Mid-Winter Tree Art

Some people went and decorated the trees on a main road on the way to my work with multi colour crepe flowers.

It looks pretty (as in, distracting enough that people can't drive straight) but the whole of northern Joburg is dying to know what it is all about.

I couldn't take a suitable picture while driving but the picture snapped while stopping at the robot just after produced a really pleasing result.

Here comes the ...weeekend.

It has been a long week. It sort of started off slow and then climaxed on Tuesday with an urgent deadline with reports to fly about like a toast from the toaster at the breakfast shop on a Sunday morning.  On Thursday I got a polite fly in the ear for failing to send off an important letter. (and attached 30 page document) and that was swiftly followed by another proposal to complete sooner than the first batch of reports.

As stressful as it is to preform and produce quality written documentation, there is a certain thrill that goes with completing a report, printing it in all it's colourful, formatted glory, binding it and wrapping it and dropping it at the front desk for DHL delivery. The fulfilling feeling of completion (on a small level).

I have learned that in the line of work I am in that a lot of the time the delivery deadlines for reports can occassionally be flexible. We argue with the client that yes, the design report is over due but here is the draft report and as you can see, the quality is rather splendid. Or we simply deliver it in teh dead of night and pretend that teh deadline meant by teh end of day and not on the day itself. Or else we offer to present the report in person and buy ourselves a few days.

However when we are competing for new work with proposals, the (future) clients are not forgiving. The proposal HAS TO be in the box before the specified time and date or else it is "thanks for playing, try harder next time."

And therefore, some of the most stressful, leaky eye inducing times I have had in this office have been from assembling proposals because irrespective of how big or small the job is or how well the rest of the team works, the time can not be negotiated and often, lengthy levels of over time must take place.

Anyhow, in between dodging the possibility of being on a plane to a far corner Mozambique on Sunday and getting ensnared into a progress meeting in Botswana instead, this proposal sits on my desk and lurks in the corner of my eye saying "Don't forget me! or else you will regret it."

Often I have no idea whether I am a good engineer (I suspect that in my moments of brilliance I may be). I see myself more of a creative lateral thinking innovator. (Give me a problem and I'll provide 5 solutions, 4 will be ridiculous and physics defying solutions and the 5th one will be unique and some way in which you will never have thought of before. - trouble is getting people to take you seriously throught the first four overripe fruit solutions before you produce the gem).

 

One thing I do know for certain (based on experience of it's importance) is how to produce a report that is a pleasure to read. A report that you can read, get distracted and not lose your place in a mire of words and graphs and tables. A report that glows with inner well-formatted radiance. MSWord is my ever willing toy boy on a good day. (and my elusive unwilling grumpy old man on a bad day)

And so back to the orignal story of my week. My work weeks are accelerating but I look forward to the thrill of another freshly produced proposal by the sweat of my brow and the ever affirming response from the man in charge "Good Job Miss Engineer".

And now for Something more Cheery

I did promise something more cheery/less gloomy, so here goes.
Last week Sunday I cast my eyeball around my little house and decided that paper recycling may be a good habit to allow for a little more space on my bookshelf.

In my teanager years it was fashionable to collect and display perfume adverts (as racy as they were). This was a matter of great competition to display the most exotic and beautiful and fabulous perfume adverts on the front of your school file. The file of course had to be clean and neat and tidy and look completely untouched. (this was true about 3% of the tiem for me)

I found that I still have my plastic folder of hundreds of pages torn out from magazines. Not only perfume adverts are contained in this collection but also articles of interest and recipes and lists left over from my days when I was a big fan of Glamour mag and Marie Claire.

In the process of reducing this massive pile of paper to a small collection of articles of actual interest (as opposed to articles showing shirtless men rolling about in the beach). such as 8 Basic moves in Stance training.

Completely unrelated note: I am experimenting with Stance Training at the moment. The key seems to be shoes with good floor grip to avoid a bruised buttocks.


I read through a list of "Fabulous ways to spend R100". One of them was:

"Send a gift to a friend and brighten her day"

...hmmm...

So I got thinking about something nice to do and came up with the idea of sending a petite bunch of flowers to my splendid friend The Accountant. She doesn't have a significant other so I figured the flowers wouldn't cause a problem and it would make her feel special (in the absence of an adoring man to shower her with the attention and goodies she deserves.)

I ran the idea past MrT over email just in case my wild Sunday evening ideas were too silly for reality. His advice was

"Wouldn't it be highly amusing to send them anonymously?"

