable crispness to the air that lets you know, make no mistake about it, winter is upon us.

The doggies wear their hated jerseys day and night now, huddling together in the fat, cushy doggie bed at night and squirming into the big bed full of warm people at first light. Slim, long-legged Candy, with her curly white poodle cut, wears her forest green knit turtleneck like a supermodel, platinum ears flowing, dark, expressive eyes flashing. Portly Nash, on the other hand, looks like a rotund little white-whiskered professor in his fleecy green-and-grey argyle vest.

The past few nights haven’t been cold enough to turn on the heaters, although we had a cold snap a week or so back that had us all huddled together beneath the fat new duvet we bought on holiday last year. Amazingly, South African houses are built without heating systems…unless you count fireplaces (which are no more numerous than in American homes)…and the winters here can be bone-chillingly cold, particularly with the stiff winds that are an integral part of the Cape Town experience. Those winds are a blessing in the dry, scorching summer months, for they both cool the air and remove air pollution, leaving the area a veritable playground in paradise. In the winter, however, they serve to exacerbate the deep chill.

By the time the gardener arrived at eight the sun had flung itself into the sky, but its light lacked warmth. Time being money for him, Christopher set to work immediately, his breath issuing out in a visible vapour ordinarily uncommon here. The lack of winter cloud cover proved itself a blessing, allowing the sun to grow robust enough to finally warm the crisp air and chill earth. By ten, Christopher’s jacket was draped neatly over a patio chair, his bare arms glistening with sweat as he clipped and snipped the rain-driven recent growth of what was rapidly becoming a small suburban jungle. Only Christopher’s weekly ministrations keep the enthusiastic vegetation at bay.

The afternoon was sunny and warm outside, but the thick brick walls of the house tend to retain the night-time chill. Sans furnace, with only the feeble heat of a fireplace to warm us…and then only in a small circle immediately in front of the hearth…I pondered dinner: what kind of dish can I prepare that will cook all day and warm up the house? The answer was a sudden craving for Texas chili and that truck stop delicacy, the Chili Size. A quick inventory of the cupboards revealed I need a few things, so it was off to the market and, an hour later, a rich pot of chili bubbled on the stove, sending a fragrant heat wafting through the house.

Dark descended upon us as quickly as it had decamped in the morning. At five I handed Christopher his daily pay and a quart of chili, the old mayo jar thickly wrapped in newspapers, and by six, when we sat down to heaping plates of chili, onion, and grated cheddar, the moonless night had returned. Black as bin Laden’s heart, the night hurls itself upon us without even a twilight’s warning, banishing the frail winter sun until it can screw up the courage to bring us yet another pale and pallid morning. It is winter in Cape Town.

My husband was born in a barn

Winter didn't sneak up on us here in the Cape the year, it arrived with a bang. One day we were eating lunch on the patio, the next day we were huddling in the bed with the doggies in midday just to keep warm!

Fortunately, as a person of foresight, I helped the maid put the electric mattress pad on the bed a few weeks back, moved my winter nightgowns to the top of the pile, and shifted Hubby's long-sleeved shirts to the front of the cupboard. The doggies have become reacquainted with their winter jersies, the fireplace is clean, the space heaters have been dusted and tested, and a small stock of coal and wood are conveniently placed in the garage. As much as is possible, we are winterized and ready for the chilly temperatures...except for Hubby... How do you winterize a husband?

He was born and raised in Durban, a place with a climate roughly akin to Miami. Durban houses have doors on their rooms solely for the purpose of privacy...there is more of a need to open doors for air flow than to close doors to conserve heat. And so my Durban born-and-bred husband has great difficulty remembering to close doors behind him when entering or exiting a room during our chilly Cape Town winters.

This is not a huge problem when the door is the one that leads to the bathroom...but when it is the door that opens onto the patio and I have just spent thirty minutes shivering as the puny little space heater worked itself into a sweat trying to heat up the frigid space I wish to occupy...well, that's a problem! Our home office is located in a room that was built in a section of the garage and is accessed through the patio: two steps out the kitchen door, turn left, open the office door. A conversation with him these days goes something like this:

SV: "Hi, honey. What can I do for you? Close the door, please."
H: "Where is the bread?"
SV: "Close the door, please. In the cupboard above the toaster."
H: " 'k."
SV: "Close both doors, please."

We shut off our geyser every evening so we don't impact the peak demand time; we run around turning off lights when the TV says power usage is increasing; we run the pool pump only during off-peak hours. He is an engineer for Eskom and is intimately familiar with the negative consequences of wasting electricity...so why does he exit the kitchen into the patio, leaving the door open to admit the frigid outdoor air?

