England's Out

I'm feeling better this weekend, now that Baby's back as good as ever. I was woken up this morning with a hard nudge to the ribs. "Pssst. Fatty Fatty Fuckface. I wanna watch Beckham!"

"Huh? Oh, hime. It's you." Seeing as how my bedroom is currently 600 degrees Celsius between the hours of 05:00 and 21:00, I sleep very lightly and Ali can wake me up any time.

"Yes, I'm a hime and I want to see the match. It starts in one hour". I racked my brain trying to think of a place we could watch the match and avoid the Portuguese crowds. The only place I could think of was Ali's old shop, so we drove into Durban and took brunch while we watched the game -- no sound on the telly.

There were a few Portuguese fans in the shop, but they stayed on one side of the room. A few cops came in during the first half, and whaddya know? One of them was the very same cop who jumped in front of my vehicle and ticketed me for going 83km. in a 50km. zone. He stepped in front of my car basically because I was the slowest vehicle in the pack. $138.00 later and I was back on the road. Due to the price of petrol, I decided to take public transit to work for June. Big mistake. 22 working days and I was late 3 times. It didn't take me long to decide to pay for the extra insurance and drive to work. Now that Baby's better, I'll be driving to work from now on. I get bitchy when I have to ride the loser cruiser, and I'm no fun at work for the rest of the day.

The body shop guys "found some stuff" that the estimator missed, so Baby ended up costing more than $6000.00 to repair, but they did some extra stuff for me. They had to replace the left front panel -- so that took care of the numerous dings that my neighbour's rear door left behind, and then as they replaced the right front panel, they blended out the scratch that my other neighbour left in the right door. I think they even tried to touch up the gouge that I left on the rear when I tried to take the hard top off. 2 minutes after I picked Baby up from the shop, I nearly had another accident because some fool turning towards me decided to cut the angle sharp and almost hit me. Bastard.

The football match went to a shootout and as you all know by now Portugal won 3-1. If they hadn't cheated so badly in the match against the Netherlands, I might have cheered for them, but they're dirty this year and don't deserve the Cup. d

A few days ago I had to take a business trip, or more of a fact-finding mission. Best known as the town with the landfill which takes in the excess garbage from the country's third-largest regional district -- I, and five others, drove five painful hours to visit one of the company's sites. I expected the town to stink like garbage, but it was actually odourless. Fucking hot, but no smell. I stayed in JLo's hotel, actually the hotel where the crew and co-stars stayed while filming one of her films. She stayed in a larger town about an hour and a half's drive away.

I learned a lot actually. 5th form chemistry really helped, and its now a pet project of mine to figure out how to better utilize the waste rock, which is too small to process further. Imagine - we're fucking it away. Anyone can come by the quarry and load up their trucks with the stuff. If they need a loader, we charge $25.00 but if they just need a few buckets it's free. I don't care about the price, but I think we could be more efficient.

The town itself, about 30km. from the site is a place I used to go when I was a kid. My mum's boyfriend would sometimes take us to his hometown and this place was halfway along the journey so we'd stop for a meal. I would order French Toast, because hotcakes suck hard. I like it there, and might move there when I get old.

I'm glad to be home, and I'm all kitted out for the 4th of July weekend, only now Ali says she doesn't want to get a tan so I guess I'll be going to the beach alone.
No fun. The only thing left to look forward to this summer is that gift certificate I won, and maybe a couple of baseball games or a show at Cirque du Soleil. The blue and yellow tents are setting up in front of my apartment building. The gift certificate restaurant is way the fuck out on Long Island and is gonna cost me more to use than the value of the prize itself. Merde! Oh well, can't be ahead all the time. C'est la vie.