Sunday, January 31, 2010

(Not so) New Year

I can hardly believe that the first month of 2010 is over and gone! I designed a new blog banner when I had a little break between Christmas and New year and intended to put it up on 1 January. Before I could do it, our house was struck by lightning and we lost a our PC (luckily motherboard only - hard disc is still intact), modem, hi-fi pre-amp, alarm system and even some of the lights went haywire! This meant no blogging, surfing and TV for a while. It's such a mission to get everything back to they way it was!
Last Friday, Leon left for a 2 week fishing trip to Namibia. He's so in love with that country and it's wonderful to hear the happiness in his voice over the phone. It's like he went home! I miss him so much but he deserves the break.

Ok - it's time to play catch-up again. Seems like that's all I do on this blog of mine!
Apart from the back to school rush, there's been a couple of highlights for me this past month:

Leon and I went to Clarens for a weekend getaway on 15 January. The mountains and fields were so green and luscious as a result of the lots of rain that fell in the area since the start of summer. The scenery were absolutely beautiful. We didn't really do much. Just relaxed and took in the beauty of nature around us. I did have some time to brows around the pretty little shops in town and spent a lot of time in the wonderful art galleries too. I especially liked these ones: The Gallery, Blou Donki and Johan Smith Art Gallery. We stayed in a little cottage at Bokpoort. Just up the road from where we stayed is this cute fantasy castle that you can rent. A bit pricey but I would love to stay there some day!

We went to watch Avatar 3D! What an absolutely amazing experience! Even despite the big hoo-haa about the movie I still didn't expect to enjoy it that much. I'm not a big science fiction fan but that movie was simply spectacular.

I went to visit my little baby girl Leeloo. It's so amazing how much she changed in the 5 weeks since my last visit. She is the most adorable little creature! I held her in my arms most of the time I was there. She even slept in the room with me. This little girl has crawled very deep into my heart already! I miss her so much!

Last Tuesday (26 Jan) was Marco's 12th b-day. They didn't have school that day as they had a Zone Athletics Meeting that day. He won the shot put and came second with javelin. I took a days leave to spend the day with him. To celebrate his b-day, his best friend came to visit this entire weekend. Yesterday, I took them out to Potchefstroom for gift shopping, movie and lunch.

We've had so much rain this past month! All the rivers and dams in the area are flooded. They had to open up 14 sluice gates at the Vaal Dam last week which resulted in the Vaal River (which flows through our little town) to flood its banks even more. Here are some pictures:

I won't promise that I'll be a better blogger this year. I've seen that life just gets in the way and somehow blogging just gets pushed down on my priority list. I'll do my best to blog as often as I can and even more important I'll try to visit my friends' blogs more often.