Capetonian woman continually surprised by events

News just in:

Capetonian Margaret Wilson (61) of Diep River, has admitted to being “almost permanently bewildered” by what she describes as “a continuous stream of surprising events” which she claims are plaguing her life.

Yesterday, my son-in-law asked if I had registered the card in my cellphone. I asked him why I needed to do this and he told me that I would be cut off if I didn’t. Who makes these silly rules up at the drop of a hat?
If they are going to do these things then they should at least tell you by sending you text messages, taking out full page advertisements in the newspapers or mentioning it on Carte Blanche or Cape Talk. If it wasn’t for Graham, I would never have known.

Mrs Wilson, who lives alone, was further incensed by the news that electricity prices would rise in Cape Town on July 1st:

I thought Graham was making this up when he told me. They did this last July too, although I’ll be surprised if this trend continues and they do it again next year. It’s going to cost me much more: since that silly loadshedding ended, I’ve been using as much electricity as I can to make up for the bits I missed. It’s difficult sleeping at night with all the lights on, but at least it keeps the burglars away.
But I don’t know where I am going to find the money. If I had known about this, I would have saved up. It’s like the petrol – you never know where you stand with that. They seem to change the price every few weeks. They should publicise these things. It’s very confusing.

When asked if she ever watched the news, Mrs Wilson said yes, although she only watches the SABC news in Afrikaans – which she doesn’t speak – “just to check Riaan Cruywagen is still alive”. She also mentioned that she only bought newspapers in order to line the bottom of her cats’ litter tray:

Pickles and Fifi just don’t seem to want to go out at the moment and I can’t say that I blame them. It’s been so cold and wet for the last few weeks. I really don’t like these cold snaps – we had them last year as well as I remember – while that football tournament was on. It just seems to get cold for a few months before it gets warmer again. Those weather people on the telly are no good either – they just say it’s going to be cold – they never tell you why. Still, I prefer this weather to when it’s too hot. I can’t stand the heat, you know?

Mrs Wilson is looking forward to watching the Super 15 semi-final from Newlands on Saturday.

Graham is going along. We love the rugby. It will be great to hear the whole crowd getting behind the local team.
I’ll be very surprised if they don’t.

(I’m submitting this post to the Southern Suburbs Tatler.)

Heart v Head

I desperately want(ed) to get down to the coast this weekend. The weather this week has been atrocious (once we’d got past Tuesday with its ridiculous midwinter 30 degreedness) and the wind has whipped up some epic swells around the South African coast. The weather service were warning of 7m off Agulhas. Yummy.

I love that kind of weather. It’s dramatic, elemental, Wuthering Heights kind of stuff. I would much rather wander along a beach in a gale, with crashing surf and disturbed seabirds than sit there in the baking sun, baking.
There are other considerations though. Family, for one, two and three. Coming from South Africa, rather than the UK, they are not so keen on the epic waves and howling wind. They want sunshine and warmth. They like to be able to see the sand to sit on and to dig in, rather than have it littered in smashed weed and marooned jellyfish. Suffice to say, their preferred conditions are not going to be much in evidence this weekend. And there’s more to do with two small kids in Cape Town than in a tiny village miles from anything except a windy beach and a wild sea.

Add to that the frankly rather scary conditions forecast for the Cape on Sunday – if you thought last night’s ice storm was bad, just wait – which is when we’d be doing the 230km back and it’s sadly a no-brainer. Or rather an all-brainer and a no-hearter. Not that I struggle to drive safely in storm force winds and heavy rain, but unfortunately, it has come to my attention that a lot of other people in this country do.

So I’ll be around this weekend, I think. Which makes it all the more important for you to take the few seconds required to ‘like’ the new 6000.co.za facebook page, download the 6000 miles… feed Android app or even the one for your Nokia Ovi, thanks to Nokia SA and #mobiblog.
And – big news – the 6000 miles… iPhone app is under development and should be with you shortly. Possibly even more shortly now that I’m going to be around some internet for the next few days.

So many ways to stay in touch. No excuses anymore.

Brolly issue

Amazing. Here I am wondering what to blog about today and then it drops into my lap onto my screen, courtesy of News24 commenter Krolie, who took full advantage of an article on the wintery weather (which missed Cape Town almost completely) to vent his or her spleen over a long-standing issue which has clearly caused a lot of pent up frustration:

For the past 20 years I each year bought an umbrella in the hope that THIS time it will do what it is supposed to, but alas, if you exit the door and there is something just stronger than a breeze, your umbrella takes another shape whipping the other way round and well, your next best hope is for a bit of water to use this useless object as a boat of sorts.
Anybody else find an umbrella pretty useless in the WC in the middle of winter? CT is well known for people hugging lampposts, even grabbing towards the closest human zipping past you as if hell bent to win a marthon.
Yip, even your rainjacket ends up not being so protective as it is renowned to do – whipping up and down and all over the place, including the clothes you’re wearing underneath. You might as well put your clothes in a packet, tie it to your body and streak down Adderley Steet, because wet you will be to the skin, no matter what you do. At least you’t hopefully have some dry clothes at the end of your “flight”.

Just wondering what the use is of a umbrella/brolly really is in this kind of weather…

Is Krolie mad? Einstein thinks so:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

When May comes around, and Krolie heads for the local umbrella shop, is there not some small hint, some glimmer of a memory that when s/he is doing is utterly pointless and has been proven so on many separate occasions over the previous two decades?

I have to say too, that it appears some degree of artistic licence has been employed here. I have never hugged a lamppost in Cape Town – there are always too many posters on them for one’s arms to get a firm grip – nor have I ever grabbed the closest human to me. The latter is an extremely dangerous means of protecting one’s self from the rain anyway. South Africans know how to fight off muggers and you’re more than likely to find yourself lying in a pool of blood, not water, with your brolly stuck somewhere where the sun don’t shine (that’s PE this week).

So people, do not buy an umbrella in the misguided hope it will keep you dry in Cape Town’s wind. And do not streak down Adderley Street. It’s not clever, and in these sort of meteorological conditions, it certainly won’t be big either.

Calibration is key

There’s no point in firing off pictures of your car’s thermometer reading (or any other thermometer reading in fact) and just expecting us to believe what it says. For a genuine and accurate measurement, you need a laboratory thermometer calibrated by the Cape Metrology Centre and then you need to pop it outside at ten past three on a Tuesday afternoon and see what happens.

Which is this:

It should probably be noted that we actually got a high of 50.9°C, but were too slow with the camera. However, with another scorcher on offer tomorrow and records to be broken, there may be a case for doing a repeat reading during our lunch break, when it may be even hotter.

As eagle-eyed readers will note, our Thermamite 1 is very capable of taking on up to four times what the South African sun can throw at it, infra-red wise.

(You should see what the Thermamite 2 can do…)

So we’re completely ready for tomorrow: Bring it on! (just as long as we can skulk back to the safety of our air-conditioned laboratory immediately afterwards. Thanks.)

UPDATE: Repeated experiment at 1300 CAT the following day yields unsurprising result:

And yes, obviously that’s in the sun – just like those cricketers down the road are…