Do you want my bread?

I’m really bad at this. Just been really busy. When I’m sleeping like 6 hours a night, writing about what I’m doing isn’t high on the list. But just now it’s Sunday evening and while I’m preparing my food for the week I have some free time.

I guess the last non-work or soccer-related thing I talked about was the Stellenbosch Wine Festival. That was three weeks ago. Wonderful. OK so what else have I been up to? Work, obviously. The standout event of the last few weeks has been preparing for and then participating in a big meeting that just happened this past Thursday. We were pitching to a very large company to fund an entrepreneurship training academy. Well, this was after a marathon 4-hour meeting between four of us on a Friday morning when we finally decided on the form that we wanted our proposal to take. That was a pretty fantastic meeting all by itself as we really debated both what we really wanted to propose, and why we were doing it at all. I love my one co-worker because he is the most blunt person I have ever met in my entire life, he doesn’t hesitate to tell you when he thinks you are crazy and off-base. There were a couple back-and-forths between him and our CEO that were a bit like watching a tennis match, with my other co-worker and I just interrupting from the peanut gallery.

So to prepare for this monster meeting, I had a bunch of slides that I had to work on. But I wasn’t able to work on them during the day on Tuesday because I was busy with meetings around the other business plans. As a result, I wound up at our CEO’s house working on Powerpoint until after 11pm. There were three of us total, and again it was actually really nice to collaborate like this and run things past them just when I had a question, and vice versa. You come up with such a stronger work product that way. I also finally heard china used in actual speech (there is a lot of slang around here that I hear rumours of but don’t actually wind up hearing until all of a sudden BAM right in your face for 5 ½ hours!). I remember thinking at one point that as absurd as this all was, I wouldn’t have it any other way and I really was living the dream. We were born for this (one of the refrains of heart).

The next night I was up until 12:30am doing the final round of edits on the 91-page document outlining the training academy. Needless to say, I didn’t prep my slides like I had intended that night, so I had to skip the gym to do so in the morning before work. I think I bemused my boss a bit by asking for the slides so I could prepare in the evening; he seemed surprised that I would do such a thing. If there is one thing I learned at Babson it was how to prepare for presentations, and I was surprised that he thought I would go into such an important meeting and just “wing it” but he was pleased that I wanted to prepare. Hey, if the rock star is happy with me I’m happy. But I was happy to say that after a stumbling start (the first slide I had to present I was expecting someone else to present) I got back in the zone. It’s interesting, this one executive who flew down from Joburg to meet with us really looked a lot like Skip Battle (from my Ask Jeeves/ask.com days).

So the meeting went really well from a number of perspectives … when there is news I will post it. I was so pumped that afternoon/evening; I think this was one of the most important meetings of my career and we just nailed it but I am trying to contain my optimism but at the very least I can say that we couldn’t have done any better than we did, and that is definitely something to be pleased about. Even our blunt friend said the next morning that “We knocked their socks off. And now they need new socks.” LOL. But yeah that evening I watched my friend’s kid so that she could train, and actually I really needed that because it was pure downtime.

Anyhow I had a talking to with the Purple Heart girls that I do business coaching for. Their sales numbers are just terrible, and they clearly don’t want to be doing this and the model has some perverse incentives in it that, well anyway suffice to say their sales numbers are terrible. So after one week where we talked about the importance of setting goals (which is a funny thing because I don’t actually like to set goals – they are always arbitrary and by the time I’m close to one I’m already past it in my mind; I prefer to aim more for concepts but that’s another story), I just asked them flat out what they would prefer to be doing. One of them wants to be a receptionist and has computer skills, the other one wants to expand a business selling hair products that she has had for a while, but has put on hiatus to work at Purple Heart. I said all right, they clearly understood all the concepts we had been going over in the business coaching so next week I was going to make them fill out the equivalent information (total sales, total COGS, profits, and inventory theoretical vs. actual reconciliation) by hand on paper. Then I would sit and look over the records of this girl’s business. To say she was excited was an understatement. Then we wrapped up and I went to go talk to someone for a minute or two and when I came back she told me that she had a business plan and would I please look at that too? I was blown away, and really excited. See, THIS is what it’s all about and it’s hard when working so much higher up the food chain not to forget it, per se, but to forget that this sort of thing is really happening as a result of your actions and work.

The other business plans are moving along, well, actually they are not so much moving along as we are stepping back and getting consensus as I mentioned. A couple of these meetings were kind of mind-blowing in that I do love jumping from one business to another and talking with different smart people all day about complicated problems. My brain just seems to work so much better and I am much more creative when I am talking through things with a bunch of smart people, it’s really great. I think all the time how lucky I am to be working at heart and doing what we are doing, with the people I’m doing it with. And we are just at the beginning; I may be drinking the Kool-Aid but I am very excited for the next six months!

