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Well, that's being a bit of a tall order at the moment.  We had a terrible year last year and were determined to have a better one now but as soon as we start thinking that things have to get better, fate seems to take great pleasure in proving us wrong.  But, I'm not going to dwell on that too much it's too depressing and it doesn't make good reading.  I've decided to find something to write about despite the situation as if I wait for something really nice to say, well, it could be a while before there's anything new to read on here!

So, onto nicer things... holiday!  Yay!  All booked now, just making some final plans to meet up with people in the States and the UK.  Most people in the world will be aware by now of the problems at Heathrow's new Terminal 5, the new home of British Airways and guess who we are flying with?  Yep, BA, so we really hope that they get things sorted before we fly into there on 13 April as it could put a real damper on the holiday if they a) lose the luggage, b) tell us we can't take any luggage (bit tough to do a three week trip without any clothes) or c) simply don't put the luggage on the plane!  We have to fly from here to London, then London to San Francisco so we're hoping to book our luggage right through so we don't have to check it all in again but let's hope they can do that!

So, from San Francisco we drive down to San Diego mostly down the coast road, though we're taking a slight detour to go to the Sequoia National Park to see the trees.  We spend a couple of days in LA to see what we want to see but really we're spending more time in San Francisco and San Diego.  From there we fly to Las Vegas for a couple of days and we have a trip to the Grand Canyon booked and after that we fly to Seattle for a couple of days, then to London for a few days to catch up with friends.  Lots of flying around so lots of time to stitch, read or watch any good movies!  I'll be keeping some sort of diary about the trip so I can post things on here though it may not be until I get back as we may not have time come on here while we're away.

So, what else?  Weather is still good over here though I think the season will really change when we're away and we'll probably come back to true autumn.  At the moment we still have lovely days, some very hot (should be 30C today) but it does get colder when the sun goes down, overnight and can be cooler in the mornings which tells us that autumn is on its way. 

We started an ex-pats group over here to meet up with people in similar positions to our own and we've had a few get togethers.  We have one next week (the weekend before we leave) and there should be some new people at that which will be great.  We're going to have 'afternoon tea' at a fabulous patissiere in Cape Town so no one will be on a diet that day!

Film: Not been to the cinema for ages - things just seem to get in the way so I am looking forward to catching a couple that I've missed during the flights for the holiday, though knowing my luck, I'll have seen everything.  Have watched a couple of things on tv - Junebug, which I really enjoyed, loved Amy Adams performance; Cry Wolf because it just happened to be on and a few classic repeats that I'd not seen for ages: The Odessa File; North by Northwest (which I always seem to watch when it's on, despite owning it on DVD); Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey (ditto); Jagged Edge (great film up until the point she finds the typewriter).   There are lots of things I'm looking forward to seeing but I have no idea when they come out over here so... may have to spend a couple of evenings or something at the movies when we are in the States.

Books: Still reading The Time Traveller's Wife and I am enjoying it.  It's quirky, interesting and the timeline thing keeps things fresh, it's a different take on a people story.  One thing I have thought about is how it's been filmed as I think some people will find it confusing, others annoying because it jumps about and it's not a straight timeline story.  I mean, I know people who found Memento difficult to watch, follow or understand because it was done in little backwards snapshots!  Guess I'll have to wait and see.

Stitching: Finished the RR piece, sent it to its owner and it's arrived safely!  Now working on finishing the birth sampler for a friend in the UK so I can give it to her when I'm over.  After that, I'll work on the other birth sampler I have for a cousin here and then something for me - yay!  Think I'll have to do some sort of lucky dip to decide what to stitch for myself first though as I have quite a stash.

Music: Stress level has been through the roof in recent weeks and I've had a lot of work to do finishing a web content project for a university over here.  So music has alternated between loud and raucous and very mellow.  At the moment I'm in the mellow mood and music of choice is Ella Fitzgerald singing all those wonderful standards that I love.  People who have worked with me will remember well the times like that as, for some of them, it was an introduction to this wonderful singer and fabulous songs.  For some, my wide music taste was rather surprising and it was just another aspect of me that didn't seem to fit 'in the box provided/created'.

Well, that's all for now...

