Bathroom Renovations (Present)

As promised - some photos of what is keeping us busy!

Werner fixed up this bathroom. It was full of mould, and yukky. Every time we paint or fix something up, it is more of the Prof gone, and gets more of an "our" character.

The paint was peeling off the ceiling. Here, Werner has scrapped it all off, and as you can see - the end result is beautiful.

This old basin was a problem and a half. When installing the new one, it leaked water on the outlet. Werner struggled with it for a whole day.... deciding that plumbing is not his thing. But - he got it sorted.

Christmas time Reflections (Present Tense)

Today, I am going on leave. Yah! We are not going away - we are fixing up the house. I will post some photos of our progress.

I was just looking back over the last few years in amazement.

Going back 3 years puts me smack in the middle of deep trouble and turmoil. The Prof had done his midnight ride to Witbank thingie, and was about to break the dreadful news of his imminent departure on Christmas Eve.

2 Years ago, I was friends with Werner, and spending Christmas time with him and his family. Quite a nice thought - neither he nor I ever spent a Christmas alone.

Last year, we were newly married, spending Christmas with the children at my sister's place.

This year: Christmas day is 1 day late - because all the children are with the Prof and Cream Puff - out on the farm in Witbank. We get them back on the 26th, so we have delayed our Christmas day celebrations to the 26th.

Christmas days used to be stressful affairs, with lots of family politics. Now they are a sweet gathering of my dearest family, and the only stress is : what dishes do we prepare for the meal. Wow - blessings indeed.

I want to take this opportunity to thank you dear reader, for sharing this journey with me. For the encouragement, for clever and insightful comments, for the keen interest and anticipation with which some friends await the next post! It has kept me writing, and challenged me to dig deeper within myself.

Mom, thank you for the beautiful translation work for our Dutch family, for the proof reading and for endlessly fixing up my WHERE and WERE mistakes!

I will do some post of photos, but continue with the story line in January. Wishing you all a very wonderful Christmas season.

Cream Puff's Birthday

Where were we? Oh yes - telling the story from Werner's side. It was March 2007, and they were still staying in their house, which had been put up for sale.

Werner discovered gifts that The Prof had given to Cream Puff – in the cupboard. (As I said before - not a very bright cookie!) There were mugs, shoes… and finally – Perfume.


I need to backtrack into my life here, to show you the significance of what happened. I am not a big perfume person. The Prof had bought me Jean Paul Gaultier perfume, the one in the picture at the top of this post. I quite liked it.

So, guess what he bought Cream Puff? Yup - Very original: Jean Paul Gaultier Perfume! The very same one.

On Cream Puff's birthday, Werner smelled this new perfume and just KNEW that she had received it as a gift from The Prof. He had not smelled it before, and she used to tell him when she bought herself perfume.

It was still early in the morning and the house hung thick with the smell of that perfume. It made him sick to his stomach.

“Go, bring me that perfume you have put on”, he told her. She bought back a bottle of perfume – not the Gaultier.

"No", he shook his head, "the other one... the one the Prof bought you for your birthday."


She eventually brought it out, and he went outside, into the street.

"SMASH it ", he told her.

He says she stood for a very long time with that bottle held high, eventually dropping it onto the street.

Today, he tells the story with a wicked grin.

"Do you know how perfume stinks when it has been in the sun all day? "

That smell he had been trying to get rid of, hung about the house like a fog. He scrubbed and hosed it down, but it took a long, long time for the smell to go away.


And my own bottle of Jean Paul Gaultier? Well, I wrapped it up and sent it to the Prof, when I realized the duplicity, and how Werner hated that smell. I imaged how the Prof passed on my bottle of perfume to Cream Puff, as a replacement.

2nd hand goods darling - like some people we know!

The Sweet Spot

This is one of my most poignant stories of Werner.

He put his house up for sale, on insistence of Cream Puff. In retrospect, he says, that it went on the market (and subsequently sold) for too cheap, because she was desperate that they get this house off their names.

This... the place that Werner had stayed home for on weekends, spent his time and money fixing up, just became another casualty of this thing called divorce.

He says - at the time, it is all unreal, and you don't really realise what is happening, it all moves too fast. I was so lucky in that sense. The Prof gave me the house, and I never went through the trauma of parting with my home and safe space.

But my story today, is about Werner's sound room. In the "Sound Industry" there is a term known as a "sweet spot". A "sweet spot", I have learnt (but never heard), is when the sound from all the speakers, in a closed room, hit your ears at the exact, precise same moment. There is not a millisecond delay in any of the sounds.

A room having a "sweet spot" will remain in exactly that state. IF you move a single article in that room, even if you bring in extra people - it changes the way the sound waves bounce off stuff - and thus disturb your "sweet spot". This is then, an elusive and difficult thing to achieve in any sound room. It requires dedication, hard work, experiments, measuring with sound equipment, disappointments, and above all - TIME, to achieve this. Some people never get it right. The shape of a room, the height of a ceiling - all affect the ability to get a "sweet spot" - or not, as the case may be.

Werner made himself a sound room in this house. He had the measuring guys there, he dropped the ceiling, put in double glass on his windows to stop vibration, raised and lowered speakers ... I think you get the picture. Huge schlep, huge expense.
And yes - FINALLY - he had a "sweet spot" in his sound room, after years of fiddling around to get it!

