an exercise in percussive maintenance
Category: That’s life
Yesterday I went shopping for new jeans. Normally, it’s a simple affair. I prefer regular blue-jeans, not that pre-faded, pre-wrinkled, fancy stitched nonsense. Once in a while I’ll change things up and buy a dark blue/navy pair for when I feel like dressing up. I’ve always bought the same brand from the same store, an exercise that usually takes ten minutes, including time spent in the checkout queue.
Not so this time.
Sometimes I wish it were legal to whack people on the head with a hammer, like this morning when was woken at 6AM by loud techno music playing, apparently, in my bedroom.
This led to some momentary confusion. To start with, I don’t have a radio in my bedroom. On top of that, I don’t own any techno music and I never listen to it; in fact, it’s one of the very few music styles that I openly detest in its entirety.
Continue reading “On loud music at 6AM on a Sunday when I was planning to lie in”
A little over two hours ago my desk started shaking. Then I realised our entire building was shaking. So this was how it was going to end?
About twenty seconds later the Earth stopped moving and two seconds later #earthquake was trending on Twitter and South Africa experienced a sudden spike in online activity. Someone needs to do a study on what this says about us as a species.
Anyhow, according to the USGS the quake measured a magnitude of 5.3 at the epicentre which is a little under 100km away from us. No damage here, but closer to the action at least one person was killed when a wall collapsed and an as-yet unknown number of miners are trapped underground (oh, yes, the epicentre is in a major gold-mining region). It’s also not known yet whether mining activity could have triggered the earthquake.
Those of you interested in this type of thing can find more information here.
P.S. Did I say no damage? Not quite accurate. My chess set was massacred.
A lone tower remains standing
Goodness! I seem to be doing a lot of these things lately. But that’s what one does if one wants to become competent in a certain field, isn’t it? Train, train, and train some more.
This time round I’m doing an advanced workshop in clinical pastoral counselling. For the practical component we’re working in a hospital with intensive care and terminal patients, which is daunting to say the least. I’m writing this over the weekend, and by the time you’re reading this I’m already more than halfway with the workshop, so hope with me that I’m still holding up okay. These things tend to be emotionally draining.
I’m pretty sure by now I just can’t wait for tomorrow so I can get back to my wife and my home, though the thought of navigating the Easter weekend traffic in the most densely populated hundred-and-fifty kilometres of South Africa is already giving me a headache as I write this post.
Oh, well. At least there’s nothing planned for the long weekend. I probably need to try to catch up with my writing for Camp NaNoWriMo, but I’m so far behind now…I think I’ll try again in June. And there’s my actual studies also still crying out for some attention. It just never ends, does it?
In case you missed it, this morning I woke up with a river in my driveway. This is the third time since we’ve moved into our apartment that this has happened, but the first time I’m blogging about it.
They say a picture paints a thousand words, so here they come…
