About two weeks ago, I reshaped a friend’s surfboard into two suitcase seized bits. Sadly both did not perform as well as the original board and have now been sent to a miracle worker who plans to stick them back together, for a small fee. It will of course never be the same again, kind of like sticking a marie biscuit back together and then using it as additional foot support in your shoe! Fear not Spider, the shaper, is making an exact replica for my mate and I will soon be the proud owner of the reinforced marie biscuit! I might just convert it into a coffee table!

Last week was also interesting. It was the culmination of mishap central in our household, all of it disgusting and dirty except for the last part!

In all of the Xenophobia chaos, I assisted somebody we know by helping them remove all of their worldly possessions from their rented place. It ended up being stored in our garage. Safe! That is until we realised that it was the source of an invasion of oriental cockroaches. After much frantic washing, spraying and disinfecting, everything was pretty much under control. My wife then discovered that when the female roach, lets call her Antoinette, dies, she drops a sack that she has spent her lifetime filling with eggs. Antoinette’s offspring are thus lovingly released into the world to continue their reign of terror. This knowledge had my wife inviting the exterminator for a visit at his earliest convenience. Lets say that the problem has now been solved.

With Antoinette’s offspring and their dirty, creepy, disgusting ways on her mind, my wife could hardly be blamed for what happened next. On route through a complex with real live wild animals of the somewhat larger kind, she spotted a beautiful buck. She did not spot the inverted speed hump and hence was unable to adjust her speed. Technology later indicated that my cars oil sump lovingly embraced the far side of this speed hump and tried desperately to stay there. Only a small portion of oil was lucky enough to remain at the scene. The rest of the oil can be found on the streets of our town. It may surprise you to learn that a sump full of oil and a new sump to hold it all can be purchased for the princely sum of 2 and a half surfboards. And I know about half surfboards! This dirty problem was solved late last week and my car now seems happy to hold onto its fresh new lubricant.

Being a family now focussed on utmost cleanliness, I broke out the pool brush in order to give the pool a friendly rub down. This is something I have done infrequently for years. I suddenly had a deep longing for a cool winter swim and without another thought gracefully slipped in. I less than gracefully slipped right back out again. Whilst stripping off my soggy shoes, pants, and jersey I discovered that my wallet had needed a wash but my cell phone was allergic to water. Operation blow dry commenced with great speed. After a couple of minutes the display flickered feebly a couple of times and died. For the first time in years, probably not since my kuif back in the late eighties, I picked up the hairdryer and tried my best to give it the blow of life. Our house exploded with joy as it came back to life. My memory stick on the other hand was not as lucky and saw the inside of both the washing machine and tumble dryer. Not sure what happened in the tumble dryer but it was certainly not dry when it came out. After giving it a turn in our blow dry theatre, we proved that one can take a memory stick for a swim, a wash and a tumble and still use the thing with no apparent ill effects!

My wife and I are quite hopeful that we will stop breaking stuff!

As for Antoinette and her offspring, history!