Birthday Fondues, CVs and Motherboards
Alright, I haven’t updated this blog since last week, so here’s what has been happening in my life since the weekend.
On Friday evening, we went to The Butcher Block in Glenwood for Peter’s surprise birthday party. It was a pleasant evening despite not knowing a good many people at the table, and, after sitting in the smoking section all night, coming home reeking almost as badly as if we had spent the night at Burn.
Saturday evening was my fondue. I hope people enjoyed it because it’s the first and last time I’ll be hosting one of that scale, for a couple of reasons. A) Fondues are not cheap. B) Paul and I spent 2 hours on Sunday morning scrubbing oily pots crusted with crumbs and nauseating meaty ‘floaters’ that had fallen off forks the evening before, and turned into snacks from Supersize Me. C) Saturday was probably the hottest day of the Durban summer so far, which made party preparations a pain. The humidity was quite literally paralysing. A couple of people at my party had bad headaches, probably as a result of dehydration or sunstroke. I spent the evening in my costume and a sarong because that was the only thing I could bear against my skin.
I didn’t take many pictures, but here are some of Bronwyn and John, Shirley and G, Shirley with Mark and Gareth, and myself and Paul. With the broken pool light it was too dark to take photos of the everyone splashing around in the pool after dinner. Shirley and I made the decision to stay out of the water, what with the guys playing dodgeball with a very hard basketball that was impossible to see against the night sky.
There is one thing that I want to say at this point and that is how I am pissed off by people who do not, or only RSVP at the last minute, for events and celebrations (eg. Weddings) that require preparations on the part of the host. There are people out there who SMS bullshit excuses 10 minutes before the party begins. Excuses like, ‘Oh, we had a business engagement come up’. No ‘business engagement’ comes up suddenly on a Saturday evening to take both parts of a couple away from a party. If you don’t want to come, and you know that early in the week, just tell the host you can’t make it. Then. It’s a common courtesy that people seem to have forgotten.
Anyway, Sunday was pretty quiet after the party clean-up. Paul and I just played PC games and watched TV.
Monday was a mix of optimism and disappointment. On the disappointment side, plans for Monday evening collapsed twice. First, Lara’s kinda-birthday bash at Waxy’s Irish pub fell through at the last minute. It’s now a given that whenever Lara organises anything that you always ALWAYS check that the arrangements have held. Normally, they break down. Monday was no exception, leaving Paul and me to fend for our dinner.
So Paul, myself and Warren decided to play Settlers of Catan. But as we were about to depart for Paul’s house, a 5-hour power failure hit Yellowwood Park, killing any chance of a game.
On the positive side, Paul has been sorting out a PC for his cousin who starts university this year, and in the process of finding and ordering parts, he came across a motherboard that would be a perfect little upgrade hop for my PC. The board supports AGP 8X and serial ATA. In dumbed down non-computer geek speak that means I can get an 8-speed AGP graphics card- If I bought a new AGP (not PCI- Express) card right now, it would only ever run at 4-speed, meaning its full performance capabilities would be wasted. In terms of serial ATA, I can have the much faster, little red cables connecting the hard drive/s to the motherboard instead of those big clunky cables that slow data transfer. The big advantage here is that I could then buy a second hard drive and know that it would have a very fast connection to the motherboard. (Please correct me, people out there, if I am talking absolute shit)
Anyway, Paul’s cousin is not a gamer. All she will be using the PC for is word processing. So the deal is that she will receive my current board in her PC case, and I will receive the new board, at the same time as I probably buy some new RAM and contribute towards a graphics card for the cousin’s PC (My current motherboard has no built in graphics card).
Of course, I am a naturally anxious person. I’m one of those believers ‘that if it aint broke, don’t fix it’. So I’m nervous about swapping parts, particularly when my mother board has been good to me. Then there’s the worry that something won’t work or won’t be compatible and the arrangements and planning will all go to hell. So we’ll wait and see what happens…
Oh, totally off-topic, but I’ve just been watching the Golden Globes on TV. ZZZZ… Granted I’ve been out of the ‘serious’ film scene this year, but really, the big ‘award’ films of 2005 are so dull. I don’t see any of them motivating the public into cinema seats.