Oops, I did mean to be talking about what ELSE I’ve been up to, huh? OK back to that. So, the weekend after Stellenbosch Wine Festival we had a weightlifting clinic at Cape CrossFit with this guy Dutch Lowy from the States. He also has a blog that you can check out here. That was great fun, including the part where I was going into a front squat, lost my balance and fell on my ass – I was going slowly enough at that point that I burst out laughing on the way down. Well, there aren’t too many weeks that go by where I don’t manage to fall on my ass, just not quite as hard as that fall that bruised my tailbone a few weeks back! Anyway I want to practice these lifts more because I actually know a lot of things that I’m doing wrong (or that I mess up when we get to heavier weights), but the only way to get better is to practice. My favourite (least favourite?) is that when I go to do the snatch I pull the bar out rather than up, so Dutch stood like 2 inches in front of me and told me not to hit him with the bar. Yeek. Well, I didn’t hit him with the bar.

Following that we went out to lunch and this is where the punchline of the joke comes in. OK the joke is not that funny objectively but it cracks me up. So one of the guys who runs our gym apparently gets a bit possessive of his food, but he [apparently] is happy to eat off of other peoples’ plates. Upon being told this, I saw that he had an empty plate while I had half an omelette left, and two pieces of toast that I had forgotten to request be replaced with something else (we’re all on the paleo diet you see, some much more strictly than others). So I turned my plate around so that the omelette was closer to me, and asked “Do you want my bread?” Now, this is what passes for a joke in our circles and I must say the reaction I got was hilarious – the look of horror was priceless, and the other coach apparently thought this was the funniest thing he had heard all day. Cult, I’m telling you. This was the same lunch where I was described as doing three things: work, CrossFit, and falling on my bum. Guess that about sums it up. So I guess this post is going to be mostly about that other half of my life!

Speaking of, two days later we had our baseline workout for the Fight Gone Bad challenge (we will do the same workout again in 8 weeks and see how much we improve). That was the day after the World Cup Final, so I went in the evening which means I had to dread …. I mean anticipate this workout all day long. All I have to say is that this is the first time I ever went 100% in a workout. Gotta do that more often, but it’s mentally difficult, I usually hover around 90%. Room for improvement. My goodness that was one heck of a workout …

Two days after that, we had a going away dinner for Dutch. This worked out quite well as I had had a sushi craving for weeks, and the place we went has a R99 special – 26 pieces, which is actually a bit too much for me to eat at once but it was so good and sushi is really not so good as leftovers. Malan was right, the sushi is good in this country! That was a really fun dinner. Afterwards three of us took Dutch out to Long Street (which was dead!) and stayed out until 3:30 in the morning (I got home at 4 as I took one of the guys back to where he stays in Camps Bay). Needless to say, I took the next day off from training. Oops.

Then I had dinner with one of the guys from the gym (sensing a pattern here??) to talk about his business idea. It’s interesting, I have been churning it around my head for some time now; hopefully some ideas will drop out sooner or later. Of course we wound up spending most of the time talking about CrossFit and the other people we train with. So it goes… later on that evening I walked the 50m down the road to Asoka for going away drinks for the co-worker who had been heading up Purple Heart and is now returning to the States. After a little bit we wound up going to a house party to play beer pong (well, I didn’t play, I was too uncoordinated from the 3 hours of sleep I’d gotten the night before!). Americans in Cape Town hey…

On Friday of that week (this is only a week ago now, I’m catching up!) I drove out to Strand to check the San Francisco Spur (!!) with one of the guys I met when I was here last year. This is all very interesting to me because we are just now discovering that our personalities are quite similar, and it’s interesting to see just how far this rabbit hole goes. I’m a bit obsessed with this at the moment as a way to gain more insight into myself; it’s just fascinating to meet someone and be able to describe how I think he would react to a given situation and have him agree with me. Well I could go on this way all night.

The CrossFit games in California were going on this weekend, so I ate up a bunch of my bandwidth watching them. Geez, I really do have no life I am realising as I write this. I saw handstand pushups in rings. Now I really have seen everything. Next time someone says there’s nothing new under the sun, I have a comeback!

In honour of the games we did a team workout in the Saturday class; that was some good fun as we figured out how to use the theory of comparative advantage to our advantage, as it were. That day was the Bastille Day Festival in Franschhoek, which was very strange to see all the French flags and weird people around! Later on that evening I was collecting on my World Cup bet (my friend had to get me drunk). Problem was, I wasn’t at all in the mood but this was really the only night when I didn’t have to get up insanely early the next morning. So I dragged myself away from the CrossFit games and out to Chevelle, where I tried my hand at brainwashing this Californian medical student from my building.

On Sunday, I practiced handstands (really, I did). Then I went out to learn surfing at Muizenberg with one of the girls I met at the gym. I was actually pretty successful at it, for being a bit nauseous from the hangover. This is the problem you see – it is such a mission to get drunk and I’m no longer enjoying it. What am I becoming? Well anyway I finished right when I finally rode the board all the way in, ha! Oh I really need to collect myself and go scuba diving soon…. Well, we had a really good time and are going to go back next weekend.

OK. Last week Monday I had dinner with this fantastic woman I met through work. She is super smart, and some people you just really click with, and can talk easily and about interesting things. Well, she and I got along well in that way, talking about everything from the definition of freedom to the existence of ghosts to metaphysics (although I suppose ghosts might fall under metaphysics unless you believe that you can measure their presence but I only ever watched one episode of Ghost Hunters so I can’t credibly evaluate this). Oddly enough, we didn’t talk about work other than to engage in the inevitable comparing notes on certain key people …. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, and now that I know about Beluga I am in big trouble. Next up: Ethiopian food.

