a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Kerkstraat (Church Street) is a popular eating and shopping street in the center of Stellenbosch. It also features some art galleries, and outdoor art. I ran some errands in the area this afternoon, and could stop and take a picture here and there.
Tuesday my sister-in-law and I checked out some furniture stores with my mom. We need a new sleeper couch and a new driekwartbed (‘three quarter bed’, 74″ x 42″) for my mom’s new digs. Yes, it’s still a long time before my mom will move, but we wanted to help since it will be a while (or quite a while) before we make it back out here. We found a nice bed at the Tafelberg Furnishers store, but the sleeper couch offerings fell short. All of them ugly and very uncomfortable to sit on! We found a very nice one at a direct sales sleeper couch manufacturer in an industrial area on the way back to Stellenbosch.
Picture : Fabric from one of the furniture items (not one we plan to buy). The San hunter-gatherer peoples are the aboriginal people of South Africa who have lived here for millennia. The San are one of fourteen known extant “ancestral population clusters” from which all known modern humans descend.
We’re working our way through several closely-spaced national holidays here in South Africa : there was Good Friday and Easter Monday, and today (since Freedom Day fell on a Sunday). Then on Thursday May 1 it’s Workers Day .. and then on Wednesday May 7 it’s Election Day! Whoah. Because of the holiday my brother and I could not pursue the transitioning of a few more accounts into my mom’s name .. but we needed a break anyway, and took a little hike up the mountain here in the neighborhood.
Sunday marked 20 years to the day that the first democratic elections in the ‘New’ South Africa were held, on April 27, 1994. With the 2014 national elections a little more than a week away, the day is not without controversy, though. Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town said he is happy Mandela is not alive to see what South Africa’s current leaders are doing to the country. While everyone gained political freedom in 1994, the matter of economic freedom for all South African citizens in 2014 is a different matter altogether.
It rained early Saturday morning, but later in the morning the clouds gave way to blue sky. March and April usually offers mild and tranquil weather (~20°C/ 70°F) here in the western Cape, and is in my view the best time to visit. Beach-goers and party animals would say December to February is the best time !
I went into Stellenbosch on Friday afternoon looking for a few items : food for the house, printer paper and ink .. and the house needs a new washing machine. The old one has been at it for 15 years and finally broke down completely.
A lot of these businesses are found along Bird Street here in Stellenbosch, so that’s where I went. There is also a suburb called Onder Papegaaiberg (‘Lower Parrot Mountain’) here .. with the nickname Voëltjiesdorp (hard to translate, something like ‘Little Birdy Town’).
We ran more errands in Stellenbosch today, and took a minute to stop by this outdoor artwork to take a picture. Dawn Jorgensen’s blog has more pictures here that shows the wonderful detail that was created with the ‘medium’ of black rubber tyres (tires).
These pictures are from Tuesday afternoon, actually. My brother Chris and I were running errands in Stellenbosch on Dorp Street, and I had to stop a this beautiful church building and take a picture or two. It was a blue sky day, just starting to fade into dusk.
It was a very emotion-filled day for the family,
starting with pulling together all the logistics for my dad’s memorial service : the flowers, the pamphlets to hand out, the tributes from my dad’s four sons each (that the minister was to read; we could not trust ourselves to do it), the refreshments to go with the tea for the guests, and the cash payments in envelopes for the staff at the church. But everything went without a hitch, and we took pictures of the family afterwards. The four brothers together made for a rare picture : two from the United States, and one from Australia joining the one that is in Stellenbosch.
My brothers and I have started tackling the sorting and categorization of the vast contents of my dad’s study. It is a large room filled with book cases, filing cabinets, desks and drawers, and electronic equipment : a lifetime’s worth of documents, pictures, mementos and possessions.
The stuff has to move; our frames of mind have to move. There is a classic Afrikaans poem that provides instructions to the movers – movers of different kinds. I posted it in Afrikaans first, with below it my own crude attempt at a translation into English.
Aan die Verhuisingsmanne
Uit ‘Tyd van Verhuising’, 1975 – Ernst van Heerden
Dra saggies, vriende,
want sierpotte en erdewerk,
keurborde en fyn glas
sluit ‘n hele lewe
met sy drome
en verlangens in;
Dra saggies, mededraers,
want die drag
van veerbed,
tafels, lessenaar
druk teen die bors
se dun skelet;
Dra saggies, regters,
want die oordeel
oor my klein bedryf
lê vasgevang
in prente, boeke
en ‘n eie ou gemakstoel;
Dra saggies, gode,
want die hart se porselein
is broos en tot veel seer
en kwesbaarheid geneig:
die kratte van ‘n lewe
kan so maklik breek.
