This weekend Norm and I had a relaxed agenda. On Friday I got home from work quite early and it was nice to not have to worry about dinner as I had been organised for once and had made it the night before. I pureed butternut and put it on top of curried mince. We just served it with salad and it was simple but yummy and low carb.

On Friday night it was only me and Norm at home and we decided to watch a film on Netflix. We chose the film Small Crimes which sounded like it would be violent enough to appeal to a bloke and hopefully contain enough black humour to appeal to my twisted sense of humour.

I thought this flick was rather dreadful and if there was any of the promised black humour I am definitely colour blind. I would guess that it was written by either an addict or someone who has experienced the chaos of life with an addict. Because this dude’s life was completely unmanageable. I got frustrated with his constant stream of bad decisions. I mean FFS dude, hello?? But then again, that is an adequate representation of life with an addict. None of the characters made you give a damn about what happened to them. 

I give this film 1.5 Kitten Stars. And that is me being a generous kitten.

The next morning we had a lazy morning planned, we were going to take the dogs on a walk in the forest. But then while lying in bed sipping a latte brought to me by my darling hubby, my phone chirped to remind me I had an appointment in the CBD to get my hair done. Oops. I jumped up and showered and headed into town. But from originally being a bit late I somehow managed to end up early when I arrived. Thank goodness for the Virgo over-estimation of travel times. It saves me over and over.

I spent a few lovely hours getting head massages, my hair treated and coloured and sipping coffee. Sometimes I think about letting the grey grow out but Norm talks me out of it.

After I got home and Mzudumo finished in the garden Norm and I decided to go out for an early dinner at our closest local pub, The Woodcutters Arms.

It was quite warm all weekend after last week’s bout of cold weather but it was just starting to cool off outside by the time we arrived at the pub so we grabbed a booth inside. You can never predict what season may be in residence in Cape Town from one day to the next.

I am nothing if not predictable when it comes to food and I had my ‘usual’ starter.

Jalapeno Cheddar Cigars (v)

Pastry Wrapped Cheese and Jalapeno, Served with Tomato & Onion Chutney
R44.00

Norm also had his fave starter.

Scotch Egg

Smoked Paprika Sea Salt, Pea Puree and Pea Shoots
R45.00

For our Main, we both decided to try the Hunters Chicken which was on the specials board. I had forgotten that Hunters Chicken comes with a sauce or I would have asked the chef to not include it. I asked for chips but they forgot so I had to wait a bit, it came with baby potatoes as pictured below. It was tasty but I found the sauce overwhelming.

We headed home for Norm to sort out the beasties and take them for a walk and feed them their dinner. Later that evening we decided to watch a film.

When we first got our LookTV installed we had started watching the movie ‘Split’. At least we thought we were watching Split. It did not seem at all like a horror and there was no sign of James McAvoy well into the film so we kept going out of the film and checking the name but it kept saying we were watching Split. We later discovered that this sometimes happens with the open source software Kodi which LookTV uses. It gets some sort of crossed message and loads the wrong film. We wasted about an hour of our lives which we will never get back. We did not enjoy the ‘wrong’ film at all so luckily I don’t have to try and find out what it is to watch the end of it.

Friday we managed to get the correct film to load for Split.

I absolutely loved this film!!!! I thought that James McAvoy did a brilliant job portraying all of the personalities that his character ‘Kevin’ exhibited. I never check for viewers’ or critic ratings on films and I now see that Split only scored a 6.4/10 on the Rotten Tomatoes website. I totally disagree, I would give this film 4.75 Kitten Stars. The missing bit of the 5th star is based on a few things in the story which seemed a bit incomplete, but that could be due to me wandering off to the kitchen or something.

I thought I would check the ratings on Rotten Tomatoes for Small Crimes and see how they compared with my views on that one and that film scored 5.5/10 so obviously I am not aligned in my opinion to the Tomato lovers. I like what I like. I don’t reallllly like tomatoes very much though so maybe it is a tomato karma payback.

