Kat's first day in Uganda

Hey everyone, so I landed in Entebbe airport about 3 hours ago and am totally exhausted but my first look at Uganda was beautiful. Evening was falling and the sun was setting over Lake Victoria and there was mist over the lake and all it was all grey merging with the grey lake with glimpses of a big cherry, red sun between the mist. I took some shots from the plane as we were flying in which I will try add in. The we is Huub and I....Huub is a doctor who has just joined HPP.
After some confusion about getting to Kampala (we discovered a driver "Herberb" had been sent for us and he was standing waiting with our names.."Huub and Katherine") we took ages getting in because there was so much traffic. It was amazing to see so many shops open at night with neon lights or flourescent lights on ...apparently they stay open till late...I think these Ugandans must work hard. Traffic was pretty similar to driving at night in Mozambique except there were fewer potholes.
Luckily I got dropped off first at my hotel cos I was yawning away in the back of the car (think it was a bakkie/jeep/landrover)...I love the hotel. Am in the Protea Hotel in luxury waiting at this moment for room service to deliver my hawaiian burger cos I'm too tired to go sit in the restaurant and use up my complimentary voucher for a free bottle of wine.

Super stoked there is wireless complimentary here so I can chat to Bryan and everyone else but looking forward to a good shower and then a long sleep. We are driving to Mbarara tomorrow - a 4 and a bit hour drive so that should be fun...sad I will be leaving the lap of luxury :P

Missing my hubby but after some sleep I should be able to get excited about this adventure :)

Left3Dead

Simon Clur's back in town.

For a bit of catch-up, we've organised a few sessions of 4 player co-op Left 4 Dead (L4D) madness, with the three core being Kat, Simon, and me, and whenever he's available, Oltman would make up the 4th. Last night we chose to indoctrinate a n00b into our survivor squad - WezFlash.

Sunday saw Simon enjoying a meaty triple-stacker Debonairs pizza with me, and some co-op L4D together at the Bothas' (Simon's confessed that he has a soft spot for them). Sadly, Debonairs spoiled our evening a bit by either refusing to make the pizza we wanted, or refusing to deliver the pizza (two separate branches). In the end we had to drive the 3.6km by road to pick it up ourselves (I make a point of this since their terms say 5km radius). This is not the end of this argument and I am already chasing it up with customer care.

Last night Simon, Kat and I enjoyed a nice dinner at Chez Nous, and then a late night stint of Left 4 Dead.

It was good to catch up and reminisce over the good old (young?) days.

Our apartment in Westville

Have some of you wanted to know what our troublesome flat looks like? Well, it's troublesome in the sense that we have had to deal with some super greedy foreigners and some super stupid (and incompetent) estate agents who just don't seem to understand anything about the expensive product they're marketing... "agents" is a very loose term for some of these idiots.

Anyway, enough ranting, here are the photographs of our flat (click on the title to go to the original FLICKR post of this picture for download options, etc. although I don't know why you'd want to download them :)):

Our Bathroom:


Main Bedroom:


Second Bedroom:


Lounge:

There is such a thing as free chocolate after all... And it tastes like Toblerone :) :)

Well what a pleasure!

Tonight Kat and I went to Woolworths to pick a nice meal for date night, and stumbled upon some real bargains!

Free chocolate, free strawberries, and R33 rotisserie chicken!

I must say, the chocolate was a bargain and very tasty. I recommend the bubbly one and the mountain one :)

Sayonara Sushi Sam the Psycho Siamese Samurai

We came home tonight and I took my traditional look at Sam's sunken sanctuary, only to discover Sam no looking so good.

Sam was very still. Very, very still. And a bit upside down.

"Uh oh. Kat. I think your fish is dead".

After the initial shock wore off, we took a brief recount of Sam's life with the (NEW) Johnstons;

Arrived December 2006 @ 767 Old Main Rd.
Moved to 3A River Drive while we were homeless ca. February 2008.
Moved to 25 Romax Court ca. July 2008.
Moved to our current home March 2009.

He's been around with us almost 3 years, which according to most websites is the average lifespan of these fish. He had a good life (and a near miss when we first got him, but we managed to save him from any fungal rot, but not from a swim bladder disorder).

