I am not blonde. I’m sort of a reddish brown with some orange streaks at the moment, but underneath all that I’m still not blonde. But I was last night.

Seems like any change in weather round here prompts Eskom (electricity provider) to start load-shedding. A few days of rain and off they go again. Our power at home went off at around 6PM yesterday. I was still at work when Hunny sms’d me to let me know, and hint that I should pick up some take-aways. Not great for the healthy eating story, especially seeing as we’d had Nandos (minus the chips / wedgies, adding some veggies) the night before, and that’s the only healthy fast food I could think of. Then I had a brainwave: Woolies!

I stopped at Woolworths and got two ready cooked meals and some prepared veggies. I was a few blocks from home, smiling happily to myself for having pulled off another ready-made and still healthy meal when I noticed the traffic lights were out. “Ah yes” I think to myself “the power is out, Hunny told me, that’s why I stopped for take-aways”. But I didn’t get take-aways did I? I got Woolies prepared meals. Meals that require microwaving to finish them off and heat them up. Microwaves that work off electricity, electricity that we don’t have right now!

Suddenly I wasn’t feeling to bright anymore. Seems I dissociated the meals we needed from the reason we needed them, and cold Prawn Masala with raw spinach & butternut didn’t sound to appetizing.

Lucky for me, while pulling into my garage and trying to think of some way to tell Hunny about this that didn’t make me out to be a total idiot, the power came back on. A few microwave minutes later, dinner was served

Those two words just about sum up my blogging activity lately. I’m not even gonna bother with excuses. I’m putting the bike trip tale on hold until I can finish all the reaming posts in that series and will now blog the random stuff that’s been happing recently.

My horse & I finally made some tangible progress in our show-jumping career. Three weekends ago we tried our first C-grade (previously jumping D-grade) competition. Nothing spectacular to report from that, we took down a few poles. That said, ‘nothing spectacular’ is a pretty good way for us to make the transition up a grade, in the past upgrades have meant an almost complete loss of confidence and several shows hoping back and forth between the new grade and the previous one.

Much more exciting to report: this past weekend when we tried 2 more C grade competitions, we really got it right. My boy finally showed off some of the talent my instructor and I have been witness to in our training sessions over the last couple of months. Yay! My faith in us is restored!

In other news, last night saw the reunion of the three wise men. Vin, Jay and Claus once again brought down the house. Well not quite. The house is still standing, but they sure did try hard. Jay & Vin are loooong time buddies of my Hunny (aka Claus – it’s a long story), and they haven’t all three been in the same place at the same time for a good while. Jay now lives on a tiny island off the coast of Madagascar (even if I could spell it’s name correctly you wouldn’t know it) and is back in SA for a brief visit and Hunny thought it’d be good to get them & their other halves & progeny round for dinner. And drinks. And general horsing around, wrestling on the kitchen floor and attempting to footprint the ceiling of our study with foot still in shoe.

There are some advantages to having three rampaging hooligans in your home though. You know those bottles of weird spirits that sit in your liquor cabinet for years because they taste so awful that no-one in their right mind would drink them, but you can’t just toss them out because they were probably gifts? There are 2 less of those bottles in my cupboard. The bottle of Madagascan Rum, the bottle of cinnamon brandy liqueur called Hot Sex, both gone. Sizeable dents also made in the grappa and tequila bottles, neither of which I’m too sad about, though I could have made Margaritas with the Jose Quervo.

Boys will be boys, but eventually the girls decided that enough fun had been had and took their other halves home to begin nursing their hangovers. Funny that when you put three guys in their early thirties together you end up with an average age of 18