Freckles & Doubt

I have been working my way gradually around the kitchen cleaning out cupboards and evicting beetles over the last couple of weeks (it's tiring and annoying and I have Zelda to play, so I've been doing it a bit at a time rather than as a single massive clean-up, which possibly means they're moving in behind me as I go, but honestly I can't.) And on Sunday I reached the large crockery/booze cupboard under the kitchen counter, and moved everything out and cleaned it obsessively, and boxed up things I never use to take to the charity shop, and rearranged it all neatly, and it was extremely satisfying.

And ten minutes later, when I had returned to my righteous tea-drinking and Zelda-playing, there was a weird, muffled, sliding crash from the kitchen, and I did a reflexive button-mash and died (again) by falling off a rock into a mudpool (sidebar: fucking Trial of Wood), and swore, and went to see what had happened. And nicely-distributed selection of the little plastic brackets holding the shelf in the newly-cleaned cupboard had popped out of their holes, dropping and tilting the shelf so that everything slid down to the end. Mercifully nothing actually broke, because that was the booze end, and there's a fair amount of liqueur as well as wine in there, and the mess would have been epically sticky. So I had to take everything out of those cupboards again, as a result of which my kitchen has spent two days looking like this:



I know these damned shelf-brackets of old, they randomly pop out all the time, they're tiny cheapy plastic things, and have worn their holes too large because they're drilled into chipboard and don't have any sort of plug or housing. And when I texted the landlord to check if he's okay with me getting a damned carpenter to put proper supports in, he remained true to his slightly kludgy DIY ethic and said, oh, no, you don't need to do that, you can put paper around the stud, or glue it. So I said, fine, if you're okay with me gluing the little buggers in, so be it.

So I have propped the shelf up on random bits of thing, and carefully collected the supports, and wrapped every stud in paper (bits of printer label, so they stick), and then glued the hell out of it with copious quantities of wood glue, with which I managed to refrain from sticking Jyn to the woodwork as she had to explore the nice new empty shelf expanse and have her nose in everything I was doing. And after I let it dry overnight, I lowered the shelf carefully back onto the supports this morning, and nothing popped off. As I should bloody well hope, after all that, it should be rock solid. I have just finished rearranging everything (again!), and my kitchen is clear, and the counter open, and I propose to go and make myself coffee walnut cake by way of self-congratulation, and also reward for having spent the last week checking board schedules, and also fortification for the next three days of exam committees.

Several things have emerged from this:
1. The damned landlord half-arses half his renovations, it's maddening. Everything's done cheaply and not quite well.
2. Having clutter all over my countertops and table for two days appears to make me very twitchy and slightly grumpy, I hate clutter.
3. My overall fitness is actually a lot better than it was a couple of months ago, apparently my not very serious exercise routine over the last six weeks or so is actually working in terms of being able to crawl around and get up off the floor and angle myself into cupboards to hammer recalcitrant shelf supports.
4. Jyn was really enjoying the empty shelves, while I was putting everything back she was seething around my ankles and growling at me!
5. I need to find a worthy recipient for all that booze, I can't actually drink at the moment, even a glass of wine gives me a serious headache the next day, and there's only so much I can use for cooking. And it's not as if I can entertain, because pandemic. Sigh.

I was very close to simply hiring the next door neighbour to do all of the above, it was a pain, but clearly sheer bloody-mindedness prevailed. I am triumphant. And also annoyed.

Mad storm experiences have distracted me from noting that my weekend away in the winelands was lovely, thank you! Franschoek is really pretty, in a slightly Disney-village sort of way that verges at times on the cutesy. It takes its French heritage very seriously, in a plethora of Frenchy names on farms, roads, shops, restaurants, art galleries (it has a metric buttload of art galleries) and wine. It also has Damned Fine Winefarms and Damned Fine Restaurants as well as superlatively lovely mountains, so I completely forgive it the slightly cut-price rural France effect.

