Prawns in the Grass

I'm thrilled to have found my very first parktown prawn :) I found it far away from Parktown. It was on the edge of a golf course in Magaliesberg. I think it might be the 2nd most interesting insect I have ever found. Second only to butterflies because butterflies are the most beautiful creatures in the universe.





I don't think these pictures do them justice. They are beautiful and the fact that they are indigenous to South Africa makes them even cooler.

I sat for a while and watched this one. Took about a hundred photos -none were very good coz I used my 2 megapixel cellphone camera and i'm not much of a photographer to begin with.

It wasn't doing much, so I took a stick and started poking at it. No, I'm not like a horrible 4 year old child who pulls cats by their tails, it has an exoskeleton and I wasn't hurting it at all.

I left it and when I came back to check later it was still lying there, but it's body was being eaten by ants.

So I guess it hadn't moved earlier coz it had been dead the whole time. Which is sad for this beautiful little cricket, well beautiful large King cricket, but lucky for me, coz apparently they bite quite hard if u come too close.

It was my first encounter with a Parktown prawn and I hope for my sake that it was pesticide in the grass and not my stick poking that killed it.

About The Arrivals

The arrivals is a lot of truth shrouded in heaps of paranoia. It's an imaginitive mind that started asking questions and has managed to uncover many truths that the higher powers would rather hide from us. It makes u start to question everything u thought u knew and to look at the way the world has panned out and recognise that everything that has happened has panned out according to a greater plan.
Knowing that the zionists are moving closer to attaining the promised land, knowing that the anti-christ is practically on our doorstep and knowing that there are so many people who are willing to carry out his plan, made me feel like I need to do something to stop it.I didn't know what I needed to do, I just knew I needed to do something. I can't let this happen. I need to fight it. I need to make people aware of what they are not seeing.
The director of the arrivals, who seems to be an ardent Matrix fan, draws a parallel to "unplugging" people, as it occurs in the Matrix trilogy. In fact he draws parallels to the Matrix in many of his arguments. I doubt that the matrix was about the same thing, but I find his linking to the Matrix theme quite apt.

Linking us to the dunya and making us as unholy as possible is seen in a whole different light. I had thought it was just commercialisation, but the arrivals makes you realise that it's all part of the greater plan of shaytaan/lucifer/the antichrist and that there are millions of people doing his work and preparing for the arrival of the antichristIt is after all, shaytaan's duty to whisper into the hearts of people and confuse them.
It's not too far-fetched to believe that the people in power and the people with huge popularity have made a pact with him, but I do find it hard to believe that they would leave the kind of clues that he picks up on.
For example, he says that starbucks supports the state of Israel and have named their company starbucks to show their loyalty to the star of Israel. If it's a great plan and they take such care to cover it up, why would they put something so blatant right there in their name?
or perhaps...they are so confident that no1 will suspect their evil-ness that they go ahead and put it in their name to gloat (insert evil-looking emoticon here)
Even if some of it is paranoid, I think it's very good to watch, just to expand ur mind and free it from all the propaganda it's been fed.
one of the comedians in the arrivals says at one point, "there is one type of prison where u can see the walls and the bars and u know that u r captured, but there's another type of prison that is even more dangerous; where u cannot see the walls or the bars and u believe that u are free."

Initially I was very disturbed at everything that I was seeing. I am an ignorant bliss kind of person and I absolutely hate it each time the rosy bubble surrounding my idea of the world bursts and I'm hit with all the ugly.But then I realised that this is the way it was meant to be; the coming of the antichrist, the pain and hardship that good people will have to endure and the wars - real wars that we are aware of, as well as silent wars that hurt us without us knowing we are being hurt, have all been written long before the world came into existence.
There are some things that are just meant to be and no matter how hard u try to fight them, they will happen. You need to watch the arrivals with this in mind and then only can u accept it's message without getting all upset and paranoid and feeling like there's no hope, or getting stubborn and cocky and closing your mind even more by rejecting everything that is being said.

5 minutes of fame...almost

I wanted to be in front of the lights and camera.
I wanted people around me to recognise me from the video.
Oooh I know u! u were in the I'm an IBMer video :)
But when the time came, I looked ahead and my brain was dead.
My soul was dead.
I couldn't bring myself to speak to a dead camera.
I was constantly chided for looking away.
I sometimes find it hard to look into people's eyes when I speak to them...
But I realise now that I need there to be eyes.
If there aren't eyes for me to look at when I speak,my personality dies.
I wanted to be a rockstar, but i failed.

