Mug ‘O Beans

Time Start: 18:32

Wow, that only took me about a month to actually blog! It was my first overseas trip however, and in years to come, at least I will always have my blog to help me remember it.

Aside from arriving back to a storm battered Durban, things have otherwise been good. Life at work has been moving along too, our department has been renamed from the Product Department to the Build & Configuration Department, the B&C team for short… Kinda reminds me of Bacon & Cheese, lol.

Speaking of teams, our department has organised a Team Building outing to do the Kark Kloof Canopy Tour, I’m more than just a little apprehensive as heights really aren’t my thing… *sigh* But I’m sure to get dragged along anyway, (since it is bring done during working hours on a Friday sometime soon) I guess I will just have to grit my teeth and get through it, hopefully in one piece, lol.

Something super however is the new masseuse, Cindy who started at our offices on the 2nd May. She runs her own company called Beauty@Worx, but is new to Durban and is still finding her feet. In order to grow her client base, she has started off with some specials until the 16th May, R60.00 for either a 30 minute back massage, reflexology or head massage. I tried out a 40 minute back massage followed by a 20 minute foot massage… I have never had a professional massage before and therefore have nothing to compare it to, but it was definitely different, but worth giving up my lunch break for, hehe. She did warn me that I would get a bit achy later on, which began in the afternoon and carried on into the next day. However, I’m sure that the more you have your knots and muscles worked, the more used to it they become. In fact, I have booked another session for tomorrow, so will see how that one goes.

Other than that, there have definitely been some developments in recent weeks; for starters, my friend Philip Berry got engaged over the Easter Weekend, on Good Friday to be exact. I have not met his fiancé as yet, but apparently she is a South African Body Building Champion. If I recall correctly, I think her name is Loretta.

Wayne and I did manage to catch up with Philip however, we all attended the Roger Goode Saturday Surgery session when it was held at GateWay on 21st April. It was a 330 event and although it started off slow, but it started early too at 16:00, but things only really picked up around 22:00. It was held at the WaveHouse in GateWay, which was quite neat because there were people surfing alongside the dancefloor.

Things have not been all sunshine and happiness however, on the night of the 16th April, one of the houses across the way experienced an attempted robbery at about 4:00am. The dogs in the neighbourhood began barking however and then the owner triggered the alarm. The robbers scrambled across the road and over our gate, in fact, there was a foot print on our postbox, which is about chest height… So they were literally “flying”. They then went over into Seeff’s yard and set off their perimeter alarm. The next morning Chubb was still hanging about and one of them came to check out our yard encase one of the robbers was still hiding there. It seemed that they had evaded getting caught completely.

I have been having some fun though, I purchased my second monitor, yet another sleek, black LG Flatron 19″ 2ms delay L1960TR model LCD, and also finally found the Marvin figurine I had been looking for on a local website called FigureFanatix. We did a bulk order at work and because our order came too over R1000.00, we got free shipping! Encase you don’t know, Marvin is the manic depressive robot from the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” movie; the figurine also has light up eyes. The only thing that could have made him better is if they had built in some Marvin phrases, hehe.

My shopping spree would have ended there, except that Musica was having a R50.00 DVD sale. I have added the following DVDs to our DVD Collection:
- Along Came Polly
- Bruce Almighty
- E.T.
- Eragon (this was a new release – R150.00)
- Ferris Beuller’s Day Off
- Hostel
- Ring, The
- Ring II, The
- Saw
- Saw II
- Terminator 3
- Truman Show, The
- Wallace and Gromit : Curse of the Were Rabbit
- War of the Worlds (was an ok movie, just had a bad ending)

Whilst there I purchased a greatest hits CD of Collective Soul
Collective Soul – 7 Year Itch

Wayne has also been wanting to get into U2, so I picked up a copy of one of their CDs for him.
U2 – Joshua Tree
I can’t believe how expensive some of their CDs are, it’s a little insane.

