Freckles & Doubt

It's been a rude shock to come back to work after a ten-day break, particularly when my week has been rendered more than somewhat hideous by a continual stream of angsty student queries. My immediate response to a knock on my door has been instant, reflexive, homicidal rage, which I instantly have to choke down in order to be empathetic to their problems; this has resulted in increased homicidal impulses owing to frustration, and as a result a rather nasty feedback loop. It is also bringing out my worst hedgehoggy tendencies to contemplate the fact that, following a roleplaying game on Wednesday night and Salty Cracker expedition last night, I have khoi_boi's birthday dinner tonight, a LARP tomorrow and a dinner date for Sunday night. Five days of unrelieved socialising make Extemp a grumpy, grumpy thing. I apologise in advance if I accidentally dismember anyone in the next few days. Nothing personal.

That being said, last night's dinner was excellent (La Mouette has a winter special on their six-course tasting menu, highly recommended), and our Lady Blackbird game is continuing to be disreputably and chaotically hilarious. The game system allows for a minimal DM presence and considerable input from the players, three out of five of whom are experienced DMs, so we tend towards horribly complicating our own lives in inventive ways. There is, thank the aetheric space-jellyfish, reason to believe that my thoroughly annoying character may be showing signs of actual personal growth, and a concomitant drift away from rampant and entitled narcissism. We can hope, anyway. If not, the Pirate King is going to almost certainly have to spank her frequently just to remain sane. On the upside, detonator innuendo, a moodily-organ-playing captain, an asteroid field which grows evil vodka potatoes, experience points for disdain, and a pirate called Cholmondeley Veruca. "We have booby-trapped your ship, in the sense that we've sent Kale to fix your engines". Also, points to the (somewhat besotted) Captain for reflexively shooting the pirate who made personal remarks about Lady Blackbird. It was cute, and is directly contributing to her personal growth. Thank the gods.

The jolly wintry LiveJournal header bar mocks me, it does, what with its jolly snowman and pretty snowflakes and its gently curvy landscape under snow. (a) It's bloody hot here, and I'm post-gastric and very fragile, and (b) my poor dear mother is stuck in London under umpteen feet of snow, her flight to Cape Town last night having coincided, with mathematical precision, with Heathrow closing down for 24 hours because of snow on the runways. The first replacement flight they can offer her is the 24th December, thus neatly knocking out half of her fairly short holiday. I think that "I'm miffed" is not only an understatement, it's a fractional stab at what she must be feeling.

I hate to break it to you, Britain, but this feathery white stuff falls out of the sky approximately annually, and proceeds to pile up into pretty, incommodious drifts in a fairly predictable and characteristic fashion. It may also have escaped your attention that you're a major international hub for air travel and its associated climate-destroying effects, to the extent where flying into Heathrow always gives me chills simply because of the number of planes I can count in the sky with mine. (They're awfully close and move awfully fast and even insane amphetamine-laced air traffic controllers have to nod sometimes, and besides, the mere fact that there are eight other airborne planes within view as we circle means there are too bloody many of us and we travel too bloody often in insanely wasteful and clumsy ways). The two above effects being noted, do you think it's too much to hope that you'd have something vaguely resembling a crisis plan in place, one which doesn't involve thousands of people sleeping on the floor in your incredibly ugly and rather filthy terminals? Particularly since air travel has a rampaging carbon footprint in giant hobnailed boots, which in turn contributes to global warming and all its merry effects, such as wilder weather extremes and, for example, ALL THIS BLOODY SNOW.

I hasten to add that my poor dear mother is not, in fact, sleeping on the floor in Heathrow, she fortunately has friends nearby and is being put up in considerably more comfort. But I resent being deprived of six days of her company by a noxious confluence of overpopulation, inefficiency and climate change. It pushes all my buttons at once, with a fine, ham-fisted indifference. Phooey.

Marking ate my weekend. OK, not quite. Marking and trying to write moving, eloquent, sophisticated papers on vampire Snow Whites ate my weekend. Om, nom, nom. In fact, not even. Actually, socialising ate my weekend, so I had to cram all the marking and paper-writing into the edges, where it worried the legs of my trousers, snarling. This three-career lifestyle isn't all that, when you get down to it.

friendly_shrink and her Nice Man braaied for us on Friday lunch, it being, of course, Braai Day; for some reason large and delectable meals for lunch - or possibly the gin - knocks out the day totally. Then we did movie club on Friday evening, of which more anon. Saturday was mostly eaten by traffic, as first_fallen had her birthday lunch in Hermanus on top of the whale festival, which, while a pleasant occasion full of lovely people I don't see often enough, means two hours to get from one side of Hermanus (Pop. 25 125) to the other, falling over the one horse on the way. Sunday was eaten by resentment, in between marking and paper-writing, because what I really need weekends for is down time, and I didn't get any. Phooey.

