RWC Japan 2019: South Africa vs Italy

Oh Rats!

Coping with disappointment is never easy.  You psyche yourself up for something you believe is going to happen, then circumstances beyond your control throw you a curve ball.  Feeling let down can be depressing.  The recent quarter final loss to Australia is a good example.  In my heart-of-hearts I had expected the Springboks to win.  I could already picture them holding the Rugby World Cup Trophy up in the air again.  The number one team in the world.  It was not meant to be.
Once the initial shock of the disappointment has passed, it's time to look at the positives.  I was just as proud of the Springboks in defeat as I would have been as if they had won.  Their sportsmanship and graciousness in defeat was something our youth can learn from.  They played like world champions right up until the final whistle.  All I am saying, is watch out in 2015!  The boys will be back!
There are always things that happen which puts disappointments in perspective.  You can't let them rule your life, you have to move on and focus on something else.  In my case, it is rats in the kitchen.  You all know that UB40 song, right?  Well, please don't sing it.  The rat problem is actually not very funny.  It is traumatising.  Maybe, dare I say it, even more than the Springboks unfair loss.

 Rats are cute.  However, when they get into your food cupboard and leave their droppings everywhere, some of their cuteness dissipates.  A few weeks ago I opened the food cupboard to see a rat quickly jump down and hide in a box amongst the neatly folded supermarket packets I recycle.  My housekeeper called the gardener and he managed to batter the rat to death.
I should have realised that rats are social creatures.  They have friends.  If you have one rat, you surely have another.
A couple of days after the death of the rat, I noticed some items knocked over in my cupboard, a half-eaten biscuit where it shouldn't have been, and what looked suspiciously like some rat droppings.  When I told my housekeeper about it she assured me the rat was dead and those brown crumbs were coffee granules, or cocoa.
On Sunday afternoon while I was reading a book on my bed, I heard a blood-curdling scream from the lounge.  A hysterical Siobhan said she'd seen a rat run down the passage.  We called on Tony, my strapping 1.95m rugby-playing twenty year old son to attack the rat.  He ran into his room screaming like a girl and jumped onto his bed.  If this is the future of rugby in South Africa, I have to wonder about winning the world cup back in 2015.  Eventually he calmed down and grabbed his Maasai spear and went to attack the rat hiding in the bottom of the food cupboard.  The rat, like lightning, jumped over Tony's foot and sped across the kitchen floor to behind the stove.  Although Tony moved the stove and the fridge, the rat had disappeared.
The screaming didn't stop with the rat.  Tony closed his bedroom curtains and a large gecko dropped down onto him.  He flung it across the room with a high-pitched yell.  Siobhan went to the bathroom and started screaming as a large cockroach had positioned itself blocking her way to the toilet.  It seems as if all the Moshi-wildlife had come out after the rains and were determined to make their presence known.
Most shops and markets in Moshi are closed on a Sunday afternoon so we weren't able to purchase some rat traps.  I managed to get two lethal-looking rat traps on Monday.  Tony tested one with my ballpoint pen and it snapped the pen clean in half.  I imagined walking into the kitchen to find a decapitated rat's head stuck in the trap and the body at the other end of the kitchen.  Despite using some of our choice imported chorizo to bait the trap, the rat and his friends weren't interested.  This morning the traps were still set, the chorizo untouched.  Tonight we might try smearing the chorizo with peanut butter.  I am determined to kill these rats, however cute they may look.
So the moral of this story is, when you are faced with having to cope with upsetting disappointments, redirect yourself and find something else to focus on.  Like rats!

Trying to live the dream

Work.  Something you have to do to survive which will hopefully give you the means to bring you closer to your dream.  Unfortunately, the constraints of work often hold you back from your dream.  Commitments, time constraints, all sent to try your patience.
Last night I dreamt that I owned six houses, each one in a different country.  I spent the year traveling around the world spending two months in each house.  That dream is probably a bit unrealistic considering that at this precise moment I don't own any property anywhere in the world.  And 3-4 houses would be better so that you can spend longer in each country.  But hey, it was just a dream.
Thinking about it though as dawn approached while I watched the Fiji Samoan World Cup Rugby game at some god-forsaken hour on a Sunday morning when all intelligent life were still firmly ensconced in their beds fast asleep, I realised that I quite liked that dream and might need to tweak it a bit and adapt it to make it my own.

The first step will be trying to save some money.  You can't buy a property without any money.  That is a sad fact of life.  Unfortunately, I don't have any of that hugtight sticky glue to keep those dollar notes firmly stuck to my coffers.  Exotic holidays are too much of a temptation and I can't resist flying off to explore somewhere new.  And then, life is so short so you really should make the most of it and not short-change yourself on those holidays.
What I'd really like to do is give up my day job and then spend my time writing and traveling.  Following my team for the 2015 Cricket and Rugby World Cups.
These dreams are not impossible; they just take a bit of conscious effort to work towards making them a reality.  A dream is broken down into small goals.  Each goal is then broken down into steps.  Don't be afraid to dream big.  It's the goals to get there that need to be small and achievable.  Maybe today is the day to work out the blueprint, the road map to achieving your dreams.  Good luck!

