Up very early to (finally) get some good news this morning.
But it is wet and wild out there, and it’s about to get wetterer and wilderer:
This is a proper biggie, even by Cape Town winter standards, and we’re very happy (and lucky) to be riding it out inside.
Stay safe out there.
Is it just us – and, to be fair, those surrounding us – who are coming to the conclusion that 2025 is actually a bit crap?
Of course, all years have their ups and their downs, but this one does seem to be continually choosing the crappy option each and every time it gets the chance.
I don’t want to go into details, because that wouldn’t do any good anyway, but there have been quite a lot of things that just could have gone much better. And a seemingly equal number that would have been much better if they just hadn’t happened.
Several examples of each have been mentioned on here.
I try hard to be a glass half full kind of guy, but it’s getting more and more difficult to repeatedly try and ignore the apparent vendetta that 2025 clearly has against us.
Even the simplest things seem to have it in for us.
And just when I thought that it might get better in the second half of the year: a fresh start and all that…
WWIII is about to enter the chat.
Thanks, Donald.
Still, other than those issues (which unfortunately is just about everything), we’re just about surviving.
Onward and upward…
Sorry for the lack of updates today. I almost forgot to blog. That would have been a bit of a disaster.
Lots on from a family point of view. It’s been busy and a bit stressful.
All went well, though.
And I’ll be back tomorrow with a proper post.
T&Cs do apply, obviously
I added a couple more tracks to my Playlist For A Chilled Braai playlist on Spotify this week, and those tracks upped the number of total tracks on said playlist to 200. Fourteen hours and forty-one minutes of musical accompaniment to your braai, and just the right mix of background and gently upbeat tracks – and just a few old skool memories thrown in – to make your braai’ing experience absolutely perfect.
And no, of course you don’t have to listen to it all at once, but the sheer amount of music on there means that you get to hear something different each time you log in and light up. So hit the save button above, click on shuffle on your device of choice, and have a great evening cooking oor die kole.
You can click through here if you can’t use the graphic above, and you can click through here to see all my other Spotify playlists, should you want to enjoy some different genres and go back in time ever so slightly*.
* Musically, I mean. I haven’t invented a time machine or anything.
Short stuff news: Today is the shortest day of the year here in the Southern Hemisphere. It also marks the Astronomical beginning of winter. Meteorologists have been here for three weeks already – please do try to keep up!).
Anyway, Cape Town will manage with just 9h53m31s of daylight today, but wow – all of that has been wall-to-wall sunshine. It’s been a stunner.
Let’s fill you in with some facts to impress your family and friends, and to annoy your enemies:
Sunrise was 7:51am this morning; sunset will be at 5:44pm this evening.
And tomorrow’s daylight will be whole 2 seconds longer than today’s.
That’s because of the sunset moving later, because the sunrise also moves later until the beginning of July. This is because the way we humans measure time and the way that the sun measures time are ever so slightly different. But because the sunset moves later faster than the sunrise moves later (still with me here?), the days do get longer.
You can see that pattern in the distance of the sun away from our little corner of Africa, as well. It reaches its furthest distance away on the 3rd July, at 152,088,000km away.
The sun was closest to Cape Town on 4th January at “just” 147,104,000km away. That means that the light from our big yellow ball takes 18 seconds more to reach us in winter than in summer.
And, to complete the comparisons, on the longest day of the year (that’s Dec 21st here):
Sunrise will be at 5:31am in the morning – 2 hours and 20 minutes earlier than today; sunset will be at 7:57pm in the evening – 2 hours and 13 minutes later than today.
That will mean 14h25m06s of daylight: fully 4h31m35s more than today.
We do have A LOT of winter to get through before those halcyon summer days (starting with Wednesday, which looks horrific), but the long journey back starts tomorrow!