Monthly Archives: August 2011

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Slipping out of Cruise mode

I have been away on an amazing cruise holiday but, as always, am pleased to be back in home waters.

The cruise was a week-long adventure in the South China seas, starting and ending in Singapore with visits to Thailand and Malaysia in between.

The format is awesome seeing as the ship travels overnight while you eat(eateateat), make merry and sleep, then docks in the port during the day so you can tour and sight-see.

The whole on-board cruise mode concept seems to revolve around food. There are several restaurants on the ship, both free and for own account. The 3 main eateries included in the cruise price are a big buffet canteen-style one adjacent to the pool (with first sitting at 6am and last at midnight!), a Chinese restaurant (that we never got to) and the Bella Vista which we ate at most often with a continental buffet and full English ticklist breakfast and 3 course set menu lunches and dinners. Several 24-hour terrace options filled the 5-hour chasm of potential foodlessness… As we found out, quite nicely with 3am baskets of chips and chicken wings big enough to have been sourced from small ostriches!

Day trips onto coastal spots are a bit ‘hurry up and wait’ being large groups in coaches with short temple(templetempletemples), local produce (cashew nuts and batiks) and museum visits (and the inevitable mammoth buffet lunch stop) being interspersed with the delays of re-communing and requisite drivetime between points of interest.

Was a great group though – really friendly bunch with none of the usual unwarranted complaints and illogical requests. Had such a good time that have come home with determination to get my ass back over to the Far East for my much-spoken-about ambition to see Vietnam and Cambodia.

Alas, haven’t gotten around to much… have returned to a swamp of To Do things – amazing how much can happen (in some instances and not happen in others, neither favourable) in such a brief absence! So, having covered the reacquainting with lost and reuniting with good over last weekend and having had yet another week slip by, I have realised that it’s become buckle-down time. Have to slip out of cruise mode and get down to DOING.

It’s August. It’s 2011. So much good intention but still so much stuff that’s been waylaid along the way in cruise mode. I seem to have flip-flopped my theory and practical. Have learned loads in practical workday life, but lost the plot with my PhD theory studies as a result; yet am taking a more theoretical approach to my midnight hours, having lost faith in instinct. It’s not all doom and gloom. I have made inroads in the immediate On The Table stuff, but am gravitating toward the need for a plan (end of month, end of year, end of next year, 5 year), then a corresponding action plan and then action.

And then (hopefully) happily ever after. 🙂

PS: They say that loose lips sink ships, but seeing as everything always comes out in the end there’s no point in harbouring the secret…

Boys are like cruise ships: they think from meal to meal, they can take you exciting places but as long as they offer the requisite array of onboard interests then no matter how exciting the coastal options it’s always good to re-embark, you want them to be especially stable when you hit stormy seas, and it’s always good to be a-shored that you’re their first port of call.

Dlogs, General

Happy Birthday Mickey and Malory!

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Today is Mickey (“The Mousse”) and Malory (“The Cake”) Mallett’s 12th birthday. We’ve come a long way (literally) since that kismet encounter at the veggie market in ‘Maritzburg. Mally was an instant hit when thrust at me and sealed the deal with a nuzzle into my neck… And first sight of Mick clarified unequivocally that they were a matched set that only the most heartless human would separate.

Their trip to their new home (several hundred kilometres away) was made in a box originally designed to house 5 reams of paper but, when lined with a fabric nappy, made for a premium puppy pad, complete with cotton wool bed, dining section, reinforced water and milk dishes and a sort of u-shaped seating amenity made from a rolled up facecloth.

They were SO tiny, each fitting into the palm of one of my hands. Way too small to be the outside dogs they were authorised to be. Night One they were allowed to sleep in the kitchen ‘to climatise’, but before long they were in the en suite… and then in the bed… where they’ve slept ever since (and, in fact, likely are right now as I type this).

Mick was quick to take Alpha male role, swinging off his big (Great Dane cross Labrador) step-brother Clyde’s jowels for fun and taking his responsibilities very seriously by doing a full perimeter curcuit in the morning to check that all was intact and then guarding the entrance of the Big Dog Igloo to make sure that they were up and manning the gates (Can’t call it ‘dogging the gate’. You know why)

Mal was all about adding to the décor. Looking beautiful and improving the aesthetics of any room she was in, simply by being in it. She never fettered herself with putting any effort into popularity, opting rather to follow a simple hierarchy of her mom… and then anyone with food and/or hands to tickle her with. Knowing that humans are less evolved, she’s quick to help us out with a nudge to the hand to remind us that we’ve stopped tickling.

Despite being as tightly wound as Scrat from Ice Age, Mally’s lived a charmed life, making the most of every lap, basket and bed opportunity (and there is always one of the 3 on the go) and enjoy the wide world of nature… through the sliding door from the comfort of the couch. She has had some troubles of late (too sensitive to be openly spoken about), but her rigid high fibre diet seems to be doing her the world of good.

