Stuff Archives

I’ve now been off the fags for a year! Wow, seems like only yesterday when I would be sneaking out from work to have a long hard suck on a fag. But no more. No longer will I be going in and out of the back door to partake in this pleasure. Never again will I long for a butt in my hand. My mouth is now a no fag zone!

I do miss them though, even after a year. Shows how addictive smoking really is.

..... go to the pub.


Poor weather again, so no mountain trip on the last day. Few pints made up for it though.

For those of you that have been reading these blogs over the last few days, I'm sure you're wondering whether or not I've got to the top of Table Mountain. Well, as reported below, the first day was rained/clouded out so we headed out on the beers. Sunday was much the same as Saturday - low cloud and more beers. This morning, however, bright sunshine and not a cloud in the sky! I noticed whilst putting my shirt on to go to work. Bugger!

Well, I've been emailing an old friend of mine, Jackie, who I used to work with back in the London days as she's also coming over here to South Africa on safari and spending some time in Cape Town. Anyway, she suggested that I should duck out from work whilst the weather's good (particularly as it's supposed to be cloudy again tomorrow) to take get up the mountain and see the view.

I thought about it for about .... oooh ..... lets say about 15 seconds and thought why not. My last meeting of the day was a 2:00 to 3:00 and that would give me plenty of time. So, I arranged for one of my colleagues here in South Africa to take me back to the hotel so I could dump my computer and then drop me off at the cable car to go up the mountain. He agreed and dropped me off. We had a quick chat and I thanked him for his hospitality etc. etc. and he left pointing me in the direction of the ticket desk.

There's normally a queue for tickets (apparently), however there wasn't when I got there. Great! But I couldn't figure out how to get into the line as all the entrances seemed to be blocked off. I then looked at all the ticket windows and they said closed. Finally, someone appeared and told me the cable car was closed due to technical difficulties.

I have one last chance tomorrow, depending on the weather, but I'm not holding my breath on this one. Seems I may have to visit the top of the mountain on my next visit.

Below is a picture taken from the foot of the mountain where the cable car leaves from. (I should have probably taken one of the closed ticket desks as that would have been more appropriate, but I didn't think of it at the time).


You will notice how my crap camera has managed to take a perfect photo of the trees in the foreground and leave the whole of Cape Town out of focus. Pretty impressive if you ask me. I don't have my proper camera here until next week (as didn't want to risk taking it to Nigeria) and don't have any photo editing software on my work computer, so this is the best I can do.

Pretty poor really, but given the run of bad luck I'm having with this mountain, it's about par for the course.

On the table this morning were two choices:

• Go sight seeing up the top of Table-Top Mountian
• Watch the rugby and drink beer

Well, it seems the gods have chosen for me. Unlike the photo snapped below that shows Cape Town bathed in sunlight, today is overcast and raining. I got up at 6:00 to play tourist. Had breakfast and went to book my trip only to be told “sorry sir, the weather is too bad, you must watch the rugby and drink beer.”

I've been fighting it. I even went down to the waterfront and wandered around. I have two really bad photos to show for it (I really need to throw this camera away - it's 6 years old and has all but had it. At least my proper one will be with me for the safari). The first is of some “witty” signposts and the second is of the Clock Tower. If you look at the sky you can see it clouding over - not quite raining when I took these but only by about an hour.


I guess the signposts are supposed to tell you how far it is if the crow flies. Well, all I can say is that the crow would be bloody knackered as the plane wouldn't even go that far given I needed to transfer in Frankfurt. So I doubt a crow would be able to make it. The other thing I've not quite figured out is why you would put a signpost up for crows as, to my knowledge, they can't read. Still, gives the idiots something to photograph as I clearly demonstrate.

Oh well, about an hour and half to kick-off. Best head back down to that Sports Bar I spotted earlier.

So, a quick 11 hours and 40 minutes later and I'm in Cape Town. I've had a quick look round and can't see any superheros though. Mind you, I didn't see any frankfurters in Frankfurt either.

Very tired and not much to say at the minute. Snapped this quick picture from the balcony of the hotel before I got some sleep. Me thinks that would be Table Top Mountain (I'm quick like that).

I'm going to see about taking a trip up there tomorrow, so, if you're lucky, I'll have the reverse picture of this one.

So first stop is Frankfurt. We got in early so I have an extra 30 minutes to wander round the airport looking for things to do, so if anyone wants a sausage, just give me a shout.

Whilst you’re thinking about that, lets rewind for a second. San Francisco airport – ended up having a long conversation with the lady at the check in desk as she was asking me about Africa and telling me that she wanted to go. Coincidentally, as if by magic, she managed to find her way over to the gate to ticket me onto the plane and have another chat. Now, my guess is that this was coincidence, or maybe even normal with the cut backs on staff, but I like to think she was following me. Never hurts to flatter yourself, that’s what I say.