Movie club was stv's choice, and the theme was apocalypse. Post-apocalypses. Post-apocalypi? (Very heavy: my next one is going to be dance movies, just to retaliate). Anyway, we watched The Book of Eli and 9, which were definitely both on theme.

• Book of Eli: interesting film, beautifully shot, lots of desert and bad guys with guns. It was flawed by its attempt at a twist, which it absolutely and completely failed in any way whatsoever to justify with the actual, you know, events of the movie. Phooey. On the upside, rather well acted.
  
• 9: interesting film, beautifully animated, lots of ruined buildings and giant evil steampunk machine things with glowing eyes. It was flawed by its attempt at a script, which it absolutely and completely failed to deliver in any way resulting in plot coherence, logical decision making, or anything resembling, you know, enough actual characterisation to create motivation or a reason to identify with these little rag-doll people. On the upside, very cute twin archivists.

I'm glad I saw both movies. I won't be adding them to my collection. But there was popcorn. And a three-day weekend, which was mostly characterised by being over. Sigh.

I love the internet. I whinge wistfully about my lack of a Castle fix, and have three offers to supply the goods in the space of twenty-four hours - one from a lurker who I didn't even know was reading. (Hi, Andrea!). I also hope the Powers That Be get their arses in gear and produce the Region 2 DVD eftsoons and right speedily, as I'm suffering gnawing guilt from all this piracy. But not, may I add, enough guilt to make me stop watching them. Gosh, no.

The piracy karma is probably what caused yesterday's merry little instalment of the South African Experience, viz. being dragged home at lunchtime by the armed response guy because, yet again, we'd been burgled. This was completely inevitable: we've had renovators in the house potentially casing the joint, and besides they managed to put a chisel through the alarm sensor cables, which means the alarm hasn't worked for a couple of months. Last week we had the sensors rewired, but the damned thing is still not sending an alert to the company even if the alarm goes off, which is Dead Suspicious as it was working fine before the renovations. The Evil Landlord is locked in an epic battle with the alarm company owing to their pathetically transparent attempt to make us buy a new system by dint of refusing to even look at the old one because it's "too old to repair". Pshaw, and likewise phooey. However, my money's on his Germanic Stubbornness quotient, which is ideally suited to these little challenges.

We were thus set up nicely by circumstances, and given the last burglary it was all curiously familiar. The bastards once again levered the burglar bars off the window in the Evil Landlord's bedroom, leaving chunks of wall all over the floor. They seem to have gone through a random selection of the house, including his gym bag and my dressing table, but yet again they don't seem to have taken any of my jewellery, which I kinda take personally since it implies an aesthetic rejection I find hurtful. Nor did they touch the CD or DVD collection, which is always my primary fear. Computers all OK, electronics untouched - in fact, the only thing they seem to have stolen was a pair of the EL's track suit pants, which seems a mite fetishistic to me. I think the slightly dadaist break-in was because they were interrupted, by (a) the alarm going off, (b) the crazy next-door-neighbour hearing it and pushing her panic button on paranoid reflex, and (c) the presence of the other next-door-neighbour's visitor in the road outside, where he was ideally positioned to watch the burglar jump over the wall and pause to put on his trousers before running down the road. (Don't ask. I suspect they may have been the missing EL trousers).

Is it just me, or are we inflicted with particularly odd burglars? Not to mention, of course, burglar bars that are attached entirely inadequately. Future plans (apart from Fix Alarm, which the EL is onto): weld bars to iron bars sunk into wall and themselves welded to iron bars sunk into floor and chained to iron bar which Hobbit is sitting on. Also, follow the XKCD principle and get a laser pointer for the cats. Irritation at future attempted burglaries will be largely assuaged by having to clear up the small piles of ash.

Summer is here! Lhud sing cuckoo; also, bah, humbug and the usual grumbling. It's early days yet, however, and in fact the sunny days with not too much actual heat are mostly tolerable, what with the recent rain, green growth everywhere and the little birdies going twit. Or, in the case of the mad pair of peregrines who nest on the hospital opposite our house, screaming their avian pea-brain heads off, presumably in some sort of mating frenzy. There's no accounting for taste; I, for one, am profoundly turned off by yelling. (Punk, so not an aphrodisiac). The warmer days also seem to bring the milk of human kindness bubbling to the surface, and there's been a positive orgy of courtesy and goodwill as we all let each other into the rush-hour traffic, beaming like loons. (This is necessary, the traffic has been unusually dire in the last few days). In keeping with this lightened mood (albeit temporarily, watch me growl once the heat-waves start), summer makes me break out the P.G. Wodehouse. Strange but true.

