Whirlwind Weekend

Ah, it's Monday ... again, already. Sigh, I tell you someone should really invent the every-week 3-day-weekend rule. My life would be happier :)

Sooo. So much to report back on. Friday started out spectacularly when a package arrived for me at work. A package? But I'm not expecting anything. Certainly not anything in a giant box ...? I became even more confused when I saw the package was from Barefoot Breaks. They were couriering up our air tickets for Zanzibar ... in a giant box? Well how's this for a brand plus? Inside the box, along with our tickets was a kikoi for each of us. Awesome! And definitely a fabulous was to start the day! (Must take a pic this afternoon when I get home, was meaning to all weekend ...).

Work ended a smidge early too as we all headed out for Farewell Drinks. And then I raced off home (amazed that there wasn't more traffic at 17h30 on a Friday afternoon?) and waited for Varen to arrive. Then we headed off to The Observatory at Aloe Ridge Hotel with a handful of the work crowd for their Dining Under the Stars experience. Yes, yes they have a truly horrendous website :P It's about as bad as the signage to the Hotel itself. So many people took a wrong turn at some giant sign pointing into the middle of nowhere :P And besides that the map on their site does little to warn you of the longer-than-you-expect dirt road (you have to go thru 3 gates!) to get there either. Needless to say, most of us were late!

Hmmm, it's a funny little place. The telescope is enormously impressive (you have to climb a ladder to see into the eye-piece, but the interior is done up in faux African face-brick and there was a movie on repeat with Hubble images projected on a screen in one corner. The food was fine, really nothing earth shattering to report - I had their Venus Sunrise (3 big prawns on a bed of cous cous) and then their deboned Oxtail, which was quite nice. Dessert was a Study of Chocolate. We went outside for a look into the telescope 3 times during the evening.

First we saw the moon. The crater detail was quite unbelievable and this was by far (for me) the most interesting thing we saw all evening. I guess because it was the closest up to anything we got. Next we saw Jupiter. But even with their giant 25" telescope, Jupiter was still only the size of a 1 Rand coin or so. We also saw 4 of it's moons. The pretty cool thing about Jupiter was it had a blue tint to the ball of light and we could see 2 lines across it, which I gather are from the speed at which it is spinning. Lastly we saw a globular cluster of stars.

Now it is quite amazing to see all this, I guess. But it's still all far tinier than you realise, being that it's so far away, even with this amazing magnification, it's small. Which I found disappointing. Also, I realised, I'm just not that into space stuff. Yeah great, millions of stars and galaxies all light years away blah blah, the light we see is thousands of years old if not more. It's honestly all just a little to large and far away for me. I can't get a perspective on it. It's almost like it's too much for my mind to fathom ... and honestly it doesn't seem especially relevant to me. I'm certainly not the alien-hunting type ;) For me, I'll just enjoy the lovely view of the moon and stars in our night sky :)

Saturday started with admin while Varen worked and then in the evening I got all dolled up and we headed off to Doodles' house for her 80's-themed birthday party :) What fun we had ... and how we laughed at what everyone was wearing. I'd teased my hair, put on some leggings, a demin skirt and an over-sized t-shirt that I stole out of Varen's cupboard and cut the neck out of. I will tell you that I was quite amazed that without spending a cent I could dress so appropriately. Haha! Was lovely to spend the night catching up with Ruby Letters, Angel&Glugs and @TomIsAwesome.

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On Sunday morning we headed out to The Cheese Shop for breakfast with some of Varen's family to celebrate his Dad's birthday. Then we attempted to do the week's grocery shopping. I stand by my rule that this needs to be done practically as the shops open on a Sunday morning or else not at all ... we couldn't track down a trolley in Woolies or PnP and even when we attempted to shop with just a basket a quick stroll into the aisles showed a sheer lack of almost everything fresh. Not to mention the Woolies queues that stopped us even bothering to pick up a basket there. As Varen said ... I should've known better on a month-end weekend!

We didn't do much else, other than a marathon bunny hutch cleaning session which involved up-ending the mouse nest behind the hutch. Sadly this time we had to kill 4 tiny pink babies :( I couldn't catch any of the adults and I wasn't setting these 4 free in my garden to have even more babies :P I tried on Saturday to find some humane traps, I tried The Lifestyle Garden Center, Builders Warehouse & Builders Express all of them stared at me with glazed eyes when I asked for a Humane Mouse Trap and pointed me off in the direction of the snap-and-kill variety. Clearly mine is a rare request. On Sunday we tried to make our own humane mouse trap. We'll see how it works, but I don't have high hopes ... I think we may just succumb to having to kill them :( But poison is simply out of the question. I am at my wit's end. I know it's not the mouse's fault ... they go where they find a safe spot (hidden away behind the hutch & not a cat in sight) and where they can find an abundance of food, water and bedding (all of which the bunny hutch provides for them!). Sigh.