Leaf Life Cycle by SciencePorn
Category Archives: Life
Breakfast in Bed
I woke up this April Fool’s Day to a strange sight – Two baleful yellow eyes staring at me over a bright orange beard. I thought it was a hungover Irish leprechaun and tried to think where I’d been last night.
Turned out it was two fried eggs and a big helping of warm baked beans on a plate brought to me in bed by my ever-loving daughter Jessie for a birthday treat!
I’m sitting up drinking my tea plotting how to smuggle Sambucca the black Labrador in to polish off what’s left on the plate.
Now they’re called . .
. . screenagers.
This was new to me.
Here we are, screenagers. Their screen-centric devices have become appendages they cannot live without, their dependency on real-time consumption, constant connectivity and an ever-expanding universe of expectations just grows, their digital maturity reaching new and higher levels. Get used to it!
Not only are there ever-more digital consumers, but more consumers own multiple smart devices. This is creating new digital services and experiences, and generating more business opportunities across every industry, age group and facet of human life.
Rita Sawtell wrote: Whatever next…..
Me: Oh, next is worse: Headsets for 3D virtual reality. this is getting bigger and bigger.
Rita: Would you really walk around with one of those on your head?
Me: Doesn’t matter what WE would do – we’re gonna have to get used to it. Soon millions of screenagers will be doing just that. And people will be longing for the days when they thought them looking down at a screen was annoying!
You’ll say “Let’s go to the Kruger Park for the holidays” and they’ll say “Nah! Went yesterday and saw it all”. And they WILL HAVE! They’ll have seen – and even “experienced” – far more than you could hope to see in ten trips.
I think this is why dying is not as bad as its made out to be. After a while you’re just READY for it!
Rita: You made me laugh out loud! That’s hysterical. We have nothing to look forward to – except death.
Steve Reed: There is one thing worse than a screenager: the late converter.
A recently-acquired top end smartphone in the hands of a 50-plus! They stop everything when it beeps, keep trying to show you photos and how clever it is, and comment loudly about everything it does or even louder when it does not do what it is supposed to do.
At least the kids keep it low key and know much more about phone etiquette . . or how to keep their phones quiet anyway.
Most phones that go off in the testing room very loudly belong to 50-plus patients. And it’s usually an AC/DC ringtone. Or Freddie Mercury.
Pills for Them
I went to my GP Steve the other day – a month or two ago – because the world is populated with arseholes and I wondered if he could do anything about it. Y’know, fix them?
Fool gave me a pill to take in the morning. I think he’s losing his touch.
Anyway, I’m reminded about it because I just read about an artist in Slaapstad who calls herself Lady Skollie. She paints some intelligent, challenging shit. This one she calls:
**** ‘Modern day Ophelia but with calming pills, pain pills and get over your fucking-self pills’ ****
I liked that.
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Funnily enough, the world does seem a bit better behaved lately. You think Steve knew something . . ?
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More about Lady Skollie or Laura Windvogel
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Earth’s Precious Water
All of Earth’s water – every drop – salt & fresh
That large blue sphere over America represents all of Earth’s water. Its diameter is about 1370km (more than the distance from Pretoria to Cape Town) and has a volume of about 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers). This sphere includes all of the water in the oceans, ice caps, lakes, rivers, groundwater, atmospheric water, and even the water in you, your dog, and your tomato plant.
The sphere may look small, but its height is three times higher than the International Space Station, which flies about 400km overhead. If you pricked that bubble it would fill all the oceans & seas, (average depth 3.7km), lakes, rivers, ice caps, underground water, everywhere. If you spilled it just over the continental USA it would be 170km deep, seventeen times deeper than the deepest ocean trench.
Liquid fresh water
The second, smaller blue sphere over Kentucky represents the world’s liquid fresh water (groundwater, lakes, swamp water, and rivers). The volume comes to about 10,633,450 km3, of which 99 percent is groundwater, much of which is not accessible to humans. The diameter of this sphere is about 272 kilometers.
Water in lakes and rivers
Can you see the third tiny blue bubble over Atlanta, Georgia? That one represents accessible fresh water – the water in all the lakes and rivers on the planet. Most of the water people and life on earth need every day comes from these surface-water sources. Scary how small it is!! The volume of this sphere is about 93,113 km3. The diameter is about 56 kilometers. It is incredibly tiny compared to the globe, but if you’re thinking “can’t be that small” you have to try to imagine a bubble 56km high—say seven times higher than Mt Everest is above sea level (or fourteen times higher than Everest above base camp, the usual picture we see of the mountain).