I already talked about how I spent the next two nights. Three, actually, as the next night after babysitting I went home, cooked dinner, and went right to bed. I slept 8 hours and was still exhausted the next morning; the emotional drain from the week was much tougher than the physical drain. On the Thursday evening workout I was JUST exhausted, not a good feeling.

The next night – same thing, I went to babysit again and then home to bed! I think I slept like 9 hours and woke up actually feeling like myself again. Good thing, too, because we had a really fun workout. I just really like handstand pushups. Yes, I’m weird. So this day turned into a bit of an all-CrossFit-all-the-time kind of thing as first of all a couple of us went over to Green Point to cook huevos rancheros (well some of us cooked, some just sat around and then ate about 100 eggs). I was happy because I got to make and eat guacamole, and guacamole is one of the best things EVER in my opinion, at least after Cathleen taught me how to make it properly. Sadly, the Springboks got their asses handed to them by Australia, but that couldn’t interrupt my high from cooking (which I love) and spending time with people I really like. Oh and the view didn’t suck either!

I collected my roommate and drove to Camps Bay, where I wound up drinking mojitos with a bunch of the guys from CCF (one of whom is friends with one of the guys I was working late into the night with last week, and of course he had to call him … “Ellie? You’re with Ellie? My Ellie?”). Yep, the one and only. Cape Town is a wicked small town… So we moved on to a house to braai, drink wine, check out the moon, play music, and chat (yes, about CrossFit what else??). Until the wine ran out (!) which was OK because it was at least 90 minutes after I should have left to get to bed as I had to get up early for the first race in the Winter Trail Series.

How’d that go for me you ask? Well, it was a 10.2km run, and it was punishing! I wanted to finish in under an hour and wound up just over 70 minutes, ugh. My goodness, there were some hills that just went on, and on, and on, and they were steep guys too. But this is where my strength comes in – I’m not a distance runner like some of these people so people would inevitably pass me on the downhills and straightaways, and then I would pass a bunch of people on the hills. I think I passed like 20 people on the last hill just before the end, and then I pulled another woman along with me in the sprint to the end (I told her not to let me beat her, and actually I was afraid for a minute I was too successful!).

Anyway it was fun, and I saw my co-worker and her husband, as well as one of the other girls from CCF (she is a fitness editor at Media 24). Of course neither of us thought to advertise, but I’ll need to buy a boys’ shirt for myself before next week so that I have something roomy to run in. Next week’s run is in the winelands I believe; should be good fun!


All right, about time to check on my dinner and actually there is some work that I really should be doing before tomorrow, and I am going to bed at 10pm; time to start getting my priorities in order here.

The World Cup is Over

Yep, it’s been over for a whole week. Time has been just flying by and at this point there is no way I can do a play-by-play of what exactly I’ve been up to, so highlight reel only starting with World Cup.

A while ago I posted on facebook my top reasons why I was looking forward to the World Cup being over (to help me get over my depression). They are:
10.I can finally start apartment hunting
9. That #@*(#$ fan walk will be a thing of the past
8. I can stop planning my social life around soccer
7. Prices will go down
6. I will be more productive at work
5. I can quit pretending I know what I’m talking about (at least in relation to soccer)
4. I can go back to Long Street without male escorts (not THAT sort of male escort)
3. Fewer vuvuzelas at all hours of the day and night
2. People will quit asking me if I’m here for World Cup
1. I’ll get more sleep
Plus one I forgot – the lane closures on match days will be done.


The first semi-final game was Netherlands-Uruguay, right here in Green Point. Two teams I had seen before, and I was happy to see that the crowd was pretty well all orange for Netherlands (oranje). When I got to the stadium (early, in time to watch warmups), I saw a TV over the concessions that was showing the game broadcasting on SABC3, which was showing the stadium. I had a bit of a crazy moment realizing that a lot of the world was watching this (or a similar) broadcast and I was there. Lucky me, and it’s not just the World Cup to me, either – it’s the World Cup in South Africa. Big difference.

After Suárez’s handball against Ghana, and just the fact that Uruguay had beaten Ghana, we were all pulling for Netherlands, who had actually been a very entertaining team to watch the entire time. I also just realized that Suárez was the same one whose play-acting had been responsible for that absurd red card that the South African goalie got, which resulted in Uruguay’s second goal (and the goal that effectively closed out the Bafana Bafana loss. Ugg. Regardless, due to his red card he didn’t play which was a shame because we didn’t get to boo his every move.

I found the match itself very entertaining. Both teams played well but Netherlands clearly dominated, and it showed in the score as they went ahead 2-0 I believe. It was a bit close to comfort at the end as Uruguay got a late goal bringing it to 3-2 Netherlands, and there was quite a flurry at the end. It was ironic because Forlán was subbed out with maybe 10 minutes left; I bet they wished he was in at the end!

Whoa, a burpee wall jump. That is crazy. I am watching the CrossFit games online right now. Wow these athletes are exhausted.

Wednesday night was the Spain-Germany game. I fully expected Germany to win this game handily, but I was pleased with the end result as I was rooting for Spain as I had picked them to win. One of my friends from Stellenbosch came into Cape Town to watch with me (from the balcony at Zula, of course), and he even had a Spain jersey on so we were all good. Even though they are the New Jersey Devils of the World Cup. But, I have always appreciated good defense even though I hate the Devils almost as much as I hate the Red Wings.

