Gabs n Stew

The Gabs n Stew and Tomas show...

So we headed to Dublin to catch up with our buddies, and spent the night at Gabs and Stew's place (sorry, and Tomas' place). Stew decided he was gonna do some boerie rolls on the braai and had bought about 2kgs of sausage. Whew.

We wanted to see Gabs and Stew of course, but the real attraction was Tomas...



Happy dad...



Happy mom...
(Well, she's been feeling pretty grotty actually, cos she's pregnant again - due about the same day as Cath) - but she put on a brave face for us while we were there.



We had a good ol time and while I amused myself with Tomas' whistle controlled train, Cath and Gabs talked baby preparation stuff.


Everybody (singing) "He's got the whole world... in his hands..."

He's a cute lil bugger. I don't know if it's just me, but everyone's babies are starting to look cuter now that I'm a dad to be...

Anyhoo, not too many weekends to go now till we're home.

email forward - don't be glum South Africans

An interesting article written by Alan Knott-Craig (MD iBurst) - to his employees

"Hi guys,Why am I writing this email? Because I'm getting the impression there are some depressed people walking around. So let's recap:

At the beginning of the year people were panicking about the oil price, inflation, electricity and economic recession. Of those big 4 concerns, 3 have taken care of themselves.

1. Oil is now below $40 a barrel, almost one quarter of the price of 4 months ago
2. inflation is not such big deal because oil is cheap nowadays so food & all other costs are falling
3. and .. we haven't had any crazy power outages since February (the Eskom saga is a complete mystery to me - The NEWSPAPERS said it would last 4 years??)
4. What about the Recession? Well, as it turns out, that was something that deserved panic. Especially if your name is Dick and you run a New York investment bank... Fortunately we don't have any Dick's at iBurst.

After the merry-go-round of bad news at the beginning of the year, capped by the xenophobic attacks it's been quite surreal to watch the "u-turn" executed by those heading for the exit door! It's a bit like watching naïve tourists run into the sea off Camp's Bay, scream in pain, and then race back onto the beach. The water looks so nice.. but don't go in there unless you're an Eskimo! Suddenly foreign shores aren't as attractive when there are no jobs, no credit, and no sunshine so people who left are returning to tell those who haven't left not to go.

Just to put a couple of Financial things in perspective, here is some info on the year-to-date performance of world stock markets (as of 10 Nov):

Iceland -89%

China -64%

Russia -64%

India -48%

Hong Kong -46%

Brazil -40%

Japan -40%

USA -36%

Australia -35%

UK -32%

New Zealand -29%

South Africa -26% ..SA is not so bad is it? I'd rather be here than in Iceland?? !!

Sunny SA is certainly not immune to the global economic crisis. Our companies are suffering too, which means fewer bonuses and more retrenchments (always a winning recipe for unhappiness). How long will it last? Who knows, but brace yourselves for a tough 2009. The good news is that after every tough time comes good times, so at least we all have something to look forward to!

What is the silver lining for SA? Our interest rates are still high, but will decrease soon to ease the burden on your back pocket. The UK and USA do not have that luxury, their interests rates are already too low to cut further and it hasn't helped them at all yet!

What else? "Mad Bob" can't last forever. When he heads off into the sunset there will be an absolute bonanza of investment and aid flooding into Zimbabwe, and a large chunk of that windfall will be via sunny SA... oh happy days. Who said there were no plusses to having a failed state as a neighbour?

What else? Anyone noticed the cranes everywhere you look? Seen the Gautrain progress? I went down to CT 2 weeks ago, and virtually the entire highway is under construction. Durban has a new Stadium; a bigger harbour AND a new Airport all finishing in the next 18months The unintended consequence of the government procrastination on infrastructure investment over the past 10 years is that now that it's finally underway - just in time to prop up our economy! Gotta love those bureaucrats.

What else? The Soccer World Cup is coming. If we get it right we'll be the hottest spot on the planet - and we'll have a real shout for hosting the Olympics in about 2020.

But don't crack open the champagne just yet, we still have our fair share of challenges. Your average Yank may be swapping his house for a trailer, but at least he's not worried about being shot in the head on the way to his next job interview. If any of you have a relative or friend in the government, please pass on this message, "Crime is out of control and most of our schools and hospitals are in disarray." Don't for a second fool yourself that we can ignore these structural problems and live the rest of our lives in blissful ignorance. We must constantly remind the politicians to do their jobs, but we cannot absolve ourselves of our responsibility to make individual contributions.

It is our business to make this land a success. Report crime, pick up litter, give to the needy, create jobs, look after the children, drink filter coffee. We've all got a responsibility to make the magic happen, otherwise you'll just end up lying in bed in 50 years time, looking back and saying "What if?"

The time of opportunity is upon us, now it's up to us to seize the day. I've said it before, I'll say it again: Life is not about waiting for storms to pass, it's about learning to dance in the rain.

Looking forward to dancing in 2009!"

Sub-editing

Every now and again you're sooooooooo tempted to write the headline you WANT to write and not the headline you know the boss wants to see...

These are photos of my computer screen while working on a story about how the Irish Health Service forks out xyz euros a year on keeping elderly people in hospital after they've suffered falls.....

The article says the cost to the health service of putting elderly people up in hospital, repairing their hips, etc, etc is 45 million euros a year - and that's just in county Cork! Hence my headlines below...




