I couldn’t resist taking a photo of this. I saw it one day and it obviously stood out for me. When I saw it the next day I drove around the block to get this photo.
Not only is ‘every’ spelt incorrectly, the %25 bit got me, and the inconsistency of the lower-case l with everything else uppercase.
It made me curious as to who created it. Was it a non-English speaker or just a really bad speller?
Either way, I took notice. However it didn’t make me go in to buy.
This time two weeks ago we moved house. It was nearly 44 degrees celsius – so pretty damn hot. But the story begins back in August.
I’d arranged to meet a friend at a cafe not far from our house. We walked there and as we nearly arrived she met us and said that it was pretty full so we decided to go to another one nearby.
After we bought our food we were sitting at a table close to the counter and I overheard the manager talking to a regular about how he and his wife wanted to buy a house nearby (in my suburb). My ears pricked up because I’d been thinking of selling for a while. JJ had finished primary school so I felt for a number of reasons it was time to move on.
When it got a bit quieter I went up to him and said that I’d overheard his conversation and that I was thinking of selling my house. He said he was interested so gave me his card.
The next day I emailed him my details and a plan of the house as it was when I bought it 17 years ago. Consequently, two weeks later he, his wife and two young children came to look at the house and said they were interested.
They dragged their heels a bit while they did some finance groundwork but made an offer, which I accepted after having done my research about what I thought I could get on the market and weighing up whether it was worth opening it up further to other potential buyers and having to pay real estate agent fees.
Things dragged on some more as they still kept on sorting out their finance but I finally got the go ahead from them to get a contract of sale organised. A spanner was put into the works as I disclosed some proposed council works which would affect them if they went ahead. This was the most stressful part for me – dealing with the council that is. They told my buyers different things to what they’d told me and there was a breakdown in communications and I thought the whole thing was going to fall through. But after a contract addendum about the council works, then another addendum about settlement date it all got sorted.
In the meantime I’d been looking at houses. I made an offer on one but was knocked back because it was a slightly lower offer with more conditions than the other offer they received. I had a break of a couple of weeks while the contract stuff was dragging on but then as it looked as though it would all go ahead I started looking again in earnest.
I looked at many houses in sought after locations, some with sparkling pools, and many houses with very odd layouts. One house that I hoped I would be interested in was quite a let-down. Its additions hadn’t been very well planned and while there were plenty of bedrooms and a couple of options for living areas it was quite strange and the backyard didn’t inspire me. Even though I sold my house privately to obviously very interested buyers I still got my garden mowed and trimmed and looking neat. This house hadn’t. There was a weird patch of fake lawn, weeds everywhere and the back fence was quite low so you could see right into the neighbour’s backyard. Other houses had too many steps inside, or one had a very steep backyard that was mostly unusable. That one’s still for sale.
But right at the time that I needed to, I found a house that had a good layout for us, incredible views and functional, usable space inside and out. Plus the kitchen and bathroom are reasonably up-to-date. I think I was the only one who made an offer, which was accepted, then it was all systems go for a four-week settlement.
I had access to the house ten days before we moved so a bunch of friends and I moved a heap of boxes and pot plants. Thank goodness for that, because it saved us time on official moving day where I was paying by the hour, plus it was goddamn hot!
A week after moving day I hosted Christmas and I even got my two sisters in the same house. They haven’t spoken for over five years so buying a new house was totally worth it just for that!
It’s been two weeks today and I still have unpacking and sorting out to do but we definitely feel as though it’s home and the feedback from friends has been really positive. I’ve already done more entertaining here in the last two weeks than I did at the previous house in the last six months.
It feels like the day is half over but I’ve only been up for one hour. It’s the first morning of daylight savings and the clocks have moved forward one hour. Going back to work on Tuesday will be a struggle because of that and because I had last week off work. Although my internal clock is set to wake me up around 6 to 6.30am anyway and it doesn’t get the ‘she’s on holidays’ memo unfortunately.
I’ve just updated the backend files of this blog. It took less than five minutes. I remember when I first started using WordPress, you had to manually copy files up using FTP and replace old ones and it was a pain. It’s so much easier now that it all happens fairly pain-free. The only gotcha is when a plugin doesn’t play nicely with the theme or a WordPress upgrade.
