Midlands getaway

We're here! Bacon Vleis, or as they call it, Beacons Vlei.

Really nice. We're in the cheaper B&B room, but no-one else is here so it's pretty much our house :)

We score cheaper rooms WITH breakfast so we can now use the savings to buy dinner :)

New blog layout

Bryan here. I've just made a template update to the blog; hopefully the new blogger template editor will inspire Kat to finally get more hands-on with the blog, but for now, I've been doodling. What do you think? :)

The old blog looked like this:

Which do you prefer?

Fifa World Cup, Westville Baptist Style

Lots of noise - vuvuzela's etc. and a few flags and face paintings and shirts the wrong way, but all in all - good effort :)

Music in the Hills 2010

It strikes me as quite strange that the first time I've actually really come to appreciate our beautiful South African (specifically, Durban) winters is when I've lived here for more than three decades. Wow they're wonderful! Nice clear skies, sunny, but not sweltering - just warm and crisp. Really wonderful! Maybe my stint in sub zero temperatures over Christmas have helped me to appreciate home more - who knows!

This Sunday past, Kat and I decided to take my mom out for a special picnic and art exhibition in Makaranga Gardens - the event was called MUSIC IN THE HILLS, and yes, there was music too!

At R80 per person it wasn't cheap, but we had a grand time (nice and sunny) and were treated to quality Philharmonics including James Bond medleys, Pirates of the Caribbean medleys, and the obligatory Superman and Pink Panther themes. I even managed to squeeze in a nap :)

Happy birthday PACMAN!!

[UPDATE: go to http://www.google.com/pacman/ to continue the madness]

Wow. What a neat surprise!
www.google.com is celebrating Pacman's 30th birthday and what better way to celebrate it than to play two player Pacman & Pacgirl with my favorite gal?
Thanks Al for the tip :)

The luxuries of location!

While driving along a road pretty much adjacent to the one we're staying on (or rather, within close proximity to it), we discovered this little convenience whose usefulness has probably been lost to most of the current generation - the little marvel of a day mostly gone by; a posting box!

No sooner had we discovered this luxury of our location, that I put it to good use. Shamefully I confess I am not sure if I included the correct postage stamps, but I am hopeful it all worked out!

Update on our lives

It appears that some people may not know the entirely current status of our lives, so here's a brief update to get people "up to some level of speed" with the (new) Johnstons:

• We own a flat (well, we own about 25% of it, and ABSA the other 75%)* in Westville
• I am presently the re-elected chairman of the trustees for this mixed commercial / residential complex
• Some guy from Israel and a few other wallies have made life in the complex a veritable hell for the other (and only honest) owners
• Amongst other things, property has essentially been taken and sold without our permission, rules have been broken (not minor things either, but rather serious things that are causing the residential units to lose real estate value or any potential rental income they may derive because no-one wants to live in the flats any more thanks to the unhappy climate and conditions), electricity has been illegally tapped off for the Thai restaurant (I better not mention the name... what's the capital of Thailand and what do you thwow at a wabbit?), our communal water supply is being used to drive the commercial ventures (and laundromats and restaurants use a lot of water, let's be honest), people ram gates when they refuse to sign for a remote control, and I've been threatened several times and assaulted because I am the chairman representing the Body Corporate in a High Court battle against the transgressors. 
• * The Thai restaurant and the Israeli oke own a portion now too, since they took some of it :-/

Blogs gone private

Well it's been a long time since our last post to this blog: sadly, it's been two months of silence and the main reason for this has been that a very sorry group of people have found it worth their while and  (apparently limitless time) to scour through our blogs and extract any tidbits of information that they can use to harass us and generally just cause headaches. Yes, these people are connected to our High Court case, so it's no surprise that they've resorted to this nefarious (and based on the logs indicating their time spent on the site and their browsing habits, also desperately sad) approach in order to somehow "gain the upper hand". In order to err on the side of caution, we've had to take our blogs "off the grid" for the time being, but rather than keep you all in the dark, and because of popular demand, we've opened it up to a select list of readers (you should feel honoured that you made the cut!).