It was a once off sale however and it is really difficult to get decent DVDs at that price around here. Some new releases retail for around R230.00 each! The only other series I may add in to our collection is the MacGyver series, our mate J managed to get hold of all 20 seasons for around R1,200.00 – not bad. I really liked MacGyver when I was younger, I’m just concerned it may not be all I remember, so I may just borrow some of J’s to start off with.

The most recent luxury Wayne and I each purchased was an original copy of the new Command & Conquer 3. Despite our ambition however, we just haven’t had the time to try it out yet. *sigh* Maybe if we stopped sleeping altogether, lol.

On the net side of things, as you know I have set up 2 Flickr albums, one for Las Vegas and one for London. Guest accounts only allow you to upload 200 photos, which is why I had to set up two separate accounts.

I have also discovered YouTube – this is a great, free, video website where anyone can upload videos of any sort, it is streaming however, so videos cannot be downloaded to your hard drive, but this also protects copyright.

I have been watching a few episodes of an old series I enjoyed called, “God, the devil and Bob“. I also found that old animated snowman short film, which I used to adore when I was a kid, Ramond Briggs’ The Snowman, it has that well known song “Walking in the Air”. You can also find the video there for Soul Action Durban 2009. Even Zach Braff has made a YouTube video, a blog post actually, he seems very down to Earth. I even enjoyed skimming through some of his blog – ZachBraff.com.

Branden knew it wouldn’t be long before I could resist, lol, but I put up a video of our flat “before” we moved in during 2005 and a new “after” we moved in video from 2007. Watch This Space for any further developments.

I also recently started using Gmail and have set up an account for this blog – coffeemongerblog at gmail.com, for those of you who have been wanting to drop me a line.

Something else which has captured the attention of people world wide is FaceBook. A website which networks friends and their photos, people in photos can be “tagged” or labelled by their friends too, which then becomes linked to their profile. I have a bunch of photos which appear in my profile in which I was tagged by other people. Quite neat! The most amazing thing is the people you find on there! I found my childhood friend, Jordan Semple, who I have not seen in well over a decade. An old school friend, Prerna found me, and I was even able to add Mike Pilavachi, Gareth Cliff and even Zach Braff to my friends on FaceBook. You can’t just add people without them authorizing you however.

In other news, my birthday is coming up soon, this Saturday, the 12th May to be exact and my friend Lauren has plans to take me out, slap makeup on me and try on wedding dresses. Yes.. It shall be fun, just oodles.

Speaking of wedding dresses, Wayne finally revealed to Vaughn that he is in fact the best man at our wedding, hehe. We finalised our photographer, David Weeks and took the necessary steps to organise our DJ. I was still undecided between our two DJs, either Jason who did my NGHS school Matric Dance in 1999 or a guy named Gary who used to DJ for Joe Kools, now renamed to Joe Cools *bleh*. I sms’ed both DJs, but only received a response back from Jason who said he would email me details, but that he is presently in the United Stated at the moment. Either way, aside from being my original first choice, I think the process of elimination may come into effect here. On an entirely different note, something which has really had people’s blood boiling lately is the local government’s decision to change the street names of our city Durban. The following names have already been changed without so much as an ounce of consent from any of the people who actually live here:

Victoria Embankment	Margaret Mncadi Avenue
Stanger Street	Stalwart Simelane Street
NMR Avenue	Masabalala Yengwa Avenue
Point Road	Mahamta Gandhi Road
Alice Street	Johannes Nkosi Street
Grey and Broad Street	Dr Yusuf Dadoo Street
Cormmecial Road	Dr AB Xuma Street
Northern Freeway	Ruth First Freeway
Durban ICC	Inkosi Albert Luthuli International Convention Centre Complex

Now there s a list of 181 street names which are to be changed, to which the city manager, Mike Sutcliffe says will happen whether we like it or not. Some of the major objections are the following well known roads; this list excludes most of the roads in the CBD, such as Smith Street, West Sreet, Soldiers Way and Commercial Road which are also being renamed:

Argyle Road	Sandile Thusi
Botanic Gardens Road	Steve Biko
Broadway	Swapo
Currie Road	Adelaide Tambo
Essenwood Road	Stephen Dlamini
Field Street	Joe Slovo
Goble Road	Smiso Nkwanyana
Kensington Drive	Fidel Castro Street
Manning Road	Lina Arense
Moore Road	Che Guvara
Musgrave Road	Walter Sisulu Avenue
North Coast Road	Chris Hani
Old Main Road	Josaih Gumede
Percy Osborne Road	M.P. Naicker
Ridge Road	Peter Mokaba
Umhlanga Rocks Drive	Beyers Naude
Windermere Road	Lilian Ngoyi
Pinetown Civic Centre	Josiah Gumede
Westridge Stadium	Tap Tap Makhathini

I live in Essenwood Road, my dad lives in Currie Road and my folks live in Windermere Road… Needless to say, I don’t want to live in Stephen Dlamini Road… This whole thing really makes my blood boil.

The city was given 21 days to object, we have until the 11th May to voice our opinions, comments and objections. Following are links to an Objection Petition, as well as a local radio, East Coast Radio which is giving the public the opportunity to air their views.

Objection Petition to the Change of Durban Street Names
East Coast Radio – Have your say about the Street Renaming
Comments, criticism or suggestions can be sent directly to:
corporategis@durban.gov.za or by post to:

Municial manager
41 Margaret Mncadi Avenue
Durban
4001

The Democratic Alliance (opposing political party) did have an objection form on their website, but the form only accommodated one road per form, i.e. I object to … being renamed to …

I have now taken part in two East Coast Radio polls about this issue, commented on it in their forum, taken part in the above objection petition, and topped it all off with an email where I politely informed the powers that be that they are all ID10Ts. I really can’t believe this, I thought it was a joke at first, since it originally bubbled to the surface around April Fools Day. First the Durban Municipality became the eThekwini Municipality overnight, then they go ahead and change about 20 street names without consulting anyone who actually resides in this country as an everyday citizen… Great example of democracy. After everything that has happened, this whole objection thing appears as if it is just for show, I really do wish it would make a difference however.

People like me will be inconvenienced because we will have to have our postal addresses changed, everything from electric bills to tax returns will have to be updated. We will have to inform everyone we know of our new address, despite the fact that we have not actually moved anywhere! Businesses will experience delays in important deliveries and will have to spend a lot of money changing letterheads, business cards, etc. GPS devices will become outdated and will all have to have software upgrades, Map companies will suffer a serious hit as any companies that hold stock of Durban maps will now find that they are absolutely worthless. Tourists won’t know where on earth they are going and none of the people who actually live here will be able to help them either. Some of the road names I can’t even pronounce.

Basically, this entire thing is just a massive waste of money. The government should be focusing on feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, stopping crime in its tracks, hiring more police men and women with better wages, funding cancer and aids societies, promoting tourism, creating jobs… humans aside, even donating funds to the SPCA would be a far more worthy cause than being on this one way mission to eliminate the “white” colonial history from Durban’s streets. Changing road names will not build a nation and at this point, it is just creating animosity toward the government, whilst I used to be fairly indifferent toward the ANC, this entire thing is really making me grind my teeth. Anyway, I just can’t talk about this anymore, I’ll begin foaming at the mouth or something…

Whilst I’m at it though, something else we have not been having much luck with is services for Wayne’s 1999 1.6 Polo Playa. After having Weiss Motors do such a poor job for the last few services, Wayne decided to give Alpine Motors a try again. They found a lot wrong with the car, including the fact that the front break pads which Weiss had supposedly replaced last time, and charged for, were worn down to 5%… It seems that Weiss were paid for parts and work which they did not even do.

