MR. CALIFORNIA

SSI's saturday school started this last saturday. for those of you who don't know, SSI, the company that bought my old company BCP, has a forward thinking CEO that, in the interest of developing future engineers, has organized, at SSI's own expense, a saturday school for underpriveledged students. the three subjects covered are maths, physical sciences, and engineering and drafting. the teachers are volunteers from SSI and now BCP.
i'd hoped to teach math (known as 'maths' here) but instead got stuck teaching physical sciences and e.g.d. (engineering and graphic design). i've since learned that i've never taken the actual coursework for e.g.d. god knows how i'm gonna teach it for 80 minutes this coming saturday. i will say this though, the physics textbook is unique to south africa. i'll include some pictures of the problems when they finally give me a textbook. i'm signed on to teach two saturdays a month for the next year. when i first got to this country i contacted habitat for humanity and enquired about helping out. they said they don't work on weekends. until this saturday school opportunity came along, i felt that i would have to quit my job to do something charitable in this country.
about the students at this saturday school; seeing them takes me back to my own youth. "does 0.2844445 round up to 0.285?" i took joelene with me to the first introductory day. i'd heard that i would be given a nickname by the kids in zulu that i wouldn't learn. so joelene was brought to be a spy and to, and this sounds messed up, show the kids one of their teachers has a coloured girlfriend. joelene echoed my sentiments when she said seeing the two of us together would probably gain more respect from the kids. i think i'm gonna need all the help i can get.
when the first of the kids rocked up, they approached joelene first. she greeted them, "sowebona" and they answered, "um, we're good. fine. punjane. is this SSI's saturday school?"

and yes, joelene is back in my life. all the coworkers that said we would get back together were right. i hate being wrong but the healing process for me and the relationship was stuck in limbo. a quick summary would be that i contacted her under the pretense that we should try to be friends again. just friends. i thought i would be able to maintain the boundaries but i'm a sucker for that girl. this blog isn't a forum for my mushy feelings so if you want to hear about all the romance and gushy stuff, you'll have to email or call me.
however, if you want a feeling for what my life was like in the interim, youtube hosts the fruits of my labors as a once again single guy here. it should be quite clear that i had a lot of free time on my hands.

the latest is that i've added sound to the cartoon i animated using fantavision back at uc davis
secondly, i created a complilation of my footage driving the INSANE roads of easter rsa, swaz, and mozambique.

luckily for me, with this new saturday school, my masters degree exam and joelene, my hands are back to being full.

I TRIED TO JUSTIFY THE GOTH SCENE...

"...but the relevence was low."

now, as you know, i stay out of office politics. but lately i find that i'm being drawn inexorably inward. my ideas are being overlooked and it's damaging my megalomania. i'll give you latest example.

at the end of my last meeting with bruce, peter-from-roads stood in the doorway with basil and waited to ask bruce a question about drainage. y'see rainwater that falls on the bridge runs off to the sides where it is collected and runs away hidden in little pipes concealed in the parapet/barrier/balustrade. however, once the bridge ends, the water runs to the side of the road where a reinforced earth retaining wall sits with the barrier on the lip. adding scuppers here creates a problem because dumping water off the top of the retaining wall would be unsightly.

at this point i suggested my solution. and it was not only shot down but i think a few of my coworkers were laughing at my idea. here's the thing... it's not like this idea i proposed hasn't been in use for hundreds of years. engineers often forget that we don't always have to use solutions found in 'the latest' construction publications. a wise engineer draws also from history. i have many books on famous bridges and structures. my mind quickly remembered a simple solution to our scupper problem.

why don't we use gargoyles?

or cherubs?

sure it would require a little redesign to accomodate the gothic stacked stone pillars but many other successful bridges have incorporated gargoyles into their architecture. see the picture on the left. roebling seemlessly integrated the gargoyle shown into the gothic architecture of the brooklyn bridge.

my proposal is far more simple but, at the same time, very practical. i've modified the architect's impression of cornubia interchange 'ramp a' over 'link b' to reflect my vision.

WHY DO THEY RUN?

