Cheap Therapy

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.

• 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.

• Dinner at The Vic, with geeks. I can highly recommend the chocolate fondant. It was somewhere between cakey and saucy and it was fabulous!
• Puggle completing the same jigsaw many times
• Catching up with Redbraids, discussing emma_in_oz’s birthing
• One step closer to a new car
• Pimping the blog for the benefit of the search engines
• Fetching Bilby’s bed frame. It used to be mine! Soon she’ll be all grown up
• Made Jamie’s chicken with potatoes, cherry tomatoes (peeled! At least until I gave up), and oregano
• Move the compost bin to the middles of the ‘herb’ spiral (closer to the house). Redistributed some of the old compost.
• Craft day, and a trip to the park with Puggle and Bilby.
• Said goodbye to Mum, who’s off to Europe for a month.

• Using Google Sketchup to model some housing development and investigate overshadowing. Pretty awesome once you get the hang of it. Write submission
• Probably no WWDC this year
• A birthday dinner for Becc with fine food and company
• A week without students. Meaning lots of things getting done while they’re not around
• Get to see Cygnet for the first time
• A long weekend. ANZAC day. Bless ‘em.
• A picnic in a smaller park than anticipated. But my first time walking both Puggle and Bilby there. Reminder, Bilby is heavy enough I need the stroller
• AppleScripty pythony Dilberty goodness
• Car test driving. Kia Grand Carnival and Toyota Tarago (Last week the Volkswagen Passat Wagon, Subaru Liberty and the Tarago). See a separate post somewhat later
• Games at Kylie’s. Happy Birthday! This time I prove I can lose at Super Scrabble as well as Scrabble

• Jen’s birthday dinner. Spiderwick Chronicles (glad I didn’t bring Puggle, there were some bits that scared me).
• A long weekend in Mandurah. Many dogs to pat. St Bernards are big! Mandurah’s newspapers are filled with a) complaints about mosquitoes (you’d think they’d have thought of that before they moved to an estuarine area), b) discussion about the art at the train station (if it inspires discussion, it’s probably art).
• Made random casserole with chook thighs, leeks, shallots, bacon, corn, cauliflower, and 1L chook stock. Was pretty good.
• Missed many people who were in town. That’s what you get when you book leave in advance. Sorry folks!
• Played with Sketchup and Google Earth to prepare a submisison on a development application. Requires more playing, could be fun…
• Bilby is into books. Does seem to look at them upside down a lot though.
• Discovered the Puggle standard opening (Move all your pawns to the third row).
• Lose weight, annoy your gallbladder. Pained sigh.
• Car shopping. It is cheaper to spend $1000 on new car seats than have to spend an extra $10,000 on a car Build and driving quality varies.
• 40th Anniversary of the cub pack I vaguely remember attending
• Family MacGeeks at the park, conveniently overlapping the end of Swancon at the park. Lens envy. Much thanks to Toby, Skip and David for their culinary efforts. Let Puggle roam free for a bit, at least until in the distance he’s noticed standing on the middle of the island with his pants around his knees. He was distracted by ducks.
• World domination planning continues

The start of the week seems a long time ago.

• Students return and wander the halls looking lost.
• WAMUG AGM, I manage to not get elected President. Yay!
• Household is down a computer. Resurrection attempts unsucessful. Backup exists but should have been a bit more current. Reprioritise maintenance of backup system. Puggle is deprived of YouTube.
• More of the public transport and walking thing.
• Gary Gygax died. His legacy was and is lots of fun for millions of people. Vale.
• Beer at the Belgian Beer Cafe, where you can get charged $24.50 for a stein of Hoegarden plus $5 deposit for the glass. Or you can get charged the same amount for a pint if you’re not paying attention… Fortunately they refunded.
• Mulberry crumble (or as Puggle called it ‘crimble crumble’) from our tree. Powered by Puggle pee.
• Bilby sang the tune to Click Go The Shears after Puggle sang it.
• No beer at home. Rectified.