and, Mr. CEO, I booked my c-section for my boy for the 1st of October. Well, Doc is 95% sure it is a boy after my last scan (Tuesday). Who would have thought? Not me. I even warned my hubby that I wouldn’t go past 3 children in trying for a boy, so convinced was I that I’d be continuing the strong female lines in my family. For the record Mr. CEO, I am surprised. Nearly 15 weeks now, and I fit into less than half of my old wardrobe, but it’s all good.

I bought a thermometer yesterday, from my local veterinary supplies shop - they assured me it was manufactured for human use. We didn’t have one, and I thought I might like one to check if I really was dying from this ultra-persistent cold that’s been stalking me for the last while. I bought this one:

Nowhere on the box does it say “Made in China / Hong Kong / Japan”, but one classic piece of poor translation gives it away. Most of the package insert is translated in an understandable if still evident manner, with the exception of this classic point under the ‘notices’ heading:

Help user to be that square qualified technical staff repair, by but repair the parts that manufacturer appoint, can demand to offer to our company.

I think that means that only square people can repair this product, and they can demand to offer their services to the company if they wish to do so Take your own guess and put it in the comments section.

Oh, and it turns out I’m not dying. Or if I am, I’m doing so with a normal body temperature.

And now, because I don’t have much to say, I’ll give you some (poor quality taken with my phone) pictures.

My favorite girl dog, Cilla catching a nap while I got ready for work this morning. She manages to look so snuggly, despite being on a hard floor with one leg twisted out behind her at an awkward angle – she always lies like that.

George checking out the cat who ventured outside to check out the garden from the safety of the patio. She’s a really timid creature, but isn’t at all bothered by George who would really like to eat her and has been caught standing with his open mouth above her neck, drooling on her. She was totally oblivious, and he didn’t do anything, just held that pose. It’s a strange relationship they have.

The cat, her name is PussyCat because well, we couldn’t seem to come up with anything else, getting ready to pounce on the shadow created by me taking her picture of her in one of her favorite spots – behind the couch. Attacking shadows and light reflections (from your watch for example) are about as brave as she gets. Oh, and she sometimes attacks her own feet around a table leg.

Life kinda hit normal again this week (well, so far) so I’m putting my blogging socks back on…

Lets see, since my last brief but momentous post (for me anyway) lots has happened. I am now 12 weeks pregnant. We had another scan last Friday and all looks great. It was really awesome to see the little one sleeping peacefully (takes after Mom). Doc then nudged around a bit to get Junior to move, where upon he/she did a big stretch, yawn, and then pretty much went back to sleep. I love this kid

The Doc also made an early prediction that this may be a boy. Of course this is way too soon to say for certain, but if she were to put money on it, she’d say boy. She also said she wouldn’t put money on it.

We decided we’d tell this news to the family, a decision I’m regretting slightly. When we uttered the words “looks like it might be a boy”, seems all the family heard was “boy!”. My mom-in-law was so excited (I’d previously said that I thought it would be a girl – just my own feeling) that she burst into tears. She came round two days later with 3 little boy outfits! So while I wasn’t hoping either way before, now I’m offering up some prayers that it is a boy after all, just to spare the (initial) disappointment.

Roughly the third question everyone asks me when they hear I’m pregnant is “So what about your horse / Are you going to stop horse-riding?”. It’s been getting on my nerves a bit. I don’t want to endanger my unborn child, but seriously folks! I’ve been riding a minimum of 5 times a week since I was around 6 years old! I haven’t driven a car that often, but no-one asks me if I’m going to stop driving. I think I can do this sensibly. I haven’t been riding much (time constraints and other issues) since I found out I was pregnant, and it’s been driving me insane. At first it wasn’t too bad. I was so tired I wouldn’t want to go and ride, but now my energy is returning I feel this profound loss off accomplishment. It’ll be 10 PM and time to go to bed but I don’t want to go! I don’t feel like I have done anything all day – despite working 10 or 12 hour days recently.

So yes, I will continue riding – gently and with consideration – a couple of times a week until it feels unsafe. If I start to loose balance or get anxious about it, I’ll stop. If my horse is having a bad/mad day, I’ll get off. I won’t do any jumping or competitions. I will be sensible about it. I can do that.

Anyway, enough about that.