So I logged into the flower shop website and sent of the cheapest possible article off to her office with a card saying

“To a Fancy Lady

From Kaptein Jannie Sparrow”

My reasoning that by supplying a ridiculous name that she would figure out that it was a joke and that it would be a friend who sent it that knew she thought Johnny Depp was “yummy” (her words).

Click... and 6 red roses in a plastic sleeve were sent as per my orders.


That was Monday. And I trawled her Facebook page hourly once I sent them to see any evidence of her receiving the gift.


I half expected her to call me and say “what’s the deal with this- I know it was you”.


Monday evening – nothing

In impatience I sent her a “Hey, how are you doing, Good weekend” IM but not a whisper.



Tuesday – nothing

I googled her name to see if there were perhaps two people with the same name working for her employer.



Wednesday – nothing

I decided to distract myself and forgot about the small shenanigan.

This week Monday the Englishman returned from holiday and as we were catching up I told him about the flowers prank.

His response was “What! That was you! High Five!”

He had been out with The Accountant and The Mechanic for movies on Sunday and the entire topic of conversation for the whole evening had been about trying to guess who had sent the flowers and the Englishman and the Mechanic telling her about how it must be a guy and how he will ask for a date and how she must dress sharp for the rest of the week to not scare her secret admirer away and how more flowers were sure to follow.

Now I had been dying the whole past week to tell her but didn’t want to give up the prank. The Englishman proposed that we convince all the rest of her friends to send her flowers weekly in turns to prolong the game. However his one singular piece of advice was “Do not tell her, she will be so disappointed.”

In a panic I contacted The Mechanic, and got just about the same advice. “She will be devastated. We must never speak of this again”

Guilt! guilt! guilt! Guilt! Guilt!

Now not telling the truth doesn’t make sense at all. How much more stupid would it be if she finds out in months time that I sent her flowers and no one told her.

So in a panic I stopped off to visit her on the way home on Monday. I happened to catch her as she was leaving to visit her mum but convinced her to come inside for a cup of tea. I told my long story and the good intentions behind it and made a huge apology.


And her response?

She thinks I am a royal piece of over-ripe fruit for thinking she would ever be disappointed.

However I can understand why the lengthy speculation, the florist delivered a huge bunch of flowers consisting of at least 3 times the original prescribed number of roses..

So the moral of the story is “Do something nice for your friends” but don’t be too obscure about it.

Happy?

Escapism

I am sorry to say that I made a gloomy post last time and I lifted my mood out of it and now these several days later, my mood has dipped again. (I'll think of something happy to post just now)



MrT and I have been brewing up a fight for a while. We had a serious discussion with my parents over wedding financing last Friday and it left both of us feeling very blue. Then after a well behaved day with The Best Friend Engineer - I has a complete screaming angry fit-throwing two-year old toddler to him the whole of last weekend and after some harsh words we made peace over hot chocolate and laptop-tv. (in my defence I was tripping on hormones and suffering a concrete-snollies cold)

Then Monday arrived with some not entirely unexpected but somewhat inconvenient news that I need to prepare to get back on the market for a home in the near future. And this has thrown teh wedding plans into an entirely new light.


So last night MrT and I had a very long and escalalingly tart discussion about how we need money for the wedding, we need money to buy a house, we need money to travel overseas, we need money to replace my car and so on and on and on the money-drains rack up.

Predictably, discussing finacial woes never result in smiles. Voices were raised and eyes did leak and wild insinuations were made.

It is ridiculous that the whole entire world acts in a certain way and just because I want to do things differently, I am made to feel like an alien from outer space. Is it IMPOSSIBLE to get married without having to prempt the thrill by co-habiting?

What is the point in spending all the money on a wedding and celebrating the transition from single-hood to partnership and wearing the beautiful wickedly overpriced dress and saying those vows when the actual transition took place months before in secret under the disapporoving eyes of my elders?

Honestly, it would be very convenient and very financially pleasing to move in with MrT.

But, it seems to me that purity is a lost art in these days. However, even if I acknowledge that I am not a 1800's romance novel heroine and the innocence of my mind long since lost to tv and radio and movies and guys who are frieds who are willing to explain the latest lingo, I know that I worked very hard to be who I am and who my friends know me to be. 

Is it so wrong to preserve something to discover after the nuptials? To leave wife-ery for the stage of my life when I will actually be a wife.

