the corner office

More than a week since the last blog; it's been pretty hectic. Last week was the usual assignment grind. Ronwen's folks came up from Durbs for the weekend. It'd been years (literally) since they'd been up to Joburg, and it was great to have them.

We went to the Sterkfontien Caves on Saturday. Good timing; we'd seen on the news a few days earlier that the Caves have had a bit of a pro-tourist facelift and rebranding. The place certainly has been improved since our last visit in 2003 or so. Now, when the cave tour is over, they have a large walkway which goes past the excavation site where Mrs Ples was dug up, and then winds around the hill back to the new exhibition complex. I had quite an odd experience walking around the hill (more of a half-hearted koppie, really). The wind was blowing up the valley through the dry grass, and it evoked really strong memories of my childhood. Living in a small town with lots of small mining villages around us, heading up into the koppies and out into the veld was an essential part of being a kid. You reach an age where you just stop doing that, and then you move to a big city where you couldn't do it, even if you wanted to, but the experience of it stays embedded in the psyche. At the risk of getting a bit sheewow-like, I felt an overwhelming sense of connectedness back to my experiences as a child, and to the bit of Africa I grew up in.

It's also a bit of a mindfsck to think that you're standing outside a cave, and that pre-humans might have been standing on, give or take some erosion and geological action, exactly the same spot a good 3 million years before you. We're only digging out their bones, now. It's a bit hard to conceive of what sorts of creatures will evolve from us and be digging up our bones 3 million years hence.

On slightly more modern-day timescales, we also went to friends A&R's engagement party on Saturday afternoon, and apart from the party being good fun as always, the really cool part was bumping into a good friend of mine I haven't seen in years. Another reminder of how quickly time seems to go by these days. One day you're thinking you need to give someone a call and 2 years later you still haven't.

Time went by pretty quickly for the most part this week, anyway. Year-end at work and a project that had to coincide with that meant that the daily hours had been edging up the past three weeks, and this week went from mildly crazy to downright insane. I realised this evening that I hadn't touched my PC since last Sunday night, which is probably also the last full night's sleep I had. I haven't worked hours like this in a while now. Thankfully, my part of the project was complete this afternoon, and I've spent the evening winding down.

Assignments are the next crisis. D-day is looming, and I've taken some time off next week to get them all done. For now though, it's bed time.