We stayed in an Airbnb for two nights, which was an experience in beautiful farm setting, comfortable beds, good internet, owls hooting in the trees at night, and an otherwise almost complete abandonment of practicality in favour of dubious "designer" aesthetic. Giant wooden chandelier aesthetic. Clunky giant wooden silver-painted monstrous mirror aesthetic. Random plethoras of blocky dog sculpture aesthetic. Dirt-coloured see-through open-weave linenoid drapey chunks of fabric over the windows instead of curtains aesthetic. (Including the window with its sill at knee height right next to the toilet, looking out on the patio by the entrance). Privacy was a complete no-go - one giant room with the bathroom sectioned off, second bedroom in a loft up a dicey and precipitous ladder, with no wall or curtain. (Or light source, for that matter). It's lucky jo&stv and I are very, very good friends, is all. Also: gas stove with oven, but no oven pans. No comfortable chairs. Dodgy electrics (no hot water on the final morning). Bumps in the bathroom floor. Loft shutter didn't latch, and blew open disconcertingly right by my head in the storm as I was drifting off to sleep on Saturday night.

But a beautiful view.



We did Colmant for champagne on Friday afternoon (we ended up very sloshed, the charmingly persuasive tasting dude had a rather heavy pouring elbow), supper at Foliage (excellent but not superlative, fascinating use of foraged ingredients), wine tasting at Topiary in the morning (Topiary has actual topiary as well as excellent shiraz, viz.:



).. followed by wine tasting at Glenwood in the late morning. The excitingly chunky Tuesday wol artwork at the head of this post is in the Glenwood foyer, it's blurry because I was, again, sloshed and was waving the camera around a bit randomly. Score at Glenwood, the wine tasting lady was a Known Associate of Jo's from AfrikaBurn, and gave us free wine as well as a virtuoso tour. Then we had lunch at Bread and Wine, which was, as always, superlative (goat's cheese and hazlenut risotto, and red curry soup with prawns, and roast duck breast, and incredible bread). Then we collapsed for the afternoon, and ate, small cautious amounts of supper at Dutch East, who gave us quite the best gnocci I've had in years, with artichoke and chilli, must try at home. We didn't have room for the deep fried milk tart, but I wanted to.

It was a lovely weekend. I approve of this full weekend in the winelands thing, it allows a quite indecent and sybaritic concentration of food, wine and landscape which is exceptionally good for the soul, if somewhat catastrophic to the bank balance. 10/10, would definitely indulge again.

It's clearly fatal to ever tidy up. Or do filing. Because if you do, in a burst of misguided enthusiasm, carefully file the last six months' worth of paper which are artistically piled in your in-tray as a Hobbit-bed, you run the risk of secreting important drunken scribblings so carefully that you can't find them for weeks. Fortunately said piece of paper turned up again this weekend in the course of a frantic scrabble for vital Morrowind cheat notes, and I am thus able to bring you the socio-chemical scientific conclusions which resulted from the entirely uncontrolled experiment of a Star Wars cocktail evening a couple of weekends back.

This was occasioned, by convoluted and lateral routes, by the Evil Landlord's company moving premises again (something they seem to do every couple of years just to test the path-finding abilities of their employees), and the mechanics of the move necessitating that he bring home temporarily his entire collection of Star Wars Lego projects. As he has a deliberate policy of acquiring a new, giant piece of Star Wars Lego every time a major client goes live, building them at work with the assistance of co-workers and keeping them artistically displayed on a spare desk in his office, there are a shitload of these things. We've had a Star Destroyer on the TV cabinet, a Death Star on the corner table and various other bits and bobs (TIE fighter, Millenium Falcon, Boba Fett's ship, etc) in odd corners for a couple of months. The cocktail party was a dual-purpose occasion to which a select group of proper enthusiasts were invited in order to (a) properly admire them, and (b) sample a dubious array of spontaneously-generated Star-Wars-themed cocktails becoming steadily more dubious as the evening advanced. ( I am cutting this, as it's long and full of photos which may clog Friends feeds. If anyone still uses Friends feeds. Does anyone still use Friends feeds? )

It was a very good evening. My drunken notes also record the following snippet of conversation:

ANDREW: "Where should I put these snacks?"
ME (distracted): "No idea, find a horizontal surface which isn't occupied by a model."
ANDREW (knowingly): "Ah, it's one of those parties."

It really was.

Oh, dear. My Imaginet geeks have failed me. Even arm-wrestling their tame Telkom guy, the one who apparently knows what he's doing, was insufficient. All he could do was to instruct me to return to start, do not collect re-wiring, please phone the original order helpline (and he gave me the wrong number) with the original description of the problem, the one that didn't work first time round, and start the weary round again.