This week I listened to a woman on the radio talking about a project she is running in some of the challenged areas of Cape Town. She described the issues concerning children in some of the communities she works in. The group she was representing do ‘knock and drops’ which means that they go into these communities and they go to the local shops and hangouts and they collect the children they find there and escort them to their homes, knock the door and ask the parents whether they knew their child was out and if so why do they allow them to roam the streets in the dark with all of the crime going on? Not as a criticism of their parenting, but as a way to raise awareness of the risks of these behaviours. The DJ said it was more of a challenge to raise kids in these tiny shacks and homes as the kids cannot just be sent to their rooms to play on their computers and iPads as a middle class home does, they often do not have a room, much less an iPad. There may only be a single ‘room’ in their entire home that is used by the entire family for all functions, living, eating and sleeping.

National Child Protection Week is commemorated in South Africa to raise awareness of the rights of children, this year it takes place from the 25th May to the 1st June. The local organisation Living Hope and various other groups are dedicating the entire month of May to Child Protection however there is still such a high rate of child rape in SA. 19 children have been murdered in the Western Cape already in 2017.

The most recent data from the South African Police Service shows that between April 2016 and December 2016, there were 30,069 reported cases of rape – down from 32,161 cases over the same period in 2015.

This data shows that South Africa’s rape statistics are double the country’s murder rate over this (275 day) period at 53.8 cases per 100,000 people in the country. This equates to one person getting raped every 13 minutes.

Assuming that The Economist’s estimate that one in every nine cases go unreported, that figure gets even more alarming, rising to someone being raped every 2 minutes.

More than 1.2 million adolescents die every year around the world — an average of 3,000 deaths per day, two-thirds of these deaths occur in Southeast Asia and Africa.

Recently we heard the story of 3 year old Courtney Pieters who disappeared while playing outside her home in Elsies River, a suburb of Cape Town.

Everyone was hopeful that she had just wandered off and would be found safe, but as time went on our hope diminished and then on Saturday we heard that Courtney’s body was located in a shallow grave near the Epping Industrial Centre. Later that same day a man was arrested for her murder. This week the suspect will be brought before the Magistrates Court. My heart breaks for her family and especially for her Mother. Her body was found the day before Mother’s Day. Please spare a thought or prayer for her family and loved ones.

When we got home on Saturday we watched a few episodes more of Breaking Bad, our new addiction. I love the part played by Bryan Cranston. In my opinion he is such an underrated actor. We are now starting series 3 already.

Afterwards we were going to watch a film but we decided it was too late to start one and moved over to a bit of light hearted comedy and ended up staying up far too late anyway. That is the problem with weekends, we stay awake late, but my body does not know it is a weekend and still wakes before 6am where I lie quietly messing about playing games on my phone, trying not to wake the household (specifically the dogs).

Sunday was Mother’s Day in South Africa and the USA. None of my 3 children were in Cape Town. Caitlin was away for her birthday redeeming a prize weekend away in Plettenberg Bay, Lily was in PE and Trevor was in Wilderness. Norm was lovely to me though and went to buy pastry and served me pastry and coffee in bed. I spent until noon lying in bed with my animals, munching pastry and drinking coffee and then finally got up and got moving. Norm took a nap so I curled up on the couch with a blanket and watched a few episodes of the Netflix series I am watching called 13 Reasons Why.

It reminds me of how horrid teenagers are to each other and how painful high school is for so many kids. I know it was for me, I hated high school. But the series is riveting viewing. It is not the sort of thing Norm enjoys though so I watch it when I am on my own. As it was Mothers Day I was going to do whatever I fancied and I fancied doing not much at all!

Caitlin and Wes arrived back in Cape Town about 7 that evening and I was given my Mothers Day presents that Caitlin had brought from all of the kids. They gave me a beautiful wooden cookbook holder and a new mixer as mine is over 20 years old and rather disgusting as the beaters are covered in rust. We are also going to the garden centre to get a plant for my garden this weekend. I want a bougainvillea to plant in the hopes it grows along the wall at the front of the house.

