Update on Frank

The year seems to be rolling away into the second quarter while I turned my back and was busy for a little while. I have been keeping busy at work and keeping busy not being at work. I got to see two good rare friends recently. One - a chap from Cape Town who I have known longer than most of my current buddies (with due exception to The Gang - that is why they are my Gang) Two - a chap from Ze Rhineland who I only got to know in the past two years since I visited Germany.

I draw some interesting parallels between these two gents because both seem to work far harder than me and seem to be achieving more with their careers than me and we're all around about the same age. Both seem to be working 16 hour days on a regular basis and make me feel all ashamed of my humble 40 hour weeks. Both are friends who I have spent very little actual time with in their presence in comparison to the duration of our relationship and yet both I have a lengthy and ongoing email correspondence with.

But despite the work-shame it was a great pleasure to see and spend time with people who are friends because they are your friends. (Not work not school not varsity - but just friendly friends)

Work-shame comments aside, overall work is going well. I tend to set my goals at being as competant as the people who were graduates the year before me. It's difficult to notice one's growth in a career until someone with less experience comes and asks you questions. 20 minutes later you realise that when we are grouped under the bracket of one to five years experience, one year is a LONG TIME.

And yet, I have the honour of working with people who experience in the power network field seems to be only exceeded by my own 92 year old grandfather who was chief planning engineer for the town council before he retired. and still, I work with these people, they make some really dumb mistakes. Silly stuff that my parents taught me before I finished high school.

Long important meetings that get rounded and closed off 35% of the way into the agenda issues followed by 30 minutes of awkward standing around.

Four hours on site in 42 degree weather without a hat.

15 minute progress meetings that get hijacked and meld into 4 hour meetings discussing nothing about progress.

Repeating what everyone else is saying over and over again in a loud informative voice even though everyone understood the junior who said the bright idea first.


I read an interesting quote the other day that rings terribly true in this situation saying :

"Middle age is when you have all the answers and no one wants to ask the questions"

(this could also apply to my father, but I didn't say that aloud - I am sure he is a pleasure to work for. My dad is super smart and stuff)

I have been living on my own in my little castle for almost a year now. Technically I moved in about a year ago. In hind sight it was both good and bad. If I could go back in time I may convince myself not to move out. I miss my parents and my brother so much. More than I could have imagined. And I still see them twice a week! And I miss having the cooking and cleaning and shopping done for me. But in exchange I have been able to explore creativity in cooking and house decorating and time scheduling. I am becoming a wine taster and an expert in the smell of ripe milk.

In the end I am achieving what I set out to do which was to become a functional adult and to learn some responsibility and to look after myself. I am learning there is always some sacrifice to achieve what we want in life.


And so now I have waxed on for a good lump of text. I haven’t mentioned Cirque Du Soliel or finding and engagement ring in the parking lot or the thrills of Aunt-ness or my holiday to the beach coming up or deciding to have a sense of humour about receiving a Save-The-Date to Mr-X’s wedding or trying to convince myself to survive not having a new car or picking out my next holiday or being showered with flowers by Mr Thursday and starting up the Office Rumour Mill.

But be sure of this boys and girls, my life isn’t boring anymore. (at least from my perspective – and I am the one having to live it)

Todays LOL

In the midst of all the things making demands on my time and the other head scratching odd things that happen from day to day, this photo comic made me highly amused.

Credit goes to ASofterWorld.

Giving up the Tube

I found this pretty cool website the other day which the author has collected all the images and quotes on the internet and made one big Tumblr called The Pursuit of Happyness. It is a pretty funky tumblr at that.

 

Anyway I found this picture on the site and I was reading it at the time where the most common thought tumbling out of my mouth all the time was about how little time I had to do all the things I really enjoy doing like Reading and Beading and Painting and Photography and Baking. It struck me as such a simple idea that if I have no time for great hobbies, why don't I turn off the TV?

 

So I promptly pulled the plug from the wall and for a week I had no TV.

 

I confess I still sat in front of the TV at dinner time but that's a habit to break another day. I have read more in that past week than the whole year so far up to that point. It was such a liberating experience; I decided to give up TV for Lent.

 

 

... Not that I make a habit of being big on Lent

 

... I have managed so far with a 75% success... but only because I was between story books.

 

So here goes to acknowledging that: this is My Life and Life is short and if I don't like how my Life is going I can change.

 

Sunset on the way to Francistown

Some days there are perks to my work (other days {cue: palm facing upwards, shrug} eeh... Its okay.

