We get by with a little (lot) help from our friends......

So after Steve suffered his major panic attack, causing the rest of us to almost suffer minor heart attack’s, it is safe to say life did NOT return to normal, but rather began a walk that has thrown the word “normal” out of our vocabulary altogether. Although at the time it sucked with caps, in hind sight it was the best thing that could ever have happened to either of us.

The advice he received from the emergency staff was to drink more fluids when exercising, they recommended a popular brand of sports drink, and maybe to see a heart specialist to have his heart checked out, and then.... well, to carry on carrying on I suppose.....

We were due to go on leave for a few days so we could spend some time with his brother who was visiting from the UK at the time. His visit brought a little false relief to us both. We threw ourselves into entertaining our house guest and possibly ignoring the horror of our recent "brick wall" experience. It's true that when you are heading in the wrong direction, God will throw you a pebble, then a rock, then a brick then eventually the whole brick wall, but His love is so fierce that He will do all He can, short of interfering in your free will, to firstly try to slow you down long enough to contemplate and hopefully recognize your wrong direction, but when that fails He will pull the brick wall maneuver to stop you in your tracks... more like a screaming halt in our case. However some days He is dealing with the ultra dense, after all that had taken place we still figured that we would carry on with life as usual. And so entertaining my brother-in-law for a few days helped to take our minds off of the reality that was lurking just beneath a very unstable tight rope that we don't remember mounting in the first place.

I'm almost embarrassed to admit that we didn't question the advice we had received and rushed off to stock up on as much sports drink as we could carry, and we glugged it down naively believing in it’s magical healing powers with each sip.... sigh. No this is not a slate against any given product, or the emergency staff, if anything this is a slate against us for being so irresponsible with our health and continuing to leave our lives in the hands of marketing, advertising and our preconceived ideas of trained professionals. It's so much easier to leave it to the “experts” so to speak. It takes the pressure off of you actually having to seek for truth yourself. Not that this is what we thought we were doing, we truly believed at the time we were doing the responsible thing by listening to people we were raised to believe knew better than us in any given area. Secondly, we were overworked, over pressured, and would rather have sat back and placed our very lives in the hands of strangers that we believed knew better. The truth is, before the gigantic all knowing internet arrived with all it's many searchable accessories, people were taught to trust the experts of any particular field since we couldn't all know everything there is to know about everything, truth be told that wasn’t even wise.

However it's not like we have become any wiser through the internet either, just better informed, if that makes sense. You see we are all guilty of having retreated into our own cocooned, technologically generated and dominated worlds. Gone are the days of people helping people, the human touch of kindness and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. These values were sadly replaced with an everyman for himself approach and if it means stepping on you to get ahead then so be it. As good as it is to be able to Google your way to answers to almost every conceivable question known to man, it has also stopped us relating with each other on a human level, and no technology can replace a human relationship or experience.

Right, now before you think I'm on a mission to slate all things technological.... (Last time I checked I was expressing myself on a blog) ....into our lives steps a lady named Mary-Ann Shearer.... and how pray tell did we find her?? Yep, you got it, we googled her :-). See it's not that I suffer technological phobia, once again, just like sports drinks are not the evil of all evils, neither is technology, and the same can be said of money, guns or anything else that has gained a bad reputation over time. It is rather man and his irresponsibility and mismanagement of all that has been entrusted to him. My point is that in spite of how screwed up the world may be due to man's inefficient management of this planet and all resources thereof, there are still glimmers of light in the shadows and the closer you get to them the brighter they shine until you realize they are not as scarce as you may have thought, nor dim as they seemed initially. Kinda the closer you get to God the more of Him you experience and the more you realize how much of Him there truly is.

Well MA is one of many bright lights we have discovered on our journey, and a journey this truly has become, but more on that later. After our houseguest left with meaningful hugs yet a scratch of the head and a shrug of the shoulders, (the first of many signs we would discover along our way as we tried to not only make sense of what had happened to us but also tried to explain it to others) we found ourselves tossed back into reality with a vengeance. To say we felt alone in the truest sense of the word would be an understatement. Perhaps it was the fact that we had been competing with the hamster on the wheel for so long that we hadn't stopped long enough to notice our cage had been moved, our water ran out and our new owner bred hamsters to feed to his pet snake... or maybe I’m being too dramatic. All I know is life had now become a very unfamiliar, scary place, with little or no road map out of the dark forest.

To be continued....

Our big discovery

So we really eat quite a lot of fruit and all our friends who come to visit often comment that the place looks like a fruit shop. We go to a few good fruit and veg shops in and around Joburg and always get great stuff, but lately we have been feeling a bit ripped off by certain shops. so Denise decided to look into the city deep fruit market where they all get their fruit from and what do you know. We can go buy directly from them !!

So we ventured off there last saturday morning and entered a whole new world. It is truly a huge market stocking all fruit and veg known to mankind - in season stuff of course. The best part of it was the prices, it's really much cheaper than going to a normal fruit and veg shop. Not that we will stop supporting our local shops, but for the bulk that we buy our fruit in it is far more cost effective. It's worth the trip once a week or every second week to go and buy like this.


As an indication, we paid R250 for this fruit below where we normally would have paid between R450 - 500. Not bad !!!



Then we wen't to another fruit shop our friend Brian told us about to go and check that out so we landed up buying some more there and then we went on to our usual places to get their big avo's so this is the whole lot that we bought that day. Thank God I won a second fridge a year ago, and now we're beginning to think we need a third....