On Friday evening, we went to The Butcher Block in Glenwood for Peter’s surprise birthday party. It was a pleasant evening despite not knowing a good many people at the table, and, after sitting in the smoking section all night, coming home reeking almost as badly as if we had spent the night at Burn.
Saturday evening was my fondue. I hope people enjoyed it because it’s the first and last time I’ll be hosting one of that scale, for a couple of reasons. A) Fondues are not cheap. B) Paul and I spent 2 hours on Sunday morning scrubbing oily pots crusted with crumbs and nauseating meaty ‘floaters’ that had fallen off forks the evening before, and turned into snacks from Supersize Me. C) Saturday was probably the hottest day of the Durban summer so far, which made party preparations a pain. The humidity was quite literally paralysing. A couple of people at my party had bad headaches, probably as a result of dehydration or sunstroke. I spent the evening in my costume and a sarong because that was the only thing I could bear against my skin.
I didn’t take many pictures, but here are some of Bronwyn and John, Shirley and G, Shirley with Mark and Gareth, and myself and Paul. With the broken pool light it was too dark to take photos of the everyone splashing around in the pool after dinner. Shirley and I made the decision to stay out of the water, what with the guys playing dodgeball with a very hard basketball that was impossible to see against the night sky.
There is one thing that I want to say at this point and that is how I am pissed off by people who do not, or only RSVP at the last minute, for events and celebrations (eg. Weddings) that require preparations on the part of the host. There are people out there who SMS bullshit excuses 10 minutes before the party begins. Excuses like, ‘Oh, we had a business engagement come up’. No ‘business engagement’ comes up suddenly on a Saturday evening to take both parts of a couple away from a party. If you don’t want to come, and you know that early in the week, just tell the host you can’t make it. Then. It’s a common courtesy that people seem to have forgotten.
Anyway, Sunday was pretty quiet after the party clean-up. Paul and I just played PC games and watched TV.
Monday was a mix of optimism and disappointment. On the disappointment side, plans for Monday evening collapsed twice. First, Lara’s kinda-birthday bash at Waxy’s Irish pub fell through at the last minute. It’s now a given that whenever Lara organises anything that you always ALWAYS check that the arrangements have held. Normally, they break down. Monday was no exception, leaving Paul and me to fend for our dinner.
So Paul, myself and Warren decided to play Settlers of Catan. But as we were about to depart for Paul’s house, a 5-hour power failure hit Yellowwood Park, killing any chance of a game.
On the positive side, Paul has been sorting out a PC for his cousin who starts university this year, and in the process of finding and ordering parts, he came across a motherboard that would be a perfect little upgrade hop for my PC. The board supports AGP 8X and serial ATA. In dumbed down non-computer geek speak that means I can get an 8-speed AGP graphics card- If I bought a new AGP (not PCI- Express) card right now, it would only ever run at 4-speed, meaning its full performance capabilities would be wasted. In terms of serial ATA, I can have the much faster, little red cables connecting the hard drive/s to the motherboard instead of those big clunky cables that slow data transfer. The big advantage here is that I could then buy a second hard drive and know that it would have a very fast connection to the motherboard. (Please correct me, people out there, if I am talking absolute shit)
Anyway, Paul’s cousin is not a gamer. All she will be using the PC for is word processing. So the deal is that she will receive my current board in her PC case, and I will receive the new board, at the same time as I probably buy some new RAM and contribute towards a graphics card for the cousin’s PC (My current motherboard has no built in graphics card).
Of course, I am a naturally anxious person. I’m one of those believers ‘that if it aint broke, don’t fix it’. So I’m nervous about swapping parts, particularly when my mother board has been good to me. Then there’s the worry that something won’t work or won’t be compatible and the arrangements and planning will all go to hell. So we’ll wait and see what happens…
Oh, totally off-topic, but I’ve just been watching the Golden Globes on TV. ZZZZ… Granted I’ve been out of the ‘serious’ film scene this year, but really, the big ‘award’ films of 2005 are so dull. I don’t see any of them motivating the public into cinema seats.
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