So I did this yesterday. With my Seekrit Weapon. I have now tried logic, calm rationality, searching questions, patiently pointing out the imbecility of the system, irritation, rage, abuse, accusations and slamming the phone down. This time, dealing a crippling blow to a hundred years of feminism while suffragettes sobbed, I waited until the first stupid objection ("this is a fault, not an order, this is the order line, phone the fault line"¹), and burst into tears. The slightly hysterical sobbing, interspersed with hiccuping attempts to explain exactly how many hours I've spent on these bloody helplines trying to log a call, eventually backed the poor operative into a corner, where he eventually overrode stuff, circumvented the bit where I'm supposed to be the account holder, and finally gave me a reference number and a date when the technician will come round to do a complete rewire, all while rather helplessly enumerating how many rules he was breaking to do so. I feel dirty. But triumphant. To such depths does the monstrosity of Telkom bring us. It remains to be seen whether the technician actually arrives next Thursday, but I'll prep a supply of tissues and a fainting couch just in case.

Nonetheless, despite the need to once more mud-wrestle the Telkom pig, I've actually had a lovely couple of days. I was abducted for drinks and supper on the Camps Bay beachfront by Michelle and Stef last night, which was pleasingly drunken and attended by a magnificent pink and gold sunset and rather wayward conversation. (They may or may not have got me onto the subject of fan fiction, which is always dangerous, because I start using words like "demographic" and "paradigm" and "narrative wish-fulfilment", and have to be sternly suppressed with more booze). The whole seems to have been sufficient to give me, once I staggered home and fell into bed, an extremely vivid and detailed series of dreams which were, I suspect, actually an episode of Supernatural or something. Small town in the American woods is invaded by the weird shape-shifting hicks from a hidden farm somewhere, who wake up and tramp into town, where they proceed to grow giant arms and knock down whole buildings, or slime up buildings as amorphous sheets so they can stalk small girl children and eat them. The Big Daddy of the family was a sort of giant muscular lizardy thing. I think by the time I woke up the entire town was either dead or assimilated. No Sam or Dean to intervene. Clearly where the scriptwriter went wrong, but I have to say, my subconscious has a superb cinematographer.

Fortunately today was a public holiday, so once I'd cleared the dream-fogs I trundled off to see How to Train Your Dragon in 3D this morning. What a sweet little film - really an object lesson in how to take a hopeless cliché (boy makes friends with Wild Creature, is redeemed, saves day) and infuse it with life and charm. The kid's personality and dialogue are lovely; the 3D is magical without being intrusive, the dragon-flight bits, particularly the end battle, are dizzying and beautiful and bloody marvellous, but overall the strength is in the dragons themselves. Toothless, the main dragon, is a completely endearing mix of puppy, kitten and wild creature, and the incredible variety of other dragons is wildly inventive. (And frequently hilarious: I cracked up completely when I realised how neatly they'd pegged the dragon types to the howling stereotypes of the kid gang - small fat kid to small fat dragon, skinny twins to the two-headed serpentine one, spiky-haired punk dragon with attitude for the girl sidekick. Also, the fat kid's D&D geekery with reference to dragon abilities caused me unholy in-joke glee, to the complete bewilderment of the nice family sitting next to me). It was a lovely way to spend a morning - absolutely no surprises, but considerable pleasures. One for the DVD collection.

This week I have to fight Home Affairs to renew my passport. I console myself with the thought that they can't possibly be as incompetent as Telkom.

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¹ If you phone the fault line they say it's an order and please phone the order line. I tell you, Kafka has nothing on these guys.

Good lord, insane weekend, made slightly more insane by the fact that I'm trying to type this while a large, fluffy, ginger hobbit attempts to sit alternately on my lap, my wrists and my keyboard. Friday night was movies, of which more anon, and Jewel Tavern, which is now in St. George's Mall and still makes damned fine Chinese food in large quantities. Saturday was the very relaxed, very pleasant, rather drunken wedding celebration of librsa and first_fallen (the drunkenness is all Carlo's fault, him and his shooters, pshaw), with the chance to see all sorts of people I haven't seen in weeks, months or years. Saturday night we broke out another bottle of wine and my new DVD copy of The Middleman, to which we are satisfactorily addicting the Evil Landlord at suitable speed. This morning Michelle abducted me for lunch in Kalk Bay, with champagne. Tonight sven&tanya fed us enormous quantities of lamb. Tomorrow I roll gently into work, almost certainly still drunk, at an advanced hour, and will probably proceed to achieve not much until the fog has cleared, which I confidently predict it'll do around Tuesday. This will be just in time for supper with jo&stv and then book club on Thursday. Memo to self, must really go back to the gym.