This was the most amazing game I have ever seen (ok, granted, I haven’t seen that many games) – according to the official stats after Spain had possession of the ball 51% of the time. It sure as heck didn’t look like that to me – it looked to me like the ball was glued to the feet of the Spaniards. They were executing the most amazing passes all around the Germans. Absolutely incredible. Well, Spain won 1-0 which was about par for the course. So we celebrated with the Uruguay fans who overhead the two of us practicing our Spanish (now that Uruguay lost I was rooting for them as they were the underdogs … my friend called me a traitor but I actually did feel quite bad for them somehow). Then we continued drinking and talking laaaate into the night; it was pretty intense as this particular friend and I are just now realizing that we have extremely similar personalities, so it’s kind of fascinating to explore that.

For the consolation game on Saturday night I went to watch at a really fun sports bar in Observatory with my co-worker. It was a nice vibe there, and the whole crowd was anti-Uruguay but the Germans won the game. My impression was that Uruguay wanted the win more than Germany, but the Germans were just far the superior team. I also wound up watching more Uruguay games than any other team – I saw the France-Uruguay in Green Point, then South Africa-Uruguay on TV, Uruguay-Ghana, Netherlands-Uruguay, and Germany-Uruguay. That’s a lot of Forlán’s hair. I was just exhausted so after this game I went home and to bed early, as apparently did most of the rest of Cape Town, in anticipation of the next night’s game.

For the final on Sunday, I did not start drinking at 10am like a lot of the people in my building (they were having a sangria party that I dropped by to say hello). I figured if I started drinking at 10am I would probably get drunk and not be able to enjoy the game, and I certainly didn’t want that. So instead I decided to celebrate by going and running from Green Point to Camps Bay and back. The Winter Trail series started in two weeks and I hadn’t been running once since I got to Cape Town, or about 10 weeks, so I figured it might be a good idea to make sure I could run 15kms or so before attempting to do so. It went pretty well – I was originally aiming for a leisurely run but instead I somehow decided part-way in a) not to run for time but to run for distance, and b) that I wanted my second half split to be faster than my first. I was doing really well and just flying through Bantry Bay and Clifton then I hit the wall right around Sea Point and literally had to force myself not to stop the last 200 meters or so. That was really interesting, the mental gymnastics that were going on in my head at that time.

Anyway, back to the World Cup. So another friend of mine from Stellenbosch came into town to watch this game. Every bar was pretty packed from early in the afternoon, and we wound up at Cubana in Green Point. This was actually pretty cool because we hung out by the bar, and I wound up sitting on the bar to watch the game which was fantastic because it was comfortable and I had a very good view. And also, it’s just cool to be able to sit on a bar. For some strange reason.

So this game was not the most entertaining I’d ever seen in terms of drama, and there was a lot of rough playing and diving on both sides. Yech. But it was a typical Spain game, and they won 1-0. To the Netherlands’ credit, Spain was unable to maintain the level of otherworldly ball control that they had had against Germany. Other than that, it was a typical Spain game with only a single [Spanish] goal. I was rooting for Spain in this game because I had chosen them, but actually I didn’t really care as I liked both teams quite well. I suppose I should have been rooting for the team that resembled the Flyers over the team that resembled the Devils, but whatever…

And just like that, the World Cup was over. I felt empty for a little bit, but life goes on. It was really something. On Wednesday after World Cup our free expression session in the morning meeting was soapbox rants or raves about World Cup and it was crazy what people had to say. One of the women in our office put together a slide show of various images of the World Cup and I had goose bumps the entire time.

From now, the entire country will need a new conversation starter! The excitement and euphoria of the opening day has been gone for a while now, actually. Has there been any lasting impact? Too soon to tell. I feel, from many conversations, like things are changing for the better but in reality I don’t think that the World Cup can or should take credit for that so much as just time. Then again, the top of the news headlines the next day was xenophobic violence in the townships against Somalis. So, we have a ways to go.

Catching up - work

Well, I am learning a lot. I have been working on these business plans for a couple of weeks now and it is quite interesting to analyse already what I have done right, and what I have done wrong. My goodness, I’ve done a lot wrong; and not so much in terms of what I’ve done but in terms of how I have gone about doing it. In short, I’ve been so focused on getting things done that I haven’t taken the time to make sure everyone is on the same page, which I KNOW is absolutely the wrong way to go about doing things but sometimes we all get blinders on.

I am also learning so much about managing because it has been a while, and it’s pretty stressful to make sure that everyone is happy, productive, and actually understanding the objectives that have been set out. There are so many interns, and some are more capable of acting on their own than others. I have always respected the amount of time it takes to be a good manager, and I know that I’m not being a particularly good manager at the moment. That bothers me in a lot of ways but then again it bothers me that I can’t work past about midnight before I can feel my mental capacity decreasing, and it bothers me that I can’t be 100% focused all day long. And it bothers me that I can’t perform certain physical activities. So apparently, I basically wish I was a Cylon. But definitely one of the final five.

