My father turned 70 a couple of weeks ago. This posting is late, because I have been busy. The crazy season is upon us.
We drink a lot of bubbly, and we’ve sabraged using anything from a sword to a kitchen spoon. It’s not difficult if you hit the bottle right (and yes, we are intimately aware of the other meaning of hitting the bottle. 14 Bottles of bubbly bit the dust on the day).
Which leads us to… how not to sabrage.
But not in the financial sense.
Tanya’s folks are staying with us. This started a complicated game of chess where they sleep in the main bedroom and Tanya and I end up in the Rand-Lover.
In theory.
In practice, when Tanya tried to get into the Rand-Lover, she slipped, fell, broke her arm.
So there I was, driving over Boyes Drive going bee-baa bee-baa to get to Constantia Mediclinic. Which is a private hospital where, in theory, things should go quickly.
We were there for almost three hours.
After sorting out the more important people in the queue (and let’s face it, kids with asthma are more important than adults with b0rken wrists), the doctor confirmed that it looked broken, had X-Rays taken, and eventually bandaged the whole mess up, sent us home, scheduled an appointment for this morning.
So now we find out whether they need to open this mess up, stick pins in, whatever.
And they refused to give her Pethadine. Tanya was so looking forward to the Pethadine… :-)
Update: so Tanya now has a bionic wrist. They operated, aligned everything, put a titanium plate in there to hold everything together.
Well, actually, they eventually operated. We were supposed to check in at 8. Ten past seven the nurse calls, tells me that the doctor will be there 9:30. Cool. We pitch at 9:30, nobody knows nothing. Nurse tells me that the doctor will be available Monday. Monday? With a broken wrist? Like hell. I make a bit of a fuss and they scramble the doctor. Doctor decides that this is serious enough to do something about, even though he’s not actually on duty. Schedules Tanya for surgery.
So later I phoned and spoke to the nurse, who told me Tanya’s staying overnight. Ten minutes later the doctor phoned, we sort of concluded that I could pick her up at 3. Went there at three, nurse says no, five. Make that five thirty.
Meanwhile we have a bunch of Tamsyn’s friends coming for a sleep-over. I’ve been relegated to the Rand-Lover, on my own this time. But first I have to fetch Tanya, take the kids to the Spur, and so forth, and so on.
Fun and games.
Update: This is what a bionic wrist looks like. The X-Ray on the right, that is (took me a while to realise that the view on the left is “before”).
“Up”
Go see it.
In a theatre. In 3D.
I’d wager it’s not what you expect, but it’s gorgeous.
If your wife says “I have the hiccups, quick, someone, give me a fright”… DON’T.
Because she will spill red wine all over the couch, the cats, you, and herself, thereby upsetting the cats and ruining the couch and her clothes, and it will all be your fault.
At least it cured the hiccups.
… in the De Waal / Hubbard / Blake household when you walk in the door and this is what you see.
LabRat pointed me at fukung.net. This is a horrible waste of time. And not safe for work, which means it’s your own time you’re wasting.
But this one made me laugh:
If you have a Boardman’s BF103 Digital Scale, take note.
This symbol denotes female,
and this one denotes male.
If you get it wrong, the POS will look things up in the wrong table, and pronounce you, the guy, underweight, and her, SWMBO, the love of your life, the one you promised to love and cherish, and the person most likely to kill you if you Don’t Watch Your Step, as obese.
You Have Been Warned.
Giovanni came to South Africa some 45 years ago [1]. He was one of the first people to cut my hair, at Salon Etna, on Thibault Square in Cape Town (my grandmother worked next door, in the Medical Centre).
Over the years Giovanni became a Cape Town landmark, to the point of briefly appearing in a Vodacom advertisement (13 seconds in).
Well, I went there this morning, and Giovanni is now called Eleanor… he retired in May, sold the place to her. She tells me he still checks in every week, and that one of the two barber’s chairs is on loan from him (he imported four chairs from Japan, waybackwhen, and vowed to give one chair to each of his sons and to keep one chair to himself [2], leaving Eleanor with a solitary chair — she will have to make a plan sometime).
Anyway, I shall toast the memories of his haircuts at sundowners tomorrow.
[1] My father can tell the story in the comments if he feels like it [3].
[2] Pieter can tell the story in the comments if he feels like it.
[3] Pieter can help my father figure out how to :-)
His name is James and he’s been building satellites in Surrey for more than a decade.
And he’s not really my brother, people just mistook him for that at my (first) wedding, which is pretty much when I saw him last.
Anywayz, sounds like he might be coming back to SA, but that would still put him 1500km north of me… at least I’ll see him slightly more often :-) Also, he can collect the six huge boxes of crap he stored at my place before he left.
