Ugh, Friday ran a little better thanks to my head cold thingie seeming to ease up just a little, and I spent from 07:00 to 17:30 at work busy churning out updates for my MAG Retail site and setting up Stephen’s PC so that he can hit the ground running come today (not that that’s going to happen thanks to all the highway closures due to flooding!). Needless to say, exercise was once again out of the question (truly a bad week in that respect!) and so it was off home where I got treated to some yummy KFC for supper and Chantelle and I ended up watching the last two thirds of Wall-e as well as the last large chunk of Cool Runnings, one of those movies I absolutely loved as a child! Final mission for the night was locating, configuring and installing a email mailing list manager on the CodeUnit server, the use of which I’ll explain later in this post. :)
Saturday morning and I decided to whisk Chantelle off to Koggelbaai for a walk on the beach after she’d finished her quick checkup on the guest house, and after a fantastically calming drive along the beautiful coastal road in glorious, glorious sunlight, we eventually pulled into the parking lot overlooking our target for the morning. Of course, opening the door drove home the fact that the weather on this side of the mountain is completely different from the basking sunlight back home, meaning Craig in his little shorts, t-shirt and slops got straight back into the car and drove instead straight through to Pringle Bay, taking the opportunity to fit in a good exploratory drive of Rooi Els along the way of course (baboons everywhere!). Our brunch spot of choice was of course the quaint little @365 restaurant once again, and we enjoyed a thoroughly good breakfast together before once more hitting the road and snaking our way back to Gordon’s Bay, where the weather too was slowly in the process of deteriorating. Nut bunnies.
Anyway, we stopped off at the guest house where I got to grips with sorting out Chantelle’s PC woes (while she got to work baking me a fresh batch of banana muffins), eventually locating her problem thanks to the discovery of a rather large backup folder that was literally taking up over two thirds of her hard drive space! Next on my list of things to do was to find a way of extracting her client list out of their booking system because once back home, I quickly set about churning out a beautiful GBL Winter Special email and then integrating the user list I had pilfered into the mailing system. Of course, all this means that sometime today, either Chantelle or I am going to hit the send button and blast off an email to a whole lot of unsuspecting, past guest house clients in the hopes that we can tickle their fancy just enough to give GBL some much needed winter business. And now that I have a nice unsubscribe link in place at the bottom of the mail, I don’t quite feel like a spam king just yet! :P
While getting that all set up took a huge chunk out of my day, I did at least fit the pleasure in of watching one or two episodes from the excellent Birdy the Mighty Decode 02 series which looks like it is shaping up to be an absolute beaut, much the same as the awesome first season I watched some time ago. Chantelle eventually arrived home, pleased with my GBL labours of the day and we quickly settled into our next task which was to take the up next couple of hours, almost right the way through to midnight – planning our honeymoon of course! We scoured over website after website, argued, pleaded, and in the end, managed to beat out a decent framework in which to proceed to the next phase of the planning stage, ending up with a lot of scribbled notes and a good idea on just what we’re going to be getting up to over the period following straight on from our wedding! (Can anyone say Lion King on the West End!? :D)
The battle didn’t go without its casualties I must note, and a rather grumpy Chantelle retired to bed beside me while I got to grips with the next chapter of my Edge graphic novel, though thankfully that all seemed to have cleared up come Sunday morning because we got up bright and early, kissed and made up and then got ready for Riley’s birthday get-together, location moved from the initial Kirstenbosch locale over to his mom’s place in Kraaifontein thanks to the rather dreadful Cape Town weather!
Despite the GPS not quite knowing exactly where the road was that Claire provided to us via SMS, it did an excellent job of getting us pretty much exactly where we needed to be, and despite our rather atrocious mix-up and bad direction giving to Pops and Ryan, the rest of the Lotter clan eventually arrived too, though they shamefully required Riley to drive out and come and fetch them in the end! As per usual, Claire and Riley and mixed up a right treat of snacks and picnic food and in the end it was a really pleasant, family-driven celebration of Riley’s 28th birthday, with him and Claire regaling us with stories of their Noordhoek horse-ride outing the day before! :)
From there we quickly popped in at Dean and Zania’s place to find out how life is treating them and see how Zania’s pregnancy is coming along, and it quickly turned into quite an enjoyable but a little bit on the short side visit (though Dean’s coffee making skills do leave a rather LOT to be desired I must mention! :P). Their little house is literally overflowing with all the baby stuff at the moment and I think we’ve got to very excited parents-to-be on our hands, and glancing to my side, I think the sight of it all is exciting a certain someone else that I know! ;)
Bidding our farewell, we then trekked through the rain back to GBL to meet up with Monty and Cheryl who had already made themselves at home under the roofed braai area while the rain poured down all around them. Gordon’s Bay itself was pretty flooded and after quite a few detours, we finally joined up with them where we snuggled up to enjoy a deliciously prepared weber chicken with some baked veggies, washed down with copious amounts of wine! Thanks to the rather miserable weather, Monty and Cheryl kicked us out of the guest house pretty early (there were no others guests staying there apart from them) and so we headed off home to enjoy the last little bit of our weekend (and deal with a whole lot of blown light bulbs back at the flat).
Note, after all the stormy weather, I was quite pleased to see that our room had managed not to flood itself and instead kept everything down to a neat little trickle! :)