On the other hand, if I were perfect life would be pretty boring as I would have no learning left to do. That I think is what I love the most about work or life in general just now, this is stretching me in all sorts of new ways but not in a way that’s too much. As my mother once said, I don’t like learning, I like knowing. So what I’m doing is close enough to a core competency that I can struggle through figuring out what to do and how to do it, and the process is fun. Being in way over my head would not be fun, I don’t imagine.

Anyway, at this exact moment I am feeling pretty excited actually because I had a fantastic meeting (why do these always seem to happen between 5 and 6pm??) with two of the members of the management team and I’m happy because we are not only giving the business plan template a dry run (and are making a ton of changes to it as a result), but also the whole incubation methodology. So, rather than red tape when we are trying to move fast, we are now actually refining the incubation methodology which is about as exciting to me, honestly, as any business plan. As much fun as it is putting a business idea through the ringer, systematizing the way to produce a business plan is both more challenging and more powerful. It is, after all, why we’re here – our rock star CEO is a visionary but we need to be able to replicate a model that works, which means the methodology has to work in the real world and not just on the drawing board.

That was a funny moment because I think all three of us had a bit of a different epiphany sitting in that room as the sun was setting over the harbour (sorry American readers, the spell check keeps “correcting” my American spellings). That is also a very cool feeling to take a bunch of bright people, put them in a room with a problem and see what comes out. There is very little to me that’s as inspiring as working with a bunch of really smart, hard-working people.

Herding cats … that about sums up what I’ve been trying to do this last week and change. A couple of highlights (other than getting dragged to the roti place twice in a week …. SO NOT ON MY DIET!):
• A visit to Philippi to meet with a large scale farmer Johan Terre’Blanche (no relation to Eugene). All I can say about this is that I’ve heard all this before (about the “benefits” of conventional over organic) and don’t agree with the half of it. Also, thank goodness I wasn’t the only one in the room who didn’t speak very good Afrikaans … my learning is coming along so slowly, there are so many other things to be doing and learning. It doesn’t help that my vocabulary is getting added to in odd ways (i.e. waterpokkies and hout (chickenpox and wood)).
• Visiting Mama Rosie and the Philippi Farmers Market (site for a future Grow Zone – see the image with the tractor) and learning about their farming challenges
• Reviewing the work I’d done on the second half of my coworker’s drug rehab parent support programme. I swear every time I meet with this guy it’s a new revelation. The world is a better place that he is in it – he makes an impact in a way that I never could, as a role model and an incredibly powerful spirit and presence. We all contribute in our own ways; my way just now is as someone who gets things done but you never know – I am so much more of a dynamic leader and speaker than I was ten years ago, who knows what role I’ll find for myself in the future.
• Watching this same [ex-gangster, mind you] guy making Purple Heart hampers
• My one co-worker asking me exactly what was in my water bottle (I drink a lot of water, ok?)
• Finally grasping conceptually what needs to happen for market research for all of these business plans
• More Purple Heart business coaching; this time of the team of girls. The epiphany this week was showing them why inventory theoretical vs. actual count was important (actually they realised this on their own, after I explained the concept of over/unders). THAT was very cool. As I read this I realise it sounds patronising which is not what I mean to be … people are people. Some are smarter than others. The people I’ve met from the townships aren’t stupid (ok some of them are but a lot of people across all walks of life are pretty stupid), but they lack knowledge. Seeing them make leaps of comprehension around business ideas …. VERY cool. Oh, and they also like the pictures of the soccer players. I think the zoom on my camera makes me the most popular person in the Purple Heart office on business coaching days.
• Working on the Purple Heart business plan all of Friday night to about 1:30am and waking up early Saturday to finish it before heading to the weightlifting clinic. The funny thing about this was discovering a major flaw in my spreadsheet around 8:30am when I had to be at the gym before 9. Nothing to focus your mind like a deadline…
• Touring the Abalimi/Harvest of Hope operation and meeting Rob Small, the founder. What an amazing character. Harvest of Hope is essentially an organisation that helps train and provide a route to market for township farmers, telling them what to grow and holding them to very strict quality standards. They also have farming training classes a few times a year that I would love to attend if I had the time (and if I didn’t probably already have 80% of the knowledge but that lats 20% is always the difference between mediocrity and excellence). I may be getting involved with a new project Rob wants to get off the ground …. More on this later if it comes to fruition. Like I needed to add something else to my plate, but this would be just up my alley.

The only other thing I can say at this point is that I wish there were more hours in the day. Boy did my ex-boss have me figured out….

I leave you all with a quote from an email I just received: “There is work to be done, mostly by you. Ellie, please drive the process. We need to torture the financial model next. Please read the whole document - all 79 pages - so that you have the context you need to complete your sections.” Life at heart.

Soccer and Wine

Saturday morning! I woke up with a headache and so clearly, 15 minutes of deadlifts were the thing to do. Got rid of my headache at least, but I really really, really need to work on my grip. Big problems when one part of your body is so much weaker than the other parts. Following that I went to the Old Biscuit Mill market to stock up on meat for two weeks, then fought match day road closure traffic all the way home. That is one thing I will not miss!