Friday night's movie was Up, in 3D, and I cannot recommend it sufficiently highly. Pixar are damned good at what they do, and what they do here is refreshingly lateral, unexpected and at times moving as well as hilarious. Apart from the 3D, which is still magical and actually used with commendable restraint, it's a very good script. The whole thing is slightly off-kilter, galloping off in mad and unexpected directions; the main character is an old man, the main plot doesn't really resemble any Hollywood cliché I can think of, and the whole is leavened with offbeat humour and very human pathos. The initial sequence covering the main character's life with his wife is particularly lovely and extremely lump-in-throatish; the dogs are hilarious, even, or perhaps particularly, to a non-dog-lover.

Where I think the film most succeeds, though, is in its purveyance quite simply of fantasy, in the sense of humdrum existence transported suddenly into colour and excitement: the house and all its rainbow balloons is an extremely potent symbol of uplift, escape and possibility. The slight off-the-wallness of subsequent events is thus perfectly in keeping with what is effectively wish-fulfillment, the happy embrace of the impossible as a fantastic antidote to the mundane. Bonus points for magical floating-balloon-house scenes, Cordon Bleu dog chefs, the Cone of Shame, a randomly demented villain, and Kevin, the giant chocoholic bird who takes on a beautifully-animated and highly endearing life of its own. Above all, though, this is about dreams: how vital they are, how compelling, and how they aren't about what you thought they were about in the first place.

In the Department of Middlemania, Episode 6 is a bit thin on pithy exclamations, although I'm partial to "Holy onions!", "That's dirty pool, I'll clean his clock!", "That really steams my clams!" and "Chocoholics Anonymous!" The episode made me very happy by being intensely rude about boy-bands and plagiarists, and supplying, straight-faced, the phrase "A duck's life hangs in the balance". This show, how I do love it.

New Interesting Discovery: weddings are better if they're smaller. And if I know a fair number of the people. And if the bride asks me to do usher duties, thus giving me a cast-iron reason to actually talk to people and ply them with champagne. Also, if some of the guests are interesting grad students/artists who not only listen to me wittering on randomly on several glasses of champagne, but who engage me in spirited debate and take it in good part when I feel impelled to state that their argument is a load of bollocks. (I seem to get argumentative on champagne, not to mention determinedly polysyllabic).

Anyway, Robbie and Vi are now safely married, in a truly lovely ceremony and reception. Vi's parents have a home in Tokai with a particularly beautiful garden which, with true Germanic efficiency, they clearly planted about 15 years ago with the intention of allowing their daughter to be married under the shower of bridal-white bougainvillea which covers the pergola. You have to admire Germanic precision, it's the only wedding I've ever attended where the several clocks in the living room struck the half hour (Vi's dad is a clockmaker) and the bride proceeded to shimmy down the stairs precisely and absolutely on time. The guests were all present and seated, partially due to my ushering efforts, which took place to a schedule provided by the bride. I attribute my success entirely to my one-sixteenth German blood, of which I am modestly proud.

I am also modestly proud of the fact that the bride and groom were re-united a few years ago, having dated in school/undergrad and then separated to different continents for about fifteen years, by dint of me Googling on Vi's behalf to find Robbie's email address. The Fatal Communication which brought them together again was sent from my computer. All my own work, that was. Heh.

Now I am going to bed, on account of how I was madly dancing until almost midnight last night and my feet and calves celebrated by throwing themselves sharply into cramp at random intervals throughout the night. My body basically hates me and doesn't want me to have any fun. In revenge, I shall take it off to the dentist next week. That'll teach it.

I derive considerable pleasure from contemplating the fact that my DVD collection is now reaching the proportions where, if I randomly decide of a Saturday evening that I want to watch something irrevocably silly and B-movie while consuming half a bottle of red wine, Independence Day is right there. I love that movie. It's so utterly dreadful, and the thunderous crash with which the clichés fall into place is so deeply pleasing. Besides, bonus Adam Baldwin, not to mention random arguments with the Evil Landlord ("the giant spaceship should have crashed on the base!" "no, it was slipping sideways when it blew up!" "was not!") and the fact that my copy is apparently a special edition with bunches of additional footage, causing me, until I worked out this fact, to glare accusingly at the bottle of wine every time I really didn't remember that bit. Also, the active pain of the frequently abysmal essays on Pan's Labyrinth I've been marking all afternoon is now somewhat dulled.