Summer also means I'm into the cotton skirts, along with their associated doom: t-shirts bare to the onlooker's gaze without intervening warmer covering, and, therefore, the dire necessity for a bra, the which I joyously do not wear all the way through autumn, winter and spring. This is one of the things I actually hate about summer, mostly because there's a sort of Seekrit Girl Club to which I do not belong, viz. the one which shares the arcane knowledge about how to stop your bra straps from perpetually slipping off your shoulders. I lack this skill. I am clearly, for the purposes of bra strap wrangling, not a girl at all. I spend most of summer mournfully raising and lowering the length of the straps, in a sad, futile sort of way, like a short-sighted peeping tom at a parlour blind. What's the secret here? string? superglue? complicated contraptions with magnets? nine-inch nails through the shoulders? I swear, I'm seriously considering the latter. I cannot but feel that it redounds negatively to my professionalism to have my eyes glaze over at intervals, usually in the middle of impassioned curriculum advice, while I grope down my sleeve via the neck.

Happy Summer Sights of the last few days, though: turning in for home past the Common, an elderly man trying to persuade his bull terrier that walkies were, in fact, Over. Man's body angled at 45^o away from dog. Dog's legs all at equal and opposite angle as he digs his feet into the ground, mule-like, and refuses to move. Upshot: by considerable straining on man's part, dog dragged along ground, leaving ruts. I laughed all the way home.

Finally, more graphical info-porn for smoczek: Best Science Visualisations. My disaster-movie-loving soul is obscurely soothed by California falling into the sea as the San Andreas cocks up its toes.

Oh, joy, after a week of exhaustion, weird spaceyness and the short-fuse temper from hell, the head-cold part of this bloody 'flu thing has hit. Once again I am a disgusting object, with Sid the Sinus Headache joyously laying cement in my skull. I managed, however, to distract myself from it sufficiently this evening to help the Evil Landlord produce a fondue evening for jo&stv and sven&tanya, which was fun, particularly since I elected to try out tempura batter in the fondue pot for the first time. (Verdict: good, and lightens the meat-heavy quotient of your average oil fondue, although it's difficult to get the fat truly hot enough on the tiny spirit flame). We fondued thin bits of sweet potato, butternut, brinjal, carrot and asparagus. Also, tempura-battered prawns ftw.

The really weird meeting of minds I have with Jo can be indexed in the perfectly serious fifteen-minute discussion we subsequently had about the exciting and inevitable art installation we could mount by disassembling a brand new latest-model Japanese small car (Honda or Toyota, or possibly a Suzuki motorcycle), and tempura-battering and deep-frying its component parts before reassembling and suspending it in exploded-car-diagram format. We feel this would constitute profound and self-aware cultural commentary, emblematising the interchangeability of consumer-cultural paradigms while simultaneously investigating notions of "freshness" and "value"¹. We are open to grant offers which would enable the realisation of this promising but expensive and technically challenging work. Or, for that matter, to franchising.

The Telkom saga continues: while they actually installed my dad's phone line on Thursday, we've been unable to phone any international numbers. When I phoned the helpline to report the fault, they told me, in tones of dulcet surprise, that oh, no! of course you can't get international lines, they're automatically locked with a new phone, and you need to have them unlocked. No, of course you can't do it via the helpline, you need to go into the Telkom Direct store and do it in person. No, of course no-one in any of the five different discussions you had with helplines and the store before installing the line actually mentioned this. That would constitute service, which runs counter to everything Telkom stands for.

Bastards. Also open to grant offers which would enable me to employ ninja assassins, preferably with a wholesale option.

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¹ Or "Japanese".

Some bastard is fiddling with the Dread Sigil Odegra again in Cape Town at the moment - traffic last night was unspeakable, Rondebosch was almost gridlocked from about 4.30 to after 6.30, which is the time I gave up trying to get over to Hout Bay to visit my dad. I figured that if it had taken me 35 minutes to fail to leave Rondebosch, the rest of it was pretty much doomed. It wasn't much fun this morning, either, 40 mins up to campus, only to find the network down. I think the Cosmic Wossnames are prodding me with sticks, and snerkling nastily as I get all twitchy without my daily blogs.

On the upside, the Department of Crazed Tabloid Surrealism is fully operational. Today's gem: MY EVIL GOAT LOVE CURSE! In true billboard headline fashion the words ramify into a host of possible meanings, leaving one unsure if the unfortunate speaker is evilly cursed to love goats, cursed in love by an evil goat, or has a nice line in expletives (I have to say, I'm having the kind of day which does, in fact, inspire me to mutter "Evil goat love!" under my breath at intervals).

