As I'm Writing This I'm Eating a Chicken Liver Pizza

...and i'm drinking an award-winner port... and listening to they might be giants... and improving my video editing knowledge through youtube. it's a koosh life.

speaking of getting my ass kicked by little old ladies, i set off this morning to find the one croquet club in maritzburg. i started by searching the web but, surprise surprise, croquet clubs don't advertise online. or anywhere. if you need them, you must find them yourself. in this sense, croquet clubs are like the a-team.

i decided to start the search at the bowls club (lawn bowling club) that i run/drive past on my way to work every morning. when i pulled in around 10:30 or so, the pitches ("rinks") were empty so i inquired with the first person i saw. the man was a tall 70 to 80 year-old named dobby who said bowling wouldn't start until later so i might as well come inside the clubhouse to watch the tri-nations rugby match about to start (s.a. springboks versus the new zealand all blacks). this building is basically the veterans memorial hall for pmb. inside was a nazi flag... captured perhaps? don't ask, don't tell.

after the rugby match ended, dobby took me outside to one of the pitches to roll a few. i wasn't dressed in the required white pants, shirt, hat and flat-bottomed shoes but they make exceptions when it's your first time. a little about the sport of bowls and how it's different from what some of us americans are used to, bocci ball:

bowls is played on grass,
bowls has no side boards,
the balls you roll aren't spherical and one side is heavier than the other. this means every ball rolled curves between one and three meters and, if thrown skillfully can come in almost sideways at the end (see posted video) on the picasa page.
the one thing that's not different is that i suck at bowls just as much as i suck at bocci ball.

after a few rounds, dobby took his leave and gave me directions to where he believed the croquet club was. behind another bowling club. pmb has five bowling clubs so whoever says that there's nothing for young people to do in this town is quite clearly overlooking bowls.

for any of you that have looked at the zoomed in satellite imagery of pmb, you've surely noticed a huge patch of green (or brown depending on the time of year the pictures were taken). this is a large area of parks, bowling greens, memorial gardens and even pmb's stadium where maritzburg united plays its home games. for some reason i've never ventured through this beautiful area. maybe it's because there's a cemetery right near the entrance.

this second bowling club is located in this pocket of green and instead of a meeting hall with a nazi flag, they had a meeting hall full of young women getting ready to celebrate a friend's baby shower. this club was self-described as having fewer "coffin dodgers" than the first one.

as senior citizens began to arrive in their traditional white pants, shirt, hat etc carrying a bag with their bowls and other equipment, i ordered a red pepper soup with basil and waited for the tournament to begin. and i waited.

eventually i started to feel self-conscious about being the only spectator so i went for a walk and stumbled upon the croquet club about to start a warm up game. even though i wasn't wearing the traditional white colors, they were insistent that i be the fourth player in the game they were about to start. the rules they were playing by were, not surprisingly, drastically different from those taught to me years ago by my dad (rules that i'm sure were tweaked significantly to pique the interest of a kid who could barely swing the mallet). the games were all doubles so i always had a teammate to let down with my inability to shoot a straight shot when it counted. part of the problem is that the mallets are some serious pieces of wood. much heavier than i'm used to and i realized i'm the type that adjusts my swing whilst i'm swinging. not easy to do with a 15 pound mallet.

so in addition to being well under half the median age, i was also the only person there to hit the ball "hockey style". it's a style that i was delicately suggested to consider changing over time. SCREW THAT!

one thing i should report is that doubles croquet involves a lot of malicious tactics. blasting opposing balls out of bounds constitutes close to a third of all the shots. constituting about half of the shots are little-old-grey-haired ladies. so you have little old ladies cursing each other with british accents. it's ADORABLE. also, the skill level there is amazing. the wicket openings are maybe 1.1 times the size of the ball you're using so even a straight on shot is tough, yet these ladies are rolling shots through from over 10 meters out. i missed a shot from about half a meter out. fifteen seconds later my ball was blasted out of bounds.

after i was exhausted from playing croquet, i watched a little bowls tournament in the centrum silver age category. the skill level is ridiculous. i shot a little video and it's up on the picasa webpage.

the bowls rinks are situated by not just the restaurant but the semi-adjoined bar. as i was leaving i saw a table-full of blokes producing pickled vegetables in super-hot chili-pepper oil. my accent landed me a place at the table and a glass of hansa pils. the next two hours were spent defending the sport of american football, my decision to come here (they were all celebrating their forthcoming emigration) and anything else they could come up with to complain about. lively to say the least. the bar was packed with blokes my age but none of them consider playing any of the croquet or bowls... shame.

i ended up leaving with a bellyful of beer and a jar of those chili oil vegetables. i had been sticking my fingers in there for the whole two hours and it made for a unique sensation when i went to take out my contacts later.

leaving the realm of what you may consider interesting subject matter, the following is a catch up of my life, my family in africa and my hobbies. for some reason not in that order.

firstly, when i'm not playing croquet, my copious amounts of spare time are being spent learning video editing skills for editing the cartoon i squeezed out in my first few months here. some of you know that i tracked down scott anderson, the creator of fantavision (the animation program from the early 80s that i use to animate) and told him about "into the night: the third coming" on youtube (with an inexplicable 2000 views and a four star rating). so hopefully the next project, "because they can..." will make him even more proud (and not get flagged on youtube for being sexually explicit). mom, dad... you're gonna be SO proud.

my cousin amie is still alive and well teaching english and cleaning up a little speck of africa for a village in tanzania. she's surviving snakes, the thornfeld and no television. compare and contrast her experience with mine. i'm drinking port and eating kfc (sometimes at the same time...). i also have a second cousin who, i believe, is on her way or will be on her way to sudan soon. here i was thinking i was a bad ass for moving to south africa and then i get shown up... BY MY OWN FAMILY!

shame...

i believe i'll have at least two more cousins in africa in early 2008 (david and robyn). they'll actually be in SOUTH AFRICA.

awesome...

nextly, the bad tie war at BCP engineers is over. bad-tie-war-refugees are returning to find their bad-tie-homes destroyed by strayed bad-tie-laser-guided bad-tie-missiles.

and speaking of work. work is still great. i'm under the gun on a few major projects. i've been working on a bridge portal (a beam with two legs that supports a road deck 6 meters off the ground). working in meters i never really had a sense of scale of this beast until thought about it and realized i could stand upright inside the beam. it's a big ass structure.

another project i'm working on had a guy come in and do the surveying with a set of laser thingamajigs. the result is a cad image that you can "fly" through. here's an image from it. its a road traveling over some train tracks. the traffic signs, road and abutments are shown solid gray. the hard-to-see grey lines are contour lines. neat.

lastly, i'll be coming back to the states for a whopping week in mid august to officiate the wedding of uber close friends kristi and nate. unlike last time, i won't be taking one week layovers everywhere that i go. if you live in d.c. or london and want to say 'hi', i recommend running out onto the tarmac. i'll be in a (over the counter) drug-induced sleep several seats in from the window over the wing.

from your updates it sounds like california is still standing. news from america doesn't really make it into the rotation here on sabc news so everything i know is what i've heard from all of you. i hear everyone now talks like pirates.

really? i'll have to see it with me own eye to b'lieve it!