I'm going to bed now. Any typos in this post are entirely drunken.

It's been raining off and on all weekend, which makes me and my garden happy, and it's still gently drizzling today. This is going some way towards reconciling me towards the headache and general disinclination I am suffering as a result of allowing Mike to ply me with altogether too much wine yesterday afternoon at his farewell braai. (He's buggering off to Oxford for a few years to do a PhD. Yay, more docs!). The bastard kept taking away my sensible glass of water and replacing it with a glass of wine, and I'm consequently a little fragile this morning. On the upside I drank enough to allow me to hold actual conversations with a notable array of complete strangers, which is a Great Leap Forward. Normally I curl up and die in a corner. Social butterfly, not.

So, Doctor Who. ( On mature reflection, I still don't have a lot of time for Russell Davies. )

Last Night I Dreamed: I was travelling across a rather attractive country, or countries, with rolling farmlands and ranges of mountains and a sandy coastline; unfortunately the whole thing was being threatened by some kind of hazy thing in the air, which was rolling in from the sea and gradually overtaking the country with unspecified ill effects. In the course of travelling with a refugee train I discovered that the country had recently abandoned the practice of growing a special kind of tree outside their homes; the tree had the power to suck in the nasty haze in a sort of mini vortex. At some stage I also realised the incredible significance of a glowing mother and daughter on horseback, who we passed in a field next to the road, and whose cart full of supplies we subsequently appropriated.

Wheee! Just got back from my first lecture of the semester - man, I'd forgotten how much I enjoy it. I'm buzzed. *bounces gently off walls*. Evilly introducing oblivious third-years to the joys of some of the dodgier corners of the internet - priceless. Also, mumbling about Freud, sexual symbolism, unreality, disembodiment, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the existence of Weasleycest. This puts me on a reasonable footing to deal with the rest of Monday, which is usually tricky because (a) Mondays are always completely insane with student advice, suggesting that the little dears spend all weekend brooding over their curriculum wrongs and simply have to have it sorted out posthaste as Monday dawns, and (b) we do that regular jo&stv socialising thing on Sunday evening so I've always slept badly owing to eating and drinking too much (and, possibly, talking too much shit)¹.

And, with reference to the latter point, I reproduce for your hock and shorror an actual conversation from last night:
EVIL LANDLORD: What's in these potatoes, bacon?
ME: No, coriander and red wine.
EL: Bacon, coriander, taste the same, really.

I have been cooking for ten years for a man who cannot tell the difference between bacon and coriander. Do I need to draw your attention to the inutterable depths of this tragedy? It's enough to make me want to give up cooking. Only not really.

I have to add, just for the record, that I'm not sure if I'm amused or horrified that my previous post should attract so much comments attention, as you witterers give your serious analytic attention to the logic of evil dogs guarding zombies. That's high-class lateral pedantry, that is.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was packing up quantities of Earl Grey teabags very lovingly into a small tin emblazoned with elephants, in order to put it into a care package for someone in prison.

¹ Also, in an interesting departure from the norm, allowing jo to tie me to the sofa with banana fibre.

'Tis the merry month of May, and as usual a new month signals the fact that I've not done half of the things I should have done months ago. Bother.

Lovely day wine-routing today with jo&stv and the Evil Landlord - we drove out to Riebeck in a wonderful low-lying cloud, with trees looming unexpectedly out of the mist and wispy bits of fog drifting around. Magical, and very slightly creepy. Good wine and company, beautiful scenery, and we returned with the car laden and labouring under the weight of boxes and boxes of quality booze. This is a good part of the world. It would be better if I wasn't feeling so BLOODY SICK all the time, though.

.

In keeping with the slightly dislocated mood of holiday, we also saw The Last Mimzy last night, emerging with the consensus that it was... cute. Cute kids, cute special effects, and the terrifying free reign of Hollywood sensibilities allowed to warp into saccharine, easy shape a tale which should have been disturbing and slightly creepy, like the mist. Even before reading the story the film was based on my sense was that the film was distorting a narrative which should have been slight, almost disconnected, an exercise in more or less random cause and effect. The neat, twee shape of the film imposed too much purpose on the idea: the story meditates primarily on the fact that kids are actually rum and alien little buggers, when you get down to it, rather than the world-saving angels the film presents. Also, the film barely touched on the Alice links, which annoys me. Never let slip a chance for a good bit of Victorian surreal, say I.

Bunny Threat Level: bleah.