On the further upside, three-day weekend, with various pleasing social wossnames lined up including, after a gap of years, Mythos! It is remotely possible that I may not actually bite any more student heads off on Tuesday, although I plan to keep "Evil goat love!" in reserve just in case.

Possible Tactical Errors When Planning A Wine-Route:

1. Plan it for the middle of a Cape heat wave. 38^o temperatures. Killing.


2. Plan it for the middle of a Cape heat wave in a car with no working aircon. We survived by rubbing ourselves down with ice cubes, which must have looked supremely dodgy.


3. Plan it for the middle of a heat wave, in the Wellington area, when Paarl Mountain has been on fire for several days. This creates a tendency for winetasters to swirl, sniff, taste and say, judiciously, "Hmmm, bit smoky on the nose." Fortunately Paarl Mountain had mostly burned itself out by the time we arrived, and we were able to detour around the enormous column of smoke. I don't know how those poor firefighters managed to work in the heatwave, it was unspeakable even sitting in a moving car with all the windows open. Apparently not too many actual vineyards were destroyed, but the smoke is going to affect this year's vintage, which I'd imagine will be some combination of disasterous, interesting, or a unique and completely unreplicable vintage each bottle of which will sell for enormous sums. I don't worry about the wine as much as I do about all those conservation areas burned out, nothing left alive. The fynbos will bounce back stronger than ever, but the animals won't.


4. Choose as your first wine farm of the day a place called the Black Pearl. The owner swears blind they predate Johnny Depp by a considerable margin ("Paarl" means "pearl", after all), but even so the trip will inevitably degenerate into a lot of "Arrrrr! 'Tis the Black Pearl!" in appropriate iterations of Geoffrey Rush. Particularly when stv is on board. The farm itself was a real find, though - one phones up to arrange a tasting, which the owner conducts personally on the balcony of his beautifully renovated 70s home (which apparently used to belong to the National Party and have red- or black-painted walls). Damned nice cabernet. Friendly dogs. Charming host. Lovely view.
   
   
   
   Also, they have alpacas.


5. Take a day off for the the wine route on a Friday in order to give oneself a long weekend, as a first, faint stab at trying to recover from a month of 11-hour days, then discover that the board schedule checking, which I'm only about a third of the way through, has to be done by Monday. Spend the non-winerouting portion of one's "rest" weekend checking board schedules and plotting the absolute destruction of the faculty admin block by judicious application of gelignite. God, I need a rest.

I have to say, despite the stacked deck ennumerated above, it was a lovely day, and full of lovely wine, lots of which we bought. The Diemersfontein Pinotage is particularly fine. Vanilla and chocolate flavours. They make it into truffles, a box of which I acquired and transported to Cape Town lovingly packed in ice. Not even heatwaves get between me and my chocolate.

It's Friday evening at a quarter to six, and where am I? Sitting in my office after a truly exhausting day of registration, playing loud Franz Ferdinand defiantly¹, and trying to juggle a timetable for 10 academics and me for triple slots over all of next week, when no-one is available for longer than two and a half hours at a time and strict parity of hours must be maintained. I am reduced to colour-coding with highlighters. (Memo to self, must accommodate my second session of root canal. This tells you everything you need to know about my life at the moment). I was rabidly insomniac last night and have no brain left, which is making this even harder than usual. Also, large men with heavy machinery are ripping up the road outside my window. I feel that I have sufficient reason to be reproachful at the Cosmic Wossnames.

On the upside, last night I installed the Evil Landlord's spanky new copy of Fable onto my computer, where it is running with a certain cheerful cuteness. If I overcome my irritation at the save functions and the inherent sexism of the underlying metaphor doesn't get my feminist goat entirely, I think it's going to be fun to play.

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¹ "You Could Have It So Much Better". Word.

Tra la la, it's January, and Seasonal Depression, as usual, has gripped me, since I'm clearly deeply contrary and insist on getting this in the depths of summer rather than winter. Work starts tomorrow and will be hell for two months, the weather's horribly hot, my neck's still itching, Avatar is being mean to Appa, and Roswell has just handed me Liz and Max breaking up and that stupid slut Tess seducing Max. Terry Pratchett is now Sir Terry, which is equally amusing and wonderful and doesn't at all make up for the Alzheimer's. And the BBC have cast a complete unknown as the next Doctor. I was very sold on the Patterson Joseph rumour, I'm narked. The new guy looks way too young, and rather dweebish.

Phooey. It's bad when even my fangirling distractions fail me. I shall go and punish myself for an hour and a half at the gym instead. Possibly medieval monks had something in the mortification-of-the-flesh department.