"why not just turn yourself in to carousel and pray like hell for renewal?"

i've been running to work for well-nigh 8 months in a country where it rains practically every day and NOT ONCE have i run to work or home in the rain. seriously, it'll be torrential for five hours whilst i'm at my desk but come quittin' time... poof. i'm so overdue to get rained on that i'm expecting to run home on a sunny day and to have an alhambra water truck run me over.

and no, they don't have the 'alhambra' brand here.

speaking of running, the comrades is in only four or five months. so i've started to get serious, i.e. running on saturdays for distances greater than my three or four km to work. this last saturday, my coworker grant invited me over to help him extend the land for his horse stables at his house in hilton. in order to get my run in and help him out, i decided to combine the two and run to his house... 14 kilometers away. running tip: when running across town make sure your destination isn't called 'hilton' a derivative of the words "hill and town".

unless you're starting from somewhere called 'upper hilton'.

the map included shows a green line indicating my run to grant's and claire's. my usual run to work starts on the right and ending at the "t" in the "Pietermaritzburg". it has its ups and downs but starting at the "P" in "Pietermaritzburg", it's ALL UPHILL. steep enough that bicyclists come down it at around 50-60 kph.

from the SHOULDER TO THE WHEEL

happy new year.

i’d wish everyone a happy 2008 but here in south africa we’ve woken up to a different year altogether. Eskom, the nation's power company, through a little lack of forethought, didn't think to build additional power plants for the additional people that were planning on both being born and using electricity. the paper today even went so far as to say that eskom encouraged local power companies to shut down their plants.

so the supposed year of 2008 has started here in south africa with much of africa watching their power turn off wherever they are during the day... then going home and having the power shut off again. luckily, i've just returned from a three week camping trip so it saved me the energy of having to pack away my (citronella) candles.

so i'm sure it's 2008 somewhere... but not here yet.

but to be fair, i learned on my three week camping trip, that south africa, whether or not it has made it to the year 2008, is way ahead of the rest of southern africa (maybe 2008 B.C.). this is based on my trip through swaziland and fairly deep into mozambique. i've put some pictures up online that sort of tell the story and document some of the more amazing sights and transpirings.

here're the pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/jonahptak/Mocambique

but did things worth mentioning happen that weren't captured on film? maybe. i'll bullet the stories and anecdotes for easy digestion.

- story one: for the drive back from inhambane i had acquired two travel companions from germany. johanna and juliana. juliana was in my 4-day open water scuba course. johanna was her sister. captured in the pictures online are parts of the ordeal of changing one's tyre in mozambique. directions to tyre shop: "drive 70 kilometers and you'll see a big orange sign on the right. the tyre shop is on the left. you can't miss it." johanna hit a pothole and blew the front left tyre one hour into the return trip. the trip there took me 2.5 days of solid driving with close to 8 hours of that spent driving well under the posted limits due to potholes. so it was disheartening that one hour into a 2.5 day drive we were using my space saver spare to get through the same terrain to get to a tyre shop.
but i learned my lesson: germans aren't meant to drive in africa. and it's not because of the reason i'm sure you're thinking. it has nothing to do with the audobahn. it has to to with german adherance to rules... adhering to the rules of the road has NO PLACE in africa. regardless of oncoming traffic, pedestrians or animals anywhere, you can drive anywhere. you're not driving in africa correctly unless oncoming traffic is flashing its brights and hooting at you. i've got some video of driving in moz. it looks like a scene from grand theft auto...

- story two: turns out that once the roads improved, the germans were big on catching up on their sleep. so i had lots of time to think about the road in front of me. southern swaz and northern south africa have tons of these yellow and white butterflies. judging by the fact that the yellow ones are always chasing the white ones, i've concluded that the yellow ones are the males. point is, these little butterflies are always flitting across the road in front of you. left alone with my thoughts i noticed two things. 1.) my little bean-shaped car feels like it's starting to lift off the road at 160kph, and 2.) that under 140kph the butterflies pass over my windscreen but over 140kph they smack into it with a little 'tic' and leave a smear.
when juliana woke up i felt like i should share my discovery. a few butterflies hit the windscreen to prove my point. and it wasn't more than ten minutes later that the point was really driven home when a medium-sized bird, with a very loud 'crack!' crashed right into the windscreen in front of juliana. i think we both saw the bird well before it made like a ricochet. this made it way worse. my soothing, parenting instincts activated and i immediately blurted, "i'm sure it's fine! glancing blow!" juliana countered that the two spatters of blood told a different story. and naturally the blood was in the small area of the windscreen that my windscreen wipers didn't reach.


- story three: on new year's eve i dove for a frisbee and totally destroyed my left shoulder. the left side of my head was numb for hours and i'd thought i'd damaged my collarbone. for two days i couldn't lift my arm or move it enough to take my shirt off. so i had to wear the same shirt for three days. this wouldn't have been so bad if i hadn't already been wearing the same shirt for three days before that. i was trying to conserve because i'd promised the girls that i'd try to have two clean shirts for the two days drive home.
on new years eve i popped three tylenol pm, the only drugs i brought with me not counting toothpaste and soap, and was almost unable to make dinner. i felt like i was moving through water. when the girls came to wake me up at 11:30 so i wouldn't sleep through new years i had no idea what was going on. the fireworks / pipe bombs that were going off all around were confusing me enough so i just went back to sleep.
and like i said, when i woke up, i'd traveled back in time to a land where there was no running water or electricity.

abracadabra! the magic of africa!

