A night under the stars

(A more accurate heading might be: “A night under the few stars we could glimpse a-twinkling through the dense clouds”. But that is too long for a heading….)
In theory, this was a really excellent idea, though!
Thanks to a link in an email sent to me by my friend Erica, who has been the very capable [...]

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Highlights of February

For other Highlights of the Month, click on:

April
March
January

Nation:
In February, President Thabo Mbeki gives his State of the Nation address. This is at a time when our nation is still grappling with erratic load shedding. The City Council has been threatening for a while to install switches in every single household’s geyser, to allow the City [...]

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Movies of February

We watched a handful of movies this month:

Atonement which is based on a book by Ian McEwan about the devastating impact of a single lie.
Iranian director’s Masjid Masjidi’s The Willow Tree is set in Tehran, and it is an exquisitely filmed movie about a university professor who gradually loses his eyesight and who has to adjust to a [...]

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A thunder of drums!

Tonight, I attended a ‘West African Drumming’ Workshop at the Pinelands High School. It formed part of the Continuing Education Programme run by the PHS on a term-by-term basis.
Our teacher was Janis Merand, and she was accompanied by four of her intermediate students, who have trained with her for about 2-3 years. The rest of [...]

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Movie review: “No Reservations”

Tonight we took out the romantic comedy “No Reservations”. You can tell that I went to the DVD store on my own – if my significant other had gone, the movie might have had the plotline “Superhero from the 25th century travels back in time to save the last woman alive on post-apocalyptic earth”.
Anyway… Catherine [...]

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The Greens trample the Blacks: Ireland vs Scotland

After Part 1 of an all-day meditation course, in which we (among other things) learned about the essencelessness of existence, I felt a strong need to reclaim my sense of identity.
And I also needed to balance my fragile sense of spirituality and equanimity with some raw power and masculinity by going to Catú to see [...]

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Movie review: “River Queen”

We took out “River Queen” on DVD tonight. It’s a 2005 movie, which was filmed in New Zealand and is set around 1868.
There are lots of spoilers in here, so don’t read any further if you want to go and watch the movie yourself.
Sarah O’Brien, the main protagonist of this movie, is played by the [...]

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Rediscovering the joy of movement

I attended an Introduction to Nia Techniques class tonight at the Pinelands High School, as part of their ongoing Continuing Education Programme. The class was supposed to be given by the enthusiastic and funny Kathy Wolstenholme, who brought the Nia Technique from the States (where pretty much all exercise programmes seem to come from!) to [...]

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A sign … of what, I wonder

This morning when I arrived at work, one of the cleaning ladies on our floor was sticking a notice to each of the toilet doors. The notice had been neatly printed out in black capital letters, highly visible from afar.
It said:
“Don’t use this toilets.
There are no water.”
I asked her, “What do you mean by ‘there [...]

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Creating a butterfly mosaic

As I don’t seem to have much talent with a paint-brush (other than painting window frames, fences or walls, which don’t really count as artistic endeavours), I thought that I would try my hand at creating a mosaic. “How hard can it be?” I thought to myself. “You just take a whole lot of colourful [...]

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