Well truly, the title and feeling are not quite right for now but it's the main reason for this post.  Thanks to Telkom (bunch of w@%$ers) I've pretty much been offline since the afternoon of 27 Feb - today was my first day back with access because it's a new month and everything 'resets'.  Starting from the beginning, ADSL here is expensive mainly because Telkom have a monopoly on the telephone things and they charge what they want.  Several people don't even bother with landlines because of that and rely solely on mobile phones.  It is also slow (though they don't think so) and very unreliable at times.  Facts to back this up are... it costs us per month here what we were paying per quarter in the UK for a 10th of the access (3GB as opposed to 30GB) plus they charge you for your phone line and the ADSL line, even though it's only one line!; they can barely manage 1MB here when were were on 4MB in the UK and heading to 8MB speed; even though you are supposed to be connected all the time with ADSL, there are times you just cannot get on.

Anyway, we reached our monthly limit on the afternoon of 27 Feb.  As there were a couple more days to go in the month, I decided we needed to buy a top up gig which you can do online... well, you could if it was working - which it wasn't.  So, had to buy it on the phone which meant I was given a new user name and password temporarily to access this extra space but the person on the phone couldn't tell me how to do this, I had to speak to someone in the technical department.  Hmm, I wondered, are those the same technical experts who run the site and can't make sure that you can top up online towards the end of a month?

To cut a long story short... a very long time on hold, several phone calls, cut off a couple of times, technical not being able to make this user name and password work, sales being unhelpful again, someone else in technical giving us instructions that screwed with our machine... in total FIVE HOURS on the phone and the upshot was we couldn't get the new user name and password to work - and now the old one wasn't working either.  R had some very interesting things to say to the technical 'expert' on the phone!  I finally got our proper user name and password to be accepted and we've been holding our breath until this morning, hoping that everything would reset, which thankfully it has.  To add insult to injury, we had to remember to call them yesterday to tell them to cancel the extra gig for next month or we'd automatically be allocated it and charged! Grrr.

So, I've not been a happy bunny.  One of the things we checked before moving here was broadband/ADSL access - R actually asked my dad about it and said, "if you don't, she won't move!"  There were other things that we should have really checked out before moving here but that's another post for another time.  Not having access to the real internet (ie sites outside of South Africa) has just been horrible.  Not only could I not go to my favourite places, I couldn't talk to my friends on messenger, couldn't call them on Skype, couldn't access my email on Gmail and couldn't do anything for our hobby business or other bits of work as they need to be accessed online!  Add to that the fact that we wanted to book bits for the holiday but couldn't and the things just pile up on you.  All of this may seem very melodramatic but it brought so many frustrations and disappointments to the fore that I have to say that it was some of the worst time we've had here.  Decisions are going to have to be made and I'm sure they will appear in here as and when.  I said in the last entry that things would wear me down soon enough though I'd rather have been proved wrong about that...

Film:  haven't really watched anything recently.  Have to admit though, two of my favourite tv programmes are back on this weekend - Supernatural and Dexter.  I'm going to try not to miss those so I don't end up with loads of them on tape and having to catch up... or trying to catch up and just not succeeding!  So much to do, so little time!

Books:  Finished Velocity.  Hmm.  Not much to say really, disappointed, all a bit pat for my liking, tried for the twist ending but I'd seen that coming and the 'ordinary hero', well, he despatched the baddies far too easily for me.  Sorry, Mr Koontz, not your best but that's just my opinion.  Now I have a confession... I have read a lot, R built me a library in the attic of our old house to take the books that I had read - some of which didn't look read because I'm so careful with them (the main reason why I won't lend out my books) - and downstairs I had a bookshelf filled with those I had yet to read.  I'm an avid book buyer as well as reader, so there are a lot of things on that shelf but the stack is going down because books are so damned expensive over here that I just don't buy that many anymore and that's another frustration over here!  Things that we like - books, games, films/dvds are really expensive.  Books, well, it works out cheaper to buy from Amazon UK, pay for the shipping and duty into the country than to buy books over here!  There are exceptions as there are some good cut price bookshops but they don't always have what I want or need.  So, the confession is that I have stacks to read and what I read isn't necessarily that new but rather what grabs me at the time I choose my new tome.  So, my current pick is The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.  I bought it ages ago, when it first appeared in paperback, from Amazon actually and it's sat on the shelf waiting to be chosen.  Okay, I admit, one reason I'm reading it now is before the film comes out because sometimes I like to see what they get right, what they get wrong and what they just change (eg Neil Gaiman's Stardust).  I'll leave commenting about it until I'm a bit further in...

