An Entertaining Picnic at Admiralty House

Attending a performance by the South African Navy Band is always a huge treat. Even more so, when it is preceded by a leisurely picnic on the lush green lawns of Admiralty House. Last Sunday, four of our friends joined us for just such a picnic.
When we arrived in the pretty suburb of Simon’s [...]

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A red polka-dot teapot

Last weekend, we bought ourselves a new teapot.
Here it is.
You might think that purchasing a teapot is a simple and straightforward task.
It is not.
When our trusty old teapot started to develop a whole network of hairline cracks, we decided it was time to let it go before it cracked completely and caused third degree burns [...]

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A Spider in the Kitchen

Early in the morning, when you stumble into the kitchen with eyes still sleep-heavy and your mind not quite at its sharpest, and you start preparing your normal breakfast on autopilot, one of the things you probably least expect – or want – to see in your kitchen sink is a creature with a bulbous [...]

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Bepuzzlement

I have just returned from the local Post Office.
And I am puzzled.
My mission: To send copies of my book to family, friends and fellow-bloggers around the world.
The friendly chap behind the counter told me that the local postage was R5.65 per book, which struck me as quite reasonable.
He asked me *twice*, though, whether I wanted [...]

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A sad goodbye to the CEP

A week or two ago, I received a letter from Ann Strybis, one of the organisers of the Continuing Education Programme that has been running at the nearby Pinelands High School for 22 years! Isn’t that extraordinary?
For the first three terms of every year, they offered a large variety of courses; some were once-off presentations [...]

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Almost drenched by a bambi bucket

The last time we’d been to Newlands Forest was at the start of November (see post), when we walked from there to Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens to have a cup of tea. The month of November passed by in a blur of work-work-work, with even the weekends not offering much of a respite.
This morning, however, we [...]

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Báirin Breac at Samhain

It is the festival of Samhain this weekend:
“At Samhain (which corresponds to modern Halloween), time lost all meaning and the past, present, and future were one. The dead, and the denizens of the Other World, walked among the living. It was a time of fairies, ghosts, demons, and witches. Winter itself was the Season of [...]

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An exciting encounter with two Egyptian geese and their young

Yesterday morning, on a walk through the neighbourhood, I spotted a pair of Egyptian geese on a grassy verge up ahead, near the traffic circle of Woodside Drive and Francis Road. The grass was very tall and overgrown, so I could just recognise the two large birds with their striking colouring. As I approached slowly, [...]

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WordPress Rocks

Yesterday morning, I received a most surprising email from the WordPress Team, advising me that my post about the full moon picnic at the Taal Monument outside Paarl had been promoted to the homepage of WordPress.com.
Initially, I thought this had to be a mistake.
But then my stats curve began to shoot up.
And then I [...]

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Hayfever hell

The city council hasn’t mowed the grass in the median of our road for a looooong time (I think they were last here sometime in August). At first, we didn’t mind too much, because it was WILD FLOWER season!
But now all the flowers are gone, and the grasses have taken over. This is hell for [...]

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