He called his dad and brothers, and they also heard the "sweet spot". Music was his very life, it was what got him through his weekends alone. This was a huge personal achievement.

And Cream Puff? She doesn't know what a "sweet spot" is. She never knew about it, and never heard it.

Selling a house, is kinda detrimental to a "sweet spot". They really hate that! You pack up that room, and the "sweet spot" moves out!

I guess it was the least of his worries at that stage, but his story made me really sad. I asked him once, if he would like to make a new sound room in our house, but he shook his head. The time, effort and money are too much. He had achieved it once, and that was it. It is a thing you only do once in a life time.

But, he said giving me a huge hug, YOU are my sweet spot now.....

Drugged

Werner himself says he doesn’t know where reality ended and paranoia started. He began to notice strange things. The first strange thing was that he was tremendously thirsty. (OK I was thirsty too, and I found out afterwards that stress does that to you – you are thirsty all the time, but you can’t eat.) As Werner describes it so well: there is a little man, standing on your throat, pressing it closed!


But together with thirst, he felt strange. He felt like he didn’t care, that he was disconnected.

A few years prior, the Dr had prescribed pills for stress, which he had not taken. He took it once, didn’t like how it made him feel, and chucked the pills, forgotten, on top of a cupboard.

He went looking for them. There should have been about 28- 29 pills left, but when he found them… there where only 2! He suspected that Cream Puff was putting the powder from these pills, into his food / sugar / coffee.

He also noticed that when he smoked his cigarettes, the filter part turned black. He kept a stash hidden away, and when he smoked those, the filter did not turn black.

Not knowing what to make of it all, he began keeping his own coffee and sugar, and was suspicious of absolutely everything Cream Puff gave him to eat or drink.

Please don’t misunderstand me, he did not think she was trying to kill him, merely trying to calm him down.

Adding to all this were the smses he had read on her phone, which also referred to pills.

Was Cream Puff drugging him as a precautionary measure to protect herself? Who knows. It is a pity he did not run blood tests at the time. But when he stopped drinking and eating what was given to him, he stopped feeling strange and disconnected. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Meet Jerry

There followed three very strange months for Werner. He somehow had a sixth sense about what Cream Puff was up to. Being friends with everyone at the university, he got the security staff to warn him when his car left the premises. He also went to look at their camera footage and saw there, that she was leaving (in the middle of the morning) with a man in the car.


It did not take him too long to figure out who the Prof was.

Now...Meet Jerry. The stories about Jerry are funny – but actually show a very desperate attempt on Werner’s part – to stop his life from falling apart. Jerry: a totally fictitious PI, made up by Werner.

How did that work? Well, we roll around with laughter when he pulls Jerry out of his hat of trick. Werner is an actor of note (he missed his calling in life!). Out comes the cell phone, as he gives us a practical demonstration. Using the house phone he rang his cell phone, then hung up the house phone and “answered” the cell. In a very serious voice he demonstrates “Jerry”.

“O hi, yes Jerry. Mmm – good and you. “ Strategic silence. “No no, don’t worry – I wipe the phone logs clean – no one will trace you. “ More silence.
“Ok – what did you find out.” Then he would walk away – pretending a private conversation. Some oooeees and aaaahs coming from his side, some silences while Jerry supposedly “fills” Werner in on what Cream Puff and the Prof had been up to. Our sides ache with laughter as he demonstrates his fictitious conversations. We can only imagine how someone “listening in” would feel – especially if they start suspecting that they might be the topic of that conversation!

With his keen sense of observation, some excellent guessing and a goodly dose of reality – Werner took some “shots in the dark”, and managed to hit bull’s eye.

He would return from his conversation with Jerry, and ask Cream Puff things like: O did you enjoy your visit to Cresta today?

Cream Puff was completely freaked out. Apparently the Prof was too. “Stop following us around”, she told him.

Then on other occasions, Werner would take his cell phone, wipe the surface clean and carefully put it down on his bed side table. When he returned from from his shower, his cell had been moved, and was full of her finger prints. Was she looking for Jerry in there?

Appointments with counselors

Werner made an appointment with a counselor for Cream Puff, and asked her to go.


On return of her “counseling session”, he casually asked her how the session had gone.

“Oh fine,” she trilled (she is a very surface, fake type of person – in my unbiased opinion of course) . “It was just an introductory session really.”

Something sounded off.

Since they worked at the same place, they drove in to work together. Cream Puff had the habit of resetting the trip meter on the car (so Werner would not know where she had been?), but she had forgotten about a second trip meter function on the car.


Werner checked the car and discovered she had gone a mere 19km in total. Somehow that wasn’t right. The next day he drove out himself and when he had not even reached the counselor’s premises after 19 km, he turned back, knowing she had lied to him.

Again he confronted her, and she just shrugged her shoulders. He made another appointment, this time for marriage counseling, with a new person, with the intention that they would go together.

That counselor wanted to speak to them separately. Cream Puff went in first. By the time she had finished – the counselor too must have been of the opinion that Werner was murderous and violent. She did not "hear" what he had to say, and so ended the attempts for counseling to save the marriage.