The rest of the day was taken up with soccer. I went to the Germany-Argentina game at Green Point. This was an afternoon (4pm) game, and it was actually pretty neat to walk the fan walk during the daylight and actually see everything. Including the wacky fans. Someone had put a big German flag up on Signal Hill which was pretty cool, except that I was rooting for Argentina, ha!

This was more of a massacre than a game, as Germany just completely took over in the second half. It was funny, our seats were in the nosebleeds … literally. We were one row from the top. But we were close to the media, and it was pretty interesting to see them all on their computers. Also we got a stunning view of sunset over the ocean as the outside of the stadium is some sort of mesh-like material. Well, as they say there is not really a bad seat in the house and we could certainly see the game very well, although my friends did leave early (this is a thing for me – I never leave until the very end, regardless of how much my team may be losing).

Following the live game, a large crew of us headed over to Dizzy’s in Camps Bay for dinner and to watch the Spain-Paraguay match. That game was mostly notable to me for the series of penalty kicks, including a Spain one where the goal was called back due to encroachment and then they missed the repeat. So much for the refs having been bought off in favour of Spain! Well, whatever, Spain won. Again. And so I won my bet [originally that Spain would win, later modified to whosever team got further, Spain in my case and Brazil in my friend’s case]. Ahhh, Spain, you’ve won me so much money as getting me drunk can be a bit of a mission…

For some reason probably having to do with working too much and not sleeping enough I became quite exhausted by the time dinner ended and did not stay out that evening with my friends. I blame the deadlifts.

It was OK because on Sunday I had to get up at a decent hour and head over to Sea Point where a bunch of us were meeting to carpool to the Stellenbosch wine festival. This was good fun except that we had to spend like 90 minutes at the first winery due to logistical issues with the park & ride system. Following that, I went to get my car and left the larger group I was with to go join a friend from I met at my gym and her sister for a couple wineries and some gossip.

Every time I make it out to the winelands it’s just breathtaking …. I have been to maybe 12 wineries now and the scenery at almost every one of them is just incredible. It’s hard even to pick a favourite as there are so many to choose from, but I ended up the day at Waterford for a chocolate and wine pairing. That was spectacular more for the chocolate than for the wine: “Masala Chai Dark Chocolate,” “Rock Salt Dark Chocolate,” and “Rose Geranium Milk Chocolate.” All were pretty incredible, and I’m not really a chocolate person. But apparently I’m not a true cheese lover, either. Random thought – I just realized the last brew pub I was in was in Illinois. That seems like a lifetime ago.

Moving on … we went back to collect all the cars, then tried to go to another wine farm but it was closed, despite what the booklet had to say. No huge surprise there. We did get accosted by German fans who insisted on painting flags on all of our faces (except for the Germans amongst us, who somehow managed to escape … random).

Last but not least today I want to pause in honor of my uncle Tom, who passed away over this weekend. My thoughts have been with my aunt, cousin, and the rest of my family all week.

Tragedy for BaGhana BaGhana

Yep. I’m sorry but that was just low, Suárez. Suárez has now turned into a bit of a swear around here … and I’m doing my best to make sure it stays that way!

But first, work. I had to be at work early again for Purple Heart business coaching. Today I was with a team of two (Patrick and Sipho). I really love this business coaching; it’s always something new! We were reviewing their inventory levels which were quite low (they had sold out of several items). I was trying to explain how to calculate when to re-order by looking at average order volumes between the days that they ordered, etc., and found that they were resistant to ordering more stock. I asked why, and it turns out they were so concerned with paying back the initial loan for the inventory that they had essentially lost sight of the trees for the forest. Muy interesante.

I spent the rest of the day at work frantically working on this RFP. I was so sleep-deprived that I went the whole day thinking I’d managed to lose my phone between the gym and the office (even heading back to the gym to look for it), only to find the darn thing in plain sight in the back seat of my car (NO IDEA how it got there). I was so tired that I could focus on only one thing and that was work. It scares me sometimes how I get into a bit of a marketing zone sometimes and everything I write just comes together. Kate, if you’re reading this I know you know what I’m talking about!

At one point my coworker came over to say hi, and oh by the way Wines with heart needs a business plan as well so I needed to talk to the guy who ran that. I was so much in the RFP zone that I didn’t even really process this. I actually tried to unload it on someone else later that afternoon (I failed miserably), and that was when I realised my work level might actually be approaching my maximum capacity because when I try to pass off a business plan that has to do with the wine industry something is seriously wrong!!

Yeah so anyway I unfortunately missed the Brazil-Netherlands game because I was stuck helping my co-worker brainstorm how to finish his sections (he was actually meant to write most of this but he got pulled into end of month status reporting meetings all day). Actually I saw the last 2 minutes of it. Shocker. Netherlands. Wow.

After a quick dinner I joined my friend and some of her friends at the Mexican Shebeen where we had a table reserved. In terms of intensity of emotion, this match was second only to the Bafana Bafana games (someone clever had come up with the BaGhana BaGhana slogan, so we of course were all into that). One of the things I remember most clearly from this was discussing our dearly hated (well, not anymore but at that point) Diego Forlán, specifically his hair. This girl at the table behind us at one point yelled out “Fuck you Forlán! You look like a parrot!” Something about the way she said this with her Afrikaans accent made it one of the funniest things I had heard in a great long while. Now the thing about Forlán is that he’s a pretty boy, and he wouldn’t be pretty if it weren’t for that hair. Not that I’m complaining – I think I’ve watched more Uruguay games than any other team, so it’s not bad to have a pretty boy striker to look at (never mind that I don’t care for pretty boys in real life). But yeah … parrot.

