Blablabla

I am sipping a sherry. Not sherry. A sherry. Don't know why. Sipping a coffee. I'd like a coffee please (perky Brit accent). Gimme a cworfee! Maybe it as nothing to do with the colonies... I'd like some coffee please. I'd like a sherry, please. Dry. Dry??? barked the barman in the Kamieskroon Hotel in fright, standing behind his fluorescent-lit bar while farmers in shorts with tanned legs and veldskoene sat drinking screwdrivers and Klippies. Not together. Some drank screwdrivers and some drank Klippies. Dry, I said, standing, ridiculously tall, with my mother beside me in the arc lights, two Chanel and Rochas-perfumed deer wandered into a hunting lodge. We don't have dry, he gasped out at last. Ok-fine, whatever you have. I think it was Old Brown. My mom had her whisky-with-intructions: I'LL pour the soda water...

Kamieskroon. If you can get there, go. Just go. It's a (serious) plane ticket and a long trip and then another world, bathed in flowers and light and lambchops.

No, and I've only had two sips of my sherry. It's medium cream. It should be dry. But...I prefer one that's inbetween. It's a sherry day. Cold, still windy. And here should be all the photographs I didn't take. Here should be the pink rhododendron on Congress. There were people in front of it this morning. I was a wuss. Here should be the white crataegus (hawthorn) now in graceful bloom outside yet more public housing, on 1st Avenue between 2nd and 3rd Streets. I didn't take my camera with me when I went to buy tea. Stupidstupidstupid. From the spicy spice shop on 1st Ave and 6th where they sell a million beers and every sort of spice you can dream up, and ghee and palm oil and nuts and tea and flours and henna and...everything. Plus lightbulbs. So I couldn't take a picture of that, either. They had fake lemon juice, too. Which reminds me of a forensic pathologist who catches his own crayfish off Cape Point and then brings these critters home to cook over the coals with...fake lemon juice. Like, Dude? But the spice shop did not have my Ahmad Afternoon Tea (with bergamot), so I got Ahmad Ceylon. Alright but Not As Nice. And organic milk! And left as usual to return to the office with hair and clothes smelling like an island that never was.

Just yesterday I was moaning to the Frenchie that the mad garden was hard to design because it has so many massive, glazed mustard pots in it that must be incorporated into the final design, and I suggested to him that he sneak in and toss them over the side of the terrace to clear the canvas a little. Well. In last night's wind they and their junipers blew over and broke.

...

Tonight it is a salad for dinner because I ate two sausage rolls from Tuckshop on 1st Street. Terribly greasy and not as good as the ones that my high school's tuck shop, purveyed for lunch (prebooked). God. High school. Screamin' heebie jeebies. Yet the mentality seems to linger and sometimes pursue.

End of ramble. I DID sneak a picture at Ever Ready Blueprint, the wonderful print shop above Union Square where we have copies made, scanned, etc. I don't ask questions but I'd like to. They have a thing for Catherine Zeta Jones. She's everywhere. There are pretzels in bowls and fortune cookies and a lot of antiquated, humancentric activity, but they deliver the goods better than anyone else I know.