I don't think it's fair that obama won a nobel prize. Somewhere deep down inside of me I've always wanted to win a nobel prize. I look at the nobel prize winners with such awe and amazement; their names are written in history and the things that they have achieved help humanity so much.

Also it's cool to have the title. Perhaps I spend too much time seeking what is cool and what sounds nice. As corpsekicker once said to me, we don't like being developers, we like the idea of development. The idea of development has worn thin for me, now I like the idea of IT architect and want to move to that role.
Although I guess that's how dreams originate. looking at something from the outside and saying..I want that.And if u don't have that dream, u don't have something to work towards and if u not working towards something, every day just follows after the last and u get stuck in the monotony of the now without thinking about the future.

I guess I'm a self proclaimed idiot

cockroaches, savouries and starlight @ merinsky

I'm being all reminiscy now like antiverbose and blogging about campusdays...
here's to the night we wrote 222 at iftaar time and came all prepared withmilkshake and spring rolls and cheese and corn samoosas and cheesecake and little peppermint chocolates.(all of which sounds sooo mouthwateringly awesome coz i'm fasting right now) .
We took this perfect meal and found the perfect place to eat it in a courtyard between the chancellors building and the old Merinsky library (thanks to corpsekicker for the name of this buildingand for the suggestion that this should be blogged about).
We sat on the cold, dirty red tiles with cockroaches the size of shoes, no cockroaches the size of cows!runinng past us. The only light we had was from the moon and stars, but the sun had set not half an hour beforeand so the light was, how can I say, Perfect :)

I can't understand people who don't need to interact with anyone! Who just sit and work the whole day, looking straight ahead at their screens.
I've moved away from my old team and i 've joined a team where everyone except me has permission to work from home, so the rest of my team doesn't even come into the office, and it's absolutely killing me to be alone.I have to wake up at 4 thirty so that I can leave the house by 5 thirty and avoid horrendous traffic. I usually end up leaving by 5:45 or 5:50, but that's beside the point, and drive for an hour before getting to an office where i sit all by my lonesome.I do a fair amount of social networking; facebook, windows live, gtalk, mxit and most recently twitter, but that's somehow just not enough for me. I need actual people who I can go for actual coffee with and take smoke breaks with and just waste time with.
Even I, being a person who thinks that having g33k status is absolutely cool because of the intellectual connotations that come with geekdom. (Basically if u are a geek,people think you are clever) find it way too hard to sit alone in the car for an hour in the morning, come to work and sit alone for 8 hours and then get back into the car and drive home all alone. This is not what I signed up for.
I guess it's a blessing in disguise that the parents haven't allowed me to move out of the house or I would come home from this alone-ness to a house that is empty and alone...
.I'm ten seconds from losing my mind...
And! my sisters earphones that I've been using to attempt to block out the deafening silence are broken... sigh! it's gonna be a long,long day.

I may not be the best-dresser around, but I take a keen interest in fashion and I really enjoy going shopping. Never before has it occurred to me to look for outfits online though, but I picked up the 'Sisters' magazine on Sunday, saw a few of the websites advertised and was inspired.


I started with IslamicDesignHouse.com and the abayas/jilbaabs that they have on sale are interesting, but not quite what I was looking for.


I moved on to another website and had a look at what they term the 'burqini' or burqah version of the bikini :P which is a bodysuit that covers ur entire awrah, head included, but is still accepted for use in swimming pools in and around the UK. I hear that there is a muslim life guard who carries out her duties wearing one such 'burqini'. It looks a bit strange and I would probably be quite self conscious if I actually decided to buy and wear one, but kudos to her for being so brave and carrying out her job islamically :)


And then I struck gold! I google image searched Islamic wear and found this picture on the blog pearls for breakfast


The blogger who put together this ensemble is not muslim, but she had a go at an Ismalic outfit and i think she did a great job:)

I decided to explore polyvore.com, the place she uses to construct her outfits and I was in heaven:) It's like playing dress-up-barbie but with real, actual clothes that you can find in the shops. You don't have to go to specific websites to find what you want, you just search for, 'green handbag' for example and the search engine goes and picks up a multitude of green handbags from different stores and different designers and you can just put them together and create something that you can buy afterwards. I don't think I'll actually ever buy anything from polvore, because with the exchange rate and the shipping costs etc it becomes quite expensive, but it's great fun to explore.

Here is my first attempt at an Islamic outfit:

It's nothing to shout about, but i'm proud of it. I think I found what I was looking for in online islamic wear and I'm definitely going to be going back to polyvore to play some more