1. I really want to get a picture of this, but I’m afraid to brandish my cellphone in downtime for fear that someone will smash my window and take it from me. There is this guy who sleeps on the pavement right by the highway off ramp. Right there, every morning, looking like a bundle of rubbish, but it you look closely you’ll see human form under the blanket and cardboard.

He’s a meter away from a 3 lane off ramp. And on his other side is the concrete wall/pillar of the actual highway above. How does he get any sleep? Isn’t there anywhere softer on the body and quieter on the ear he could choose?

2. The block on which I park has security guards with dogs on the corners, to make sure folks make it from their parking garage to their office block without getting mugged. I feel for those dogs, because really, what kind of life is that for an animal. I wonder if it crushes their playful spirit. So I took some comfort seeing on doggie playing tug-o-war with his master over a plastic bottle yesterday morning. I’m glad that service dogs can still play a little.

Every time I think that I couldn’t fit anything more into my life, I find that I can. But at what cost?

Part and parcel with being deployed to down town Joburg comes traffic. Lots of it. My new location adds roughly an hour to my travel time daily. Okay so half of that is stolen from sleep time, but the other half is taken from my son. And probably more than just that because I no longer am as able to run errands in my lunch break. I am also often annoyed and exhausted once I finally do make it to him.

I say that I wouldn’t give up my job even if I could afford to, but truth is that you can’t really evaluate that properly until you are in that situation. If I gave up my horses and the expenses that came with them I could probably give up my job, but then who would I be?

I’d be a clean slate waiting for a fresh start, but I would also be wiped clean of major contributions to who I am.

Hmmm, something to think about on this Sunday evening.

I started a 6 month contract this morning in bank city downtown. I have spent the past week sending evil vibes to the boss who has posted me here, because I’m adverse to change and I don’t go downtown without a busload of other people.

As I was getting into my car I realised I hadn’t charged my Blackberry so would be GPS-less too, argh! But I made it with only one attempt to turn the wrong way down a one way street. Which resulted in a trip around the block.

And you know what, its not so bad. I still have to actually leave the parkade, traverse a block and start the job, but hey I survived the drive.

From the parkade, several levels up, I can see people hanging their washing on apartment block rooftops. Different lifestyle this …

Went out for a friends hen night on saturday – 10 more sleeps Kylie! – and stayed out way too late. Got home right as Aidan was demanding his 4AM bottie. I didn’t drink much so I wasn’t battling any hangovers, but it seems my immune system is a tad fragile at the mo. I didn’t get the opportunity to catch up any sleep on Sunday, and the resultant breach in the immune defenses has left me with a fiery throat, post nasal drip and ringing ears – with the accompanying light headedness. Not fun. Rather annoying in fact.

But now, one day later it seems like Aidan is coming down with the same thing. Not enough of a gap there for me to have given it to him, I suspect we both picked it up from the same place. Thing is, I can’t recall us being around any sick people 3-5 days ago. We did visit my SIL and Aidans cousins on sunday but they were all in good health…

It’s so frustrating. It seems to me like my boy gets sick from every sick person he encounters. When is his immune system gonna strengthen up? He’s a well fed boy, I have him on a multi-vit designed especially for respiratory tract support and it’s still summer! What more can I do without barricading us in the house 24-7-365?

Argh. Imagine what we’d be like if he were still in daycare?

Kay, I’ll stop whining now and get my sorry arse to bed. Maybe we’ll all wake up healthy in the morning.

 

All bounced out

So we sleep under a Blessed sky tonight, and hope our luck holds for another 354 days.

Raise your glasses to 2010.

It was a disclaimer dinner. The term in our household for a meal that required some ingenuity to pull together from limited available ingredients. If you call “disclaimer meal” it means that any criticism of the chef doesn’t count. In fact it’s a mute point. The chef wasn’t working with the ingredients of their choice.

This was my disclaimer meal and it wasn’t just bad, it was bland, so I added some Tobasco (Hot sauce). The mild to mine, the stronger one to Hunnys. We ate. Then I rubbed my eye. With Tobasco on my finger. Dear mother it hurt.

Lots of flushing with saline later, I went to bed.

The next morning, just before I dashed out of the house for work, I took a quick look in the mirror and spotted one normal and one rather red eyeball staring back at me. So I reached into the cabinet for the eye drops. Not the soothing ones, the ones that are like bleach for your eyeballs. The ones that give you a nice healthy looking white eyeball in exchange for a few moments of discomfort. A critical item in the bathroom cabinet of a working mom of a one year old.

I started with the Tobasco eyeball. One teeny drop. And Oh my dear sweet feet it hurt. Tobasco eyeball screws shut like a like a child proof medicine bottle. The other eyeball slams shut in sympathy. I stumble blindly towards the toilet in search of some toilet paper to stop my freshly applied eye liner and mascara – violet, to bring out the green in my eyes – from streaming down my face. I am thinking: ‘What the …? Some messed up reaction between the Tobasco and the eye bleach maybe?’

Slowly the non-Tobasco eyeball gathers the courage to check out its surroundings, make sure the same onslaught isn’t headed its way. Looking down it spies the discarded eye drop bottle on the floor. The red eye drop bottle. But the eye drop bottle isn’t red. The Innoxa Young Solution (I like to kid myself) Wipe Out Spot Drops bottle is red.

Yup, the Innoxa Young Solution (Still kidding myself) Wipe Out Spot Drops with the ingredients list of Alcohol Denat., Aqua, Hamamelis Virginiana, Salicylic Acid, Panthenol, Hydroxypropylcellulose, Phenoxyethanol, Farnesol, Glyceryl Laurate, Parfum, Peg-40 Hydrogenated Castor Oil, Allantoin and Xanthan Gum. The only spot control I own because it’s the only one I have found that works. This means that it burns like the midday desert sun on a pimple. It burns like acid (what a coincidence, it as acid!) on an eye ball.

