Purpose

Instead of making a New Year's resolution for 2024, I've chosen One Word to guide my year. I discovered the concept on a Facebook group I belong to.

My word for the year is PURPOSE.

I haven't accomplished much during the first few days of 2024. When I focus on the word purpose, I've been questioning a lot of the decisions I make. Among them is the decision to start a new blog.

I feel like I'm failing already. None of my social media shares are attracting readers. So what is the purpose of posting?

I'm seriously considering abandoning this blog and focusing on the bonsai blog I started nearly a decade ago. That one was going well until Covid came along. Lockdown made me lazy and the consequence of that has been chronic pain in my legs. Most of my trees have survived, but I haven't been doing the work required to keep them looking good. The pain makes it difficult.

One of the things I'm hoping to achieve in 2024 is to do the work, even if it hurts. Then I'll have something to write about for my bonsai blog. A blog with a real Purpose.

Aiden Markram, You Beauty

In a match which strongly favoured the bowlers, with no batsman in either team able to score 50 in the first innings, Aiden Markram stood man alone in South Africa's second knock. As SA's batsmen continued to fall cheaply, with only Dean Elgar, David Bedingham and Marco Jansen reaching double figures, Markram scored 106, almost double SA's first innings total. When he was finally dismissed, SA's lead was a mere 64. Could the specialist bowlers somehow manage to accumulate enough runs to take SA to an unlikely win?

They added a few more runs, bringing SA's total to 176, to set India a target of 79 for victory. They got there with ease.

South Africa take an unwanted place in the history books as losers of the shortest Test Match ever.

The series was drawn one all.

A Bad Start to 2024 for Team South Africa

The South African cricket team ended 2023 on a high with a big win against India despite captain Temba Bavuma being injured early on and being unable to make a meaningful contribution to the match. For those unfamiliar with the game, players cannot be replaced unless they suffer a concussion. Thankfully he did not.

There were several strong performances by the team with man of the match Dean Elgar scoring 185.

Bring on 2024 and we entered the match with high hopes of giving Elgar a good send-off in his final test before retiring from international cricket.

It's very early in the match, just two hours play in a match which is intended to last five days, but things are not looking good. Elgar's contribution  was 4 with the top scores being Kyle Verrynne's 15 and David Bedingham's 12. In total the team scored 55.

It feels like we've already lost the match.

Update: South Africa have done well to restrict India to a lead of 98 runs. Still a mountain to climb, but there's a little bit of hope.

The Party's Over

Life in South Africa is full of frustrations, but probably the one that received most attention during 2023 was loadshedding, defined as "the interruption of an electricity supply to avoid excessive load on the generating plant". A couple of days ago I read that we had 335 days of loadshedding last year. That's right, only 30 days of uninterrupted power!!

Somehow the powers that be managed to keep the lights on over the Christmas and New Year period, but now the party's over. With the year less than a day old, it was announced that loadshedding would return from 5am on 2 January. At time of writing the lights have just come on after my first scheduled power cut of the year - a cut that lasted about 2¼ hours. It's my only one for today, but I'm scheduled for two such cuts tomorrow. And those are good days. When things get bad we can be kept in the dark for over 10 hours per day broken into sessions of 2½ or 4½ hours.

And that's just scheduled power cuts. Sometimes things go badly wrong and power doesn't return when loadshedding ends. In early December I had a power failure which lasted 26 hours. Some people have had to endure much worse.

My photo for the day is a tribute to loadshedding - a light with only one special bulb burning. For dramatic effect, I inverted it so that the bulb that's burning is black and the rest of them are white.

COMPLIMENT OF THE SEASON.

It seems scammers never rest.

"COMPLIMENT OF THE SEASON." is the title of a phishing email I've just found in my inbox. It's been there for a few days, but I'm a lazy person and don't open my email every day. Just one of many bad habits I need to break in 2024.

The text of the email made no mention of the festive season though.  Instead it offered me $3.75 million "for your past effort".

As phishing emails this one seems rather lazy. I can't see anything that would tempt anyone to claim their money.

What kind of person falls for something like this?

And then I found a couple more. One offering a 40% refund on my insurance, and another claiming to be my bank statement from a bank with which I don't have an account.

My Life is Full of Failed Blogs

 My life is full of failed blogs.

Perhaps my biggest failure was the one I started at the beginning of 2020. I was hoping to improve my life, so I called it “Positively 2020”. My goal was to find something positive to write about every day. Unfortunately positive thinking doesn’t come naturally to me, so it didn’t last very long. And as it turned out, 2020 soon became a disaster for the world.

I won’t make that mistake again.

My goal for this blog is to be realistic and write about what’s happening in My World. No boundaries. One day I may write about the Cricket or Tennis - my two favourite sports. Another day I might write about something frustrating that’s happened to me. Let’s see what 2024 brings.

My life is full of failed blogs. I hope this won’t be one of them.