@withoutaleaf’s baking triumph. Three days and about 300kgs of butter. By the time we emerge, many of us will have developed a host of refined skills that will probably all be useless in the cannibal wasteland that will follow. We should really be practising barbecuing human hearts and syphoning deisel from speeding trucks while shooting lever-action shotguns with our free hand. Ah well, I was never going to achieve the rank of warlord. More likely I’d be food, second-class.
Trinket is the agile one. So using the balcony railing as her runway doesn’t bother us. Skitten on the other hand - who’s twice been witnessed trying to jump onto a coffee table and failing - makes us fret every time. I took a run Friday when the maximum lockdown restrictions ended. But I need to rethink. The government’s curious decision to only allow exercise between 6 and 9 AM meant that my run by the river was like Oxford Street on a Saturday morning. Most people were wearing masks, but the social distancing is near impossible. . In general our government has given a very mixed performance during the pandemic so far. They locked down early and hard - which is good. But they’ve failed to provide adequately for the massive food insecurity, tolerated extraordinary levels of police brutality (including multiple murders of civlians), and made decisions on lockdown policies that lack any evidence base. It feels, as usual, like the conflict between the essentially competent (if unimaginative) faction of the president and his allies vs. the remaining kleptocrats from Jacob Zuma’s economic strip-mining regime - including the police minister, Bekhi Cele.
That time @withoutaleaf decided to make samoosas for dinner. That’s all we had. A freakin’ pile of homemade samoosas. Because we’re grownups and we can do whatever the hell we like. It was pretty great. There was tamarind sauce. I miss those samoosas.
Morning e para aprender Portugués and drinking coffee in the sun on the balcony. Once I’ve reclaimed my chair from Trinket, that is. We sometimes call this coffee press the, “Darth Vader plunger,” - because it looks like the French Press that would be supplied on Imperial Star Destroyers (imagine the drain gurgle as Vader pours coffee into his helmet). We’ve had it many years and it’s travelled many miles. And it still keeps coffee hot for upwards of an hour.
Housecats. Except they’re free to wander. Luckily Skitten does not, as a rule.
I’m relying heavily on this grinning, moustachioed cyclops to see me through.
A fat, heavy bass guitar amplifier holding up a fat, heavy boi.
Household objects. I believe my dad bought these mugs in Johannesburg in the 1960s. Lieberman apparently. They’re objectively the best coffee mugs. Thick sides retain heat, and modest volume means that it’s still hot when you get to the bottom. I have two and I love them. My folks actually bought some more - very similar - in the ’90s or early 2000s because they were still making them. I’ve been thinking about capitalism’s gears starting to really grind. Consumerism is really bonkers. Many things that are sold everyday last for generations and don’t need replacement. At some point this century, the global population is going to begin falling. And if the game isn’t up by then, it will be after.
Amazingly sharp and contrasty folding binoculars from the 1980s. Posting so that @furiousgreencloud can prove her claims.
Skitten has made the rocking chair by the bedroom window its own perfect bed. It even uses my old Tanzanian blanket as a pillow.