I am teaching my maid to bake, encouraging her by striking a deal that she can take home half of whatever she makes (I supply the ingredients). Using the (gas) stove to cook an all-day pot of soup or pasta sauce or baking something like bread, which requires a warm rising place and a pre-heated oven, are good ways to efficiently use the energy expended: get something good to eat and get the room warm at the same time! This morning the oven is hard at work heating the kitchen and dining room while a luscious batch of scones browns inside...Hubby (who is home on leave) is still tucked up in his bed...how long will it be before our precious heat is vented to the frigid expanse of patio as he pops his head in to ask where I have hidden the milk for his tea?

What is it with men...and boys...with doors? I can remember my mother bellowing at my brother "Close the damned door! What? Were you born in a barn?" My own sons were equally door-knob challenged. One would think that an engineer for the power company (who is also the household member who actually has to pay the utility for our power consumption,) would be a bit more circumspect when it comes to conservation of a resource for which he must shell out hard-earned rands. But old habits die hard, I guess, and while I am sure he wasn't actually born in a barn, I know he was born in a place with a far warmer winter clime.

Maybe I should place under his pillow a subliminal tape recording to program his subconscious brain...close the door...close the door...close the door...

How rude!

Dearest Hubby took me out to dinner last night for my birthday. I had expressed a wish for sushi, so we headed to the nearest Cape Town Fish Market and ended up at the one at the Paddocks in Milnerton, near Woodbridge Island. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the area, it is an upmarket area and the restaurant has a view of the island, the sea, and Table Mountain.

The sushi bar was busy, full of the rich and the trendy, but we managed to find two seats and began ogling the tempting array of dishes rolling past on the little motorized conveyor belt. The sushi bars at Cape Town Fish Markets are long oval affairs with the sushi chefs on the inside of the oval preparing the sushi, the patrons seated on the outside, and a segmented conveyor belt endlessly rotating, carrying the tender morsels past each customer. When something comes by that you like, you simply lift the little plate from the conveyor, place it in front of you, limber up the chopsticks, and dig in.

Because most diners only take a plate or two at a time and the chefs are continuously busy adding new dishes to the conveyor, you seldom have to wait more than a few seconds for something tempting to pass before your eyes. Despite the fact that the place was crowded, things were going along swimmingly, the regularly occurring empty spots being quickly refilled by the busy chefs. And then the Greedy Twins came in.

I don’t know what some people have against taking their turns. What makes two people so oblivious to the local custom…and the feelings of the other patrons…that they can come in from nowhere and lay waste to the evening’s offerings? A man and a woman walked up to the sushi bar and, without taking seats, began snatching things off the conveyor belt and covering the bar in front of them. They were to my right and the conveyor was moving in a clockwise direction so, instead of the occasional empty space on the belt as it passed before me, suddenly there was the occasional dish of sushi as an empty belt rolled by! Slowly, patrons began looking up from their conversations and casting their eyes around the bar, wondering where the food went, while Piggly and Wiggly added to their ever-growing stash.

What really ticked me off was that the management and wait staff didn’t seem to think there was a problem here. When P&W shoved everything in the direction of a waiter and demanded it be packaged for takeaway, someone should have noted down everything on the bar, returned the food to the conveyor so the other 40 or so people at the bar could eat, and told Piggly and his Wiggly gal pal to have a seat while the chefs prepared their takeaway for them!

As it was, even the painfully thin, brutally nipped-and-tucked Paris Hilton wannabe at the other end of the bar took notice of the barren belt…I doubt she ate more than one California roll at a sitting, but even she saw that the bar full of patrons who arrived ahead of these boors were staring at a barren larder as the latecomers packed it all up and carried it away. It took the better part of half an hour to restock the conveyor, during which time more than a few patrons settled their bills and went home…we among them. After all, if you’ve come to eat sushi and suddenly the cupboard is bare, why hang about?

I have to wonder if those people had any idea how rude they were and how they, basically, shoved themselves to the head of the queue and then took almost everything on offer, leaving a good three dozen people staring at empty space where their dinner was supposed to be.

Nah…if they had a clue, they wouldn’t have done it…would they?

Another year gone by...

Today I am 59 and I have to ask…when does menopause end?

I told my Dear Hubby yesterday that I have just one year left now, that I am capable of the kind of sleight-of-mind necessary to stretch the definition of “middle age” to cover the fifties, but nobody, not even me, can call 60 “middle aged.” In 365 days, I will be officially old.