Nigger Balls

in two weeks i'll be on the road headed to mocambique by way of st. lucia and swaziland. have tent, will travel. i'm quite nervous about dealing with the so-called "law enforcement" in mocambique. i've been told that at the border posts they will help themselves to any liquor i try to bring in. also, i've been told to bring an extra license. this is worrisome in that i don't have a license other than the one that i got at AAA where all the personal info is written in ball point pen. it's really a miracle that it got me through my first traffic infraction.

temperatures are expected to climb into the 40's (celcius). multiply that by 1.8 and add 32 and poof you've got good times. on the positive side, i expect the beer in mocambique to taste especially nice at these temperatures.

for those of you with a.d.d., here's the latest in bullet format:

- i've cut my hair. my attempt to see how long i could grow it ended in "too long". (see picture)
- i've seriously resumed my training for the comrades. ran for 90 minutes today through some SERIOUS hills.
- i play scrabble at lunch against the secretary in roads, ramona. i've never been so beaten in my life. and i can't blame my losses entirely on the fact that my american spellings aren't in their dictionaries over here (plow=plough, curb=kerb, etc.)
- the bcp field hockey team finished the season in last place (see picture)
- in the midlands, i just missed getting hailed on by golf-ball-sized hail.
- speaking of 'golf-ball-sized', one of those giant beatles with a horn flew into my flat. i've graduated to the next level in dealing with large insects. i wonder what could possibly come next...

one weird factoid i learned whilst booking all my accommodations is that it costs more for me to call swaziland and mocombique than it does to call the united states.

speaking of borderline interesting subjects, sandile, one of my young black coworkers down in city planning gave notice to take a higher paying job in a municipality up north a bit. the new job, i'm sure, will be paying him an assload of dough to basically scratch his ass until he retires. assuming he enjoys/tolerates firsthand experience with a sickeningly corrupt government (this coming from an american), he'll do fine. the point of this story is two-fold. sandile and i parted on bittersweet terms.

y'see last weekend was the 'end of the year holiday party'. the theme was rock and roll. the company hired a dance teacher to get us all to go through some swing dance moves. being dateless (the ONLY dateless person in the whole company), i got paired up with sandile. generously i volunteered to be the woman (he's taller) but my god if this guy couldn't get the 1-2-3-2-2-3-rock step thing down. so i dumped him and grabbed ramona (her date has back problems?). poor sandile stood there staring (heart-broken) knives at me whilst she and i jumped and jived.

the next week sandile came up to structures and somehow the conversation came up if i've ever called anyone a "nigger" before. i told him that, oddly enough, i'd used the n-word to get virgilio's friends attention when he was fall-over-get-thrown-out-of-club drunk after the office party. it had the desired effect on his drunk ass too.

sandile then says, "call me one"

what?! no thanks.

"c'mon" he says.

the thing about the n-word in south africa is that it doesn't have the venom that it has in the united states. south africa has its equivalent word. starts with a "k" but i don't know how to spell it... so i won't try.

apparently the n-word is such a non-word here that people in south africa grew up eating a candy called (get this) "nigger balls". they sound like gobstoppers from america except they (and i'm not making this up) start black and "change colors as you suck on them." here's an old folk song by an afrikaans musician that mentions nigger balls. i BEG you to download the 30 second sample. it'll also give you the best taste of what an afrikaans accent sounds like.

i've also become accustomed to the accents here that if i hear an american accent (usually on the morning news) my ears perk up.

promptly changing gears, joelene and i broke up for good a few weeks ago and it's left me with plenty of spare time on my hands. my creative juices are now flowing and the fruits of my labour are either on youtube or are forthcoming. the bad news is that it has been brought to my attention (by scott anderson the maker of fantavision no less) that there is someone else out there in the world who is still creating works with fantavision. an older version of fantavision no less. and he's far more skilled with it than i. check this shit out. http://youtube.com/watch?v=9PAkjzZQvOY

there's no way i can top that. should i fall on my sword?

THINGS ARE LOOKING UP IN SOUTH AFRICA

last weekend was our weekend in durban. on our way to the food faire, joelene remarks, "i wonder what everyone is looking at" i hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary but when we drove by a second time (we were lost) it was clear that a large group of people was craning their collective necks.

