Cheap Therapy

• Many things have happened, given my last published update was September 14th
• Went to something to do with the iPhone that I can’t talk about.  And yet I can talk about programming the iPhone. Stupid NDA. Met some interesting people and talked shop.
• Wandered aimlessly around Sydney. Well, there was the Lindt café, beer, much walking (and thus blisters), cheap cherries (AU$7-8/kg), Qantas Club, art and nice Unagi-don. Oh, and Nicole and Hugh opening their film. Catching up with friends was good too, although would have liked to catch up with more of them!
• Less than a week away and already Bilby and Cygnet have changed noticeably.
• My father made 3 score and 10. Hopefully now the world is a different place to what it was then.
• Shopping with the whole family
• Deb’s fabulous Disco 40th
• Camera (box) shopping
• J’s first Birthday party
• Dreams of people falling. People falling in reality
• SF@The pub

• The evil yellow grapefruit tree is in flower
• The lemon is in flower, and green fruit
• The plum has come into blossom this week. So has the ‘other’ plum.
• The mango has some new growth
• Two leaves on the fig! Maybe it will survive this season
• There are lots of mulberrys. Perhaps a combination of Puggle pee and trace elements agrees with it. Pie tonight hopefully Nice photo op if only I could remember where the battery charger is.
• The apple is still not dead.
• The nectarine probably is dead.
• There are white creeper roses, probably from the rootstock
• Weeds
• More trace elements watered in

I was in the kitchen the other day and heard Bilby calling me. For the Watchmen fans, imagine a thigh high Rorschach with a pink flowery hat and instead of his ink-blot mask a flannel with a duck on it. Not to mention a high pitched giggle. If only I’d had my camera…

It seems I haven’t posted a redux-ion in some time. Since last:

• Went postal (voting, that is).
• Greeted the new arrival
• Fathers’ Day
• Discovered a rust spot under the weather seal on the door of the new car. Missed by the RAC. Not mentioned by the dealer (if they noticed it). Bugger.
• Visited a few car shops to get anti-rust stuff.
• Therapeutic shopping at NetPlus (need more storage), OfficeWorks (noticed they now have magnetic print-yourself car signage) and Zytech.
• Want one of the new iPod Touches with a speaker!
• Was not destroyed by Large Hadron Collider. Nor was world. At least not that I could tell.
• Made a lot of some assortment of toast, boiled eggs, baked beans and Weet-Bix every morning.
• Many stories were read.
• Drove the battlewagon some more.
• Attended surprise birthday for MikeyOb.
• Showed Puggle how to solder. Badly. But at least good enough to fix the cordless phones. Discovered you can answer the landline while the voip line is still ringing. Then pick up the voip line and get a dialtone even though the landline is in use
• …darling, names, names names…
• Walked to the shops with the kids. Had coffee. Waitron brought water with plastic cups for the kids unbidden, and my cappuccino plus two ‘cups of froth’ for the kids totalled $3.65 (cheaper than I pay for just a coffee many places). Hats off to Bada Bing.
• Discovered the evil credit card company (ANZ) will ring you to tell you you’re overlimit, but not before they’ve charged you $35 for the privilege. It also seems easier to cancel and apply for a new card than to get a limit increase (even if it’s to a lower limit than you were on before!). Getting a decrease is much easier. They did at least have a callback number when I didn’t believe they were the bank and resisted my social engineering attempt when I hadn’t identified myself.
• Helped the kids make vege kebabs with pesto. Yummy!
• Took the opportunity to indulge in pate, soft, hard and (soon) blue cheeses.
• Roasted a chook.

It’d been suggested that a good fathers’ day present would be not helping with Cygnet’s birth. Which as it turned out was not what I wound up doing on Fathers’ day. Instead, I found myself in the kitchen, babe in arms, with Bilby and Puggle pleading for breakfast. All very domestic.

Both sets of grandparents paid a visit, (reminder, clean the lens before the baby’s born!), as did the midwife. Then Bilby and Puggle were whisked away to play with their cousins for a few peaceful hours.

I did manage to score some homemade Rocky Road, a copy of Stardust, and of course Cygnet and spend the majority of the day in my pyjamas.

Puggle (to man walking dogs): What are their names?
Man: Mulder and Sculley
Me: Ah
My Mum: Who are they, people from Star Wars?
Me: No, The X-Files
Puggle: What’s that?
Me: A TV show.
Man: I’m glad someone knows that, most people go “Who are they?”
My Mum: My son knows.

