advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
I Inherited My Father's House and Spent a Year Fighting With Its Roof. AI-Generated.
The house nobody wanted to deal with My father died in the winter, quietly, in the house he had built additions onto for forty years on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast. My two sisters live overseas now, one in Perth and one in London, and by a kind of unspoken family logic the house became my problem, because I was the one who was still here and still, at forty-one, apparently the child who fixed things.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Hailstorm That Finally Made Me Understand My Own House. AI-Generated.
The night the sky changed its mind I bought my first house at thirty-six, on my own, after years of renting flats where every problem belonged to somebody else. A little face-brick place in Kempton Park with a jacaranda in the front garden and a geyser that groaned like an old dog. I loved it with the fierce, slightly anxious love you have for the first thing that is truly yours.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
My Teenage Son Stopped Talking to Me, So I Booked Us Something With No Screen In It
When your kid goes quiet Nobody warns you about the silence. Everyone warns you about the tantrums when they are small, the nappies, the sleepless nights. Nobody tells you that one ordinary Tuesday your son will be fifteen and will answer everything with a single syllable and a shrug, and that you will find yourself grateful for the shrug because at least it is a response.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Conference Ended Early and I Had a Free Afternoon in Johannesburg. AI-Generated.
The afternoon I did not plan for I am the kind of person who plans holidays in a spreadsheet. Columns for cost, columns for travel time, a little conditional-format traffic light that turns red when I am about to overspend. So it says something that the best afternoon I have had in years happened because a workshop got cancelled.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The October My Ceiling Came Down On The Basin. AI-Generated.
The sound I heard from my bed, and what it actually was I heard it at about half past eight on a Tuesday night in late October, and I did not know what I was hearing. I was in bed in Heidedal with a cup of rooibos going cold on the side table, watching nothing, and outside the hail started on the roof like somebody was throwing handfuls of marbles at the house. It went from nothing to everything in maybe ninety seconds. My gutters made a noise I have never heard them make. The dogs across the road lost their minds. I remember thinking, quite calmly, that the plants in the yard were finished, and then I turned over and I slept, because I am thirty-eight years old and I have been through Free State storms my whole life and you do not get up in the middle of one.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Maths I Did On The Back Of A Till Slip. AI-Generated.
The night the numbers stopped lying to me I did the sums standing up, in the kitchen, at twenty past nine at night, on the back of a Shoprite till slip that still smelled faintly of the polony I had bought that afternoon. My aunt's kettle was doing its slow angry build behind me. There was a pen on the fridge, one of those cheap blue ones with the cap chewed flat, and I took it and started writing on the white side of the slip because there was no paper in that house that wasn't already a school book or a bill.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Gate at Ten to Five. AI-Generated.
The lock, the dark, the smell The gate at the municipal pool in Gqeberha has a padlock that was old when I was young. It is rusted through on one side, and the shackle sticks, and on a July morning at ten to five you cannot see the keyhole because there is no light there, the streetlamp on that corner has been out since before Easter. So you do it by feel. You get your thumb on the body of the lock and your finger under the shackle and you push the key in blind and you turn.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Green Binder On The Kitchen Table. AI-Generated.
The smell before anything else The binder came home with me in a canvas bag that used to hold my father's swimming things, and when I put it on the kitchen table and opened it the first thing that reached me was not the paper or the numbers. It was the glue. That old gum smell, slightly sweet, slightly sour, the smell of a stationery cupboard in a school that has not been redecorated since 1978. I teach geography. I have opened a lot of cupboards like that. But this glue was older and it had been drying in a green ring binder for four decades, layer on layer, and when the covers came apart it breathed out at me and I sat down hard on the kitchen chair.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Ride-On Mower Was The One That Told Me. AI-Generated.
The morning the machine would not start The battery on the ride-on mower died on a Tuesday in early May, and I sat on that stupid green seat in my slippers for about eleven minutes before I understood what I was actually upset about.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Winter I Learned to Read a Newspaper Through a Bedsheet. AI-Generated.
Six in the morning, and I am arguing with a machine It is minus two outside and not much warmer in the laundry room, because the laundry room is a converted stoep with a roof on it and the previous owner clearly believed that people who wash things do not feel cold. I am in a jersey that used to be my husband's, and a beanie, and slippers with a hole where my right big toe has staged a slow escape. The tumble dryer is making a noise I have started calling the death rattle, a sort of dragging clatter, like someone rolling a marble around inside a biscuit tin. It has been making that noise for a month. Every morning I switch it on and it clatters and every morning I think, today. Today it goes. And then it finishes the cycle, because it is a machine of enormous spite, and I forgive it, because the alternative is a phone call and money.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Night I Drove Up the N2 With a Cooler Box of Someone Else's Food. AI-Generated.
The bakkie and the broken mirror My cousin Sanele lent me his bakkie on the condition that I bring it back with a full tank and no new scratches, which was funny, because the passenger side mirror had already been snapped off at the stem long before I got it. Somebody had wrapped the stump in silver duct tape that had gone grey and furry at the edges. So for eleven hundred and something kilometres I drove with one eye on the road and one on the rearview, twisting my whole body around every time I wanted to change lanes, like a man reversing out of a driveway for two days straight.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