Surface liquid fresh water is incredibly precious! Let’s not dam it, pollute it or waste it.
The Future’s Uncertain. Do Something!
I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer,
because the future’s uncertain
and the end is always near!
THE DOORS ca. 1970 “Roadhouse Blues”
Gotta luvvit
Did You Got a Licence?
Dad, asks TomTom, When does this licence expire?
We’re sitting outside a nightclub at 11pm and he’s asking while we’re waiting for the last of the boys so we take home all eleven that we brought (yes, ELEVEN).
Dunno, let’s check, I say. I know he’s interested as we were once bust in Lesotho for an expired licence and he doesn’t want that to happen again. Those okes with guns made him nervous. Me too. Soon after that they had their 2014 coup!
September 2015, I sigh.
So I’m in the queue for my licence for the third time. The first time I sat next to an old toppie. He musta been 60 if he was a day. He was timing the transactions. Average seven minutes per person and there were 17 ahead of me, so I would have been late for work, so I left. The second time I was making good progress when I overheard from the counter “where’s your proof of address”, so I left.
This third time I have all three papers. For the bakkie, the trailer and Jessie’s scooter – those two expired in 2014! And I have my proof of address, my ID card and money.
But not enough. I had R430 and the bakkie alone is R620 so I’ll be back a fourth time with more cash.
Hell is going to be like this. Queues.
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pic of a more recent disk added later
Hey, boy!
*sigh* Penny Sparrow-like, she didnt see (doesn’t see? chooses to ignore?) the insult
An Electric Shock
Another bill shock when my July bill comes through at R80 000 instead of the usual R4 000. After much back-and-forth on email and on the phone with deaf and tone-deaf males I have to go in to Florence Mkhize building in old Smith Street now Anton Lembede Street. A car guard finds me a spot and takes charge of my bakkie.
At last someone who would listen. Reluctantly (“Can’t you just pay?”) but she listened as I told her the tale of when my bill had been inflated by R140 000 a couple years ago and it was their mistake; and how now that it had been bumped up to R80 000 from its usual R4 000 I needed to know where that came from; She showed me. eThekwini municipality had billed me for electricity for my flat but not for my home since June 2011. Then I said I need all penalties and interest reversed as ’twas not my fault; She did so. Then I said I don’t want to pay for anything older than 36 months old – statute of limitations; Hey, she didn’t know about that! But after disappearing for a while she came back to say Agreed! Lovely lady with a wicked sense of humour! Ms Pride Gumbi.
Off we go to sign the agreement. Ms Gumbi sticks her finger on the biometric door opener and hey sesame! “Hey, it knows you!” I said and she cackled out loud. It hadn’t known me when I tried my finger on arrival as there was no-one to open up – it said Unidentified. Try Again. Down the elevator and into the foyer and out into the street; all the way she’s greeting everyone by name and hugely friendly. She’s well-known and well-liked it seems.
Downstairs another fingerprint and out to the ground floor next door and I’m asked/instructed to Sit. Stay while she goes through another fingerprint door. This one doesn’t sesame, so she waddles back to the counters shouting Knock Knock! She greets a lady teller in her usual friendly familiar way and gets told “Just push. Its broken” and in she goes.
Eventually I sign for R71 000 in arrears, payable over 36 months. It’ll add R2025 to the monthly bill. I think of challenging the figures again, it looks a bit high but hey, I’m weary. Let’s just go home. I buy my car guard a Russian roll from a take-away to go with his tip. And I scarf one meself.
Off to the Master
Needed a fresh copy of my Letter of Executorship as Aitch’s one firm just woke up that they still have her pension money.
So off to the office of the Master of the Kwazulu-Natal High Court Durban downtown. Devonshire place near the old Durban Club (where I once got kicked out as Glen Barker’s guest for “unacceptable attire” – I was wearing slacks, shoes and a white top like we used to test eyes in back then. Farking snobs, I’m glad they went bankrupt and had to sell the club to a Zim lady, cadre of Bob Mugabe’s. Imagine how that must have stuck in their cravated craws! Pricks).
Pleasant enough experience as bureaucratic torture goes. Until it came time to pay. R4,50 – that’s about 30 US cents – for a copy of the letter. The catch: You had to leave the building, find an ABSA bank, queue there, pay and then come back with your receipt, starting afresh at the back of the queue!
You COULD NOT dream up a less convenient way of handling that if you spent a week plotting how to mess with a citizen’s mind!