S. I. P (sink in peace) Sushi Sam. You were a fun guy, and we didn't really realise it all the time :)

60s slideshow

For posterity's sake (the main gadget slideshow will change over time), here is a slideshow of some pictures I dumped on PICASA for now so you can get a taste of what fun we had at our 60th birthday party. Click to play the slideshow.

Layout changes

I've made some basic layout changes to this blog to incorporate what I think is a better design to the layout and also splash out some slideshow gadget stuff for the combined 60s party Kat and I had. Hopefully Kat won't object to these modifications - please let us know if this site is too slow with the changes!

Brief catch-up (AKA castration times)

Hi everyone (uh, I mean, mom... and that guy who stumbled on this site by accident)

Okay, so I'm back from Mozambique - what an amazing experience!! I thought I'd die, but thankfully I held out until Thursday morning before I started to contract Moz-lung (it's not that well known, but it started to spread like crazy in our team of 34). I've been out of action for about a week - still coughing now even - but life is looking good.

Will catch up on the 24 voice messages I have, and get things in order (and get used to work again, and this awful commercialised capitalist society we live in), and then try to post more information.

In brief:

1. Mozambique was awesome
2. I had a very busy Sunday night at church - counted money (very low turnout on the finances side), prepared burgers (we did a special cheese & pineapple deal this week), served coffee (we did a special hot chocolate and marshmallows deal this week), and gave a testimony in the sermon (I should be in line for a St.'hood ...)
3. Speaking of St.'hood - check out http://brattex.blogspot.com/2009/07/stefan-terblanche_16.html for the antics that a bunch of guys got up to in Mozambique. It was inevitable that we'd talk about sport, and it was inevitable that I'd bring up Stefan Terblanche, and it was madness how everyone got involved in the conversation and we came up with our very own meme! Check it out! (Rumour has it that Stefan himself will view the page soon; in the meanwhile the Sharks players are ragging him about it or something)
4. My little Max puppy (his full name is Texas Maximillion the Third; based on him being Tex, and me being Brat, so it's Brat+Tex, and his nickname is Max, and he's my third dog) is having his balls cut off at the tender age of 9 and a half! I feel so guilty and so awful, but he's had a good innings. I guess now he'll just be using his pillow to sleep on in future :-/

That's my brief update! Kat's been doing okay - been an awesome help having her around to look after me - she came back a day after I did from her stint in the 'Berg for Duncan's birthday (with the family) and she was exhausted! We're looking forward to some fun times ahead though; with me bringing back from Moz what I've learnt, and for us to start taking the next steps in our journeys through life, whatever they are!

Ciao for now!

Eeek a week apart!

Oh dear, so I see neither of us have been particularly informative of late so I'd better feel you in on latest events. So Bryan is off on the Westville Baptist Church Mozambique mission tomorrow morning early early....I'm staying at home after much confusion about whether I should be going or not. I've decided to stay as I don't have leave available and would have to take unpaid leave and there is loads of work to do in my new job. Feeling very sad though that we won't be sharing the experience together especially as it has so many momentus memories for us...first mission we went on we were broken up so you can imagine the torment, second mission we got engaged on the Costa da Sol beach, third mission we were married...the Mozzies must think we are loopy! So seeing as we love sharing experiences that grow and challenge us it's crumby that I'm not going. Anyway enough moping, am hoping that I have made a good decision and if not then I will just have to learn from it...I have already learn that I tend to jump to conclusions and worry about making decisions based on my assumptions so from now on I'm going to work on not jumping so far ahead and trying to wrestle with imagined decisions that may never need to be made...I know this probably doesn't make sense but it is my weakness to jump the gun and I need to learn to investigate all the realistic options first and go step by step.
So anyway, I'm rising early to drop Bryan off for the mission (aarghh serious lack of sleep this week) and am going to be totally lonely for the week but am also looking forward to going to bed early, organising and tidying our home (this is what I keep myself busy with when I'm lonely or bored and have had enough sleep), taking some time out for just me and keeping everyone on mission prayfully in mind.

Have loaded Bryan up with snacks and goodies for the trip seeing as they are really going rural this year and am planning big meal tonight, hopefully we get him all packed and ready so we can enjoy a relaxing evening.

