Hoke’s Ramblings

In the age of bulk SMS’s and blogs, let me take this moment to wish one and all a Merry Christmas, and stupendous 2007, whilst I test out my spiffy new Logitech® Cordless Desktop® MX™ 3000 Laser – Thanks, Lina!

So, after almost a year away from the salty oceans, I got to join a bunch of workmates for a week of super-relaxed leisure diving at Sodwana Bay.

One of our crowd, Heidi, was doing her advanced course, and we all joined her on her deep dive. I must say, that’s the most relaxing time I’ve ever had underwater – it was magnificent! Perhaps there was a bit of narcedness involved, but I’m not complaining.

The only complaint is that at those depths, after fifteen minutes or so your dive computer starts spouting dire warnings of impending doom, so we had to cut it short.

A real pity, but the dive was definately worth it – warm, calm, and all the usual oddities you see at those depths, including an organic feather duster like the one I saw on my last deep dive in Sodwana, and now I have a witness, too! Pity Ed didn’t see it swimming, though.

We also had two stints on quad bikes, which was just as much fun as I remember having last time, if not more so. We did a one-hour tour the first day, and two days later, after recovering from the first ride, took a three hour, 50 km tour up to Lake Sibaya. What an awesome way to see such a beautiful location (if not the most eco-friendly).

On a techie note, Picasa2.5 supports geotagging via Google Earth. Click here for a KMZ file for Google Earth showing the location of some of our adventures, with included pics (about 200kB). For general pictures from the trip, look over here.

Wow. I was going back through Ye Olde Hoke’s Ramblinges Archyves and came across a post from 28 November 2005 stating that news of my (then) recent Mozambican dive trip was imminent. Hmmm.

In honour of this momentous occassion, I dug up this video taken by some Hungarian tourism scouts who happened to be on our snorkelling trip, where we came across a feeding frenzy of countless mantas and whale sharks – definately the highlight of the trip!

Here’s Ed finning like there’s no tomorrow trying to keep up with one of these magnificent beasts…

Maybe I won’t be so shoddy posting about my upcoming trip to Sodwana in early December. But you never know.

The nice thing about having your own house, is that when you pretty it up, you're prettying up your own home, and not some landlord pimp's.

The other side of the coin is that when things go bad, you have to sort 'em out yourself.

Having successfully repaired a blocked cistern inlet valve on one toilet, destroyed the inlet valve on the other while trying to see how the confounded thing works to repair the first, and having two fully operational toilet cisterns by the end of the day, I now feel I am qualified to own a home.

I am no longer Mr Hockaday. I am now Mr and Mrs Hockaday. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s starting to sink in.

Since I’m lying in bed on a Sunday morning eating freshly baked muffins and enjoying a fabulous cup of coffee brought to me by my darling wife, it seems an excellent time to talk about the joys of marriage. How long the muffins and coffee will last, however, only time will tell.

This past Sunday, Lina and I were married in a lovely garden wedding ceremony, where just about everything went as planned, and the things that didn’t, well, what does it matter anyway? It was just the way we wanted it, and the reception went off fairly smoothly too, thanks to my Best Man/Wedding Singer/M.C. Justin. Thanks for making our stresses yours for the day!

And after a wonderful day, we had a wonderful week at sea on the Rhapsody, cruising up to Bazaruto. It was a perfect honeymoon, because it packed into one week all the permutations of better/worse, sickenss/health and richer/poorer…

We each had our days of sea-sickness (I’ve realised being of naval blood does not exempt you from this – all hail the Sturgeron!), where we had to look after each other, and then after getting pretty lucky on the roulette tables, Lina squandered my winnings at Blackjack, so the whole wedding vows got wrapped up into a five day cruise.

Besides the nasty gurgly feeling in my tummy on Tuesday, it was a really awesome trip. The on-board entertainment was superb, and the weather at Bazaruto couldn’t have been better (my dad only told me when we got back that the trip there last month suffered a hurricane!!)

Thanks to my dad’s professional acquaintance with the captain, we scored our choice of wine at dinner on the house, together with champagne and a fruit basket in our cabin. Then on Friday morning my dad worked an extra shift to bring home the Rhapsody, where we got front-row seats on the bridge. Our thanks to my (our) dad and Captain Siviero for a wonderful trip!

Some wedding pics here and some honeymoon pics can be viewed here. I didn’t upload every single sunrise/sunset shot though.

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!!

Since I have been branded for all eternity as a pedantic spelling enthusiast, I thought I may as well have my own symbol.

As least I can’t be accused of being anti-semantic

While some people glean great joy from posting mundane inanities every day, I prefer to wait until something worthwhile comes along to post. But then others get antsy if you don't post something for a week or two.

Since the current rage seems to be posting stuff about demonic parallels with your favourite pet, I thought I'd stick this pic up…

Goodness me, it's been AGES since I last posted. Hopefully I haven't lost too many of my regulars …especially since there weren't too many to begin with.

I recently spent a marvellous week diving in Mozambique, but the moment seems to have past to relegate it to the halls of blogging, but what other purpose does a blog serve, than to commemorate these marvellous moments – I pledge to have it up here, um, soonish.

Been trekking around the country – Xmas in Durban, a night in PE, and now I'm in Cape Town, where I have become an uncle-in-law-to-be…Lina's sister gave birth to a healthy baby boy yesterday – Geluk, Kobus en Jodrieka!

And obviously a belated Merry Christmas to all, and all the best for this new year, that has sprung upon us all too suddenly…I mean, I'm getting married THIS year now!!

More sometime.

I just had to share. Sheba is a ridiculously high energy ball of fluff, that loves to get into the dirtiest, smelliest, muddiest of places imaginable, which makes digging and watering flower beds a royal pain. We had to buy a compost bin yesterday to keep her out of the decomposing muck!

But miraculously, her fur seems to be a dirt repellant. As soon as the mud in this pic dried up, she was good as new!