Updating

Well, the blogging curse seems to have hit me: infrequent updates. Things have been quite busy the last while, and I've been trying to deliver some decent updates of my thesis to my professor, with which I have been moderately successful. Dalene had a good time in Malta, and came back a few days after my last post. In the last two weeks, I helped out twice at the night shelter, since the permanent guy is writing exams - our cell group arranged to help him out over these few weeks. Our car has been leaking water, which is a major trial, especially since the leak is unreliable. We discovered this during late afternoon traffic in Stellenbosch, and were lucky to make the garage in time to get a refill. With all the emptying, we managed to lose the cap of the radiator's water bottle, so we've had to get a new one. Last weekend, we popped by Dalene's folks to visit Dalene's grandparents, since her grandfather had turned 77 during the week. Afterwards, we went by James and Verna, and had a pleasant visit. They're getting a swimming pool put in, and of course, there are complications and arguments with the contractors and builders (aren't there always). Jason's crawling now, and putting everything in his mouth, but they seem to be handling their frustration ok. During the week, I saw James and Verna again: I attended the UWC Honours students' project presentations, since I'm their external examiner this year. Afterwards, we went for lunch with Reg Dodds and Isabel Venter. I also ran into Maricel, who did her Ph.D. with Dalene, and is graduating with her in December. This weekend was packing on Saturday morning, since we're moving at the end of the month, and in the afternoon we went to Somerset mall to return an item, and ended up spending the whole afternoon gift shopping. That evening Sharnelle had us over at her place for a potjie prepared by Cobus. I ate way too much, but it was nice visiting with them and Sonet and Theuns, who had left Emma for babysitting with Theuns's folks. Despite their busy schedule, Sonet and Theuns look very happy. Sonet has started work again, so with her working in Paarl and him in Malmesbury, they're getting more serious about leaving Bellville. They were actually planning to look at places in Malmesbury yesterday... The trip back was marred by an ugly incident. Some of our country's criminal element tried to waylay us on the N1, just short of the Wynland Engen 1-stop, by throwing rocks at Dalene's car. Fortunately, we were missed by the big grey construction block(s?), but some gravel did hit us, breaking a light fitting, chipping the windscreen in 2 places, and scraping the body work in a few places. When we got home, we phoned the police, who told us a van was already on the way, so I don't know if there were other victims who prompted an earlier call. This has again prompted the "why don't you leave SA" discussion with some people, and I'm not entirely sure, at the moment. It seems mostly momentum, actually. Oh, I almost forgot. I saw Brink and Antoinette's son Alex in the mall as well. I hadn't seen him since before he could crawl, and now he's 18 months - he gave me high-five before we went our seperate ways. Sunday, Dalene took me out for lunch (Blue Orange), where we both had food with Brie, getting caught out by the super-mature cheese. And after church, we went for a visit to Marius and Janette, who we'd been hoping to see for a while. But I left our wedding photos behind, only to be reprimanded, since they actually hadn't seen them, despite my convictions. On the computer front, Mozilla and Internet Explorer's new versions came out in the last few weeks, and I had the misfortune of upgrading to IE7 on a windows box. Well, the upgrade itself went smoothly. Pity I wanted to browse as well... Mozilla Firefox 2 on the other hand, seems quite slick. And I think the "ad-blocker Plus" extension is worth a plug. Download and install it (after you've installed Firefox), and start blocking all the irritating content on webpages. Yay! That is all.