Post, as promised

It has been a busy time! I guess it's the whole end-of-year-itis that hits around this time every year, but I really feel like I need a holiday now. That's wishful thinking, of course, but we're all allowed to dream.

My folks are setting off on their little little 3-week jaunt around Eastern Europe next week and I am so jealous. TSC and his team will be repainting their house while they're gone, which means that I will barely see him. That man is unbelievable when it comes to work. As soon as he has a project on the go, everything else falls away... his studying, his wife... *Sigh* I'm hoping that he'll be more reasonable this time, but I doubt it. I'm pretty sure that he sees this an yet another opportunity to try to prove himself to my folks.

In other news... I scraped the side of my car on a pillar in the parking bay last week. Argh! I drive so carefully and try to take really good care of my car and then I do something stupid like that. THEN... when I took the bloody thing to the panelbeaters, they tell me that, actually, the front of my car needs work too! Why? Because I went through a huge and completely unavoidable pothole that stretched right across one of the main roads in Rosebank (a very affluent part of Johannesburg) awhile ago, which has buggered up my bumper.

So I call my insurance agency and log the claims. Becuase the incidents are separate, they apparently need separate claims and I must pay the excess twice over. AND... because I am under the age of 26, my excess is very much higher. I could cry.

Sorry - this is very much a rant of a post, isn't it? Even Formula One has let me down. After quite a dull race on Sunday, the last few laps burst into action when the rain came down, and Kimi Raikkonen and Lewis Hamilton (two of the main championship contenders, from Ferrari and McLaren respectively) were fighting it out on the track. They came close to touching and Lewis, who was behind, needed to go off onto the grass. He came back on the track ahead of Kimi. Now, in this situation, a driver can be penalised for gaining advantage off-track, so according to the rules, Lewis needed to surrender the position back to Kimi. He did, letting Kimi pull in front of him. He then made another attempt at overtaking the Finn, and pulled it off magnificently.

Kimi then lost it and smashed his car into the wall, while Lewis managed to remain cool and calm in crazy conditions (skidding around a wet track on his "dry" tyres) to pull off a win. Celebrations ensued on the podium.

And then... because the body that runs F1, the FIA, and Ferrari are big buddies (fact: the Ferrari team boss and the FIA boss go on annual ski holidays together), Ferrari complained that Lewis still gained advantage off-track, and the FIA penalised Lewis by 25 seconds, putting him in third place, and handing the race to the other Ferrari driver, Phillipe Massa.

This drives me mental, especially because in the last race, Ferrari unsafely released Massa into oncoming traffic in the pit lane, which blatantly trangresses the regulations, which state that a team needs to check the pit lane before allowing their driver out. Did the FIA allow Ferrari's race to be compromised? No, they just gave Massa a fine.

Almost enough to make me quit watching. Almost.