"i wonder what everyone is looking at" i remarked.

we pulled over. about a dozen or so floors up an old apartment building that had some time ago caught blaze, there was a man, in essence, standing on the ledge. to be exact there was no ledge. he was supporting himself like koozko and whatsisname in the emperor's new groove.

i took a few pictures and wrote some koombi names down that i'd seen in the area. one was "dogg poundz: known by many, loved by few, feared by all". the crowd grew and shortly after joelene and i wondered aloud if it was wrong for us to be parked and staring, apparently waiting for the next step (pun intended), we heard someone shout "jump!". it kind of answered the question but definitely made us feel better. i noticed that the car dealership next door was pumping billy joel's "i guess that's why they call it the blues" beautifully understated.

too bad they weren't playing
bette midler's "wind beneath my wings"
kriss kross' "jump"
house of pain "jump around"
sugar ray "i just wanna fly"
natalie imbruglia(?)'s "i'm like a bird"
van halen's "jump"
diana ross' "jump for my love"

we were on a good roll. we also took the time to ask directions to the food fair. there we drank wine by the glass, somehow paying less than it would cost from a bottle store. durban's sister cities had a booth where they were giving out samples of food from their home town's. seafood gumbo from new orleans and fried rice from... somewhere in china.

somewhere during the evening i asked joelene a question i ask her quite frequently. "what's wrong with that guy?" i don't have to point because it's usually pretty clear who i'm asking about. "advanced stages of leprosy" she answered immediately.

"seeing leprosy makes my skin crawl."
"that makes two of you."

it was the second case of it i'd seen since arriving. the first case i didn't know what i was looking at but i did notice the gentleman was missing his left arm.

one more rarity that day was that we saw two mixed race couples and only one albino.

on to business.

the following monday it was announced at tea that bcp had accepted an offer from a large international (ssi/dhv) company to merge / be absorbed. so we're going from being one of the larger civil engineering firms in kwazulu natal province to one of the larger civil engineering firms in south africa and hence southern africa. apparently they also have international offices in europe. holland if i heard correctly. maybe i'll design a windmill before i die.

so that's the big buzz. joining forces opens bcp engineers up to working on projects that we simply weren't considered able to bid on in the past. one huge project we tried valliantly for but came third on was won by ssi. they have single projects larger than what we worked on in an entire year. but they want to be bigger and bcp has a great reputation and lots of contacts so it should be mutually beneficial. especially for the younger engineers such as grant, andrew and myself. especially for the less encumbered younger engineers such as just me. so i'm 'holding thumbs' as the candy bars here exclaim.

in summary: ten years ago i was hired by a company with three employees. 12 months ago it had grown 66% to five employess. it then lost 20% of it's staff when i left to join bcp, a company with about 90 employees. six months later it is now being incorporated into another south african firm with several hundred employees. it's exponential growth. at this rate by the time i retire, my company will employ 60% of all living organisms on earth.

here is a list of the koombi names i saw around durban last weekend:

just cruising
motivation
snow lady
menace 2 society
q.t. pi
kaycee
dogg pound
players (sexy)
smooth
metro vibe
theater of dreams
united passion
london boyz
d.p.g. style - big hound in the pound
slo-jam
just another cute and sexy plaything

and my two favorites:

pimp aftermath
&
wicked arab

OVERWHELMING, IS IT NOT?

it's thursday now. after yizkor i broke the fast with the lipschitz family. they were beyond nice and i stuffed myself with every manner of fish. gefilte, lox, and mackerel i think. i stayed late watching the semis of the t20 cricket world cup (taking place a few kilometers away) between champions australia and india. i drove back to pmb, got my running stuff together, drove to joelene's and set my alarm for 03:20. you have four hours, my phone told me, until your alarm time.

moments later it was 3:20. half an hour later, joelene and i were out of bed and hitting the road for durban again. knowing that i probably couldn't keep it, i promised that if joelene drove there, i would drive back. my nerves were acting up. my 1/5 odds of finishing this race were feeling very optimistic. i felt maybe 1/1,000,000 now.
when we arrived at kings park i looked around and felt out of place. i'd bought a water belt and a bunch of gu. nobody i saw around had one. i left it all in the car. i did decide to take the cellphone with douglas adams and i made my way to the start line.
not taking any gu with me turned out to be a MAJOR mistake. every 5km or so there were stations but all they had was water and... COKE. before i knew i'd made a mistake i'd realized that a group of ten runners, one with a flag strapped to his head, were passing me and getting passed every several minutes. eventually they explained they were running at the exact pace to qualify for comrades and i should join them. eventually i fell in, weary that if i should have to take a break, i would fall behind the pace. i wanted to stay a little ahead.
didn't matter. at kilometer 18 or so, my calves started tightening up and by 26 i said farewell to the two remaining runners in the group and walked... nay hobbled back to the car. if i'd signed up for the half marathon instead of the full, i'd have earned a medal too. c'est la vie.