Don't expect much coming from us at the moment anyway, because we've been so used to NOT posting news that it's going to require some changes of habit, and also Kat and I are both presently desperately sick, so we're not really in the mood right now :)

A lot has happened in the past two months, and hopefully over the course of the next several weeks we'll be able to catch those that care back up to speed!

Life :)

Aaah. What bliss! A peaceful trip down the coast and a welcome break from all the muck of the past week+ ...

Good friends, good rest, good food, good times!

And of course, I got to enjoy pretty much all of the Super 14 rugby action, and Kat / Steve had their fair share of RomCom's, and we indulged in a good night out (dinner & a movie) - The Book of Eli is as how I predicted it would be; Mad Max with a biblical twist (I'd give it a 6 out of 10... But that's a story for another time).

The verse for the weekend; Rom 12:1-4 ... Do not conform to the pattern of this world... renew your mind!!

What temptation it is to sell our flat and buy a beach house...

Peace out!

Twelve minutes means mighty fine

What started off as a lovely sunny day out together at Umhlanga beach has turned into a rather expensive excursion for us!
For the record, this is Kat's responsibility, not mine :) ... This had better not be coming out of my birthday budget!

Back into the swing of life in sunny RSA

Highly recommended! Woodrose in Hillcrest Heritage Market!

Final posts of holiday are up

The final posts (with more photo's than text) from our holiday blog are up:

Day 18 is up: http://bratandkat.blogspot.com/2010/01/day-18-san-francisco-penultimate-day-of.html
Day 19 is up: http://bratandkat.blogspot.com/2010/01/day-19-final-day-san-francisco-new-york.html

Hello World... I mean, South Africa!

A few milestones today!

First, it happens to be the FIRST day of 2010 that we have spent on African soil!

Second, I just realised... When we woke up earlier "this day" we walked across the Golden Gate Bridge and now here we are back home in South Africa! How insane!!!

You see, our day started at around 10am on Thursday morning (that's about 8pm Thursday your time) and did a lot of sightseeing and exploring for the day.

The highlight was undoubtedly walking across the Golden Gate Bridge and watching the sunset over the Pacific Ocean (around 5pm our time... 3am your time). After that we headed to our hotel where we shuttled to SFO International Airport.

We hit the flight from SFO to JFK around 11pm our time (9am your time on Friday) and landed in JFK 8am their time (3pm your time). From there we flew to JHB, and then DBN.

In other words, our body clocks started flying 1130pm Thursday, and landed 36 hours later on Saturday 1130am. In reality we were up since 10am so add on another 13 hours or so, and we've been awake for almost 40 hours with 6 hours' worth of naps (they were never long or good enough to be termed "sleeps").

What amazes me - and maybe it's just the tiredness talking - is that earlier in our "woken day", we were in San Francisco, checking out Golden Gate Bridge, before flying to JFK, and then off to JHB and finally, DBN.

How small this world has become!!

Final Day

Goodbye USA!

We are presently sitting at JFK awaiting the boarding call for SA flight 204 to JHB. The time here is 7 hours before the time on this post (US Eastern time). We took off from San Francisco around 10:20pm Western Time (is it Pacific Western time?), and landed here 6am'ish in JFK. It was about 6 hours of flying, but it was actually very comfortable - the Boeing 757-3 cabin flight we were on had ample leg room (even for under-seat storage AND legs), and the arm rests folded all the way back. It was very pleasant! Best flight I've ever had. Congratulations to United Airlines!

Day 19 (Final Day) - San Francisco - New York

Well everyone, it is with great sadness that I type this final post and bring an end (almost) to our USA 2009/2010 holiday. It's been a wonderful experience and made even moreso by my trusty travel companion, my sweet BlackBerry Katherine. Since this is going to be a long "day" (wake up 10am on Thursday morning, land in Durban 11:30am Saturday), we will do our best to keep the post as close to a picture-story (with captions) as possible, for your reading pleasure. For those that have endured my lengthy accounts of our holiday, thank you for taking the time - it was a joy feeling like people that we value were sharing in our day-to-day adventures. Thanks too for your comments!