Stitching: finishing the RR piece and then moving on to finish the two birth samplers. I'm also sorting out patterns and materials for my really good friend L who visited me recently and who I taught to stitch when she was here.  I actually stitched her a piece as a gift a few years back before we left the UK as a little something to remember me by before we moved.  I can't believe that she's stitching now and actually enjoying it, which is great.  I've actually taught half a dozen people to stitch since I moved here which is nice and eventually I'd like to have a stitching group here as I did back in the UK.  People are always surprised when they find out I stitch.  They tell me that I don't look like 'the type', though when questioned, they can't actually tell me what 'the type' is.

Music:  been sorting out my iTunes categories and looking at putting some of my vinyl onto CD, then onto iTunes and ultimately my iPod - especially for the California road trip... next month, oh my, it will be next month!  Wow!  The only vinyl album I've put onto iTunes at the moment is Colourbox by Colourbox and I transferred this ages ago but I've listened to it a few times over the past few days while I've been working and I still love it, still believe it was ahead of its time - a true classic of the 80s.

Holiday: so far we've booked flights there and back with our stop in London on the way back to catch up with people; booked the flight from San Diego to Las Vegas; the hotel in Vegas; and the Grand Canyon trip.  Now that the internet is back at our fingertips, we can book the rest soon!

Well, time to end another long entry...

Well, I've finally decided to start a journal after talking about it for so long.  Now I'll just need to keep it up as so many of these things have been started and then cease to be updated. 

So, why now?  Why not?  It's sort of still quite close to the start of the year and I'm determined to have a better one than the last.  Perhaps keeping this will make me find the positives and try not to dwell on the negatives too much - though I can't promise that there won't be some of that!

There have been a couple of positive starts to the year: I've started writing again - out of the blue a new lyric came bounding into my head and i had to get it down on paper (ok, on screen) and that made me realise how much I've missed my music since moving here. 

Oh yeah, better explain that - moved here to Cape Town, South Africa back in Sept 2005.  Came with husband and in-laws, all my family actually live here already.  Bit of a wrench after being born and bred in London, England and pretty much living in the same house for most of my life (was the family home then inherited).  Seemed like a good idea at the time, at other times I wonder what the hell we've done but as I always say, "this is real life, not a dress rehearsal", we will work at making the best of it (for the moment).  Sometimes it's wonderful, sometimes it's just not - a bit like life really.

Another positive was finding my 'stitchy bug' (seemed to have been on a long holiday and was reluctant to return) and getting the first piece finished for the year - for someone else of course - and so I need to get other things done so I can do something for me.  I'm a SABLE stitcher - Stash Acquired Beyond Life Expectancy - and I know that's not going to change in the near future!

Fun event - is planning our trip to the Grand Canyon/Las Vegas/California due to take place in April with a few days stop over in London to see friends.  All to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary, our being together for 20 years and best friends for 21 years.

What else?  Work isn't too bad - still doing some freelance editing for a university over here and just taken on some transcription work for a UK company over here to fill in the gaps.  Plus, the hobby business R and I have started is moving to the next level and will require more attention and work.  Then there's the house to still renovate, the cats to look after and of course the in-laws who live in a 'granny flat' attached to the house.  I'm in the habit of saying that I don't need children, I have parents - his two and my father - they are enough to handle!

Couple more bits of general information, areas that I'll probably expand on as entries progress.

Film: last film seen - 13 Ghosts on TV last night, seen it before but stayed up to watch it again for the house and the unusual cast.  Actually a bit hooked on some TV programmes at the moment!  Need to organise a day at the movies soon to catch up with stuff on release.  Love horror films but have no one to go with.

Music:  see above.  Current Foo Fighters album is playing, really getting into this quite easily.  Never really got into In Your Honour that much, maybe it was the feel of two totally separate albums.  This fits more with me, like One By One and Nothing Left To Lose (my fave I think).

Books: Anthony Kiedis' Scar Tissue and Velocity by Dean Koontz.

Stitching: Last bit of a Honeypot Bears round robin, birth sampler for a friend, birth sampler for a cousin.

Well, I think that will do for the first bit of insight into the world of Z.