Poor Mick hasn’t had it so easy. He had an unfortunate interlude with a BMW early on and was deemed a no-hope case by the vet several times over his recovery. But he’s a fighter. And he came back to life as good as he was before… but sans an eye and with some very butch war wounds. As if that wasn’t enough, he developed an allergy to dust (a real problem when your legs are 5cm), which went straight to his good eye. And if that wasn’t enough, the ophthalmologist found a lump on Mickey’s neck on his final visit, so he went straight from his clean bill of optical health to the vet to be checked in for removal of the growth. Although cancerous, it was benign and again, all was well. He’s had one last bout of cancer removal (lumps on his head), but besides that is a very happy and healthy little creature, with an air of sophistication from his premature greying, earning him the new mickname “Silver Fox”.

They’re a comical pair. As intro to birthday week, I took them to the Golden Harvest Park on Monday with the SA Gills. Mickey ran around like he was a Labrador in a perfume commercial, ears flapping all akimbo in the wind, leaping each step in the long grass. Every now and the he’d be in the distance and stop stock-still, look around, realise he had no idea where he was, he’d look left and right, then leftrightleftright, then whip around, looking everywhere for me. Of course I was shouting and arm-waving wildly… and as soon as he saw me he’d be off again.

Mal isn’t a huge one for the great outdoors – although she does like to win and is Rudolph-like in her dogged positioning as the lead dog when out walking in the neighbourhood – and isn’t subtle when she’s had enough. When she’d had enough at the park, she found an open car and hopped in. It wasn’t our car. It belonged to an ominous group of very suspicious looking fellows. Out in the park. During the day. On their phones. No sweat to Mal, she hopped in the car all happy and waggly. And then jumped into the back as I approached, as is customary (she doesn’t drive). I was horrified and mortified (especially seeing as we’d just come from the lake section so her feet were all muddy. But the men said nothing to my barrage of apologies and nervous giggles as we played the usual cat and mouse with her jumping in the front as I opened the back door and vice versa. And we’re still alive to tell the tale so no harm done really.

There are just so many anecdotes like the above. I wish I could jot them all down, but who has that kind of time?! It’s so busy at the moment that I’m postponing the Annual Hotdog Party even (who can forget the first one with wall-to-wall mattresses in the garage floor so everything was on the ground and the big dogs could party with us, the Barney tableware and conical hats, the hotdogs, the presents, the bunting…. Ah!) We’ve been through so much! I hope we have another 12 happy years together!

General

Blogging the i and not crossing the t

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In the (hilarious! must watch!) sitcom, ‘Community’ (perfect to inhale a season in a single Sunday), one of the characters gets accused of cheating when crib notes are found and the little circles she uses to dot her i‘s are the distinguishing trademark that points the finger at her. Being Community and not CSI, they didn’t call in a graphologist to analyse the script, font, pressure, content, copy (still not sure why copy is called copy when mostly it’s supposed to be original?) and it still ended all smiles, laughs and happiness.

Made me think about “dotting one’s i’s” in the proverbial sense. I stopped literally dotting my i‘s in my early teen years. Seemed like a wasted nanosecond to stab the page when, if correctly scribed, the letter was perfectly recognisable on its own. Clearly, I was never the type to embrace the curly hooded a, elaborate g and y tails, Pacman-looking e or who’d finish the word and then retrospectively have to go backwards to dot and cross, as one would do in cursive. Instead, my script represented my preference for the quickest and most practical output.

The proverbial, as always, is not as simple. Is dotting the i really about tying up all the loose ends? How much i-dotting is enough? Can there be too much? Am I the i? And is there such a thing as getting one’s t’s cross(ed)?! Maybe the broader answer lies not in the way things are written down, but from the clues intrinsically in the words present themselves in. Putting the i into words I want to write, like happiness, smiles, patience, choice and communication (a two-way street so it needs 2 i‘s). Keeping away from t words like past, temper, tantrum, teary, tacky.

I also managed to squeeze in a half season of Gossip Girl (on Saturday), where the sins and tales of betrayals always seem to be pegged on trysts. Ex-oh ex-oh. Yup, ex uh-oh. No good ever comes from lots words with ‘her’: either, neither, slither, wither, dither, disher, fisher, poacher, encroacher, another, the other, why bother?! Complicated and emotional scenarios where the secrets and lies could have been eased by making the illicit (with 3 i‘s, definitely a crowd) explicit (although still 2 i’s and an ex, so still not easy). Expelling the ex as excess and putting the u in truth and trust. It’s a case of needing u and i to build a bridge and communicate; deciding whether you’re wanting to put the ‘am’ into drama or family.

But that’s all best-not-dwelt-in TV melodrama and I’m glad I’m pencilling my future and not penning my past. I think the answer to a question I was innocuously asked yesterday is that I’d rather be a ‘never was’ than a ‘has been’ because in my world, dotting my I is not a ‘make the circle bigger’ affair. I’m not just jotting down copy in a cheap attempt to put my am into famous, but am working at creating stories that are quality and lasting content. I’d like to think that there are bigger and better things to come all round.