Sitting minding my own business on the way home and CRASH! Right up the rear. It was a dominee of sorts. Pastor, Preacher, Holy Man, you know the type. One of those churches I am highly critical of. You know PTL – No, not Praise The Lord, Pass The Loot.
I was OK:
Him? Well, bless him:
I dunno. You’d think the Lawd or the guardian angel would install those proximity sensors in dominee’s cars so even if they’re perusing their holy cellphones the car would glide to a safe halt with auto-braking. No?
Anyway, aren’t guardian angels meant to sit on your shoulder? Why didn’t his shout, Whoa!? or better, earlier on, Hey man, put down your phone!?
How long we’ll still be going to game reserves I dunno. The only reason the teenagers still think Hluhluwe is tolerable – the saving grace? The satellite TV and the buffet meals!
Soon I may have to visit game reserves alone, unaccompanied by anyone in a sky-blue onesie with cloud pattern.
A slap-up breakfast in bed and a card from my Jess.
A hug and a promise of a meal and card in the July hols from TomTom. Conditions: He shops, chooses, cooks and serves. I must only chauffeur and pay. Woolworths, not Spar or PnP, please.
Found some old pics from Apache Oklahoma back in 1973.
Dragging Main with my Olympus cameraSelf portrait at the Swandas (original “selfie”??) – my last hosts in Oklahoma – Their farm was called “The Swanderosa” (kidding!!)
I had a wonderful camera back in 1973 – TechRadar says some consider it a cult classic! The Olympus Trip 35 was a small, lightweight, very portable 35mm film camera, which became a mainstay of many holidays and day trips. Launched in 1968 and discontinued in the 1980s, over ten million were sold, earning this humble point-and-shoot legendary status. The Trip 35 featured a 40mm f/2.8 lens, a light-activated light meter and two shooting modes: Program Automatic and a flash mode with a fixed aperture setting that could be set using the aperture ring.
‘Smorning I went for the worst nature walk I’ve been on in my laaf! This was May 2015. I knew I shouldna gone, but friends said come and I thought ‘don’t be a recluse all your life.’ So forty fools wandered through a coastal grassland and riverine forest starting long after 9am. Brats as young as three scurrying around underfoot. NOT my style!
Not a leaf stirred, not a birds turd.
Got home at noon and saw more birds and blomma cheese in ten minutes than on the whole 2,5hr walk. We live and don’t learn.
Make no mistake, Roosfontein is a beautiful grassland and riverine spot and well worth a visit. Early morning best, small group best. Ah, well, I took Jess along and she got some exercise.
– Roosfontein Jessie –– too late in the day, too crowded –
feature pic on top is from Amblers hiking club – thanks!
~~~oo0oo~~~
One year later, a decades-long struggle by environmentalists finally succeeded with the official proclamation of the Roosfontein Nature Reserve.
The nature reserve, which will now be preserved for future
generations, borders the Westville Prison and is being preserved to
protect the endangered rare dwarf chameleon, North Coast grasslands and
medicinal plants.
The land had been earmarked for a golf course, stadium and casino in
the past, but environmental activists fought for its preservation.
Richard Boon, manager in biodiversity planning at the eThekwini
Municipality, said the nature reserve covered 213 hectares, with a
further 20 hectares near the nature reserve earmarked for housing
projects.
Dr Debra Roberts, deputy head of environmental planning and climate
protection, said it was a joyous moment that the reserve had finally
been proclaimed such and recounted how they had negotiated with the
Westville mayor pre-1994 not to misuse the land.
She said the challenge for Durban and African cities now was to
create uniquely African cities that were not made in the image of
mini-European cities.
“We’ve had to decolonise our minds,” she said. “We need to be
uniquely African, like when you go to Rio or Nairobi, they have huge
natural parks and savannahs. Our cities have to be different and must
play a different role.
“Look at the beautiful grass hills, these are a valuable resource. That is why a golf course on that land was not part of building an African city, that is why we started lobbying 30 years ago, we said we think this is valuable and we need to protect it for the future and keep Roosfontein free of development,” she said.
I had scrambled egg, the kingfisher had a snake, thoroughly tenderised. He bashed it repeatedly till he thought it was definitely dead, then swallowed it head-first. It looked like a small red-lipped herald maybe.
It bucketed down Sunday from about 5am to 9. Then it carried on raining. The gutters overflowed in a curtain of waterfalls all around the house; The pool overflowed and the lawn turned into a lake. The sound on the patio roof and the scullery roof reminded me of rain on the tin roofs of my childhood. Lovely sound. We bunkered down and sat inside cosy and dry.
Up at 4am, left at 4.30, inside the Mfolosi gate at 7.15am. Me and Jess and a friend. Tom couldn’t imagine anything worse that being stuck in a car with two girls and no wifi, so he stayed home. Later, he went fishing for grunter in the harbour with the Naude boys. Craig took a picture:
In Mfolosi we had good close-up views of nine white rhino, buffalo, warthog, giraffe, zebra, kudu, nyala and impala. An across-the-river view of four or five lions; Two eles about 100m off and approaching but Jess got nervous from watching youtube where eles overturn cars so we drove off. And bonus: Two black rhino as we were leaving the park.
LOTS of birds, including the best single bird party I’ve seen in years! A drongo chased a southern black tit so I stopped to look. Next a black-headed oriole, a golden-tailed woodpecker, a puffback shrike, white helmet shrikes, a bearded woodpecker, dark-capped bulbuls, orange-breasted bush shrike, a grey-headed bush shrike calling nearby, petronias, black-collared barbets, yellow-bellied bulbul, a large cisticola, white-bellied sunbird. All moving together in some trees against a rocky hillside on the way up to Mpila camp. Magic! That made my day. The girls wondered why I had switched off when there was “nothing to see.”
Also saw white-backed vultures, emerald-spotted wood dove, cape turtle dove, red-faced mousebirds, paradise flycatcher, black-crowned tchagra, chinspot batis, gorgeous bush shrike (heard only), cape glossy starling, a single red-billed quelea in a flock of winter weavers, pied crow, red-billed oxpecker, golden-breasted bunting, blue waxbill, melba finch pair.
Breakfast and lunch at the picnic spots. Home by 5pm.
I must remember to take photos! On this outing I took one: the tortoise on the tar road!
Got this from twitter – I broke up with my gym We were just not working out
I actually belong to Virgin Active lately for the first time ever. So TomTom can work out forrugby. “Its absolutely essential Dad! Everyone . . . “
And how many times does he actually use the gym? Um, not often. To put it mildly.
*
correction: Second time. Aitch bought me a ten year contract when Virgin’s predecessor – Health & Racquet Club, remember them? – first started many moons ago but my shadow never darkened the door.
Update:
Tom now belongs to the gym next door. Cheaper, closer. And he’s going regularly.
Update on the update:
Didn’t last. Takes after ‘is Dad ‘e does.
On the banks of the beautiful Umkomaas river at what the Porters used to call ‘The A-frame’ campsite. The A-frame washed away in the 1987 floods, heading downstream and maybe out the mouth, into the Indian Ocean and off to Australia.
Leopard and otter footprints; A tiny little dead shrew – what kind? dwarf?;
A magic lunch on the rocks next to a pool in the river below a little rapid.
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.
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.
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.
~~~oo0oo~~~
Funnily enough, the world does seem a bit better behaved lately. You think Steve knew something . . ?
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.
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