So unless you’ve been living under a rock this past week, you will know that Luis Suárez blocked a would-be goal by Ghana and then Asamoah Gyan missed the penalty kick, and Uruguay won the game on penalty kicks. I tell you my heart just broke for Gyan when he missed that goal and I think that image of him trying to hide tears after that miss is one of the iconic moments of the World Cup. Ouch … so after the game the air just went out of the place and almost everyone left, leaving beers half-drunk. It was that bad. I remember we were all hugging each other, and then this one guy gave me a big hug and then immediately asked me if I wanted to dance. Yep, Cape Town during World Cup.

Never one to abuse alcohol, I did finish my beer before heading back home to sleep. Oh, and I actually had a beer confiscated by the police on the way home! He probably wanted to drink it to console himself, and I actually didn’t really want to be drinking it anyway.

Spain-Portugal and a bunch of other stuff

I was originally not going to go to this game. I was for a while a bit relieved because it fell on a school night and I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with that, especially only four days after Netherlands-Cameroon …. But, what can I say, World Cup fever took over and by Tuesday morning I was quite excited. Not to mention that I had money riding on Spain.

But first – the work day. Oh, actually, before that was Tuesday’s workout which actually made me sore later; the first time I’d been properly sore in about a month. It consisted of 150m of walking lunges carrying a weight. Good heavens that was painful, and of course in the Old Castle Brewery between heart, Purple Heart, and the Hub you have to go up and down stairs all day long. Sheer craziness.

Yeah so I can’t actually remember what I did that day. But I do remember leaving early, around 5pm, to go home and cook dinner before heading out to the game. The fan walk was as annoying as always, and the queues to get in were some of the worst I’d seen them, outside of the first game. Yech.

This game was pretty fantastic. I was pulling for Spain, as mentioned above, but also just because I like them. It was quite interesting – Spain had ball control for most of the game, but Portugal actually had some of the best chances, I thought. After David Villa broke the Green Point curse (scoring here has been quite low overall, Portugal’s scorching of North Korea aside) and scored his fourth goal in as many games (amazing, but not quite as amazing as when he scored his fifth goal in five games a few days later in Spain’s 1-0 win over Paraguay that won me my bet), Spain started playing what I can really only describe as the trap. Didn’t help I suppose that I was there with a fellow hockey fan. Because yeah that was all I needed, to have the boys in red compared to the New Jersey Devils, blargh.

This is a dangerous game to play – it seemed like the whole match the ball was glued to Spain’s feet but whenever Portugal would get the ball they would generate a decent scoring chance and if one of those went in it would have been a whole different game. But it didn’t, so Spain won 1-0.

Wednesday I was very sore. And the day was literally filled with meetings – first FoodTents then a couple on Purple Heart. The FoodTents meeting was a bit intense, because there are a lot of decisions that need to be made quite quickly, and it’s pretty complicated – everything from what should the product mix be to how we should go to market (or even if we should or should we leave that to the entrepreneur/beneficiary). Even on the social impact side there is a lot of work to be done, to quantify what it means in terms of social impact to produce a certain amount of food.

In the middle we went out to lunch (I owed a couple of people lunch, and for one of them it was his last day) to a place called Jamaican Me Crazy. That took forever, and my pumpkin soup was watery and I scared/amused my co-worker by refusing to eat the utterly fried dough that came with my meal (he was happy to eat them for me). I was not pleased because I didn’t have time for a two-hour lunch but that is what wound up happening. And I wonder why I don’t get any sleep. But, sitting in the winter sun looking at Devil’s Peak and the lovely different colored houses in upper Woodstock was quite nice, I’ll admit.

So after work I quickly ran to get my veggie bag, then to my apartment to unpack it, and hurried over to Perseverence to meet some friends (a group of people from the gym, and some of their coworkers). But unfortunately I could only stay for one drink as a group of us were going out to Bombay Bicycle Club for another friend’s going away dinner. I really wanted to stay longer, but hey these people aren’t going anywhere. So saying goodbye was sad, but the meal was good and passing the hats around quite amusing I must say. Then instead of going out after I went home, probably to work some more before getting to bed.

Thursday we started off our morning meeting in I think one of the best ways I have seen so far. The guy who is running one of the in-house social enterprises wanted us to take the time to say things that we have left unsaid to our co-workers. One of the great things about heart is that everyone is really genuine, so it was really nice to hear the things that we had to say about each other. I thought it was really cool that there were actually three people that I had literally within the past 24 hours been thinking nice thoughts about, and to have an opportunity to tell them what I thought was nice. Of course there was the inevitable mutual love-fest going on with one of the projects I’ve been working on, but hey that’s a good thing. It is still nice to make implicit mutual respect implicit; usually these conversations only come out over a few beers and not at 8:30am!

