We've been back at school a few weeks now and everyone has found their rhythm again. Frost has a lot going on - he's started drama after school and is performing as An Alien who speaks English. In the class he is one of three boys. Frost is also playing Ultimate Frisbee and tennis lessons. The focus on sports is because, since he is taking Band and Japanese at school he has to prove his eligibility to skip PE by doing 60 hours of extra-curricular sports.
Wren has been doing skiing. We are still in a snow-drought in the NW but the kids enjoyed their lesson. It was very low key and a great first day on the snow for Wren. I sat in the lodge and chatted.
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| Taking a break with the Powder Pigs |
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| Balancing! |
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| Getting a tow up the slope with Jason |
I have also been busy. I have taken an art class on botanical drawing which I was given for Christmas. I was interested in how precise botanical illustration is expected to be - measurement and accuracy of perspective and consistent visual plane were our first lessons. We had to draw on tracing paper to transfer a 'good' copy of our sketch to the quality paper so as not to mess the surface. Here is my first transfer and the subject - an artichoke.
3 comments:
you write: "We've been back at school a few weeks now and everyone has found their rhythm again." Wait.... did I dream it, or weren't you basking on an idyllic beach on Grand Cayman barely 10 days ago?
I too could find my rhythm doing that ;-)
Yep. We arrived home 8 tiny little days ago. I am not really in my rhythm. I am still eating weirdly. I feel like dinner for breakfast so I often have veggie marinara then miss lunch and eat baked goods mid afternoon. Another reason Anna's raw food craze is guilting me.
BUT I had divine tom yum soup yesterday. :) How are you after your splendid South African Safari Holiday?
I am 3kg heavier than I was before our splendid S.African safari!
It's barely 11am and so far today I've had cereal with golden raisins and banana, 2 (small) slices of toast with salted butter, 5 naartjies, tea, and milky coffee (called "renversé" in Switzerland). Anna's raw thing is massively guilting me too. I find myself particularly munchy in the morning. And I cannot resist the biltong and peppermint crisps that we brought back with us.
SA was splendid in so many ways... little things, like for the first time in many years nobody asked where I was from! or if they did, it was because they were trying to pinpoint where in SA my accent came from... like "Oh, I knew you were from Durban, from the way you said 'the Berg!'"
The plush safari was fab as a one-off family event, but I doubt I'd to it quite like that again. I wavered between loving the brash intrepidness of it--plowing over thorn trees in a phenomenal landcruiser (with ranger and tracker); and abhorring the hubris of it all. As someone pointed out, I might be making too big a deal of the brusque bushwhacking -- nothing more extreme than the damage done by an elephant on a routine basis. And most of the time we were on dirt roads, not driving through the brush. Even so I did find it somehow unnecessary to drive really really close to the animals -- like when we were driving at night along a dry riverbed (adjacent to the lodge)... driving directly towards several lions (which were walking towards us), that had killed a nyala at the camp the night before. While the ranger and tracker clearly knew that the lions would ignore us (which they did), it just seemed unnecessary to be at spitting distance... if for any reason a lion had decided not to ignore us (in our open-top vehicle), we would have had been ripe for a Darwin award. hmmm...
Anton and Tracie are at Umfolozi right now; they were at the Kruger Park last week.
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