I have noticed from my Google Analytics stats that I get fairly regular hits from India, Dillip, is that you? If it is, leave a comment and say Hi …

Also, quite a few folks have found my blog searching for Smiths Motorcycles. I’d expect it’s this post that brings them here. While I didn’t explicitly say that Smiths was where I had such shocking service with my bike, I did tag them on the post, and I suppose you can draw the link yourselves. Well, the guy can do a good job, but it may just take you half a year to get your bike back …

Well, that’s all for now folks. Will try to post a little more regularly again.

I have the best Hunny in the whole wide world!

We visited family who own a Wii on the weekend, (Hunny got his ass whipped by his 5 year old nephew and it was just the coolest thing ever. I played one game of tennis and I was hooked. It’s the most cheerful interface I’ve ever seen. You create you little Mii character, and he dances around and gets all happy when you win: too cute.

Anyways, yesterday afternoon Hunny went out and bought me one! I love this guy! Played for about 4 hours last night, and by an amazing stroke of luck I had leave booked for today anyways (get some of the things done that are queuing up on my to do list) so guess what I’ve been doing all morning? Love it love it love it! Not sure so much of that list is going to get done today, but I really do have to go and pick up my bank card: my old one expired at the end of January…

Oh, and on a side note, I got my Google Analytics stats this morning, I have 8 click-throughs from blogspace.mweb.co.za, but I don’t know whos blog it’s from. If you are one of the folks who has been referred from mweb blogs please leave a comment and let me know how you found me? Just curious is all, all traffic is good traffic

One more thing, I didn’t give link credit to my friend who took the bike-jacket photo’s on Friday, that was Black Macros. For some deep thinking and a side of humor go pay him a visit.

Gotta go do some wii-boxing now, cheers!
 

*Alex enters to drum rolls, thunderous applause and whistles*

I did it! I rode my bike to work! Ha ha, and you thought I was gonna say I’d completed my 30-in-30

Well, actually I’ve done both today, but lets start with the bike:

I have ridden my bike to work only once before, more than a year ago when I was young and naive. I hate hate hate town traffic. Cars all around me, traffic light and stop streets, it freaks me out. Almost as much as my fear of stalling my bike across an intersection. In fact, I think I’m more afraid of looking like an idiot on a bike than I am of someone actually driving onto me. Today vanity and pride won over those fears. I think I mentioned my new biking jacket? The one Hunny got me for Christmas that arrived end Jan. I just had to show it to the folks at work, but there was no ways I was going to drive it to work in my car, especially after all the flack I got last year for being the biker chick without a bike. So this morning I put on my new jacket and my big girl panties, hoped on my bike and rode to work (Safely accompanied by mother hen aka Hunny)

Whoohoo! This is big progress from me. A friend at work took these pics…

From the front: my butch pose

and from the back:

   
If you’ve been counting (I have!) today I officially complete my 30-in-30! There are 31 tags, but that’s because I posted twice in on day (can you imagine that?!) I promise not to disappear totally from the blogsphere just because I’m done with the challenge, but I am taking this weekend off.

Right back at the beginning of the challenge you might remember me saying that it’s hard for me to form habits. Well, I proved that to myself with this. At around 28 days I very nearly forgot to post. It slipped my mind for most of the day. If 27 days isn’t long enough to create a habit, then what is? Good thing I like my electric toothbrush so much or who knows what’d happen.

On a related note, I have found my next challenge: http://www.nanowrimo.org/

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Yeah, it’s more than 8 months away, but who’s going to do this with me? Common guys, it’ll be great! Go sign up! I always wanted to write a novel, this may actually get me started. I mean, if I can blog for 30 days straight, I’m halfway there, right?

Triumph in the face of adversity

Two summers ago I planted some of these little seedlings in some pots near my front door. They only last a season but they seed enough to grow fresh ones the following year. I haven’t planted any more since that first year and I cleaned out the pots over that winter, but two years later these little things still sprout up between the cracks of the paving.

What a way to start my week

Set the scene: My car is parked in the garage, Hunnys car sleeps in our visitors parking bay because the bikes take up the other spot in the garage. Our garage has a switch which disables the remotes from working on the electric doors. Not what you want in the daytime because you wouldn’t be able to open the doors from the outside, but it locks the garage up nice and tight at night. We also have a door leading into the kitchen from the garage.