This was also the day that someone told me my job was their worst nightmare. He meant this in the kindest possible way – meaning that they had a tremendous amount of respect for what I was trying to do; shape four business models at the same time. I do know that my stress level is unhealthily high, to the point where someone called me out in the kitchen. Asked how I was doing and apparently I responded a bit defensively….. “What? I’m fine! Who said I wasn’t fine?!” ok not like that, but enough that I got teased about it. Yoga maybe. Or, get back into running – that was what I liked about long runs back in Bolton; it was the only time of the day my brain wasn’t going 100 miles an hour.

The rest of the day I spent mainly on the Grow South Africa project, which is more complex than I feel like explaining just now. This was when I realized that I’m going to have to get more efficient at this or it’s going to take forever. Hopefully once I finish wrapping my head around the potential business and operational models and figuring out what research we need collating the results will be straightforward. Or that is the theory, at least.

Towards the end of the day I got roped into an RFP for Parliament that we were responding to. So instead of a hot date with my pillow I wound up on my computer until after midnight which was absolutely not what I needed given how little sleep I’d been getting. Lekker slaap indeed.

Madness at the Silicon Cape

Monday was an interesting day. I had a new intern start working for me and all I can say is THANK GOODNESS because this guy is fabulous. No business experience and studying philosophy but smart, hard-working, good instincts, creative, and common sense. That’s about all you need to be successful in business and I seem to recall myself entering the startup world head first with my liberal arts background. Hooray for being thought how to think!

I started planning with some coworkers the market research we are going to need for some of our business plans. For Purple Heart as we have already written most of the plan what we need is data to back up our wild suppositions (never mind that this is completely the wrong way to go about writing a business plan). For several of the others, where the businesses are much more nascent we have the ability to do things properly.

So I set my intern off to researching market size and segmentation for voluntourism and I started working on the social impact section of the FoodTents business plan. This, of course, led pretty quickly into questioning a lot of the statements I picked up from our existing materials. Wrapping my head around the complexity of the proposed expansion of the business model was a bit challenging. I’m actually not there yet, a week later, mainly due to the fact that other than one meeting on the subject I was pulled in other directions all week. But, more on that later.

According to my calendar, I spent much of the rest of the afternoon working on reviewing sections of the Purple Heart business plan. So, I suppose that is what I did.

In the evening there was a networking event put on by the Silicon Cape Initiative. Now I had been following Silicon Cape remotely ever since my first Skype call with Justin Stanford last September. I still remember that conversation because I was so happy to hear a South African accent that it literally made my day, and because I was inspired by the passion and the vision he had for what he was doing. The Silicon Cape initiative aims to bring people from the tech industry together, and get South Africa recognized internationally but mainly in the U.S. as a high tech hub. There are a lot of barriers – distance, lack of capital, actually a lot of lack of expertise, etc., etc. but the aim is laudable. I think that the initiative has a lot of promise but there needs to be more bringing of people together, so this networking event (only the third since the launch in October), was a good start.

Now believe it or not Becky Brandt (and others), I really am shy! At least until I get to know you, then I am most definitely not (ok I know you all believe that!). To cut to the chase, I considered not going to this event because I didn’t have anyone to go with and I always like to run back to safety, or at least have someone to go around and meet people with. But I figured what the hell, I’m talented and good looking (inside joke), I actually am fine with networking even if I don’t care for it, and it’s good to push yourself to do things that are uncomfortable. And there was an open bar. That helps.

So I went. The event was at the Old Biscuit Mill and it was crazy to see that space transformed so differently! I really wished I’d brought my camera, as words don’t really describe the scene very well. There were the hay bales of course, but lots of standing-height tables, fires, and huge screens with live Twitter feeds of the #siliconcape tag. This was amusing especially when DustinStanford (a parody of JustinStanford) started up. This provided us with some good amusement during the obligatory sales pitch by the good sponsors at FNB and Paypal. What these people clearly don’t realise, though, is that their audience is of above-average intelligence and a more subtle sales approach would have been much more effective. Ahh I hate it when marketers don’t understand their audience.

Saul Klein was amazing though! I wanted to get a chance to talk to him after he spoke but he vanished (figures). Well, that’s what the internet is for.

It was nice, actually, to be back in the company of tech people. I was a bit of a minor celebrity in my own right due to my first-hand experience of Silicon Valley during the tech boom. The first guy I met kept introducing me in this vein. The true test that you’re around people who are fascinated by Silicon Valley? They ask you how much you used to be worth. I was thinking yeah, nice to have THAT rubbed in again. I did find it strange that fewer people asked me why in the world I left the Valley to begin with. Too polite I suppose. Well, money isn’t everything.

All in all, I met some really pretty interesting people. Amazing how small of a world it is – the first guy I met was just told at an ANDE conference a few days earlier that he needed to get in touch with heart, and his co-worker had spent time at Berkeley. I also amused myself by feeling the need to explain to him that no, I don’t get referral bonuses from my gym. One of the people I met amused me by saying that CrossFit sounded like a cult to which I had to admit that I was in complete agreement, and I’d been saying that since before I joined the cult! But I met one guy who apparently is responsible for importing large numbers of vuvuzelas from China (always good when you get to say “so this is all YOUR fault!”), and amused a bunch of people by eating additional curry for dessert instead of dessert. I’m sorry but that curry was fantastic! Even the bartenders were really cool. It’s always a party when the bartenders are cool.