Vacation in the Magaliesberg (by Midas), and a new light bulb for the kitchen (by Jonah)

Hello everyone. Things had been getting pretty boring around the house lately, so last week we packed up for a few days and took Mom and Dad on vacation to the Magaliesberg.

The Magaliesberg mountains are very old, says Dad, so they're not very high and make for good hiking. Dad also told me that they don't have any monkeys living in them, so I was pretty excited because I don't like monkeys.

It took us about an hour and a half to drive to the farm cottage we rented. Dad has been driving slow these days because the police sent him some things in the mail and Mom got mad at him and said he had to be more careful.

Here we are at Saamrus Guest Farm. Our cottage is in the background and it was called Hoep Hoep. I don't know what that means but it's funny that it rhymes with poop.

Mellie and I were pretty chuffed to check the place out. The porch was pretty cool - you can see how excited Mellie is about it. On the right you can see our spacious bathroom.

This is the living room - Mom and Dad wouldn't let me sit on the couches so I can't tell you if they were comfortable but they don't look like they were.

And here's the kitchen. Dad kept hitting his head on the thing with the candles in it.

And here's our bedroom which you can see has a pretty sweet window for barking at stuff. 

And finally, this is the bathroom that Mom and Dad used. It was awesome because the tub was full of interesting spiders, there was no hot water, and you could see people on the road from the window!

There are a lot of other cool-looking cottages on the farm but Dad said our car couldn't drive to them so we had to stay at the bottom of the hill near the neighbors.

Okay, let's talk about what we did for fun. Mostly, we went for some walks. Here we are at the start of one.

Mom said we were doing very good, so she let us wander off our leashes.

And that's how we found this dry riverbed. I didn't like this place because there were lots of ticks.

Another fun thing to do was to stare at stuff from the porch and sometimes bark at it.

Mom and Dad liked to do this too.

Birds are fun to bark at, like this Black-Shouldered Kite and this African Grey Hornbill.

There was also a nice pool at Saamrus, but Mom wouldn't go in because it was full of cool dead crickets and shongololos and also me and Mellie couldn't go in because the sign said so. We still like Kimi's pool the best.

Mom and Dad also spent a lot of time making food but they didn't let us try any so I can't tell you if it was good.

Even though we got a lot of ticks, Saamrus was a pretty cool place to hang out for a while, but we missed our friends in Johannesburg, so we had to come home. We'll let Dad tell you about what happened when we got back.

One of the glaring flaws in our kitchen was the lack of any light over the main cooking area. Fixing that situation requires turning off the main breaker (since the entire house is run on two circuits), something I hadn't wanted to do at night. Since we got home from vacation in the early afternoon it seemed like a perfect opportunity to remedy this situation. You can see in the background how excited Midas is about being home.

Unfortunately, the only way to access the house's wiring is via a single man-hole above the shower in the bathroom.

Lacking a ladder with 10 foot ceilings means we had to "make a plan" as the locals say - Safety First!

And away we go!

I'm not going to lie, it's pretty creepy up there. But I'll spare you the details. After about an hour of wiring, only one crack on the head from the rafters, and nearly going through the suspended ceiling, I was ready to install our new fixture.

This also required some ladder improvisation skills. 

Nothing is so tiring as working over your head. What's worse is the massive wedgie that I can't attend to because I'm balanced on a stool over a wire baking rack and holding 220v in my left hand.

Ta-dah! We can now tell if food is burning, if water is boiling, just what it is we're actually eating for dinner, and how close the knife has been getting to our fingers. Additionally, I now know that this fume hood terminates blindly next to bone-dry wooden rafters in the attic, so we'll keep our flambeeing to a minimum.