To the Movers
from Tyd van Verhuising (‘A Time of Moving’), 1975 – Ernst van Heerden
Carry softly, friends,
for vases and pottery,
choice plates and fine glass
encompass an entire life
with its dreams
and desires;
Carry softly, fellow carriers,
for the bearing
of feather bed,
tables, desk
press against the thin skeleton
of the chest;
Carry softly, judges,
for judgement
of my small industry
lie trapped in pictures, books
and an old easy chair;
Carry softly, gods,
for the porcelain of the heart
is fragile and prone to much hurt
and vulnerability:
the crates of a life
can break so easily.
All went well with my departure out of Frankfurt, arrival in Johannesburg, and arrival into Cape Town International Airport. My brothers picked me up at the airport, and we joined my mom and my aunt in Stellenbosch, a 40 minute drive away. My dad’s memorial service is scheduled for Tuesday.
It is 7.30 pm in Germany on Saturday night. I am back at Frankfurt airport after arriving this morning. I did stay over for 8 hours in the Sheraton hotel right on the doorstep of the airport – very convenient. I split the time between sleeping, and taking a quick train ride out to the city.
My bags are packed, and I’m heading to South Africa for my dad’s memorial service. I have a long layover in Frankfurt, so long that I should check into a day hotel there to get some sleep. There are some right at the airport, and I may just do that. I only arrive in Cape Town at about 12 noon on Sunday.
It rained on and off all day here in Seattle, and so when the sun came out and struck the new green leaves on the tree in the street, I went to the upstairs window to take a look. That’s when I noticed the rainbow. I ran downstairs and took a picture. All rainbows appear opposite of where the sun is (so I am looking east), and they are actually are full circles! – but most observers just see what is to them, the upper half of the arc.
I am re-posting this picture that my brother had posted on Facebook on Monday. If I go by the two candles on the cake, it is September of ’67, his second birthday. My dad must have been 33 at the time, and had just lit the two candles on the birthday cake. He made the patio furniture frames (in the background) and my mom the flowery cushions of sponge and vinyl cloth. I am in the middle, mesmerized by the cake. I remember that plastic table cloth with the ribbons so well, and the candle holders. One was an elephant, the other a springbok (antelope).
It was a somber day for me .. late afternoon I went for a walk to Volunteer Park. We are all flowers, fragile as flowers in the wind, I thought, when I saw these.
Province of South Africa, the middle one of three boys.It was a gorgeous Sunday here in Seattle, but it was almost 4 o’clock before I chased myself out of the house to go for a walk. So where to go, I thought? I chose the University District; took the No 43 bus out there and walked around, and made a stop at the great bookstore that is run by the University of Washington.
On the internet front, news broke this week of 
researchers discovering an widely-used internet security door (an encryption protocol called OpenSSL) that has been left ajar for almost two years now. It is called the ‘Heartbleed’ bug because it draws encryption keys (!) and password information (!) from the back-and-forth sending of encrypted data between a server and a client computer. Hackers using it leave no trace, so it is unknown how widespread its exploitation has been.
Says internet security expert Brian Krebs on his blog : It is likely that a great many Internet users will be asked to change their passwords this week (I hope). Meantime, companies and organizations running vulnerable versions should upgrade to the latest iteration of OpenSSL (1.0.1g) — as quickly as possible. So the company has to upgrade its OpenSSL, and the users have to change their passwords as well. The problem is, given the growing public awareness of this bug, it’s probable that phishers and other scam artists will take full advantage of the situation. (Sending users fake and infected requests for clicking on a link to changing a password, for example. ALWAYS go directly to the website by typing in the URL or using an established ‘favorites’ link, when changing a password).
Here are Krebs’s 3 Basic Rules for online safety, that should drastically reduce the chances of handing control over of one’s computer to the bad guys.
Rule 1) If you didn’t go looking for it, don’t install it.
Rule 2) If you installed it, keep it updated.
Rule 3) If you no longer need it, get rid of it!
I had some credit on Amazon after sending in my old iPad for recycling, and browsed around for items of interest to buy. (The challenge with Amazon is not what to buy, of course. It is what not to buy, with the overwhelming variety of items on sale). Anyway, I checked out the section that sells little bits of scrap metal (yes, there is one). Why would I buy a bit of metal? Well, the notion of a little bit of 100% pure metal appeals to the alchemist in me.
And there are some curious metals. Mercury is definitely at the top of the list, but it is very poisonous. So I settled for a vial of the metal called gallium. Gallium is a brittle, soft metallic element that becomes a liquid at around only 85°F (29.4 °C), meaning it will melt in one’s hands or in warm water. (Even though it’s not poisonous, it’s probably not a good idea to touch it, since it sticks to one’s skin, I read on-line). Check out this YouTube clip of a gallium spoon used to stir hot water, here.
