brett-reid.com

It’s been ages since my last blog post, luckily I’m the only one reading them Quite a bit has happened, in summary:

We’ve set a date for our wedding:
Jackie and I have found our wedding venue, Le Franschhoek, and set the date for 21st November 2009. That took about 2 months of driving on weekends to wine farms (which I quite enjoyed) in Stellenbosch, Paarl and Franschhoek. Le Franschhoek was able to offer us everything in one place and the setting is awesome.

We flew up to Joburg for Morne and Liezel’s wedding:
With GPS in hand we flew into Joburg (Lanseria) and made our way to Avianto for Morne’s wedding. The venue was awesome, tuscan villa style and was great to share their special day with them. After that we headed over toIllovo Protea Hotel for the night and I wanted to visit as much family as possible (pretty much all my family’s in JHB). Jackie and I had a great time and realised that a weekend in Joburg is good fun.

Christmas with the family at my parents place:
Pretty much the norm. Jackie’s parents live in Manchester so we all headed to my parents place in Camps Bay. Jackie had taken charge of table decorations to experiment with ideas for the wedding. We therefore had the fanciest christmas setting ever complete with formal menus. It was good fun until my mom put the Mama Mia DVD on (xmas gift) – 2 hours of torture. By the end of the day we were all stuffed and tired and took a slow drive home for an afternoon powernap. Jackie gave me a tyre pressure checker so I can make sure my tyres aren’t going to explode on me when they heat up

Best New Year’s Eve in a long time:
I had almost given up on New Years until this year. It had gotten more and more bleek with age. The house parties had become calmer, people had babies, we stood around a braai etc. This time Wesley (best mate) and I had vowed to make it legendary. Morne and Liezel would be down from JHB so we wanted to hook up with them too. Wesley and Ezelle (g/f) have a very smart flat in town. The plan was for that to be HQ so that we wouldn’t need to drive drunk. I brought the cocktail accessories and we had cocktails etc up to about 11:30pm where we made our way to Bang Bang. Andy got us all on the guestlist so we cruized in nicely and then Morne’s buddy Troydon was playing the 12am set so we hit the dancefloor for the countdown. Countdown was awesome and then we headed indoors to jam some more. Richard had joined us and we got the tequila flowing. We walked home and all crashed at Wesley’s place. Great nite!

Sven’s wedding:
We were invited to join Sven for his special day at Backsberg wine estate. It was a beautiful setting and we got some cool ideas for our wedding. We ran into Elize (ex work colleague) and had a fun night. David Spade’s twin brother joined us at the table and Michael Boltons twin brother took some photos. I set some sort of time record of 20 minutes from Royal Ascot to the parking lot at Backsberg, averaging around 160kph. Awesome.

Jeremy’s Bachelors:
Jeremy is getting married next week so I was invited to his Bachelors yesterday (Sat 7th Feb). Jeremy is Jackie’s friend Monya’s fiance. Jackie worked with Monya at Ogilvy. The Bachelors was going to be on the Peroni Catamaran sailing from Waterfront to Clifton 4th and back. We met at Pauliner in the 37 degree heat. A few beers later we were on the yacht heading to clifton. There was a hen party on the same boat, also with a pirate theme – quite a co-incidence! There were about 50+ on the cat and 40 of those were sitting up by the nose (bow), so the boat would pitch ‘a bit more than usual’ which was quite funny at times! The beer was flowing and what bachelors is complete without a 14″ rubber ****. It made an appearance and the girls were screaming with laughter, some shocked, some intrigued – classic stuff! When we got to clifton some of the guys swam in the freezing water, there were offers of a bottle of wine to the girl who swam naked but no takers. It was awesome on the catamaran. From there we met up with the Hen Party (our girls) at La Med. Ran into Darrell and Colin who were having Colins bachelors. He was dressed like a pimp with his trademark M&R helmet. Had a beer at both bachelor groups and eventually we combined into one big party. There were collections going around for a bottle of tequila, La Med charges R500 for a bottle!!! Jackie and I left around 10ish and went for a bite to eat. Their wedding is next week in Tulbagh, should be great.