TransNot

South African railways are a dead loss. Rename them trance-net? It is surely the only railway (so-called) service in the world that can:

• hold the world speed record of 245 kph (152 mph)¹for our Cape Gauge of 1076mm , but also
• cut almost all stops from all main lines (to save time) and then take longer to complete their journeys than they did 50 years ago.
• take 80 years to beat ox wagon transport riders plying Qgeberha to Bulawayo

WIKI

‘wiki’ is an internet word. One could thnk it stands for:

What I Know Is …

This should be easy, right? No secrets … must mean no passwords. Yay! Wikipedia says

“A wiki (/ˈwɪki/ (listen) WIK-ee) is a hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project and could be either open to the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base”

MARKDOWN

You read it here!

Markdown will replace Word processors

Why? Because everything is goingto the Web. Who wants to learn complex word processor programs when in the end theey will save to a far simpler format? Writing in word processors is like converting Pounds, Shillings & Pence to Dollars.

We are looking at replacing this blog with Diaspora*.

Q: What is Diaspora*?

A: FB ALT. Facebook Alternative

Why would we wish to do that? We can think of two things right off the bat:

1. No Ads
2. The Zuck does not make it easy for us to get our data (posts) back. All those pearls of wisdom lie on secret servers, somewhere
3. Interaction. As explained at its inception, we didn’t have a budget for a blog, and started this one on a free instance under Gitub. For it to remain free, it needs to be static, whereas we would prefer our associates and readers to comment.

XENOPHOBIA

Jasper writes:

In 1949, my father took me for a walk down to East Street, Pietermaritzburg. We stopped perhaps 50m away from the Indian-owned shops on the corner, where one turned toward Bishopstowe, a farming district named from the home and headquarters of Bishop Colenso.

A lone young sable antelope bull arrived out of the blue on Hanglip this week.

What3Words

We introduce as many people as we can to the app What3Words. Surprisingly, there are still people who have never heard of it. Recently, explaining its use to someone brought the immediate response

This should be amazing for emergency services

So it is.

Apologies for the long delay in posting.

Jasper relocated to Egoli in August 2021 to be closer to his daughter, Shashi, and new arrival, granddaughter Ella.

Since the 2021 Financial Year beginning, much has changed on and around Hanglip:

• The livestock operation is leased.

• Some staff left, and found employment elsewhere, fortunate given the COVID–19 pandemic wearing on and on.

• New interns arrived, and some “in turn” (ahem) have moved on to gainful employment as per the hopes and intentions of the intern programme.
• The ANC’s share of the vote was lessened by an Independent Rate-Payer association in the last municipal elections
• Barley sprouts were grown during the 2021 dry winter months, and fed to milkers. That was discontinued with the good spring rains providing abundant veld greens.
• Shane Lieberberg and Jon Theron stayed for some months in the Werfgebou, but have now moved back to the farm “Hlton”.
• Friend and assoiate Mr Charles Gavaza and family devoted last year’s winter and autumn to planting an old land to vegetables, following the “zhou” method of cultivation. After patiently waiting for Oom Jan’s “late frost” date (15 October) to pass, they fortunately caught very good spring rains.
• A few months of fresh vegetable sales in Colesberg followed until the cold, and moreover the weirdly over-abundant autumn rains, set in.
• The Oorlogspoort river rose and still the rain lingered, followed by massive flooding, convering the low level bridge on the Steynsburg road for a day or two.

Winter Grain Fodder

Since the leasing of the extensive farm, we now graze a few family cattle on the core hectares reserved from the leased area. A few old lands have been planted to mixed grains for fodder and to boost milking nutrition at the end of winter.

An old cultivator chained to the DTV and weighted with boulders adequately disturbed the Tamarisk Land surface:

Easter Update 2021

Coinciding with FYE, this is a good time to review the past year:

1. Lease
2. Old Land Regeneration
3. Welcomes (Jon & Shane, Graduates. Jersey cows)
4. Starlink revisited

Lease

2021, it was long planned, is the year the livestock operation would change on Hanglip. That plan left us with the core area of the farm, straddling the Oorlogspoortrivier, to concentrate on. Naturally, back in the day, croplands were situated near the river, and this meant that most of what we have to ourselves is worked out old croplands. For them to be of much use, we have to look at returning them to productivity.

HERBY CHRISTMAS

Jasper packed a large bunch of Artemisia Afra for his Christmas holiday in Johannesburg. He and his daughter Shashi repacked into the resulting Christmas gifts:

Artemesia Afra

Jasper stripped leaves from stems and packed them into (recycled nut butter) bottles, while Shashi hand wrote labels and pasted them onto the bottles. So, for the cost of harvesting the Wilde Als (Atemisia Afra), plus the cost of a page of sticky labels and some ink, seven gifts were hand made, and a pleasant, “crafty” afternoon was spent.