the corner office

Last night in Durban. Sad our break is over, but a little eager to get back home.

It's been a relaxing week. On Monday we drove up to Maritzburg with my cousin M and his girlfriend L to visit my grandmother and aunt. M & L are moving to the UK and were flying on Tuesday - more folks off on an overseas adventure. On Thursday we went to the Durban Museum (of Natural History, I think), and the museum in the old courthouse. Nice but depressing - South Africans as a nation don't give museums the appreciation or support they deserve and it shows. We had lunch at Joe Kool's on the beachfront (it's been 3 years since our last visit, and the JK's chicken calzone was as goopy and excellent as ever). A stroll along the pier and back home driving through the 'old' suburbs on the hill. Durbs is a beautiful city, really it is. The weekend was spent at my parents' place where I managed to make my way through Jeffrey Archer's Kane and Abel, and picked up some cooking tips from my mom. I think I was also at least partly successful in satisfying the parental units that despite me being unemployed that yes, I'm a grown-up and I do know what I'm doing with my life and Ronwen and I are not about to go hungry or be thrown out in the streets just yet.

Apart from that, I've basically spent the week lazing around, soaking up too much brain sludge on satellite TV and playing around on the 'puter. In addition to having some deep thoughts, I got Eclipse up and running again and stared at the screen trying to decide exactly what I felt like doing. I eventually banged out some code for pet projects, and spent quite a bit of time working through some parts of the Java API that had been hit-and-run affairs in the past. It's nice to be able to muck about with tech stuff and just play, without being in a mad rush to churn out working code.

On a slightly more embarassing front, I would have posted something to the effect that it was roughly a year ago that I kicked the smoking habit, except that I'm afraid I've been "backsliding" a bit the past 2 weeks. Not quite regressed to the point of smoking full-time or buying m'own, but I'm guilty of the occasional post-prandial puff, and a few more besides. Eh well, the holiday's over tomorrow, and I'll be back on the straight and narrow again. Why is the all the fun stuff always bad for you?