freckles_and_doubt: (Default)
Freckles & Doubt ([personal profile] freckles_and_doubt) wrote2010-09-15 10:11 am

smoke gets in your eyes

Looking at today's soft, misty, slightly relentless rain, you wouldn't believe we had our first braai of the season on Sunday night, sparked by a really indecently warm and beautiful weekend. Ah, Cape Town, how I love your cussed refusal to pay any attention to conventional seasons. Bloody-minded individualism is one of my favourite virtues. (Whoa! actually, some of that wasn't actually rain, but guys with a very long brush washing the outside of my office windows. Explains all the mad thumping sounds I've been hearing all morning.)

A slightly tragic realisation may, however, have arisen out of said Sunday braai. I'm actually quite used to the experience of staggering through a rather high proportion of Monday mornings with an epic and crippling sinus headache: we have a regular Monday morning meeting, and I tend to associate it with headaches to a statistically significant extent. I'd always put it down to (a) hangover, and (b) general resentment of Mondays. However, I really don't tipple with sufficient abandon to result in hangovers, which in any case shouldn't really infect my sinuses, and the same goes for work-loathing - tension headache, yes, sinus headache, unlikely. Sid is evil, but not that evil. No, I think it's fairly simple: I'm reacting to the wood smoke. It's inflaming my sinuses, which are merrily becoming infected and crippling me to the usual plan, with a side order of Glands. This is a horrible thing to contemplate. I'm really only an imitation South African, but I do enjoy our Sunday evening braais in summer, and resent the prospect of spending future iterations in the kitchen, with my head in a paper bag.

Truly lovely weekend notwithstanding, it's been a fairly horrible week. I am very tired and sinusy; I am enmeshed in the labyrinthine processes of insurance protocols after that stupid little accident the other week while I was so 'fluey; and I still haven't marked all these Frankenstein scripts, which seem to be multiplying on some kind of moebius principle I somewhat resent. Also, by way of a kicker, the nice agent lady in France mailed me yesterday to say that my tenants are suddenly baling after three months in the house, and that she doesn't want to carry on representing it as a rental property, it's not worth her while. She'll try and sell it for me if I want to, but no more renting. Bleah. Trying to work out if it's worth it. In French.

All this is giving me the most unlikely and (generally) horrible dreams. Night before last it was an extended cuddle session with, for some reason, Keanu Reeves, who was kinda cute, but which mostly caused angst and depression because he played mad amounts of polo and now I had to pretend to be enthusiastic about riding horses. Last night was another of those oh god I've screwed up irrevocably dreams, in this case by not realising that the man under the floorboards was there when I ran the giant machine which wound him in ropes around a floor joist and then perforated him all over with enormous sharpened metal pins. At some point he became me, and I had to watch my body slowly shredding and dissolving because of all the perforations. I'm a bit fragile this morning.

[identity profile] rumint.livejournal.com 2010-09-15 08:56 am (UTC)(link)
Given how low the european property market is at present, I wouldn't recommend selling for another year or two. Of course that requires finding a new letting agent...

[identity profile] strawberryfrog.livejournal.com 2010-09-15 09:38 am (UTC)(link)
It's a pity that none of us have use for a house in France. That's supposed to be a status symbol for Brits.

[identity profile] herne-kzn.livejournal.com 2010-09-15 11:35 am (UTC)(link)
http://www.homedefenseproducts.com/gas_masks.html
I suggest the Advantage 1000. You can fill the canteen with gin.

[identity profile] extemporanea.livejournal.com 2010-09-16 09:17 am (UTC)(link)
Good lord, you do hang around some odd corners of the internet. I fear, sir, that even with the added Bombay Sapphire incentive I cannot reconcile it with my sartorial conscience to wear anything so detrimental to my appearance.

I keep meaning to go back and comment on one of your earlier posts, that link to the article on the history of Goth was wonderful, and caused me to spend the better part of the morning listening to weird fringe bands on YouTube and waxing nostalgic. Sigh. Thank you.

[identity profile] herne-kzn.livejournal.com 2010-09-16 10:35 am (UTC)(link)
I had much the same sort of day after reading it.

Just you wait though. When the Mad Max future arrives, the contents of my survival bunker will allow be to becme a powerful regional warlord and sweep my vision of Utopia across the wastelands.

[identity profile] extemporanea.livejournal.com 2010-09-16 11:27 am (UTC)(link)
This is a strangely compelling image. Memo to self, should really see Mad Max sometime.

[identity profile] tngr-spacecadet.livejournal.com 2010-09-15 03:28 pm (UTC)(link)
Construction on steam room has started, you will be welcome to come and soothe your sinus when that is in place! Also, please shout if I should I ask C if she can help with the French.

[identity profile] extemporanea.livejournal.com 2010-09-16 09:18 am (UTC)(link)
Hmmm, steam room. Maybe this will finally incite me to go back to the gym. Thank you for the French offer, I shall remember it gratefully if there's a crisis, but for now I'm stumbling through with Google Translate and my dictionary. Memo to self: learn more French swear words.