N'est pas:- Internet being shaped to dial-up speed for nearly 2 weeks. I was of course blaming the children for overdoing it on Club Penguin but turns out when I looked at my usage stats my blowout day is Monday when the blameless children are safely at school. And the activity eating most of my bytes? Catch-up blog reading after the weekends. So it's your fault, bloggers. You and your fancy pictures.
- Rent going up, due to "market forces". I think "market forces" is a mean reason to up the rent. Especially when the real estate market in Melbourne is so massively inflated anyway. There's this unstated power-play thing going on which is that people NEED somewhere to live so we keep letting it be inflated. And, renters in Australia are treated like second-class citizens and can't get long leases like you do in Europe so landlords are allowed to put the rent up every 6 months if they want, by as much as they feel like. We aren't even supposed to put blue-tack on the walls. I know I'm acting like a baby about this in many regards because I chose not to be a wage slave and our rent is actually very cheap comparatively but I don't care. Market Forces my arse. Our rent is not cheap to us.
- The Corolla's alternator dying, causing 2 flat batteries in 2 days and then making us carless over the weekend. What was even more NOT-HOT was that when we had the flat battery at the pool after swimming lessons, the 2 young boofheads in the shmancy yellow convertible initially refused to give me a jump-start because they were in a massive hurry to get to A HAIRCUT APPOINTMENT. I tell this to people and they say youth of today I'm not surprised but I WAS surprised. I seriously thought they'd be glad to help. In the end, they thought better of it and came over and gave me the jump and I quietly put up with the high levels of patronising that accompanied it and said thanks, have a nice haircut as I left.
- Getting myself an internet filter thingo to make sure the kids don't stumble onto anything nasty and then finding I couldn't upload anything to Flickr or weigh in on Facebook. I've fixed the facebook side of things, but the only solution to the photo problem is turning it off while I upload. Apparently it's a known Mac /K9 problem.
Well, that was quite a lot of whinging wasn't it? Now for...
Chaud.
- Being unfazeable in the face of mini-crisis. The first flat battery was at 8am in the morning just as were leaving for Climber's dental check-up (no cavities!) and it takes 2 months to get a new appointment. So I ran next door and asked my neighbours if I could use their car for a jumpstart, and as he was baby-wrangling at that moment, I took his keys, drove the car down our skinny driveway, squeezed out the 2 inch gap between cardoor and house, rang Fixit and he talked me through doing the whole palaver on my own. Backed the neighbour's car back out the driveway without incident (have I mentioned I hate reversing?) thanked them profusely (we have lovely neighbours, both sides) and got to the dentist on time. Left the car unlocked and running the whole time (Fixit couldn't believe I did that but it had to recharge for 30 minutes, it was on a quiet street off a noisy main street and I could see it from the waiting room) and then got the kids to school at 5 minutes after the bell which meant we didn't even have to sign the late book. And my battery was fully charged again. Let me tell you that I swaggered into coffee with Elda feeling pretty impressed with myself.
- Having a Mister Fixit for a boyfriend. He took the day off Monday, took the busted alternator out of the car, dropped it into an auto-electrician's, picked up a working alternator at 3.30 and had the car ready for me to drive to tap that night. Which was a good thing, because I wasn't really keen on coming home in the dark on the tram with my stereo equipment and my takings, call me crazy.
- Fixit getting through to the last round of the Epic Never-Ending Job Application. They rang him today. His final step is the face to face interview (out comes that suit again) which will be next Wednesday. Last week I was completely confident that he'd make it through, but when the phone stayed silent so long we both (separately and tacitly) gave up hope. When he texted me this morning I was Christmas shopping at ToysRUs and I was so relieved I all but burst into tears. Fortunately I was able to pull myself together, because otherwise it would have been me and the thwarted 2 year olds carrying on like pork chops, and that just would have been embarrassing.