Bryan is also preaching on Sunday morning after a long drive on Sat so please keep him in your thoughts and prayers...am so proud and excited for him!

Got to go do the work...bye peeps!

Withdrawal symptoms

I know a lot of you out there are desperate to know what's going on with the Johnstons, so I'm sorry for not keeping you updated.

A lot of stuff has been happening, and we'll do our best to blog about it at some point - in a nutshell:

1. Kat's 30th birthday happened
2. Kat and my 60th birthday party happened
3. I'm preparing to depart on a week-long mission to Mozambique (tomorrow) - check out my personal blog for more details

Until later, then!!

Janith + Rafael Campero - 12 months and still both alive!

Hey guys

Congratulations on making it to one year and still not having hurt each other in any nasty way :)

You own a house, you have a baby, what more could you want? What's that? Another baby??

Well done guys - we recall with great fondness that special wedding day, and I seem to have a knack of screwing up *something* whenever I MC - for your wedding it was the distinct honour of being the first friend to see Janith in her wedding dress, arriving at the chapel moments before going in, and when she said "hi Bryan", I replied with "when must they play the music?" instead of saying something gentle and reassuring, or at least complimentary :) ... ah well...

Where's all the coloured folk at?

Welcome weekend! We've missed you so!

This is the official final pre-30's Saturday and Sunday that Katherine will ever have (unless she manages to discover the trick to stopping time. Somehow spinning herself anti-clockwise every evening hasn't managed to achieve anything for her so far apart from some weird dizziness and vertigo).

In the morning we planned to take my mom to the HCA fair, but I received a sleep-disrupting phone call at 7am from her saying she was sick, so Kat and I went up at about 11am on our own.

It was really busy, but the one thing that stood out to me was the fact that it was like a whites-only Christian convention*, very similar to the Mighty Mens Conference*. It's crazy that I'd still notice that sort of thing, but it was glaringly obvious in the crowd of three or four thousand.

At any rate, it was fun to walk around and check out what was on offer. We bumped into Shane James and otherwise remained fairly anonymous. I did this game called tombola and "won" R5's worth of orange Cheetahs crocs, and Kat "won" R5's worth of SA rugby crocs (so jealous!). It was fun, but I think the people running it enjoyed it more than we did. They loved having adults participating. How it works? You use a finger (any finger) and point at a random card and then they dig up a prize from the box with the corresponding card. Tough huh?

The rest of the evening was spent watching rugby, eating fruit salad, lasagne, salad, pies, chips, and drinking fruit juice.

I highly recommend the classic strawberry mix from Woolworths!!

*obviously this was not the planners' intention

The Perfect Pizza ... Plan

Aah... Wood-fired Pizza Perfect - the perfect end to the perfect evening, resulting in me proposing to my wife, the perfect and prime plot to pig out on pizza. Permit me to provide you, dear reader, with the precise playing out of our ploy to present ourselves with a piece-meal path to partaking in a particularly regular Italian-produced meal.

What precisely is the plan, people may ask?

Primarily, the plan is to pick pizze (that's the correct Italian plural for pizza) from the list in priority, from top to bottom, one at a time. The reason? Why not! It may take us a few years, and we may never get to indulge in the entire menu, but it's a fun plan, and who knows - maybe we'll win something more than just a peculiar portion of pride from persevering with our private challenge :)

We aren't Pizza Perfect pundits by any stretch of the imaginaton, and pizza isn't in predominant provision in our premises, but in light of our desires to do memorable and exciting things, this is placed right up there with playing piano and planting potatoes!

One thing I am certain of - it certainly will lead to more peaceful picking of pizze in-store, and the precision with which we shall purchase our pastry will present the other patrons with paralysing and petrifying pressure to pick their pasta post-haste.

We don't eat much pizza normally, but this year alone we've purchased three perfect pizza meals so it may prove to be practical for our continued patronage, although we must certainly pace ourselves and prepare to pack some leftovers for work the next day. The placing of the orders is one thing, but the paying for all the pizze could reach in excess of R1,000! The pair of us will pursue this palatable challenge with vigour while also pursuing princely principals of prudence.