Then there's the stories I sub...
Note this before and after example ....

Then:

ENGLAND wing Mark Cueto has revealed the full extent of a prolonged
injury nightmare that left him wondering whether he would play
top-level rugby again.

He has not been seen in England colours since his controversial
disallowed try during the 2007 World Cup final, when it was ruled
after what seemed an eternity of TV replays that Cueto had brushed the
touchline.

England subsequently relinquished their...

Pity it was a South African editing your story loser!


Now:

ENGLAND wing Mark Cueto has revealed the full extent of a prolonged
injury nightmare that left him wondering whether he would play
top-level rugby again.

He has not been seen in England colours since the 2007 World Cup
final when he came agonisingly close to scoring in the corner, only
to be tackled into touch.

England subsequently relinquished their...


OKAY, OKAY - I know it's a small thing, but I just hated whingeing poms and it's been a year and a half now since the final. The whiners need to get over themselves. It wasn't a try. Aaaaargh!

Anyway... an example of what gets me through the night...
sometimes I sits and subs and sometimes I just sits.

Getting ready to go home

What a lot we got.

Well, we decided that seeing as we're trying to save some cash on our move back home, and our first quote was for R30,000, Cath thought it would be a good idea to get everything we intend to take home, and put it in a pile in the lounge, so we could see how big / small it really is - thus being able to accurately say how much stuff we wish to move, thus getting an accurate quote.

This wasn't all of it, but you get the idea don't you?


Oh, FYI, it was snowing outside our window earlier this week. Tried to take a piccie but it wouldn't do it justice. Very unusual to snow in the city centre.

I went to the shop later and got rained on on the way there and snowed on on the way back - that's also not the most normal.

Wozniacki

Yep. I have a new favourite tennis player. She hasn't done anything at the slams yet, but hey, she's young - just 18. Watch this space.

(Singing):
She's gorgeous,
She's plucky,
Her surname's Wozniacki
She's a babe!





http://images.google.ie/images?hl=en&client=firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&hs=Hdo&q=Caroline+Wozniacki&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=5&ct=title

skiing 2 - Happy NY

Happy New Year!

Well all the restaurants were charging about 100 euros a person for New Year's eve, so we decided to do the self-catering thing, get a bottle of wine and a beer or two and have our own celebration at our place. But come 11.30ish, we hit the streets to go and take in the fireworks over the ski slopes.

Cath and Lou.

They were pretty awesome - we took about a million photos so I'll just put up my favourites - (Thank God I hear you say) it was pretty smokey after a while cos there really were about a thousand fireworks going off - most of them the shooty up into the sky ones.

The crowd at the fireworks.

More photies of us. Like I say, pretty smokey.

No filters used in these photies (and no photoshop either) - this is as they were taken.

So after that we headed back to the Olympic village and had a piccie in front of it.




I think this was from another day - meal time. Werner looks a lil tired.

This was on our last day - we took the camera out with us on our trip to Saulx de Oux or whatever its called. We were now so confident in our brilliant skiing ability that we risked taking it on the tough slopes.

But first we had a few runs on our cool lil blue slope - just to get our skis to the right temperature of course! This is Cath gunning it down...



Damn! I say damn! I got myself a fine wife!

She's so speedy.



Alan ponders his descent... his descent to... CERTAIN DEATH!

No trip would be complete without the
customary 'hold the camera and take your own photo' shot.

The lil ski brats that are flying past you at 100km p/h. Nah, these ones are just learning.

I think that's me in the foreground.

Cath. This wasn't a sunrise or sunset or anything - just a steepy slope.

Your's truly in the gondola taking us over the mountain.

View from the gondola.

Of course, all this travelling over mountains and taking various routes meant it wasn't easy to know where we were going. Cath had the map and so for about a two-hour period, we would stop every 15 minutes and try and figure out where we were and where we wanted to be to meet up with the other two.



But we did get some good pics at most of our stops.

Oh oh - here comes Cath. she's going a bit faster than normal. She doesn't like too much pace so she's probably gonna stop herself from going too fast by doing...

The Plop.

Singing: "I'm on the top (top) of the world, looking down (down) on creation..."



And we did catch up with them and had another lekker lunch.

Werner shows us how the snowboarders do it:

And Lou shows us how fast SHE can go.

But they both went a little too fast to get any more photos of them.

Stunning.



Who's that person in the funky hat. Oh I know...

Lou and Werner on the ski lift behind us. Our lift beat there's - the only time we were faster than them all week.

Cath skiing at sunset.



Last piccie together before we hand back our skis.

Of course, we stayed as late as we could, which meant a real battle for the ski lifts with every other Tom, Dick and Luigi.



Heading back at our train station, catching the train to Milano (that's Milan to you simple folk)..

At our supper stop before we said goodbye to Lou and Werner - they were staying the night and heading back to SA the next day - I couldn't resist having a pizza with some 'cow ham' as mentioned above on the menu.

And that was that. What a cool trip. Being a bit tight with our savings, I have to admit, Cath basically made me do the skiing thing when I was concerned at how much it cost. But she was right - it was well-worth it, and we probably couldn't have done it much cheaper than we did, so all in all, I was uber-chuffed with the experience.

Good one babes.