And on top of that, I fought so long and hard for independance and the adventure of living alone, it seems unfair to give it up before the party.

Gloomy Day Tune

This cold overcast weather makes me melancholy...

 

Winter in Joburg can be a little like a mood swinging teenager. Sunny and crisp on one day like the cold doesn't matter and overcast and withdrawn the next like the cold is overwhelming.

 

I heard this song on the radio the other day. It is beautifully played. This song goes out to the remorseful-memory-dregging Frankie, and to any other twenty-something who has lived long enough to have a distinction within their happy and sad memories between these present days and those past days. 

 

Anyway, what goes better with feeling old and pathetic in cold cloudy weather than some mournful piano playing?

 

 

"Someone Like You" (abridged) by Adele

I heard
That you're settled down
That you
Found a girl
And you're
Married now

I heard
That your dreams came true.
Guess she gave you things
I didn't give to you

...

 

Never mind
I'll find someone like you
I wish nothing but the best for you too
"Don't forget me," I begged
"I'll remember," you said
"Sometimes it lasts in love
But sometimes it hurts instead."
Sometimes it lasts in love
But sometimes it hurts instead,
Yeah.

You know how the time flies
Only yesterday
It was the time of our lives
We were born and raised
In a summer haze
Bound by the surprise
Of our glory days

...

Never mind
I'll find someone like you
I wish nothing but the best for you too
"Don't forget me," I begged
"I'll remember," you said
"Sometimes it lasts in love
But sometimes it hurts instead."

Nothing compares
No worries or cares
Regrets and mistakes
They are memories made.
Who would have known
How bittersweet this would taste?

Never mind
I'll find someone like you
I wish nothing but the best for you too
"Don't forget me," I begged
"I'll remember," you said
"Sometimes it lasts in love
But sometimes it hurts instead"

Sometimes it lasts in love
But sometimes it hurts instead

Wedding Buzz Slowdown

So after a furious few weeks of wedding enthusiasm and planning and choosing and selecting all the fantastic nitty gritty details, MrT and I have done very very little in the way of wedding planning of late. (Okay correction: we came up with a few Genius Ideas about how to make the wedding more US-ish and less generic-wedding-ish ... but it's a secret - the wedding gremlins might steal the ideas)

We started off so terribly excited and we went trotting through venues and wedding diaries and catalogues and price schedules. We made selections on venue and menu and photographer and cake and flowers and theme and colours. But the concept of the cost of it all becomes really overwhelming stressful. I put on my big girl pants and accepted that my parents aren't being withholding and mean but that they really just don't want to spend frivolous money unnecessarily. (Not that we asked for frivolous money... yet)

Then I delved into wedding dress shopping on a very cursory level. I watched one of my betrothed best friends try on some dresses for herself. I accessed every wedding dress website advertised in my SA local bride’s catalogue. And the result was far less than inspiring; it was more of a boggy disappointment. I am heartbroken that the nice dresses are three times the price of what I want to spend and the ones that are in my price range, are honestly a little bit ugly and out of fashion by half a decade. (Does anyone else want to wear a dress that looks like it was made out of lace table cloths, a ton of pearlish beads and a glue gun?)

So I found a happy place in my head to deal with Wedding Dress Stuff (until I have time to find a suitable solution) I browse all the Really designer wedding dresses (the kind that I would never consider even asking for the price for) and I fantasise about the idea of if I lived in a world where a dress costing the same price as a small car would be nothing. It's like shopping for real estate by looking at buying a castle in Scotland or Bavaria. We don't really want to own a historical land mark but it's nice to think about. I don't really need a Vera Wang wedding dress but gosh, that woman makes a fine white dress.

We will regain momentum soon enough but for now I need a solid break from reality and a little happy time in the 8 year old princess dream land.

Send on the Cinderella pictures! (Castle pictures accepted too)

Secrets!

I have a secret! It's Killing Me! I must tell!

 

I was listening on the radio this morning and they were interviewing a specific personality about his new show. My ears perked up because MrT goes on about him a bit. So I jumped on the internet and nabbed two tickets for tomorrow night.

 

I really hope MrT will be super surprised and pleased.... and of course that we have a splendid good evening tomorrow of course.

 

S-O E-X-C-I-T-E-D. Fun Times! Splendidness!

 

(Now to tell MrT he can't read my blog for a day or two)

 

On another note, PostSecret is addictive and horrifying and funny and scary all at the same time.