Hols

Honestly? I don’t consider a break that is less than two weeks an actual holiday. Its tradition: academic institutions don’t want to give holidays in April and September, but they are forced by tradition. I am sure that for the first half of my school career we had holidays of decent length. Now we get stuck with two to two and a half months of vacation at the end of the year. Great… Anyway, the holiday is over, I achieved very little and tomorrow the final harsh stretch of the year begins. This is going to be tough one, so I bought me a bottle of Amarula to help along the way.

In the past week I visited another university campus, lost the rest of my gambling credits at the local casino while trying different strategies with my newfound knowledge of probability and statistics and visited South Africa’s only nuclear power plant. The latter was a trip to gain insights into new developments on the nuclear front for a presentation my group and I have to give for our physics class. Fun stuff. It really irritates me that I have to spend so much time on physics, because I don’t have it after this year. Still, if I don’t put in effort into these little projects, I’ll be in as much trouble as I am in now with my Applied Mathematics. This is not how I planned my first year… Still, the visit to the Koeberg nuclear power plant was an interesting one. I didn’t have special clearance or anything of the sort, but I was amazed how much help a mention of “studying B.Sc.” could muster. Hehe :) The site of the plant is actually really cool. The company that owns the plant developed a nature reserve around it to ease the environmental fanatics and keep residential areas at bay for a while. It’s really nice, especially on one of the first really warm days after winter.

“Spring has sprung”, as the ad on the radio says. We’ve had a few lovely days, the flowers are in full bloom and nature already seems completely revitalized. Whether it is restless pets or junkie bees chasing coffee and cigarette smoke on UCT campus, a change is in the air. The time of sundowners on the balcony and open air concerts returns to the Cape. It is time again for people to get in their cars and explore their favorite places in the Cape: walks on the beach at Campsbay, enjoying fish at Houtbay, driving along Chapman’s Peak, discovering a new restaurant in the City or enjoying a live jazz band at the V&A Waterfront. True, it’s a bit early to start thinking about things like that, but it’s something I sense in the air. It’s a mindset: some people just need to discover for themselves. It’ll be nice to get around to some of that later, but for now I have to focus on the studies. Lekker droë bek.

In closing I want to blame the following factors for the periodically poor spelling and grammar of my posts: fatigue, caught-in-the-moment-syndrome, alcohol and Microsoft’s faulty spelling and grammar checking. As a rule, I don’t re-read stuff I’ve just written, therefore I make few corrections.

Tomorrow is Monday; to arms!