Funny, but I don’t feel old. I don’t even feel old approaching. According to most people who know me, I’m not looking particularly old, either…but you know friends and family…they probably wouldn’t tell me my age was showing even if I was down to no teeth and wrinkles so profound I was tripping over them. While having my roots touched up last month (yes, I am a natural blonde, just not this naturally blonde) I asked my hairdresser how much grey has sprinkled itself into my tresses and she said about a dozen…I have to believe her because the reason I asked is that I didn’t see any when I checked and Hubby, a wise man who knows when to keep his own counsel, wouldn’t admit to having found any!

While I am postponing the admission of being old, I cannot escape the fact that I am aging. Of course we are all aging…we begin doing that the day we are born…but there is a certain point in life when we look at ourselves in the mirror and realize that some things in our lives are not only gone, they are gone forever…like perky boobs or an unlined brow…and some things are here to stay…like crinkly skin and sagging jowls. Time and gravity take their toll and at that certain age…if you aren’t one of those pathetic people showing your wrinkled belly to the world in obscenely low-cut jeans and your pre-teen granddaughter’s cropped top…you simply cannot deny it any more.

I don’t know if men have a biological rite of passage out of youth, but women do. It’s called “menopause.” We can hand over our pension savings to the cosmetic surgeon, with his scalpels and lasers, suctions and injections, and come away with a temporarily updated version of ourselves, but we can’t fool Mother Nature and our ovaries. At some point in life the oestrogen factories start shutting down and middle age comes firmly upon us, like it or not.

Menopause has been likened to a latter-day menarche, just in reverse. Girls’ bodies gradually prepare themselves for the onset of womanhood and, once the ovaries kick into gear, there are a few years in which the hormones have to get settled down into a predictable flow: adolescence. We know, however, that this “adjustment period” will eventually end…at least physically…and once it is over and our bodies are acclimated to the new chemical brew, life goes on. One would expect menopause to work much the same way, but in reverse: a period of time in which the body reverts to its previous low-oestrogen state, followed by an expanse of years in which we are no longer tormented by cramps, PMS, monthly indispositions, or rabid curiosity about the latest and greatest advances in contraception and feminine hygiene products. And, indeed, that is our eventual destination but just how long is this journey and just how rocky is this road?

Fully twelve years ago I remember getting up from my desk and heading for the copy machine and nearly fainting half way there. Now, this is wholly unlike me…I am one of those indomitable types who would be at the very bottom of your list of “women most likely to faint for any reason whatsoever.” I’ve administered first aid to auto accident victims with gruesome injuries, I’ve endured a robbery in which I was assaulted with fists, feet, and knives, I’ve suffered the sudden and unexpected death of my dearest husband, and sat vigil at the bedside of a comatose infant. If that which does not kill us makes us strong, then I’m among the tougher of my sisters…so what is this nearly fainting half way to the copy machine crap?

So, I figured I was just standing up a bit too fast…blood rushing out of the head sort of thing…so I tried rising from my chair more slowly and, instead of rushing to the copier, being more measured in my approach…to no avail. Half way to the copier, I was feeling faint again. After a few more episodes, one in which I actually saw stars and swirling black clouds, I made it a point to visit my doctor. She gave me a prescription for female hormones and when I objected, she said “just try it for a couple of weeks…trust me on this…” Amazingly, my near-fainting spells cleared up in less than 48 hours and, thankfully, did not return when I stopped the hormones.

A dozen years have passed and, frankly, I have no idea why I am still experiencing symptoms. Oh, the fainting spells are gone and I am finding the odd stray dark hair in places more appropriate to my husband that to me (I’m beginning to think that the Bearded Lady of circus lore was simply any post-menopausal female who has lost her tweezers!), but the classic symptoms don’t seem to want to give up their hold on my physiognomy and retreat into the mists of history: I am still getting random hot flashes, especially at night. I am convinced that the sleep disturbances that are a legendary part of the “change” are really nothing more than nocturnal hot flashes that require the sufferer to awaken to some degree in order to alleviate the discomfort…remove the blanket…remove the sheet…remove the nightgown…remove the husband…point the fan directly at the body…and now you’re awake!

Unlike some women I have known, the hot flashes haven’t been such a problem for me. Some women have told me about trembling spells of rushes of body heat, sweat pouring down their brows, and noticeably reddened faces…I’ve never experienced anything like that, just a mild, uncomfortable overheating, easily remedied by a small fan directed at the face for several hours at a time. My doctor tells me that this is due to my excess weight, that fat tissue produces oestrogen and helps to mitigate my symptoms…who knew?? A positive side to being a pudgy! But that fat tissue must be sleeping at night, right along with my consciousness, because at two in the morning, with a fan trained on the bed, I find myself awake and rearranging the bedclothes and rolling Dear Hubby to the far side of the, thankfully, king-sized bed!