I don’t believe my non-Tobasco eyeball. I walk one-eyed back to the bathroom cabinet. Tobasco eye is still cowering behind it’s lid. I open the cabinet. There on the bottom shelf are the eye drops.

I close the cabinet. Tobasco eye has emerged from its hiding place and stares back at me in the mirror. The white of my eye isn’t. It’s blood red. By contrast its iris is the most brilliant green.

Three years before I started a blog I started a blog. Hunny created it and told me to post some stuff on it. I didn’t grasp the concept very well at the time, but I wrote some stuff and posted it. And then I promptly forgot about it.
I have no idea where it is now. It’s out there somewhere still, I’m sure, but I don’t even recall the name, and I didn’t put my name to it, so chances are good I won’t ever find it again.

This blog can’t suffer that fate, if only because I own its domain, and that domain is my name. So unless I forget me name, it’s safe. It’s not safe from neglect though, I’ve proved that time and again.

I’d like to find that old blog of mine though. It was a great snapshot of my life at the time. In a crushing job, planning a wedding on shortish notice, and suffering greatly under the stress that came from the crappy job.

My how times change! Now I’m married, have a gorgeous boy child, and really battle to get freak-out stressed about work. Pity that, because that level of stress is a great diet plan for me. Sure I get annoyed; angry sometimes. And when faced with something new and daunting I still get some knots in my stomach. But that’s nothing like the wreck I used to be when things weren’t working and I had to go and sit in the toilets for a while lest I cry in front of my co-workers.

Two things have contributed to this. First off, I have a much better bunch of colleagues. These guys do actually work as a team, not against one another. But mostly it’s Aidan. I finally have the ‘this is not the end of the world’ perspective I have always been searching for in my work-life.
Because seriously, the world will not end if our software is down for a little while. Hell, I don’t even work on the kind of stuff that could kill a couple of people if it’s not operational (think medical software), never mind the stuff that launches nuclear weapons and kills whole nations.

Now when 2PM comes around, I go home. Sure I’ll pitch in and stay a little longer if it will actually achieve results, but now I have a boy to go and collect, and love, and be fascinated by, and be frustrated by, and laugh at, and laugh with, and teach, and learn from. And that is just so much bigger than any job I have ever done.

Dear friend H and her man P have just adopted a gorgeous boy, they brought him home yesterday. Congratulations guys, and little KB, you’re joining a great family and extended church family, and you already have totally devoted parents, welcome little guy:

A little background on H & I’s friendship, we’ve been friends for just about ever, or around age 12 anyhow. We went through some tough teens times together and remained inseperable even though for the most part we went to different high schools and universities. We even had this awkward teenage phase when we dressed in identical skimpy outfits (shod in the iconic 8 hole Docs), died our hair the same colour and trawled the malls and youth groups together. Aaah, those were the days. Thankfully there is precious little photographic evidence

I have the cutest 7 month old ever

This one’s more a testimony to the size of Hunny’s boot than it is the size of Aidan…

Happy chappie

This ones my favourite

Well, it’s been a while folks? Hasn’t it? They days are just flying buy and I just realized it’s been 5 (five!!) weeks since I last posted.

I’ve figured out part of the problem though. My best ideas come to me in morning traffic, which worked out okay previously, because I’d get to work and do a quick post. Now I’m working a 6 hour day, and leave strictly at 2pm each day, I feel kinda bad about blogging at work.

Not to mention that work has blocked my blog anyway, so even if I had a few passing thoughts to post, I can’t get there!

So here’s a few passing thoughts that I have managed to remember for long enough to post.

First, some Kudos: Outsurance, for those non SA readers (yeah, all of you, say Hi ) is a local insurance company. They do this really nice thing, where they deploy pointsmen to intersections where traffic lights aren’t working, or that are unusually congested in peak time traffic, to ease things up. Great advertising for them, and we score too. Well, I saw two of their blokes riding off to their assignment the other day, on their typical lime green scooters, and I was impressed by the gear that the company provides for them. Most motor cycle delivery guys are in an old, doesn’t fit properly, helmet and whatever else they happened to be wearing that day. Given their income bracket, that doesn’t usually mean great protective gear. But these two Outsurance guys had been provided with proper protective gear, from jackets, pants and gloves, even down to proper riding boots and knee guards. I’m impressed. Thank you Outsurance for kitting out your guys in such a responsible manner.

Next, about being a mom. I was gonna post this on mothers day, shows how well I am doing. I wasn’t very maternal before Aidan. I’m still not that much so except where it comes to my own son. But I have noticed a strong empathy with other mothers everywhere. I ache for the poor mom walking down the street with the little boy in clothes that no longer fit him, pants that should have been to the ankle now closer to his knees. I’m sure it’s not her intention, but she just can’t afford to keep buying new clothes for a boy that won’t stop growing. I cry for moms of sick – really sick – babies who have no choice but to just cope, because their child needs them. I even feel terrible pangs of emotion for moms in movies who are trying in vain to protect their children from some unseen evil.

And I notice cases of child neglect or abuse in the news so much more these days, and it turn me cold. Knowing how dependant Aidan is on me, how could someone deliberately hurt a child?

I come from a family of sympathy criers. Well, the female side anyway. My mom, sis and I are all the same, show us a sad movie, or put us in a room with someone else who’s crying, and we’ll be crying along with them. And now because of these emotional revelations I’m so much more raw. There is just so much more to be emotional about. It’s quite a rollercoaster ride.

On the flip side, I’m often fighting back happy tears for every mom I see share a special moment with their child.

I need to keep some tissues in my handbag …