Later Norm and I went for dinner at my fave place, Massimo’s in Hout Bay.

As our starter, we both had the fried baby calamari. I love the coating Massimo uses on his seafood, it is light as air.

I love their pizzas so I had one of my favourites of their offerings, the Hot Latina with tomato, mozzarella, chorizo, red onions & fresh chili for R128.

Norm ordered the Chicken dish that was on special.  Free range chicken breast stuffed with Italian garlic sausage, parmesan & peas, served with boulangere potatoes and green beans 125.

The delicious potato dish was so yummy and I was rather envious Norm got it and nicked a wee bite. Norm really enjoyed this dish and almost licked his plate.

Massimo’s have a brilliant concept called ‘Pay it Forward‘.  Massimo’s clients can buy one or more R10 ‘virtual’ slices of pizza and for every 6 slices sold Massimo’s will deliver one pizza to a local charity. We added 2 pieces to our bill. ‪#‎shareMassimosLove‬ ‪#‎payitforward‬

After we got home we decided to watch a film. We wanted something light and frivolous and as we have been spending so much time with our current Breaking Bad obsession we chose ‘Why Him?’ with Bryan Cranston and James Franco. It also starred one of my fave comedy actresses Megan Mullally, formerly ‘Karen’ of Will and Grace. She and Bryan had a hilarious scene where she was high on weed and trying to seduce him.

I had expected a light chuckle at best but we laughed our legs off. Not literally of course, don’t be silly. But we had a lot of laugh out loud moments and really enjoyed it. I would give this film a solid 4 Kitten Stars for amusement value.

We had a Chimney Sweep around on Monday to try and sort our blocked chimney for winter.

He said he had never seen so much ‘stuff’ in a chimney. (umm yay us? #Winning)

Eventually he ended up with 3 full black bin bags of bird nest debris!

Maybe it was storks trying to finally bring me some grandkids?

I am surprised we did not catch out house on fire when we tried to make a fire previously. Such a risk! Everything is so dry as the drought continues in the Western Cape and it has been announced that level 4 water restrictions are being implemented.

We cannot save more water than we currently are doing in our home. However a lot of other households need to start doing so based on the levels in our dams.

This week I finally booked the last 2 days accommodation in Port Elizabeth for our upcoming 20th anniversary trip. After we leave the safari lodge we have already booked we will then drive on to spend 2 days in PE. We will stay at the Radisson Blu. It looks lovely as it has sea views from all of the rooms.

One of the prizes that Caitlin won in her package that she took for her birthday weekend was a couples photographic shoot by Sharyn Hodges Photography. We were given a sneak peak of the pics and they are so stunning!! They are such a beautiful couple.

Last night Caitlin and I went out for a belated Mother’s Day dinner at Grill Under the Milkwood.

We were seated and given our menus, we were one of only 2 occupied tables at the time we sat down. We decided what we wanted to order but when the waiter came and Caitlin ordered a chicken dish they said they were out of chicken. Out of chicken?! It was only 6.30pm and there was a shop open literally across the road. How can a restaurant be out of chicken? Caitlin does not really like red meat and she did not fancy fish.

Now I remember why we have not been to this restaurant in ages.

I ordered the 200g fillet steak with chips and onion rings as an extra side because I love onion rings.

Caitlin ended up just having a beef burger which looked pretty good, she said it was fine. We were not out late as Caitlin is at the Bieber concert tonight and didn’t want two late nights in a row. Not that I was chomping at the bit to go clubbing myself as I get up at sparrow’s fart.

This week I made contact with a woman who has various circles, both a Sisters and a Drumming circle as well as performing sweat lodges for the Solstices. I found her via an acquaintance and when she mailed me I got a feeling like an electric current racing through my body. I think I may have found my Shamanism teacher.

When the student is ready, the Universe will provide. I am so excited to begin this journey – I hope you are looking forward to walking this path with me?