Hunny left for work before me yesterday morning, as most mornings, so when I realized that I couldn’t find my keys he was already at his desk and starting his day. I turned the house upside down searching for my keys, everywhere that I could look which was the whole house except for the garage. My kitchen-garage door key is on the missing set of keys, and because Hunnys car doesn’t sleep in the garage, he doesn’t go in there in the mornings, so that door was still locked. The only place the keys could be was inside the garage, and I couldn’t get in there for that exact reason!

I sheepishly emailed my manager and asked if I could work from home, as I suspected I had locked my keys in the garage so it was holding my car hostage. Doh!

My guess was right though. When Hunny got home in the afternoon and I got into the garage with his keys, this is where I found them.

(Yeah, hanging onto the keyhole, out the way of Hunny locking up the house with his keys last night! Sneaky buggers)

By the way, I was going to post this yesterday, but I couldn’t because I’d left my phone-to-pc cable at work over the weekend – the one I need to get the pics off  – and of course I didn’t go in to work yesterday!

He does something to completely redeem himself. If you haven’t read my last two posts about my horse, Dartmoor, you should. It gives some perspective to this post.

I’m been pulling my hair about my horse for the last week. Over the course of 5 days he went from his usual state of partially freaked out into total freak-out overdrive mode. He was almost unworkable, I had to spend 70% of our sessions just trying to get him to calm down enough so we could continue with what we were actually supposed to be doing. I was close to the end of my tether, contemplating giving him 6 months off just so I could have a break from him.

Then today I took him to a three-phase event. It’s not his forte: he’s usually two tense for the dressage phase and the cross country really rattles his brain cell. He’s a definite ‘look-before-you-leap type, and cross country requires a brave horse that’s willing to do things like plunge into water without knowing how deep it might be or jump off a bank without being able to see the landing until the last stride.

Once a year I take him to one of these events because all the galloping across the countryside does make him a little braver when he gets to his usual competition style: show jumping. I also have a theory that it makes him grateful for the bigger but less scary looking jumps in the show-jumping ring.

Well today he totally outdid himself. We arrived late and unprepared: I’d left my boots at home. Hunny raced back home to fetch them for me while I completed a very hurried warm up. Hunny arrived back just in time for me to put my boots on and trot into the dressage arena. He stayed calm *very unusual for him* and did his best dressage test ever. The judge wrote on out comment sheet “What an obedient and willing horse” – that’s a first!

We went out into the country a penalty score of 43.6, lying in second place behind someone with a penalty score of 38, and with two score of 44 right behind me. We had a great cross country round, he started out good and just got better. He trotted straight into the two water complexes on the course, stayed focused and obedient into the skinny (narrow) jumps and really opened out his stride across the long distances between jumps. When I pulled up at the finish I know I was clear for jumping, but I didn’t know if I’d incurred any time penalties.

The third phase is show jumping – his forte – so I was pretty convinced he’d do okay at that, especially considering it was about half the height he normally jumps in dedicated show-jumping competitions. I learnt just before the show-jumping started that after the cross country points had been tallied we were in first place. We were inside the ideal time, so we got no time penalties, and the person who was beating me had a couple of stops in the country, incurring extra penalties.

After finding this out I was so nervous I could hardly bring myself to warm up! No worries, Dartmoor did his job and gave a lovely clear round. It was only afterwards that I learnt that the guy I had beaten into second was only 0.4 penalties behind me! But we won! Amazing! My timid little show-jumper won a three-phase event and totally redeemed himself.

I suppose the highs are as high as the lows are low. That’s my boy!

*okay, I’ll stop blogging about my horse now*

Confidence is a funny thing. If you don’t have it naturally it’s so difficult to gain. If you do have it naturally then it sticks like glue. Then there is the confidence that comes from naivety, which is what I think I had with my biking. You’re confident because you don’t know any better, then something bursts your bubble and you need to learn confidence all over again, one baby step at a time.

My head knew that there were dangers involved, but they didn’t translate through my body. I wanted to get on a bike, so I did it. Then I came off said bike, and now my body knows what it has to be afraid off. Not having a bike to ride for 6 months didn’t help either. Getting back on after 6 months was like learning all over again. The difference is that this time, I was nervous.

Speed doesn’t bother me much. Each ride we go on I start out slowly, but as my confidence grows I get more comfortable with the throttle. It’s the cornering that quickens my heart rate and tightens the muscles in my arms & shoulders. My eyes see the barriers I might crash into before they see the route I’m trying to take, and any good biking instructor will tell you that your bike goes where your eyes are looking… My brain has to remind my arms that I need to relax. I can almost feel those impulses traveling from my brain to my arms, telling them they need to relax so I can lean into my turn. It’s amazing how the human body works.