Why I can't write

This seems to be the year of distractions.
I don't know what it is that some years you can achieve so much and other years it's just one distraction after another that blocks your vision, hampers your creativity and manages to force one's writing onto the back burner. 
I love writing.  Stories, relationship advice, I love it.  But this year it is a struggle and just isn't happening for me.
My youngest daughter will tell you, I'm addicted to research.  Mention something I don't know and I have an obsessive compulsion to find out all I can about it.  This means that my time on my laptop is ill-spent researching trivial bits and pieces that mean nothing to anybody just to satisfy some weird urge I have to acquire useless knowledge about random subjects.  It's a huge time-waster that I can't get control of.  An addiction I don't seem quite ready to give up.
During my recovery time after another bout with breast cancer, I should have been able to use that time to write.  Instead, I became completely obsessed with researching my roots.  I did find out some scandalous stuff but seriously, what can I actually do with that information?  How useful is it?  If I am honest with myself then it is just another waste of my time and time is very precious to me.

Being an armchair sports fanatic, a year of world cups is the worst possible thing for me.  First the cricket world cup consumed my weekends and killed my writing.  Now it's the rugby world cup and as a die-hard Springbok supporter I find it of the utmost importance to my sanity and psyche to compulsively read every bit of news about the Springboks and their world cup bid written in every blog and newspaper around the world.  Weekends are taken up with rugby-watching and it's very hard to focus on anything else.  Even planning an October getaway and December holiday has been pushed aside.  I have a one-track mind and it's not about sex.  Rugby, that's all I can think about at present.  I try and avoid conversations with people as I instinctively try and turn the conversations around to rugby and the Springboks chances in this world cup.  This is sad.

I have two books I should be working on.  Redesigning yourself for the multi-tasking generation which I'm co-writing with Jeremy Sherr, and C U @ 8, a novel I'm quite excited about.  I've promised myself that after the world cup, these books will get my full attention.  But there's always something else, isn't there?

Marketing.  The bain of my life.  Indie authors have to spend a lot of time marketing, especially if you want to enjoy the successes which come with increased sales.  Marketing is time-consuming, and at the moment is compartmentalised with watching E!  I can do both at the same time.  However, I do not spend nearly enough time on marketing.

Parenting takes time if you are a single-parent.  Your children expect you to talk and interact with them, fetch and carry them, all of which makes inroads on your time.  And if you just agree with them or pretend to listen, they have this nasty habit of taking your inattention personally, and throwing it back at you when you need their support.

And last of all is my job.  A huge distraction as I have to go to work during the week.  Because you receive a salary, the expectation is that you'll put in the hours and do the work.  Unfortunately, I do love my job so feel this compulsion to do the extra yards and go the extra mile.  If only I had a horrible job and didn't have to work.  Now if I could just make the time for marketing, to get the sales to supplement my income, then maybe...?  With one more child to go to university and finish school, retiring to write is not an option for a good few years.

My goal for this week is to manage my time and make the time to write.  It's what I'm passionate about (besides the rugby) so it stands to reason that I should make the time to follow my passion.

Have a good week.

Cindy

How long is a piece of string?

My teenage daughter loves to ask me questions that I have no possible way of knowing the answer.  When will the power come back on?  Do you think we'll get the generator working this time?  When will the fuel shortage be over?  Where do you think the housekeeper put my Garfield t-shirt?  Eventually last night I turned around to face her and said, "How long is a piece of string?"
The truth is that we are often faced with questions for which we don't know the answers.  This can cause anxiety if you let the unknown get to you, but if you learn to just chillax and go with the flow, handle each day as it comes and try not to plan too far ahead, you'll be okay.  We adapt and why waste time and energy worrying about things completely out of our control.
What we know is that at the moment in Moshi, Tanzania, we will have at least 8 hours out of every 24 without power.  Sometimes it can be more than 8 hours.  There is a schedule which TANESCO doesn't stick to, so you are never entirely sure when you'll have power or not.  Apparently the power cuts are because the Tanzanian government didn't think it necessary to plan ahead for a growing population.  Now the power stations are old and shutting down, and the new ones they are supposedly building will only be ready in 2013, so until then I can't see the power situation improving.  One just has to get creative and fork out the money for a generator.
This past week the power cuts have been compounded by a fuel shortage.  The price of fuel has been increasing at an alarming rate and the government, bless their cotton socks, decided to step in and take action.  They have now made a law that fuel has to be sold at a much cheaper price dictated by them.  As you can imagine, the suppliers to the fuel stations are seeing their large profits made on the backs of the impoverished population decreasing, so they have refused to supply fuel at the government dictated prices.  The result, the majority of fuel stations have shut down and put up barricades.  Those selling fuel have long queues and run out of fuel quite quickly.  If you are running a generator to cope with the power cuts, this is a big problem.  If you love watching rugby on TV and are eagerly awaiting the rugby world cup, then this can be a possible catastrophe.  Writing has to be put on hold as there is only so much you can do on the laptop before the battery dies.
My book sales are continuing to climb which is a highlight at present in an otherwise dark and gloomy world. The recent riots in England made me think I'd rather have our power problems than that. Imagine what you must feel as a parent if you see your child looting shops on the television news. Would you report them to the police?

So how much longer will all of this continue?  How long is a piece of string?
Have a great week!
Cindy