so Claire called yesterday. I was annoyed - I was literally walking to the phone to call her and she called me first. Again. This is the third time (out of three) since she left. So how much of an uncaring, non-calling, low-life bastard do I look like at this stage? Worse though - she flies tonight. Come this time on Wednesday, she will be half a world away in Vancouver, heading to Whistler and a menial job as a Gold Lounge Attendant having to wait hand and foot on the skiing elite at God-knows-which-resort up in the Canadian Rockies. While this is what she wants to do and she will earn good money, and this is all to fund a road trip from Vancouver to Mexico City via Washington, Oregon California and Colorado and whatever else is between San Diego and Mexico City, it worries me to think that she will be spending the next 6 months having to fawn about in the presence of guests expecting bang for their buck and whatever else Management throws at you when you are renting the presidential suite instead of just a room in a 5-star resort. I know you are entitled to good service when you go out to a restaurant or hotel or whatever, but my own days of waitering back when I was but a mere lad of 19 taught me a thing or two about human nature. And Management's reponse when it comes to Customer Satisfaction over staff. Nevertheless, the call yesterday was short and not entirely sweet. She was really emotional - I'm not sure if it was just because of the impending Into the Great Wide Open or if there was something else happening, and she was a little abrupt and not forthcoming with details. Although we did not end off on unfriendly terms, it wasn't quite the parting I was hoping for. My body is feeling twice its 28 years following a karate grading on Saturday. Not mine, you understand - black belt gradings (self-indulgence, yes) only occur every couple of years, following the attaining (is that a word?) of a higher purpose and raised consciousness and shit. I mean no disrespect to the institution. Either way, my juniors - all my Monday Fight Night boys - were up for various belts; and we also had two of our guys promoted to Brown belt. It was a tough grading - 4-minute Hell beforehand followed by another two hours of combat and combat applications and basic techniques and sequences - conducted in tepid weather (which is good - last year it was in the 30s (or 90s in that Fahrenhiet nonsense) outdoors and well into the 40s inside the club) and although I was there more to help with the evaluation and to make sure nobody was slacking off, I participated as much as I could - did the 14 station 4-minute hell; did the basic techniques, volunteered to be a crash-test combat dummy and get flung around, did all the sequences etc - and I'm glad to say all my boys came through with flying colours, even though one of them was thrown awkwardly and had his opponent stumble and come down knees first onto his ball-sack. Poor guy puked his guts out, which was the correct response (and is something we teach our combatants - what to expect when you hit someone or get hit in the throat/arms/chest/solar-plexus/eye/ribs/nuts etc and how to play off it). And then we went back to one of the new Brown Belt guys' place and got tanked and swam in our underwear and shot the shit and stuff like that. I've given them all tonight off. I shall probably bite the bullet and go for a haircut with my free time - going to lop it off from halfway down my back probably up to my shoulder-blades or thereabouts. And maybe run some colour through it. Maybe. Last time I did that (light brown streaks through my normal dark brown) it went orange-weird in the sun and after a couple weeks I looked like a stoned, washed-up, rent-boy crackwhore. The blood was on the floor, at the new gym, where I went for a relaxing swim last night to work off the residual stiffness from saturday. There was a very fresh and very red trail of blood splatterlings leading from the locker area of the locker room through to the basin/toilet area of the locker room, bypassing the shower and steam-room area of the locker room. Not too sure of the cause of said mini-massacre, but it looked fairly rancid. Proceeded afterwards to head up the hill alongside the gym with my camera and tripod to snap the clouds and the mountains of Cape Town and the bay at sunset and took a large chunk out of my thumb on the side of the tripod in the process. More blood. And the cloud cover was a little dense, so the sun was unable to produce the usual vivid multitude of reds that I was hoping to photograph in the sky. Stupid weather. -d-