My confidence is slowly returning though. I could feel it creeping back into my veins with each kilometer traveled, each turn executed, each successful negotiation of traffic I did this morning. It was a glorious feeling: each time I didn’t panic when the road ahead wasn’t clear was a victory.

When it returns this time, it will be confidence that comes with knowledge and experience, and that to me is the best kind to have.

Well, sort of. It was more like a chair on a raft powered by a small engine, but the effect was unique and quite lovely, as was most of the wedding.

The wedding was that of a college friend of mine, and it was a picnic wedding. The thank you gifts were the picnic blankets themselves, and the cake was individual chocolate cylinders filled with a cake and mouse combination. My friend and his new wife were quite determined to have this as a picnic wedding, a decision that probably had all involved worried this whole week! Joburg hasn’t seen this much consistent rain in years! But it held off today, and the sun came out for perfect picnicking weather.

Last night’s birthday party was great fun also. Heather choose her local, slightly dodgy (her words, not mine!) pizza place as the venue and they actually make great pizza! Typical that I would find them right after I start my diet healthy eating plan! Add a couple of jugs of sangria and we chatted away until late into the night. I suspect I still smell like garlic though!

Here’s a cute snap of our Labradors, Cilla and George, being entertained by bubble confetti from yesterdays wedding. Cilla is the one trying to lick the bubbles, George thinks this is all a little suspicious…

Last weekend flew by with me hardly noticing, and I theorized that it may have been because I spent almost all weekend lying on my bed reading what ended up being two and a half books. This weekend is fast escaping me for the opposite reason!

Friday night I attended a hen’s party, with an interesting twist. We were split up into teams and each team cooked a different part of the meal we then ate together. It was a get way for guests to get to know each other before the wedding that takes place tomorrow afternoon. It will be my second wedding for the weekend …

This morning we attended the wedding two friends from our church. The groom is professional tenor, so we knew there would be quite a bit of singing. There were around 120 people in a church hall with great acoustics, a proper organ, and a choir, so the hymns really did sound good, especially the African language song that a top notch South African conductor tutored us whities on before the ceremony started.

We leave home in half an hour for a birthday celebration for my oldest friend, we met in primary school, and with the other wedding tomorrow morning, I’m going to be all partied out and wanting a weekend by tomorrow afternoon!

But it’s all good stuff, so I’m not complaining.

One of the things I appreciate about the company that I work for is that they have an active Social Responsibility program. It’s all about investing in our nation, giving something back and helping people develop sustainable incomes. And the PR doesn’t hurt. It’s the first company that I have worked for that encourages its staff as much to get involved in these activities.

Once a year we hold an event called Festive Tree. This year we took around 500 kids from poor areas, many of them affected by HIV/AIDS, out for a day of fun and learning, and gave them some useful gifts like school shoes and stationary. While the kids were off having fun (hosted by members of staff that volunteered to help) some of the other staff, including myself, went to their community centre and put some DIY efforts into the centre.

This year our DIY team visited an Educational Foundation east of Mamelodi called Berakah. They are involved in a number of projects including HIV/AIDS and Orphan Care, Preschool supervision and education through a crèche and after school care centre programs. This link will take you to the location of our efforts on the weekend.

Spouses and anyone else you can rope in to help are more than welcome, and Hunny & I along with 20 or so other people arrived at Berakah at 7:30 AM. We quickly set about doing what we could to patch the place up. Our efforts included planting trees and shrubs, tightening the ties that hold up the marquee that serves as their main hall, patching the concrete floor in the hall, painting several outbuildings and putting us shelves, floor mats, storage containers and packing the many donated toys for the crèche. Most of the equipment used and donated to the centre was sponsored by contacts, friends and family of the staff, or the staff themselves.

I arrived at least a little hungover from too much wine drinking the night before, but I had worked out my hangover by 10:00 AM. By about 2:30 PM when we left most of us were totally exhausted, but feeling great. It’s a little self-righteous, but it felt really good to be doing something for someone else who really needs it. I am still glowing today.

If your company offers you an opportunity like this to get involved in your community and give something back, and you haven’t helped out yet, I strongly recommend it. You’ll be helping yourself as equally as much.

Some pics taken on the day can be found here.