Please, I must place emphasis on the fact that this preliminary proposal is our intellectual property!

Some may feel that this is a peculiar and perilous (particularly pathetic) paltry pass at achieving some epithets of grandeur. I can assure those that feel this way, that we are doing this only for a bit of fun, and not any degree of over-indulgence!

To pacify all you eager readers, I'll present the progress of our peerless ploy online and include the link in an update. Please, plagiarism is not permitted and anyone purported to be poaching, will be presented to the police. Until then, please be patient while our peachy plan pans out...

PEACE!

Hannah Thomas

The homegroup snuck out of church at 19h15 to go and visit the Thomas family. Rich Erasmus was preaching something about Hebrews 10:23-25 and connecting with community or something. Then he mentioned the 8pm movie, at which point our home group got up from various spots in the church and left. Hopefully he wasn't too confused :)



We spotted the lovely mother (some sort of super diet there), proud father, and adorable daughter. Layle snapped a shot but I failed to get it. She's apparently very sweet, very healthy, very audible, very hungry - and what lovely sideburns she has! Aubrey must be proud!



That's the update for now - Hannah Thomas, welcome to God's green earth.



An sms from her loving father arrived yesterday and reads:



"Sent: May 30, 2009 09:57

Going to have to take a rain cheque on tonight due a very small girl deciding to make her grand entrance onto God's great earth today. Going to be a long day, I'll keep in touch."



Interestingly, Layle observed that Hannah is a palindrome! ...And incidentally, she WAS just born yesterday!

One of those days...

Man. What a day.

Let's see, I think the end of the story is a wonderful way to sum up how this has just been "one of those days"... Our dear tenant left one of the taps running in the flat the entire day, and at about 230pm I received a call from the chiropractor below advising me that water was coming into his section from above. Kind of sums up the day, doesn't it?

What we did today (in no particular order):

* contractors came to work to attend to our faulty LAB doors (four of them, for over two years)
* contractors left without having done anything
* plumbers came to fix my mom's faulty geyser (which had been "fixed" two weeks earlier by them)
* plumbers left my mom's place without repairing the fault in her geyser
* insurance now claimed they couldn't cover the damage because it was a new fault (?)
* Kat found a new plumber to come and repair the geyser (this guy was amazing! Mamba plumbers - Lloyd; highly recommended)
* the security guys came 2 hours early for an appointment at my mom's house so I had to leave work to attend to them at 1030am as opposed to our previously agreed 12pm appointment. Technicians were there to repair the stuff-up the previous technicians had done but blamed on "old wires"
* I again had to tell the security company we were not going to be happy to pay for a fault that wasn't there prior to the first technician (Radebe) showing up
* a dodgy red Honda Ballade ND662164 was spotted driving up and down our road
* security at guard hut up the road said the Honda was a cop car because the occupants had guns and kevlar. Some comfort.
* technicians didn't do anything, but said the alarm was a mess. They left with a promise to "report the problem" to management. Sounds familiar.
* DISCOVERY confirmed I was a member of VITALITY so Kat could migrate on as my dependant and not lose any points next week. This after I first applied May 7'ish, and again a week later, and again a week later after DISCOVERY kept losing my application.
* Kat found out that I was actually only being put on VITALITY in JULY so her points wouldn't be transferred across.
* my new BlackBerry suffers from a "white screen of death" (WSOD) and I can't use it
* I phone VITALITY who tells me I must talk to my HR. My HR says I must talk to VITALITY. Last time I phoned, VITALITY said I must do this or that, but now today's rep says do that or this.
* I phone management. She asks how I got her personal number, but still agrees to help. I'm on VITALITY for June now.
* BlackBerry WSOD again
* Soren comes to my office and has a breakdown which is ended off by him yelling "my [expletive] Friday is over". I calm him down. He then bounces out joyful for the weekend
* my firefox crashes with all my vital windows and tabs going away
* my LAB image for 210 PCs next semester, decides to break while I'm preparing it
* my virtual server gives an access violation and I can't get in
* I come home from work @ 7pm to find the school across the road is having a camp-out this weekend.

But Kat and I have a date night, and Kat is spoiling me rotten (see pictures). Aah, roll on Saturday :)