Under a Dodgy Influence
It’s what one expects: Invite Brauer to a small gathering unaccompanied, and . .
I had to tell Terry, the good wife:
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What is the most valuable life skill a person can have?
The ability to be happy.
A sense of humour!
The ability to be happy while also being alone.
Resilience – the ability to bounce back
Life won’t always be fair to you. The ability to bounce back and the attitude of not giving up on life is a rare trait worth trying hard to cultivate.
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The ability to make someone laugh!
The ability to forgive and forget.
This realisation:
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Self Discipline : The only skill you require to master any other skills or habits.
The ability to express your thoughts:
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The ability to learn (also from your mistakes).
The ability to let go – Of stuff and of guilt and blame.
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Getting out of your comfort zone:
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Being completely honest with yourself, and both strict and patient with (and even kind to) yourself.
Realising how fortunate you are. The knowledge that you have enough already . . or more simply: ‘gratitude’.
The ability to love yourself – and then to radiate that love outwards.
The willingness to try new stuff with enthusiasm.
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These answers were given by various quora.com readers/writers. I chose the ones I liked best!
Memoirs: THIS is what I’m on about
It’s sad when – too late – we regretfully say: “I wish I had asked my mother about that.” Or my father. Or my grandmother.
Most parents know our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are. Only when they have children of their own—and feel the first twinges of their own advancing age—do they suddenly want to know more about their family heritage and all its stories, legends, myths and anecdotes: ‘What exactly were those stories my mom used to tell about . . . (her ancestors? farming? their old cars? camping? traveling? the war? books she’d read?)?’ ‘Where exactly was it that she grew up? Sure, Harrismith district, but which farm, where?’
Writers are the custodians of memory, and that’s what you must become to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into. That record can take many shapes. It can be a formal memoir. Or it can be an informal family history, written to tell your children and your grandchildren about the family they were born into. It can be the oral history that you extract by tape recorder or mp3 from a parent or a grandparent too old, too sick or not inclined to do any writing. Or it can be anything else you want it to be: some hybrid mixture of history and reminiscence.
Whatever it is, it’s an important kind of writing.
Too often memories die with their owner, and too often time surprises us by running out. Pffft! like that.
Start like this:
1955 – born
1960 – memories of the ‘farmhouse’
1961 – Moved to town
1961- Sub A Teacher Mrs van Reenen
1972 – Matric
etc
Then go back to it regularly, or every time you think of something, and add little bits – just dates and notes. It’ll grow from there. And your grandkids WILL be fascinated. Your great-grandkids more so.
Best place to do it nowadays is on a blog just like this one.
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Paraphrased from William Zinsser – “How to Write a Memoir”
detente cordiale
Jess had four seventeen-year-olds around and Tom one fourteen-year-old. I thought never the twain would meet but I was wrong.
It helped that there was one new girl the boys hadn’t met before and they were quite intrigued by her.
They had a ball – ending up in a water balloon fight. The girls won.
‘Security is an Illusion’
This is less of a quote and more of a personal mantra.
The idea we can make ourselves safe, our loved ones safe, our world safe is a pernicious and dangerous idea that limits freedom and kills curiosity. Unfortunately, it’s an idea our society seems to be preoccupied with lately. 
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for reasonable individual, personal (and personalised) precautions, but I worry about a society that thinks its OK to prescribe to others what they may or may not do as long as they say “It’s for our security”. Cut down that whole clump of indigenous trees and bush? Good idea. Mow that whole strip of grassland along the fence? Good idea. Run vicious electrified or razor wire along the top of every wall, every fence? Good idea. Those are NOT good ideas!
And I worry about a generation that genuinely seems to think walking somewhere is inherently dangerous (“um, not for me, understand, but for the kids”) and playing outside is “more risky” than playing indoors. So many people tell of having fun as kids jumping over a fence, but see to it that their kids cannot.
When fear rules our lives we cease to live.
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
Security is also a con. Used to sell products and used to sell wars.
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(Thank you ironic1.com – I used your post and modified it).
Bayete Mkhulu!
Tobias is a grandfather. Sphamandla has a little boy, healthy and ‘very big’.
I told him he’s a kehla now. “You can call me mkhulu” he said in the same unbelieving way I said “Now I’m a pensioner” this last birthday.
Eish! Where’s the emergency brake?
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‘course my coming-of-age party was ruined in that I’ve been offered pensioners discount for the past twenty years already by sumbitches who obviously need spectacles.
~~~oo0oo~~~