Picked some pears today, and did some bottling. The pears on our homesteads are very old , kind of hard , and very small, but they are as sweet as honey.
I have applied for my electricity to be seperated from my son's, as the two places used to belong to one family, and they had electricity installed in my house from their box. As up to now the next door place belonged to first Irma, and then to Jan, we kind of shared the invoice.
But Jan was talking more and more about moving back to a city, as it was too difficult for him to cope with the children and his job that took him to Johannesburg such a lot. I like to be prepared, as I knew that Eskom, our electricity provider was very slow, maybe they had a lot of backlogs, but after applying, they told me it could take up to four or five months! So I waited.
I went to Capetown with Jan and the kids, and we had a lovely time, until Jan was contacted by the Uniondale police, telling him that our houses were burgled! I felt quite sick, as the crime in Haarlem was becoming just to much to feel safe. We immediately packed up, thanked Trienkie and Erna, Jan's friend that he was staying with, and set off back home.
Jan's house was ransacked, all his computers stolen, a lot of electrical stuff, and also Nina's expensive camera. They also took Andreas's toy gun brought from Denmark by Nina's sister, maybe thinking that it was real, as it did look like the real thing. My house was untouched, but they had broken my car's window, and the police thought that they wanted to steal it, but the wheels had locked, and they couldn't push it out onto the road.
They had at first tried to pry the rubber away from the glass to just open the window, but in the process the door was scratched and dented badly.
Poor Jan was devastated, as they had even took his sittingroom carpet, but he was in a state about the computers, as he does all his work on that.
The police from Uniondale was very good, while the Haarlem lot was not featuring at all. It is said that our police are in cahouts with the thieves, and when they found a gas spray used by the police under one bed, we were sure that it must be so. The gas spray cans used by the police have a number, and this one was indeed traced to one of our policemen in Haarlem. He swore that it was stolen from his house!
The people in Haarlem are really good. One of the thieves came to this woman's house, wanting to sell a play gun for a minimal amount. As the woman could see that it was an expensive toy, she alerted the Uniondale police. Within about three days four men were picked up, but what happened to the policeman whose gas spray was found in Jan's house was never revealed!