Baked

a cake tonight. Thanks Mum for the recipe. It was bigger than this when it came out of the oven.

Been working at home today

Here's the nerve center for opperation CT.

Surprising Sundays

Not really knowing what to do on sunday we decided to head up the coast and check out the Atlantis Dunes. We'd heard that these were some quite impressive inland dunes.

We drove out to Atlantis which was in general terms a pretty grim place. Aparently when the residents were forcibly removed from the area of Cape Town knows as District 6 many were moved out to Atlantis resulting in an urban sprawl made up predeominsantly of semi shack semi prefab homes.

So we ariveded out at the dunes and learned that we needed to have bought a permit from the Water Board Office in Cape Town! Apparenly the palce is some form of water collection system. Luckily there was a guy running sand boarding classes who conveniently sold is the R9 permit each. Que light bulb...Sand boarding..the guy was pretty cool and told us know he was running a session an hour later and we could just jump on. So we heading into the dunes to have a walk before our first sand boarding session..

The place was completely mad like nothing we'd ever seen before. A massive expoanse of empty sand dunes which were actually quite disturbingly high in places. Lots of guys driving round in 4X4's, riding Quads and MX bikes - a tribute to every red neck petrol head obsession - all on top of the City water supply!! And a note on the 4X4 drivers. Some of them were particualarly moronic, rather than asking us to move out of the way they just drove right towards us requiring us the almost dive out of the way. A felt obliged to flip them the bird just to show my apreciation.







So now to the feature of the day..sandboarding...As most of you knwo, I like to think I know a bit about sliding or rolling on a board so fancied my chances some what. It actually worked out pretty well, Nicky got herself up and sliding and I whilst completely covering myelf in sand by 'rag dolling' a couple of times got the hand of it. Here's the evidence.

Go Nicky, go..


Super stylin'




Screw it, if I'm gonna hurt myself I may as well do it properly.

Potter's Fever

We went to see Potter IV on friday. I have to say it wasn't very beleivable..

and Nickys of page 200 or something now of the fianl installment..

Dinner was...

...the best two steaks we'd both had in Cape Town and the first time medium rare was actually medium rare.

The outdoor weekend begins

So after a sligntly slow start to Saturday we decided that we'd walk up Table Mountain. Taking a more leisurely pace than the time I raced myself up we made it up in 2 hours dead. That did include a lunch break halfway up on 'Lizard Rock'.

Here's some pics of the day.

Take note of Nicky's beaming smile confirming that this was pretty near the start of the walk.


Here's the view close to the top looking up into the gorge.


And here we are at the top, look the smile has returned, although brought on largly by the scones and creme. You can take the tourists out of England but .. etc etc.

My Camera's on it's holidays

My Camera's been having a few issues lately so is curently in Jo'burg visiting the Canon repair shop.

For those of you interested in digital photography here's some info for you I didn't know about digital cameras. Cameras can develop dead pixels on the CCD which show up as white pixels with lots of interpolation around them. The white dot where the CCD is getting erroneoud image data and the interpolation where the camera is trying to smooth the image data as part of normal processing. This as you can imagine is pretty annoying once you know it's there. I've discovered that all cameras have dead pixels on the CCD but in the factory these are cloned from a neighbour so you don't see them. So to get newly dead pixels sorted out they're supposed to be able to do this re-cloning to hide the newly dead ones.. Get this - Olympus cameras do this automatically. Nikon, Canon you've got to send for repair.

So now you know..