The list from Alpine spanned over two A4 pages, in some cases, the labour was more expensive than the part being replaced, one labour amount even equalled around R2000.00! The total of parts which needed replacing and attending to equalled to a whopping R30,000… After some humming and haa’ing, Wayne decided to get all the quirks seen to. Needless to say, once the car arrived back, one would expect it to be in pristine condition.

However, this was sadly not the case. Whilst the clutch had greatly improved and was lovely and smooth, the car air conditioner still does not work at all, the exhaust still rattles and the gears are now incredibly stiff. Wayne’s gear lock has lost it’s spring-release since it went in and there is now a strange rattle coming from behind the engine on the passenger side… Needless to say, it is going back in to Alpine again, the earliest that they could manage is the 21st May. *sigh*

Wayne is determined that leaving Alpine in the first place was the cause of all these issues, but there was not really anywhere else to go that was decent. Kings Park VW merged with Weiss and the majority of people I know wouldn’t touch Hoopers with a barge pole. The only place we haven’t tried out yet is the VW Umhlanga branch. A co-worker of mine, Brett is due to try them out, so will see what he makes of them. If I get the chance I will publish the quote of things which got fixed on Wayne’s car, it was quite phenomenal !

In brighter news, I finally got around to a long overdue spring cleaning, yes it took up most of what would have otherwise been a very treasured long weekend, but there is nothing like clean surfaces and a clutter free, dust free dwelling area. Yes, apart from being a sentimental fool, deep inside I’m also an obsessive compulsive neat freak, lol.

This passing Sunday, the 5th May, Wayne and I hosted our Church Leadership course for the first time. It was quite an event and I think we somewhat overestimated the amount that the 12 of us would actually eat.

Our Breakfast Menu consisted of:
1.5 litre Liqui Fruit Juices (4 Cartons)
Scrambled Eggs (made from 24 eggs)
Bacon (3 Packs)
French Toast (16 Slices – used 12 eggs)
Fried Banana (9 Bananas)
Fried Viennas (pack of 12)
Fried Tomatoes
McCains Oven Chips (a Tray full)
Baked Beans (2 Tins)
We decided not to serve a “Variety of Cereals”
Tea / Rooibos & Coffee

Tea Break Menu
Tea & Coffee
Yoghurts (12 small tubs)
Woolworth’s Choc Chip Cookies (2 pkts)
Nutti crust Biscuits
Choco kits Biscuits (brought by Brigitte)

Needless to say, by the end of it, I was most grateful to Theresa who handled the banana and viennas, Brigitte who handled the fried tomatoes and Wayne who was the operational manager of everything else. I arranged the bacon on the oven tray for cooking, cooked the French toast and laid the table in the lounge.

We all feasted, made a mess, had a wonderful leadership session and partook in a light tea. Leftovers consisted of about 9 yoghurt tubs, 1 carton of liqui fruit, an awful lot of fried banana, a fair amount of scrambled eggs, 5 rashers of bacon, 2 slices of tomato, 1 vienna, a handful of chips, a half filled bowl of baked beans and about 6 slices of French toast.

Oh well, there is a first time for everything, Wayne and I enjoyed some lovely toasted breakfast salmies, it was worth the effort and the cleanup, even if it was just for those delicious sandwiches, hehe. It seems that the fried viennas and tomatoes were the greatest hit, worth noting.

By the way, for those of you who don’t know, it’s Mother’s Day this Sunday along with my step dad, Dave’s birthday. A handy gift for dads, which I got for both of mine, is a novelty tennis racket, styled Bug Zapper.

Aside from saving up money for a second car, Wayne and I still have a list of things “To Do” around the flat, along with a list of want to buys:
- New Hard Drives for our Server under the Stairs, Harred
- Oak Games Cabinet
- Second Fridge
- MVIX Player (available from Digital Planet – I do prefer the look of the MV-5000U although it doesn’t make room for the future of Wireless LAN capabilities which we may soon consider.)

Time End: 21:03

~ by coffeemonger on Monday, May 7, 2007.