Dull Friday

Silver wakes me up from about four am onwards – every half hour or so. Every time I cuddle and pet her before turning over and sleeping some more. By six I’ve had enough, I open the door and out she goes. Leisurely cup of coffee before I go off to work. As I’m locking up, Silver comes back. I left her sitting in front of the door staring at it, willing it to open!

Bit of a barney at work, when I’m told off about not having finished the deadlined task – by the same people who kept me from continuing on it with continuous ‘Can you quickly ... this and that’. Right. So I say I have no problem leaving everything to wait until this task is done. Agreed. Now I’m waiting for either of them to try another ‘Can you quickly ...’ he he e.

One of our guys has a birthday tomorrow and he’s invited us for a braai – now everyone’s collecting to buy him a present. His household helper is moonlighting for us, cleaning our office – and she has a definite idea what she wants to get for him. We must pay and her present will be to set it up for him. That’s the South African culture – there may not be racism, but the Apartheid-roles of Whites give Blacks take hasn’t changed. That’s because for the majority of Blacks, not much has changed either. Instead of a small group of Whites being rich, while they struggle to survive, there is now a small group of Blacks getting rich – while they still struggle to survive. Only now a lot of whites also struggle to survive. Let’s leave it at that.

The weather is threatening rain tomorrow around eleven. That’s when I go for my haircut. I’m wondering if I’ll be able to spend any time in the garden at all tomorrow – I need to cut some of the dead flowers and some of the dead leaves. And there is still that large patch near the garage where those patches of large, flat weeds still need attention. Though I won’t have much time to garden tomorrow, with the braai in the afternoon. Sunday doesn’t look promising, either. Monday even worse – so I don’t think the gardener will turn up. He should have worked for my neighbour this week – but couldn’t get transport (refer to the tire-burning, I mentioned on Monday). So we thought he’d work for her next week – but he’s adamant that I need him. I think it’s those weeds which are killing the grass which are bothering him! But if the weather is bad, he can’t work. So ... the issue is the drum. If he says he’ll come, I leave it over the weekend. If he then doesn’t come – I have to make a plan in the evenings.

Shopping will have to be Makro tomorrow. Not keen, as it’s the furthest from home, hence I only go once a month.

When I got home I found the garden disservice had been around. They finally manage to break the entire bottom corner off the planter. For No Reason. Whatsoever. I had cleared all grass and weeds in a wide circle around the planter. At least the fences protected my flowers – they could do very little damage. All they could do was to cover the plants in all the off-cuts – it’s like they use the weed-eater to blow the cut grass ahead until they come to the beds, where they all stop. And they cut those big-leaved weeds covering such large patches! And left the cut-off leaves. Everywhere. It looks awful! I decided to clean up the one side, today, until it got too cold. Turns out I worked two hours! Oh, and guess which grass they didn’t touch? Anything trying to cover the path! That’s all left completely untouched! None of the weeds on the path, nor any of the grass on the edge. On the bright side, one or two of the Gazania were left standing!

Well, I cut the dead Daffodils, the yellow leaves off the Nasturtium and picked up as much of the dead grass I could. You can see where I’ve worked – it looks much better. I didn’t take any photos – neither before, nor after.

I did try to take some cute photos of Silver. She’s really mean to me: holds an absolutely adorable pose right up to the instant before I take the photo – so every single one is a blurred image of Silver turning or moving just out of shot. Blurred images of silver fur. Thank goodness for digital! I’ve never been a good photographer – and I’m not much better now. But at least, with a digital, I can take hundreds of photos without fear of bankrupting myself! Not like my one trip to the UK, where I took something like 36 photos on a 24-film! Wish digital had been around in those days – I did quite a lot of sight-seeing in London. But then again, there’s loads of really good photos available of everything now somewhere on the web, so no real loss there.