a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
I ran some errands Friday morning, but then had I to go home and answer a dozen e-mails that came in from the Denver project. Technology brings the work e-mails to my smart phone, but I cannot pull up full screen work sheets and applications on a tiny phone screen!
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.
My body clock is still shifted toward going to bed early and getting up early, so I went for a walk early in the morning. (Normally I go to bed late and sleep until I have to get up!). Here are some pictures I took along 14th Street here in downtown Denver.
For the first time this year while I had been in Denver, I left my jacket in the hotel. The day-time temperatures reached into the 80s (26 °C+) here in Denver on Monday and Tuesday. I’m still a little bleary-eyed from jet lag, but today was already a lot better than Monday!
It’s Monday and I was off to Denver early this morning. No rest for the wicked, as the saying goes!
I read about ‘The Silicon Valley Conspiracy’ in Bloomberg Business Week on the airplane. Only thing is, it was for real. Over the past several years, Google, Apple, Adobe and Intel conspired to use their vast wealth and warped sense of entitlement, says Businessweek, to suppress the salaries of their programmers and engineers. They basically agreed not to hire away each other’s employees. The $324 million that the companies agreed to pay to settle a class-action law suit, amounts to 0.4% of their combined total revenue for the most recent quarter. That ‘Don’t Be Evil’ slogan attributed to the Google of yore is starting to look awfully tarnished.
I had the removal of one of the three big trees in my back yard scheduled for this past Friday, and it went ahead even though I was traveling. The arborist that took the tree out stopped by today (just to say he planted a sign out on the sidewalk to advertise his business). Seattle City Light had to take the power line coming into the house by the corner down for the day, and it took them until 12 noon on Friday to get here – but after that everything went well. (Yes, I don’t like to take out trees, but this one has been making trouble for me for a number of years by giving squirrels access to the roof, dumping pine needles into the gutter, and it’s in the way of a new fence that has to go in right about where it stands).
I made it in to my Seattle home at around 2 pm this afternoon. The flight went well; Lufthansa took good care of us and I managed to sleep a little bit. It’s just all those time zones we crossed to get here : my body clock has a lot of adjustment to do.
It’s 7 am here in Frankfurt. We arrived an hour ago from Johannesburg, at 6 am. The Germans run a sharp operation here (of course), with everyone at the airport at their posts this early in the morning, and most of the duty-free stores and others open as well.
I’m at Cape Town airport. I will go back the same way I came, with a stop in Johannesburg, then up north to Frankfurt, and then across the Atlantic to Seattle for an arrival on Saturday.
My time in Stellenbosch is running out, so here are some pictures I took as I ran errands with my brother and sister-in-law.
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.