hell of a season

A week into one of the worst heatwaves I can remember and we're all gatvol. Tips on how to stay cool can be heard on radio, in staff rooms and at the supermarket and I think I've just about tried them all. They all work for about a half an hour, until whatever was wet, dries.

I was at the beach just after five this morning in a desperate attempt to catch a coolish breeze or two...and I wasn't alone. You can see the heat in these pics!!
Urgh. Fast forward to winter!

Hell of a Season- The Black Keys - El Camino 2011

weightless

 Another dry and dusty school field. This time the field belongs to the local high school. And the kids are not running. They're flying.....and spinning...and hurtling through the air at breakneck speeds.

 And  posing. Oh yeah. Lots of posing going on.

  Apart from bumping into past pupils every two minutes (some of them clearly trying to avoid me- lol) and almost getting locked in the school grounds,  it was a good afternoon.

More in Flickr

 'weightless' by Nada Surf

be careful out there

So what do you do when you get to the end of a week in which one of your pupils has been raped and has to undergo examinations by doctors and police and starts a month's course of antiretrovirals which are said to make a person extremely ill; your neighbour kills himself by standing in front of a train (arms crossed on his chest, apparently) and another pupil tells you that her neighbours, including her bff, died in a fire in their flat?  A fire that was started in some bizarre attempt to exorcise evil spirits.....

You pour yourself a very big glass of wine, light some candles and then you set your iPod shuffle to the Loud & Angry Music playlist.

Eish.

Just as well there are some good news stories out there.

Like a certain couple who's honeymoon in Meeru is not on the rocks. Phew! ;-P

And another couple (shhhhhh) who are going to have a baby!

Look after yourselves, people.

Seriously weird youtube vid to one of my all time favourite angry songs.
Calexico's 'Black Heart'

windy with a chance of sandblasting

Well, the sun’s out.

And so is the wind.

There’s only one person I know who’s thrilled we’ve the
South Easters howling again.

           But really, what's the point of fighting it if you're a Capetonian?

It's here to stay for the next, what...three months? And you can wipe that grin off your face brother mine!

So let's be positive. It's not called the Cape Doctor for nothing.

It's cleaning the city's air and blowing away all our cobwebs.

And um, it's good to get out there in the fresh saltiness

and have the wind whipping your cheeks. :-/

In case anyone's wondering I've made three beach walks so far.

Because as wonderful and bracing as it is to have fresh air whipping your face it's not terribly nice having half of the Strand beach in your eyes, up your nose and in your hair as well.

Dustin O'Halloran- Opus 23-

for Aunty Jill. RIP.

..er...spring? hello?

 After huffing and puffing my way through what must have been a trully hilarious

teachers vs Gr7 girls netball match on Thursday I've made some promises to my heart.

I'll walk on the beach every day.  These holidays. These ten day holidays.

I'll not eat anything really bad....like white bread.

And condensed milk.

Straight out the tin.

Walk on the beach day one.

 

 Jocelyn, a building for you. : ) Fiddled a wee bit in PS.

 

As luck would have it, just as this delightful looking family arrived my battery ran out.

When I took this shot it was so flat that the auto focus couldn't work anymore.

I quite like the blur though.

ETA: WTF is blogger doing to the photo thumbnails these days?!!Blech!! 
I've half a mind to move over to Wordpress.

observations on day one

 

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

 Always put your name on your umbrella so you don't get lost when you come out of the sea.

 

Make the most of what you've got. Use chemicals if you have to.

 

Pack a hat.

 

Never underestimate the allure of the shower cap as fashion accessory.

There's always ice-cream.

Happy New Year everyone!!!


More pics in Flickr.

Jenny Lewis 'Acid Tongue'- my song of 2008

The best thing...

The best thing- the Youtube bit

Sooo....Forty
How the hell are ya?
People say you're cool. You don't give a happy hoot what others say. That's fine by me. I was kind of heading that way already.
It means I can continue to sit at my computer and watch freshly downloaded TV in the morning before school.
While applying eye-makeup, blow-drying my hair and finishing off a maths worksheet on fractions. Multi-tasking is effortless when you're forty.
I've learned stuff.
I've learned to embrace my problem hair. Celebrate it even.
I've learned how to conquer some fears... I can now stand up on a stage and talk to a hall full of people without dissolving into a quivering mess.
I've learned that it really is best to wash your dishes after supper.
I've also learned the incredibly vital skill of downloading torrents.
And I'm more organised now. I have a filing system and I know how to use it. Most of the time.
I've learned I don't have to apologise to anyone for liking ELO or Bad Company or the Barenaked Ladies.
That I can sing along with any one of these so-not-cool bands in the car.  With people watching. And I don't give a damn.
Perhaps that's the theme for the next decade....I'm forty and frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.

Can I get a hallelujah?!!!

  Thanks to my lovely family for a stunning birthday weekend filled with many best things.....

 

 

...can't think of a better way to celebrate one's fortieth. 

Thank you ; ) 

Check out more photos in flickr.

