The Day, redux
Today I took a day of selfish annual leave to do handover swimming lessons with Puggle and Bilby. The day unfolds thus…
Bilby (as usual) wakes me up because she would like her Weet-Bix (the 5-grain ones are pretty good, although given how infrequently I eat commercial breakfast cereal I can still taste the sugar). Amazingly she then goes back to bed, leaving me to try to catch up on shuteye on the couch so as not to disturb anyone.
Finally others surface and it’s time for breakfast proper, with the usual battle with Puggle to convince him to get himself dressed.
Mum comes over to mind Bilby, then it’s into bathers and we’re off to swimming.
Puggle’s class is just us, the instructor and one other parent and child, which is good from my perspective. He’s working hard on his windmill arms. We have some olympic swimming footage to show him as inspiration 
The pool is nice and warm, but it’s cold outside and the day is getting cooler.
Lunch for Bilby (Puggle is still watching the concrete pour at the end of the street). Then it’s time to swim again. Bilby’s class is empty, except for us.
She swims to the point of exhaustion, I think she spends more time with her head under water than above it. She’s more comfortable with the lesson than I am.
After that it’s off to pick up the new car, Dad kindly gives me a lift. Cheque handed over, keys picked up, it’s time to pilot the battle wagon back home. You’d think if you wanted to make your customers happy you’d bother to sell them a car that doesn’t have the ‘empty’ petrol warning light on.
I forget that the new fangled ABS and EBFD don’t stop me spinning the wheels at the lights. Not used to having a V6 It happily cruises down the freeway.
Home and lunch. Then off to cash in receipts at Medicare, health insurer, then Medicare again (this time with a massive queue). A brief trip to Dymocks to pick up a new street map to go with the car.Then it’s home and with the car seats fitted it’s time to fill up and go for a drive.
$95 worth of petrol later…!
I get to check out the cruise control (sadly it doesn’t do the steering). Annoyingly I set it at the legal speed limit and it stays there, which means the car is going slower than most of the other traffic. Having the car attempt to get back to speed is amusing though, although it tends to floor it, not sure if it could spin its own wheels…
A stereo that works and plays CD’s (not that we’ve tested that yet)! Lots of bits that open and close… Two trip odometers. Sadly the manual is not yet with us, so some of the buttons just require guessing. But boy is it huge! I’m sure the back end is out there somewhere… Needless to say we’re trying to only park anywhere that requires going forwards at the moment.
Then after the drive it’s home and time to prep dinner, put the kids to bed and watch some Middleman.
May even get the tax return done tonight…
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:30 am
Best thing about Medicare? You can mail your receipts in and have them deposit straight to your bank account without dealing with those increasingly-long queues.
August 22nd, 2008 at 12:22 pm
You can have the doctor’s surgery swipe your card and deposit the money directly into your account immediately after you’ve paid it, too… but if you want to end up with cash… you need to do the queuing thing…
(actually Fe)