Onto Frankfurt and first impression is strange as it doesn’t seem to have an efficient feel about it. There’s a lot of people wandering round trying to figure out what they are doing. Given that we are in Germany, it’s my guess that it’s the people that are wrong and not the airport. And how correct that statement is – there a lot of old fashioned boards around listing departing flights, so bearing in mind I came in through the back door (connecting flight) and am trying to find out where to transfer rather than coming in through the front door and have someone tell me the gate, obvious thing is to look at one of these boards to figure out where my next flight is leaving from. Well, given the number of flights that leave Frankfurt, the list is pretty long and the boards only cover those leaving in the next hour which, when you think about it, doesn’t make sense as if you’re in the wrong place, you’ve likely missed your flight by now or are going to have the sprint of your life to get from one side of the airport to the other.

So, where’s all the help? Ah! There are these stations marked “information” that have touch screen terminals that you can use to find out where your flight is going to be leaving from. See, knew there would be an explanation.

Only think is, I hadn’t figured this out before deciding to find a Lufthansa desk to ask where my flight would be leaving from. Little sidetrack – my tickets are marked as being booked through Lufthansa, but none of my flights are actually with Lufthansa. The two today are United Airlines from San Francisco to Frankfurt and South African Airways from Frankfurt to Cape Town. Just to make it confusing. Still the Lufthansa person was extremely helpful, insisting on writing the gate number on my ticket. Brilliant, that way I wouldn’t forget to go to the wrong gate as he’d got the wrong one. Fortunately, in the meantime, I’d noticed the “information” stations and decided to play on one. Well, that and the fact that I decided to get a drink in the club lounge.

I note that airlines are now starting to have two lounges – first class and business class. Presumably business class has now turned into common class as there are too many people flying it. The one thing I did note is that the Lufthansa first class lounge in Frankfurt (and maybe for other locations as well) is called the “Senator Lounge.” I wonder if they practice foot tapping in there?

Well, thanks for everything - I'm off!

Not quite disappearing for ever, but I'm going on a trip to South Africa, Nigeria and the UK. Basically means that the entries over the next few weeks may be quite sporadic and may also have a little bit of an African theme to them.

I'm going to try and set vote questions each week, but they may get set a little earlier on some weeks in order that I can make sure the entries are there before the automated email goes out on Monday morning. If, however, I miss the time window, then you will just see the previous weeks question. Sorry, but be safe in the knowledge that I don't care as I will be on holiday.

Right, time to do some last minute packing before 22 hours of flying which I'm not looking forward to. My guess is that by the end of it I will have seen every movie that's out there at the minute.

Had the opportunity to go to one of my friends houses in the North Bay, place called San Anselmo, for a bar-b-que this long weekend. Had a great time, but more importantly it gives me the opportunity to follow up on the aerial photographs bad pun with the following image:

Oh what fun you can have with Photoshop and a couple of hours!

Back to the bar-b-que, it was great as the hosts have this cute dog, Winston. All the kids loved running round playing with him. So did William until the food came out. I'm still trying to figure out which one managed to scavenge the most food, but they seemed to be making a competition over it.

I only had a really old camera with me, so most of the photos didn't come out, but you can see from the shot below that William and Winston are clearly going head to head for Karen's attention to see who can get the next morsel to be offered.

Those of you that know me and have seen the long list of cars that I've let fall to bits on me may be surprised at the title. Don't be, this probably isn't going to result in the most productive automobile maintenance tips.

But first, let me start by saying that I have washed my car this year.

Actually, that's not strictly speaking true. I was rear ended earlier this year and when they repaired the car, they cleaned it as well. Bargain.

In fairness, there's probably another element that needs to be stated here. I got rear ended a couple of years ago. The person who rear ended me didn't want to claim through their insurance so they gave me cash. I decided there were better things to spend the cash on than repairing the car and thought there was a fair chance someone would hit me again. And I was right, so I made a couple of bucks by hanging on in there.

On that note, it's also worth pointing out that I think the lack of money spent on car care far outweighs the additional depreciation. So driving a rust bucket's not too bad.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah! The current jalopy popped one of its warning lights on - “Service Engine Soon.” One quick look at the mileage and it seems we'd done something like 89,790. An odd number, but I figured that I'd tripped some internal clock thing that tells the car to put the light on for the 90,000 mile service.

It's actually quite disconcerting driving round with a warning light on. It got to the point where I was seriously considering buying some black duct tape to put over the light so it wouldn't bother me. Again, being too lazy to go out and buy the duct tape, I applied the “hang on in there” principle. Turns out this was again the right thing to do! The light has now gone out. We're up to 93,000 miles now. I don't know whether I went past the clock trip switch or if the bulb's blown, but the net result is the same - I'm no longer disconcerted about driving round with a warning light on.

Clearly everything's OK as there's no warning light on. And to think - some day, someone out there will buy this well looked after car!

This comes with so many possible titles:

"Who says you can't have brains and beauty?"
"The state of education"

....

I'm sure most of you have seen this. For those of you that haven't, this is South Carolina's answer to a question on "Miss Teen USA"

Enjoy!