Spoil Yourself Instead

So last night was fairly uneventful and I yawned my head off thru most of it. Tuesday was catching up to me. I did manage to hit the shops in search of an appropriate Valentines card for Varen and a 50th birthday card for Mom.

So Valentines day ... the uber-Hallmark holiday of the year. Our office is strewn with pink heart balloons. I've left Varen at home scheming something for this evening :) I'm not that into V-Day, but I do like to do something just to acknowledge it, be that dinner at home or out but NO extravagant gifts please. Luckily Varen, the most spoiling boyf the rest of the year round, barely blinks in the face of Valentines day. Like most boys he professes that he shouldn't need one day to show me how much he loves me. Unlike most boys, he does show me all year round on a regular basis :) Sigh.

And now for a something completely different that has been bugging me. So, as all of you around the world should know by now, South Africa is heading for the dark ages ... by that I mean we are running out of power to light our offices, homes and shopping centres. And as such there has been plenty of load-shedding affecting us all. One of the primary annoyances during load-shedding (aside from lack of hot water) is traffic lights. When they switch off the electricity to an area, it means the traffic lights are no longer able to function and as such our usual Jhb traffic increases to ridiculous proportions ... people seem to get just as stupid without lights as they do in the rain! But this is not what's bothering me.

Lately I've noticed that the JMPD has pointsmen out at traffic lights that are in fact working ?! So fair enough, for the first few days, even the first week maybe, I can understand that perhaps there have been complaints about the traffic light timing and they are checking to see how changing it could improve the traffic flow ... because when the pointsmen are posted at working lights, they seem to force motorists to ignore the red & green. However, these pointsmen have been at one of the light's I've noticed this at since December. Surely that's enough investigation and now you actually just fix the timing and send these fellows on their merry way to where their services are in dire need (like Sandton at 5pm during load-shedding?). Sigh.