Having worked in the world of the internet I would always tell my clients that a web site that was old and stale was worse than no web site at all. Well upon visiting my site tonight I was nearly knocked out cold by the rotting stench of a site that had not been updated for a year. So apologies to anyone who may have inadvertently tried to get some updated Brizzi family news and instead was greeted by maggots feeding on the putrefied remains of last years news.
I hope non of you are eating dinner as you read this. Well my dad said to me once when I was young and complaining that time was taking so long to pass before some event or other, that as you pass 40 time just starts to fly by. Well like most things he tried to teach me and I ignored, he was right about that as well. I was worried about being 40 and now I am passed 41. All of this diatribe is of course just to make excuses as to why I have not had the time to update the site. Anyway here goes with a year of news, I promise I will try and stick to the salient points.
No news would be complete without some comment on the ski season. Well we were lucky that we had good snow late November and early December. This kind of set the whole season up and the groomed slopes aided with some cannon snow lasted the season out in great shape. As for powder though we saw precious little of that, with hardly any snow worth writing about falling for practically the rest of the season. We had a couple of great days in France just after Christmas with Karin and Raymond. Cindy and I also had some great fun off-piste in the end of season slush puppy. It was fun we skied right until the end of April, the last few days in shorts as the weather was so warm (see the photos).
Other than that I cannot think of any significant events this winter, well besides Catrina taking a turn at being taken off the mountain in a stretcher (knee injury) and my taking a few days off after twisting my ankle really badly, after a 1m or so fall while boarding in heavy fog. Catrina gained a lot of confidence this year and was skiing down blacks no problem (when we told her they were red) of course if we were unlucky enough for her to see a board saying she was on a black she would immediately panic. After managing to fool her a few times she realised she was good enough to go down blacks and she was fine. Calvin continued with the snowboarding team and this year we followed him around a little and so got to ski at other resorts like Champoluc, Gressoney, Pila and Courmayeur. Calvin also went to ski camp with his school, which of course he loved. (how come my school never went of ski camp????).
All of the kids are doing really well at school. Nicola is deputy head girl at Camps Bay, a prefect and playing 1st team water polo and soccer. She is of course finding matric hard but is doing really well and I am really proud of her. Calvin does well when he is hammered by his mom. When Cindy watches over him he gets great results, but being a lazy little s&%t, the minute he is left alone he rides the thin line between just failing or just doing enough. His exams this year went really well due to Cindy's "pressure". When we "rewarded" him for the great result I kidded with him that half of it was going to Cindy. Catrina is a little Angel at school, top marks and glowing reports, what more can I say - we are really lucky with our kids.
Despite theoretically not being on the Benvenuto club board Cindy still continued with her heavy involvement with the Club. She seems to get sucked into most things and so keeps really busy there. All for a good cause I suppose so I should not gripe. For me the work front continues to be tough and unforgiving, with literally thousands of layoffs, some of them really close friends and colleagues. I sit and wonder when it will be me that gets the dreaded call. So far I have been lucky, but the corporate world has no memory, when you do well everybody loves you and the minute things don't go well, they fire your arse.
With the arrival of summer and the great, if not too hot, weather all the summer things have started. A friend of mine from junior school, Robert Ransley, and his family came over for two weeks. I hadn't seen or spoken to him since I was twelve, nearly 29 years. It was amazing to catch up with him and any trepidation we may have had about him coming over to stay soon vanished as he was the same guy i knew all those years ago and his wife Linda was a scream. We had such a nice time together and the two weeks just flew passed. During the time we went mtbiking in Switzerland with Karin and Raymond. My folks and Cindy, Linda, Rob and the kids all walked while the rest of us went cycling. The place we went to was the Val Maggia above Locarno in Switzerland - so beautiful.
Our summer hols this year were fantastic. How we got there was a long story. At Christmas we had the good fortune to meet one of Nicola's class mates father. Nicola had told us that her friend Megan was in France so I suggested to Nicola she phone Megan and invite her to come skiing with us. So Megan her dad, Ian, his wife, Jo, and their little girl Lisle came and spent a few days over Christmas in La Thuile. As our house was full, I got them a run down apartment just below us. Well the world is so small it turned out that Jo and Karin were running mates from Cape Town who had lost touch ten years or so previously. So we had this Great Christmas dinner with 17 people around a specially built, by Raymond, table. Lianne (our old au pair) and her boyfriend, Scott, my sister and a friend of Raymond's, Hans, and two other friends of Karin and Ray, Gwen and Jerry, made up the 17 people. Anyway turned out that Jo and Ian run a company called Voyage Charters ( see www.voyagecharters.com) We told Ian we were thinking of going with Danny to the Caribbean for a yacht charter. Ian suggested the Seychelles we prettier and to cut a long story short we all went to the Seychelles for our summer Holiday. It was fantastic, the Yacht, "Walkabout", was a 50ft Catamaran with every luxury you can imagine on onboard, including a Captain and Cook (Thomas and Elsett who spoiled us rotten). Despite lots and lots and lots of rain which stopped us sailing around as much as is normally done, we had a fantastic time. I could write pages and pages on the scuba diving, snorkelling, wakeboarding (got up on my first time out and whilst I wasn't dong jumps etc. I was able to go pretty well with my snow boarding background) kayaking etc.etc.etc. After a week on the yacht we spent two days on La Digue at a lovely place owned by some friends of my folks, Lisa and Karl. The place is called Chateaux St Cloud and we highly recommend it. Especially since La Digue is one, if not the, most beautiful island in the Seychelles. The scuba and snorkelling were great. We saw sharks, rays, turtles and so many fish it was incredible. We then spent 4 nights on Mahe at another lovely place suggested to us by Jo and Ian, Le Petit Village. Right on the beach it was a really beautiful setting.
Unfortunately as my space on the web is limited I have had to remove a lot of the old photos so please don't try and click on them they are gone.
Well
I am sure I have bored you all to tears now and before you commit hari kiri I
will end off with the promise that I will do an update before 2004.