So, maybe the difference between being old and being middle-aged is less one of a number of years achieved and more of development. My body seems to be stuck firmly in the middle ages, and my husband (who is considerably younger than I am) tells me that I will never be old because I don’t know how to be (such a sweeeeet man!).

I dunno…I guess I’ll have to check next birthday and see how I feel then…

Of bugs and women...

I detest insects. Yah, yah, I know about their place in the ecosystem and all that stuff, but surely expecting them to keep to all but the 255 square meters of this planet I call my house cannot be called unreasonable, can it?

Oh, there are a few of the multi-legged little wretches I find tolerable…lady bugs, praying mantises, dragon flies and, of course, butterflies (although not their creepy little garden-devouring predecessors!)…yup, that pretty much makes up the list. Everything else that ambulates on more than four legs is, as far as I am concerned, a candidate for immediate extermination.

I come from a family of long-lived women. Most of us have lived well into our seventies, and more than a few have marched strongly through the eighties. That being the case, I expect to pack a few more decades under my belt before permanently packing it in…and I would just as soon not hasten my demise by poisoning my environment with toxic chemicals and the like. That is not to say that I won’ use insecticides…I most certainly will! But I have a strong preference for using other, non-toxic methods where possible. Hence my affinity for certain insects that devour their hexapod cousins, such as the lady bug (she loves aphids), praying mantises (anything that comes within range!), and dragonflies, the nymphs of which prey on the larvae of mosquitoes just as the adults eat the nasty little biting buggers themselves. I have a strong affinity for passive, non-toxic, low-maintenance insect control.

Early this week we had a bit of excitement in the house. Priscilla, one of my friends, had dropped by and as we sat at the table chatting, the maid started up a hysterical babble in Xhosa at the front door. She was flapping her broom at a corner and, being rather arachnophobic, I immediately presumed she was trying to kill a large spider…certainly a small one wouldn’t cause such a ruckus? Priscilla interceded, translating for me, and it came to light that the creature causing the commotion was a thoroughly frightened and absolutely cowed little gecko about 12 centimetres long. Swooping down between broom beats, I snatched his tightly curled little body out of the corner and carried him out to the patio, trailed by a wide-eyed Priscilla. I tried to put him on the wall of the house where he could run up and hide in the ceiling boards, but his little gripper pads were tightly adhered to my rescuing fingers and, while explaining to Priscilla that geckos ate bugs and were not poisonous, I carefully unstuck his little feet from my hand. I was actually able to persuade her to lightly run a finger over the little guy’s tail before I put him on the wall and he scurried to safety.

“Never kill a lizard,” I advised her. “There are no poisonous lizards in South Africa and they eat bugs.” I went on to explain that small geckos like the one I had just rescued from a horrible death-by-broom ate such things as mosquitoes and ants, while their larger cousins would make a happy meal of cockroaches and other large insects. “They’re cheaper than Doom,” I told her, “and don’t leave poison around to make your child sick!”

My mother-in-law, who is South African and who has lived her life in Durban, takes a dim view of my dedication to my lizards. Last year I rescued a small chameleon from death-by-curious dog, and at one time in America I kept horned toads (a rather disc-shaped American desert lizard) in the house as a control measure against the cockroaches and other creeping creatures that took possession of the house every night at dark. Like the maid, my mother-in-law attacks the beasts with a broom, although I must commend her for her restraint when I am about, even in her own house. She will even point out to me the occasional iguana clinging to the garden wall rather than beat it away with her broom, and when she is at my house…although I know it costs her greatly…she ignores the little visitors that often festoon the walls.

Occasionally I find a little black curl of gecko exhaust on the tiles, confirmation of their predatory efficiency. My mother-in-law finds this evidence of their existence objectionable, but I simply remind myself of how many dead bugs it must have taken to produce that bit of effluent and carefully remove with a bit of tissue to the loo…a small price to pay for the elimination of the little multi-legged trespassers!

Last night we spotted a new gecko prowling the upper reaches of the bedroom walls, a tiny little fellow no more than 4 centimetres long. He made his way behind the armoire and spent the day snoozing back there, re-emerging this evening to prowl the walls again. I’m happy to see him…I hope tomorrow night he returns again and this time brings his big brothers…