Hoke’s Ramblings

Okay, so I get an email over the weekend from my good mate Peter in Taiwan saying there’s not enough on my blog about what’s actually going on with me.

That’s mostly because my life is mundane and boring, but also because I’m a really lazy blogger. This weekend however, was anything but mundane and boring.

Seeing as I was to be married in less than 8 days, the lads decided to ‘treat’ me to a guys day/night out. This involved dragging me to a paintball range, throwing me into a bright yellow jumpsuit and having me run up and down the range unarmed, with open season declared on the human banana.

It’s quite remarkable how when the target is unarmed and highly visible how everyone armed with a projectile launcher with questionable accuracy siddenly becomes an instant marksman. For every ‘pffft’ I hear from the 8 guns on the range, I felt a blinding pain in my ribs, neck, back, front and other places until I got back to beginning and hit the deck.

Okay, there was more to it than that. They also sent me into the range with some ammo this time, and had a round robin two-at-a-time tag-team continually assault me until I basically couldn’t stand any longer. I did at one stage get both enemies at once though, which made me think I was invincible, but the next two promptly vinced me good and proper.

After an afternoon of physical pain and suffering I was taken pub-crawling for the psychological pain and suffering. I was given a white tee-shirt to wear, with a list of tasks written on it that I had to perform before the end of the evening. These were mostly questionable at best, but that’s all I have to say about that.

But besides all this, I know I still want to marry Lina, which I suppose is the whole point of the exercise anyway, so I guess I passed with flying colours

We won’t talk about Sunday morning, because I didn’t witness much of it, but in the afternoon I did witness the most amazing game of cricket ever played. If I could only go back in time and place all my lifesavings on SA beating Australia after they posted 430-odd I’d be a very, very rich man.

Straight after our stunning 1-wicket/1-ball victory a bunch of us hopped in the car to go and see some guy named Bryan Adams sing at the Dome. While I’m no huge fan, I suspected it would be a good show, and I was not disappointed. The guy sprays a lot, has turn-ups in his jeans, yet he still somehow manages to ooze coolness from every pore.

I guess after a crazy weekend like this, I can only follow it with another crazy weekend doing something like getting married, so what the heck - 6 days to go!!