|
TheTome /
YetiBeThePHPYearsYou are on the archive wiki. The new wiki is here. This be a third archive.For older old stuff see YetiBesOldStuff and YetiBesNewerOldStuff. 20/10/2004 Well, I am finally back from the gold mines and all in all I must say it was very interesting. Plenty of experience and stories but I don't have time right now. I might include a few some time. All is well in the land of Bevan. Kim is moving to Bloem in 2 weeks, which is about a third of the distance to Durban. Needless to say that I am pleased. I have also managed to get myself into a gym routine while I was away and am currently going every morning before work. I'm quite surprised by my dedication. I must say I am feeling great and have dropped about 10kg in two months. The new wiki looks... interesting. I don't like the look of it but it seems groovy. What is the general perception? I haven't had a chance to look at whats happening yet. Will also have to take a look at the formal blog things and see if its worth converting. — You can change the style sheet that you view the wiki with by going into your preferences — SynKronos I'll write a decent post when I have time. I forgot to pay my phone bill so am currently without the net. Hope everyone is doing well. 03/08/2004 Okay, now I'm cross. I was intending to come down for DragonFire? and really looking forward to being in CapeTown and seeing the people again. Sadly however, this will not happen. I foolishly waited too long to book a flight and the only things available are far too expensive and at the wrong times. Needless to say I am right pissed off and feel a complete fool. Look out for Kim though, She will be down.
21/07/2004 I bought my first guitar about 7 years ago from a shop called Andy McGibbon?'s guitar world on the corner of Jan Smuts and Republic in Joburg. It is a great shop fully stocked to satisfy all your guitaring needs, throw in the most friendly and helpful staff I've come across and you have the place that I have used for every guitar related purchase I have made. Unfortunately the above mentioned guitar wasn't as great as the shop it was bought from. In fact it was pretty much the cheapest one there, a R800 strat copy. Still at that stage I was the limiting factor, not the guitar and we spent many happy hours together. Now, 7 years later, I am still the limiting factor but I have a little more cash in my pocket so I decided to take the money that my gradfather left me and buy myself a new guitar... not just any guitar, the guitar I fell in love with when I bought my first guitar, a Brian Moore i1. Unfortunately for me this was just a little out of my price range. By just a little I mean just R20 000. What I did buy however was a Brian Moore i81... and my baby is boooooooodiful! Pictures don't do her justice, trust me on this one, and she sounds even better than she looks. Now all I need to do is find a name. Kim has been temporarily ousted, but she says she understands. :) Unfortunately my next door neighbour is on night shift at the moment (and has been terribly kind by waking up during the morning to let TELKOM into my house and install my phone - more on this to come) so I have had to keep the noise down slightly. I'm looking forward to the weekend when I can really open her up and see what she can do. So anyway, while I was standing around waiting for them to prepare my guitar I bumped into a friend of mine who I haven't seen since high school. We used to sing together in the choir and went on two tours together so we used to know each other quite well. When we were in school he was an excellent guitarist and from the sounds of things he is now even better. Apparently he is working at Andy's over weekends although as he says its more lurking than working. He is giving guitar lessons and actually taught my brother for a little while. To cut a long story short I will be taking lessons with him during August and September when I'm in Randfontein - more on this to come. I am really excited, until now I have been completely self taught and it will be good to get some professional guidance. Now back to the phone. I moved into my current place in December last year. Since then I have been without telephone. As you can imagine this is very annoying because I have to talk to Kim on a cell phone, which gets expensive and cooks your brain until crisp and brown, and of course I can't access the net from home. Well, Finsch outside services and TELKOM have finally got their a into g and installed the bloody things, only 2 years after the flats were erected, now thats planning for you. Still I am currently pleased with them so I won't slander them further. Now you may even see me on #claws from time to time. :) In other good news I am going on gold secondment for the whole of August and September and half of October. The GCC that I am going to write next year requires that I spend at least two months on a gold mine and this is it. It is going to be interesting and stuff but more importantly I am going to be in Randfontein, just an hour from JHB. I can't wait. Come to think of it, this was a bloody stupid time to install a new phone. 06/07/04 As I was standing on the banks of a dam whiling away the early hours of Saturday morning, I felt a buzz in my pocket and a familiar tune. Needless to say I hit silent and ignored it. A little later I felt guilty, I am acting shaft engineer at the moment and the mine might need to get hold of me. I picked up my phone and dialled 111: "you have one new message..." "hi Bevan, this is Bongani..." balls! Bongani is the dude I'm acting for"... there has been an accident on the shaft." double balls! At this point the message went fuzzy and I didn't follow any further. I tried to call back and phoned every number I know on the mine, but no one answered. I needed to sit down. All I knew is that there had been an accident on the shaft and they were supposed to be changing ropes that weekend... Oh well, there was nothing I could do. I went back to fishing and waited to hear more. Bongani called a little later and filled me in. Apparently there had been an incident involving some electric cables and some old ventilation pipes that were being transported on top of the cage. It is a reportable incident but at least no one was killed. All in all it could have been a lot worse. Now I'm starting to see why they call this the hot seat. Shiver on 3 ...2, 3, BRRRRRR! Damn it is cold here. I am convinced that all cold in South Africa originates in our shaft and spreads out from there. Those cold fronts you see coming in over Cape Town are just the cold air that reached the oceans and needs to be recycled. I know this to be true because I participated in a shaft exam on Friday. This is basically where you sit on top of the cage and go very slowly down the shaft checking that everything is order. This was a 6-monthly inspection with management so we didn?t stop and it only took 2 hours. Now I feel really sorry for the poor buggers who do a 7 hour weekly version! Its been a month since I last posted. As usual all sorts of cool, interesting, scary and amusing things have happened, you have to love life on a mine. I even started a ?things to post? list to keep track. I?ve just been too lazy to actually do any posting. I left you all last month with, what I now realise is, an ambiguous message about my uncle being down here. He is a civil engineer and has built all sorts of damns and stuff. It would seem he?s quite good with water. He was down to do a water balance, or more specifically, to tell us where we should measure so that he could do the water balance. He was in LA for the night and so we went out to dinner with a couple of others. Very cool evening all in all. The thing is that I haven?t really had too much to do with him since I was about 18 and interacting with him as an adult was kind of bazaar. We have a new security officer at Finsch, a fairly decent young guy with a good sense of humour. Unfortunately for him there are a few professions where a sense of humour is not a good idea. An undertaker is one of them, a proctologist another and the dude that body searches you on the way out of the mine is a third. As Finsch is a diamond mine there is a random selection process on the way out and about 5% of people are pulled over for a body search. Nothing invasive but slightly more personal than your standard frisk. In my year and almost a half working here I have been searched many times and it is old hat. You know the routine and what they are looking for, still it is slightly stressful. It would not be pleasant to be caught with, say, a diamond stuck in the tread of your shoe. When you are selected you want to get it over with and get out of there. The other day I was selected... and I was slightly stressed. I was also lucky enough to be assigned the new guy, you know the one with a misplaced sense of humour. ?Look this way please (pointing to his right)... okay, now to the left... HAHA! That?s not your left.? In other news I finally found earl grey tea in Lime Acres... quick, get the pitch forks, the English are coming. Oh, and don?t worry, I lost the list so you won?t be subjected to 3 month old recaps. for old stuff see YetiBesOldStuff for newer old stuff see YetiBesNewerOldStuff |