• Dinner with the folks. They get to see the battlewagon. Puggle is very keen on it, and Bilby didn’t like going for a drive in the old car
• Pretty much proof the car dealer put a car they were too lazy to let us drive ‘on offer’ (it’s no longer on offer since our sale was finalised, but it’s still there unsold).
• Trying to sell the old car. Vacuuming and detailing. The harder I vacuum the more sand is revealed. When did we stuff it full of Christmas trees?
• Farewell morning tea, luncheon, and post-work drinks for the old boss. Last time he was farewelling me
• Pizza dinner with Redbraids and MikeyOb, which was very pleasant, and reminded us of our laxness in inviting people over for dinner for adult conversation…
• The annual paying of the big bills, and doing of the tax. Followed by the watching of the bank balance. Then the bill for the stamp duty on the car arrives
• My GP retired. Then started running for the Labor party!
• Puggle is obsessed with take-away chicken from Chooks after we bought some the other night. Tonight he offered that he and Bilby would order that, and we could eat the regular dinner. He asked for the phone number so he could ring up and order some. He even suggested that he and Bilby might eat some regular dinner as well as Chooks. I suspect we may not go there in a while until the obsession has died down!
• Edging closer to the arrival of Cygnet. I should really start looking at names.

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…

• Put an offer on a car, as detailed elsewhere. RAC check on Monday morning (they state they’ll e-mail results within 2 hours of completion!). RAC were annoying by claiming the car was a 4WD, so they’d charge $90 more. Now they just claim it’s ‘large’ (which at that stage was not mentioned on their web site as costing any different), and are still claiming the extra.
• MacGeeks dinner at Taste of Thai, which was quite pleasant, if somewhat understaffed on a Tuesday night.
• Boss announced he’s taking on a position elsewhere on campus to continue his missionary work. I for one welcome our new overlord who’s probably reading this
• Swimming with Bilby, Puggle and Mama. Bilby delights in swimming back and forth between us two, to the point where she is too exhausted to actually swim. Puggle enjoys himself and shows off his windmill arms.

The only people I’d imagine I could feel more unclean dealing with would be Nazi used car salesmen. Failing that, it was time to head off to the dealership and test drive some cars we’re intending to buy. Amazingly, having given them 24 hours notice of intent to test-drive, we find that the car that was boxed in on the lot has miraculously become ‘on offer’, so is unavailable for a drive. The internal alarms are going off at this stage “YOU ARE BEING CONNED”, but we take the salesdroids (the probably-evil-someone-from-the-Empire-has-corrupted-it-sort) at their word. Obviously some people are prepared to put an offer on a car they haven’t test driven. Will be interesting to see if that car’s still available for sale next week.
Off for a test drive. Seems ok. Price is okish.
Make them an offer of about 10% off the marked price (as I’ve done previously when buying secondhand). Am told that’s a bit ambitious. They ask “What can I do to help you buy the car?” I say “Make it cheaper” Duh! We get shuffled to one of the bosses. Ask if they’d expect to buy a used car at the advertised price. They waffle on. As we’re leaving the salesdroid suggests he might be able to offer us to get the stamp duty off. We say we’ll think about it and leave.
On the way out a guy allegedly from the RAC (his ID is from a survey company) is conducting a survey into car safety ratings, he offers us a free scratchy in return for info from us, including household income. I don’t bother checking the privacy policy. I wonder if the guy actually works for the dealership.
Thinking about it over a coffee we decide to go for it, the car is relatively new, so pending an RAC check and with stamp duty covered it would be pretty reasonable (although, not the deal we’d hoped for).
So, back to the dealership, we say we’re interested if the stamp duty is off. (I note a giant laser printed memo on the desk indicating a $200 bonus to the person who sells the most x this month, which is rapidly hidden So the droid fills out the offer paperwork, which sort of gives the impression that that’s ok (once he’s filled in the right license plate!). At least he fills in the ’subject to RAC inspection _satisfactory_to_customer’ bit without any hassle). The trick is though after filling in the paperwork he goes to get it approved, and the other boss indicates that no, they can only give us $250 off (we’ve indicated we’re going to be buying post-purchase accessories from them, apparently that has no bearing on the deal). So now we’re playing good-cop-bad-cop. The deal isn’t final until it’s signed by the manager, not the salesdroid.
So basically we can walk away and no doubt have to play this game at another dealership, probably for a worse price, or just get it over and done with, despite the whole uneasy unclean feeling.
So, give them the magic credit card, they take the deposit, and everyone evaporates, leaving us like cold fish on the salesfloor. We make our own way out. Possibly it’s because we just bought the car the manager’s was taking home for the weekend and the salesdroid has to go and re-park it and remove the manager’s gear. Possibly it’s because it’s 20 minutes after closing. But really I get the impression that now we’re committed they don’t give a damn. The salesdroid waves on the way out.
Then it’s home to scrub.
So I guess my advice in retrospect is don’t let them start writing up the offer until they know it’s going to get approved. If they say the other car you’re interested in is on offer then try to get some proof (although hey, maybe it’s the guy who was magically on the phone wanting to buy it a week and a half ago on Wednesday night).
So, having booked the RAC inspection online (why does their RAC form not have an ‘ASAP’ time?), we await the next chapter of the saga.