I just spent a full day of traveling on site in Botswana and after driving a good 600 km we were pretty much feeling the whole tired vibe. So on the way dodging enthusiastic land rovers and tailing construction trucks, I snapped this picture of the wicked awesome sunset. It was impressive enough that it made me feel good for a little while. For the record, I was not driving at the time....

Sunsets woooo!

Pipe dream wings

Credit to MrT for the caption

Scenes on the way home

Beginning of the year traffic is always a nightmare and going home on fridays especially are times when I think about biting chunks out of my steering wheel in frustration.

Conversely, the number one way to make sure the traffic moves is to find something else to do while your clutch wears out.

I acquired a fabulous new phone a few weeks ago. (more on that in an other blog post.) So after moving 10m in 5 minutes - less than a kilometre my house... I decided to play with my mobile phone camera. (thrilling story this...)

As I set up the shot of the dark thunder clouds behind the pine trees, the robot changed and I had to move up five cars lest I be hooted at. So here's some pictures of some other foliage amd storm clouds instead :)

I can see you....

I have discovered that my blog has this nifty little feature...  It gives me statistics as to who has been reading my blog and where the got to my blog from and what country they are from. (I will not confess how l;ong this has been a source of both curiousity, morbid fear and ego inflation for me)

This is mostly a terribly amusing tool, especially the obscure search terms people have used that happened cause them to arrive at my blog.

For example if you are searching for barely clothed women who are fully deprived of bodily covering but to spice things up you type in auntys instead of girls or woman you will happen upon a post I made titled "Auntys heart full of Love" about the birth of my nephew.

In a less hilarious example, if you are searching for hotels in Botswana and you look up the Kidron suites hotel you will get my blog as the only three posts on the Internet referencing it. (this is a cause of great concern because my work colleagues could legitimately happen to get to my blog by mistake)

I was smart enough to remove all references to the acronym for the company I work for in cause I have written anything here that could be deemed as a dismissible offence. (does dozing off at work count 18 months after it happened?)

What is also interesting is who exactly is reading my blog - in the past month the stats for page views have been as follows:

1. South Africa 91
2. United Kingdom 33
3. United States 32
4. United Arab Emirates 18
5. Malaysia 6
6. Russia 2
7. China 1
8. Czech Republic 1
9. France 1
10. South Korea 1

Now some of these are confused people looking for pron (misspelling intentional) and several are people I have given the address to and many people are referred to my blog from Facebook. It is kind of very interesting matching countries to referring websites. And some readers are from links from friends blogs. (It seems however that this month my high readership in Europe has lapsed a little.)

 

Finally the most bizarre thing is that there is one post that gets read more often than any other post, more often than the next 6 most often read posts. This post gets read at least 10 times a month. My only hypothesis is that this post pops up most commonly when google references my blog... or else I may need to do some selective Internet searching to find out if I have been a victim of intellectual property burglary. And that post is (one of my finer items I believe) reposted here to celebrate itself as the seeming proclaimed winner of my blog! (I should be able to do better over a year later....) I will start working on a revised list ASAP.

 

With no further ado:

 

Monday 21 December 2009

Things that slightly unnerve me...

Some things just make my imagination of worst possible scenarios run wild.


- being overtaken on the way home by a sirens-blaring police car and seeing it turn into your road. or a fire engine, or an ambulance


- seeing three senior management guys rush past you into the boardroom for a sudden meeting and cue: slam door as you walk past.

- when the guy you secretly had a crush on makes a special effort to tell you specifically about his new girlfriend.

- watching videos late at night and listening through your headphones and not being sure if the voices you hear are the soundtrack or from your garden


- when the cat jumps on your bed in the middle of the night and walks around cautiously (burglar!)


- arriving home on the late side and still getting home before your parents.


- being stared at. (no further explanation required - stop that okay? I Said Stop That!)

- funny coloured spots in your protein (red in egg, white in beef, green in chicken, black in sausage)

- seeing a stranger walk away as you approach your desk

- Similarly, seeing your parent walking out of your bedroom


- when you mislay your "very angry diary"

- reading your bank statement before your remember the what the big-spend of the month was


- dozing off when you shouldn't and realising that not 20 seconds have passed but 15 minutes.

- when you look for your car in your usual parking bay - when you have parked elsewhere

- seeing a police car in traffic and not being able to remember if you were speeding when you drove past him

- cars stopped on the side of the road when travelling late at night (road block!)


- being followed along your route home by cars with tinted windows

- speeding and realising the person following is keeping pace

- seeing mould on your bread/cheese halfway through eating the sandwich

- when you don't hear from someone in weeks and you wonder if they are dead... (it is concerning when you wonder if they are dead and the idea is more curious than sad)