Wow, it’s much colder these mornings now that I’m not sporting my fluffy, rugged beard anymore. Chantelle’s hinting and the fact that Jessica was in real danger of forgetting her daddy’s handsome face prompted an impromptu shave-off on Sunday evening, leaving me a far colder person in return.

Anyway, I had completely forgotten just how hectic early morning Cape Town traffic into the city is, what with having the luxury travelling along the quiet Baden Powell coastal road for the last three and a half years since moving to Touchwork, which is of course situated in Westlake Business Park, handy when you’re driving in from the rather remote Gordon’s Bay.

The reason I braved the N1 Cape Town traffic this morning is a rather funny story mind you. Unable to source her stylish party boxes from the usual avenues, Chantelle was sitting in a bit of a pickle as we are just about out of our signature black boxes and with a market on Saturday, this is a bit of a disaster.

Luckily for us though, in her attempts to trace more boxes, she stumbled across the original packaging manufacturer, one Merrypak situated in Ndabeni, Cape town. So yesterday morning she convinced her mom to join her as they headed out that way to check out the factory shop and in the process successfully secure some much needed packaging for the market.

Of course, this infers that she was on an early shift yesterday, meaning that after her trip to Cape Town industria, it was straight back to work, with the result being that I only got to see her on her return home just before 21:00 last night.

Naturally the first thing she did was take the packaging out of the car, rip free a box in order to show me… and then curse like a sailor when it dawned on her that the person who retrieved her order from the back of the factory had in fact given her the wrong boxes – completely unusable in our context!

Frustrated, she called her mom to rant a little, and a short while after putting the phone down, her mom called us back to say that she and Monty would be able to make a trip through to Merrypak this afternoon in order to return the goods, provided of course that we could get the boxes to them before the afternoon.

And with Chantelle on morning shift today, that meant I had an opportunity to shine and earn brownie points with wifey, by selflessly offering to make a super early trip through to Bellville (leaving at 05:30), followed by a trip through to Westlake in order to undertake an early morning gym session at Steenberg Virgin Active, and then finally work.

All of which explains how it came to be that I sat in the horrible gnarled mess that is Cape Town traffic in the early morning hours, as I shot down the N2, crossed on the R300, delivered in Bellville, exited on the N1 towards Cape Town, hopped on the M5, switched to the N2, hopped onto the M3 and parked at the gym.

(To be honest, it was technically free flowing I suppose, but still, what a LOT of cars on the road – certainly not something I’m used to driving in!)

Which brings me to a completely different musing. We are currently seriously in the process of contemplating a move back to the Northern Suburbs, back to where our wonderful support structure of friends and family reside. But more on this in another post later this week. I need to get off this desktop at the gym and started heading over to work if I don’t want to be late…