Rambles from World's End

So the morning of the last Saturday of the month’s rolls around, the Mauritian is off at gym working the past week out of his system and the butterfly is charging about the house naked when there is the expected knock at the door. It is time for the monthly visit from the local Jehovah’s Witness who goes by the name of Jeff. Jeff is a “landscaper” by trade, an intelligent man with an open and honest face and a friendly and respectful manner. He is also a lapsed Catholic who has dedicated himself to the “Jehovah's Witness” sect and it determined to convert me. I admire his determination, his debating skills and his knowledge of the bible and look forward to a debate I can sink my teeth into for half an hour once a month. I started out just listening to what he had to say as I had absolutely no knowledge of what a “JW” believes or does not, I even started reading the little pamphlets they give out. Then I started to compare the bible quotes in these pamphlets to that of my own bible ...

Just over a month ago, here at the end of the world, the earth moved! Stop smirking I mean that literally, the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates shifted and the earth literally moved. The Rictor Scale measured a 7.1 earthquake with the epicentre just south of Christchurch along a fault line that nobody knew existed. According to one report the last time this particular fault line is thought to have moved was about sixteen thousand years ago and it made up for this lack of movement by condensing it all into about two minutes and shifted up to five kilometres in places instead of a slow four millimetres a year. A month later and the aftershocks just keep coming with reports of up to one hundred aftershocks in one day. But the most miraculous fact about this is that to date there has not been a single fatality. There is a poem by William Congreve which ends “...Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn'd.” The earths temperature is rising the polar ice caps are melting faster. The h...

I had a bitter exchange with a woman at the supermarket a few weeks ago. The Butterfly was having one of her very rare disobedient moments and completely ignoring my requests or instructions. So after three warnings I smacked her butt, where upon this woman berated me for being so cruel and abusive and embarrassing my child like that in public! I was rather taken aback and retaliated with a rather bitchy “Would you rather I put her in a time out and gave her a lolly for misbehaving?” In hindsight I should have just acted dumb, smiled sweetly and nodded as I walked away. But as I generally leap before I look I plunged feet first into a very heated debate with a very hot headed stubborn and not so intelligent individual. Now don’t misunderstand me, I do not advocate smacking as the only form of discipline and I do agree that in some cases it can be abusive. I also do not discount using the “timeout” method. For both me and the Butterfly using a combination of smacks and timeouts works ...