Category: General

I took a package to the post office on Friday and as usual inquired what ‘nice’ new stamps they might have.  Yes, the ‘forever’* ones with the little birds on, I said.   The mountain bluebird on one of them reminded me of an article I read recently in the New York Times of a writer whose mother was a member of the North American Bluebird Society (NABS). Their mission : ‘A non-profit education, conservation and research organization that promotes the recovery of bluebirds and other native cavity-nesting bird species in North America’. Sparrows are not native to North America, and said her mother: ‘think of them as feathered sharks’. Read the rest of it here : The Truth About Sparrows.  It is somewhat shocking what some Bluebird Society members will do to save the bluebirds!  But I guess it needs to be done.    

*Note to United States Postal Services : Nothing is forever! .. not even your forever stamps! (Forever means these stamps are good for first class mail, no matter if there are future increases in the stamp prices.  Hmm.  I’m going to wait 20 years and send a letter with one of these stamps).

Check out these cool inventions I found in recent issues of Bloomberg Businessweek.

It was Monday, Memorial Day of 2014, here in the United States today (a national holiday honoring fallen soldiers in the country’s wars); also the considered the ‘unofficial’ start of summer.  We still have cool temperatures here in Seattle, so it always comes as a surprise to me to realize in May that the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere is less than a month away!  Check out this infographic that explains the history of Memorial Day here in the USA that I found on-line.

I made it home on Thursday night, thankful that our flight out of Denver was not delayed by the weather.

On Friday my contractors Bryan and Paul completed the installation of a new fence on the north side of my property, as well as installing a ‘Nest’ internet-connected, smart thermostat inside the house for me. The device has a very elegant look, and can be controlled from anywhere with my smart phone.   (Or it can just be left to ‘learn’ one’s typical daily and weekly schedule with its built-in activity sensors).

Yes, my old Honeywell thermostat was programmable, but there are holidays, daylight savings-time shifts, and simply times when one comes home ‘unexpectedly’ (vis-à-vis the programmed thermostat schedule).   With remote access and control to it, I can warm up my house ahead of time so that I don’t step out of the taxi cab and into an icebox. 

I made it out to Denver with my usual early morning flight.   I went for a walk tonight after dinner, to the Denver City Hall – forgetting that I have been wanting to go and check out the recently remodeled Union Station (train station) here in downtown.  So I will have to do that tomorrow or Wednesday.

The Rubik’s cube is 40.  It’s shocking (that it is that old), but I do remember that I was still in school when it first appeared.  My younger brother could solve it in under 2 minutes .. while I never did get the hang of it ! Invented in 1974 by Hungarian mathematician Ernő Rubik, it is the world’s top-selling puzzle game, and widely considered to be the world’s best-selling toy.   Google is celebrating the anniversary with a virtual Rubik’s cube on its home page (picture on the right; it takes a little imagination to see ‘Google’ written there!

And how many permutations of the cube color positions are there? 43 quintillion.  The number is so large that the packaging simply says ‘billions’ of possible permutations.

*ESPN is a television sports network here in the USA.

I brought a set of silver spoons back from South Africa : a gift from my mom (that belonged to my grand-mother).  While checking them out a little closer today, I noticed the letters EPNS-AI stamped on the back. Turns out the EPNS stands for electroplated nickel-silver and the AI stands for superior quality (the thickest layer of silver).  So how to clean silverware (made of silver)?  One way is to simply use a glass bowl lined with kitchen-grade aluminum foil, filled with hot water and ordinary salt.   The electrochemical reaction (exchange of electrons between the aluminum and silver) will clean the tarnish.  I also recall ‘Silvo’ that we used on occasion in my parents’ house – a mild liquid metal polish that originated in Britain at the turn of the last century.

We walked by this Chevrolet Corvette Stingray on the way to lunch today here in Denver. It’s brand new and has to be a 2014 model. It must have set its owner back some $60,000.

I read a few pages of my TIME magazine this morning on the plane to Denver – about the recent tragedy on Mount Everest.  (Sixteen sherpas were killed in the single most deadliest incident on Mount Everest when giant pieces of ice broke loose higher up).  I remember when I first learned of Mount Everest as a schoolboy that I liked that the height expressed in either meters or feet has some pattern to it – 8,848 m (29,029 ft).   P.S. Check out the price tag for an individual undertaking an expedition on the second graphiic.

 

A very happy Mother’s Day to all the moms in the whole wide world.
We love you! We salute you!

Yesterday was Election Day in South Africa (the national elections is held every 5 years), so I had to check in on the results.   The election is the first one after Nelson Mandela’s death, and marks the 20th anniversary since he was elected South Africa’s first post-apartheid president.   As for the 2014 elections, seems to me there are no major surprises so far : the African National Congress (ANC) is on the way to win in all the provinces except the Western Cape. The Democratic Alliance holds sway there.  The support for any party after these two falls off precipitously, but hey – they keep trying.  There is the Economic Freedom Fighters with some support, and way, way down the list with 3,000 votes nationally, the Keep It Straight and Simple Party (KISS).  The KISS party’s logo is a kiss imprint of two lips. Yes.

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.

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 !

 

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.

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.

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).