Let it all hang out

let it all hang out

What do you get when you take a bunch of teachers wine tasting at the end of a rough term?
A slow, inexorable slide (well, maybe not so slow) into drunken debauchery. Well, maybe not too debaucherous, (spell check says there's no such word but you know what I mean) ...but drunken slide into something.....
...Silliness. And comradery.... and the sense of  freedom that drinking five half glasses of champagne in quick succession (with nougat chasers) can bring.


If anyone finds themselves near the JC LeRoux Estate with some time on their hands, a craving for sweets and the desire to get really pissed really quickly, go for the champagne and nougat tasting.

Names and faces are blurred to protect the innocents they teach. And because I might not have had the steadiest hand at the time.

Somewhere in Stellenbosch. 

This shot was taken from inside the hired van we used for the day. I'm amazed that any pics post champagne guzzling tasting came out, quite frankly.  We went on to do another wine farm and had lunch at some stage but the memory's a bit of a blur at this point.
It rained a bit. We ate. We drank some more.
And suddenly all the dramas and politics and clusterfucks of the term faded into insignificance.
We were bathed in the glow of achievement and sheer gratitude that we had made it out alive.

what teachers make












ETA- After working on this bloody code for the last three hours and exceeding my geek quota for the day I give up. How the hell do I get that godawful blue in the title post to GO AWAY?!!! J- do you know? The little bugger is sitting embedded in a wad of CSS that I actually thought I understood but is now total gobbledegeek. *sigh*
That colour is killing me.
Fixed. *g*

kites are fun

kites are fun
It's amazing what the power of the lens can do.
It dragged me out of the stupor I usually find myself in when the school term has finally ended. This morning my body felt like I'd just crawled on my elbows ( boot camp-style...in the mud) through WWIII- and if you teach you'll understand when I say that a Concert Term in the middle of winter is the equivalent of trench warfare. You can't see where you're going, you never see sunlight and the only things keeping you going are the hip flask and postcards from home.

Anywayyyy, I had to go and buy some electricity so I decided to kill two birds and take the Sigma for a walk on the beach. There is a special little hell reserved for all those privileged enough to find themselves living in the coastal town of the Strand.... The Wind. It blows there. A lot.
So I wasn't too surprised to find it really pumping (as the windsurfers lovingly refer to a gale). I sat in my car in disgust and then realised that I couldn't keep Sigma wrapped up in cotton wool for ever. If she were to be my walkabout  lens she'd have to just get out there and be exposed to the elements. So I drove down to the surfers' end and to my delight found the sky festooned with brightly coloured kites. And surfers hanging on down below for dear life.
Telephoto time.

The wind was freezing and I got earache in my left ear, but it was also wonderfully exhilarating.
I won't bore you with the technical details. It always takes me forever to work out the right settings (I'm stubbornly staying in manual mode) and it's a kind of hit and miss thing still. These are the hits. Hopefully.

 

While the kite surfers were creating intrinsically beautiful and colourful whoops and sweeps across the shoreline a bit further down the beach, others were trying to look cool but only managing the bloody-hell-it's-freezing look.

 

They were shooting an ad for something or other. A small patch of sand was littered with skinny models wrapped up to their noses in beach towels. And some guy with a loudhailer kept shouting 'OK people, I know it's cold but we need you to....' etc etc....

This extra had the right idea...

You gotta get off your butt.

 

And shoot the breeze.

 Go fly a kite.

More kites and things at my Flickr site.

PS- Check out the Youtube vid link under the title. Love this song and the video is quirky, cute and just perfect.

Lost Coastlines..and a new lens

Lost Coastlines
Today was my duvet day. A Friday when one of us (name drawn from a hat) is fortunate enough to escape the institution at 10:00  and start the weekend early. The only thing stopping me from making an actual date with my duvet and climbing into bed with a copy of Julie & Julia in one hand and bar of chocolate in the other, was the fact that I had a brand spanking new lens waiting for me at the post office. So I collected my Sigma 18-200 f/3.5 (how scary is it that I know those specs off by heart?) and headed for the beach.

The Sigma is a telephoto lens which, as my brother so succinctly put it, will now allow me to take sneaky pics of people without them knowing.
Of course, we've had the shittiest weather imaginable and winter still has us in it's claws so when I arrived at the Strand beach it was decidedly empty. No people anywhere.
So I took pics of big fat clouds and churned up brown sea....

 

And an interesting log bit.

And a half a tree dumped rather artistically during one of our recent storms....

 

So far no people.

I was just beginning to give up when this lady arrived, dogs in tow. Telephoto time.

See how powerful the lens is? 

I'm terrible at estimating distances but I'm standing like, really far away, OK?

Two things I had not noticed until I popped this shot in Lightroom...

a.) She's smiling at me. I had no idea! Probably telling me to bugger off under her breath.

b.) The big rottweiler is cocking it's leg over the flotsam and jetsam. Niiice.

Then this guy walked in from the sea.

I think he knew I was trying to shoot him.
He'd keep on looking round and I'd noncholantly swing the lens away and pretend I was actually looking somewhere else.
Then another surfer arrived.

I was really far away for this shot too.
He seemed in an awful hurry. I could have told him not to get too excited....not much happening out there with waves like that. What's the surfer term for those conditions, boet?
Crap?
 My lens however, in my totally unprofessional opinion is not crap.
I love it already.