I keep this blog going for some reason. It’s been going for ten and a half years now. I don’t think I even acknowledged my ten year anniversary because I so rarely write here these days. Back then this was more of a parenting blog. Back then the blogging community in Australia was quite different. Back then blogger’s press kits weren’t even heard of, and working with brands wasn’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eyes yet. I used to love the sense of community that was around – when people used to comment on blogs. Facebook and Twitter weren’t around to compete with blog comments either so you could contain a conversation in one place. Now I see blog post links go up on Twitter and Facebook and comments made on those platforms and the poor old blog can be neglected unless you’re a popular blogger. I know my commenting on blogs has dropped off and a lot of that is because of the commenting systems used. If you use Disqus I won’t comment. I often want to keep what I say on a blog off of other social media platforms and Disqus doesn’t allow me to do that while adding a link back to this blog in case someone wants to visit. I don’t mind using my name and email but don’t want to be tied in to having to login to something to comment. And once I make my mind up about something it can take a while to sway me. A bit like self-serve checkouts – I am still really opposed to them.
The other thing is that because the blogging landscape has changed and because brands have entered the fray there just doesn’t seem to be the quality of blogs around now like there used to be. Maybe I’m just missing the underground blogging movement that does exist? Maybe I’m just seeing the blogs that are working with blogging agencies and writing a lot of sponsored content. Usually when I see the words ‘sponsored post’ at the top of a blog post I don’t bother reading it.
I know I’ve got advertising on my blog, ie BlogHer. I must take it off actually because I hardly earn anything off it. I joined BlogHer back in their infancy and they were recently bought out. It’s also American based so many of the things they do offer bloggers just aren’t really worth my while, or available to me as an Australian.
Ten years ago when I started this blog my son was three years old. He’s now 14. When he was three I wrote a lot about parenting but I don’t feel I can do that any more. I took a lovely photo of him and the dog lying on the floor having a boy-dog moment and as I took it he told me not to put it on social media. I respect that and I respect that his life isn’t fodder for this blog although there’s lots I could write about. Navigating the teen world and technology would be one standout for me. Anyone else struggling with that? We’ve come to a truce on that front for now I think and without going into detail of how we got there, he’s allowed maximum four hours a day on the xbox on weekends only. No xbox during the school week. Now the computer and internet time is a different story.
If you still read my blog, or you’ve just found it I’d love to hear your comments using whatever details you would like.
Anyway, another half hour has passed so I’d better get on and make the most of this shorter day.
I’ve let this blog languish almost as long as it’s been winter. Spring is on its way though and is letting winter know it will be kicked to the kerb for another nine months. Maybe spring will help renew me around here too.
It’s been an interesting few months.
I overheard a conversation in a cafe a few weeks ago which could change my life in a fairly major way even though I’d been heading in that direction anyway. Am not spilling beans on this overheard conversation until things are settled though.
I was on the radio recently. I was approached out of the blue to speak about venting online from an online specialist point of view. While I was being briefed/asked if I would go on, part of me was thinking – no, no no. The other part of me thought, what the heck – take a risk. I listened to the other part and did it. Without having listened to myself I think I did okay. And I didn’t embarrass myself or get stuck for words. I was on the other end of a phone which made it a bit easier I think, and they had another person on discussing the same topic so the focus wasn’t totally on me anyway.
My son is a few months into his 14th year now and it’s an interesting journey. I’m finding I have to let the type of control I used to have with him go. I’m finding that really hard. It’s particularly hard around how much time he thinks he should spend playing xbox, compared to the amount of time I think he should be allowed on it. Overall though, he’s pretty pleasant and seems to be liking high school.
Happy belated birthday to my gorgeous son. His birthday coincided with a visit from his great aunt (pictured bottom right) who was in town for a couple of days. She suggested he take the day off school and when I asked him if he wanted to do this he jumped at the chance. That was before I told him what we were doing.
We drove to Victor Harbor so our aunt could catch up with another relative and a couple of childhood friends and – bless my lad – he went along with it. After all, the choice was to go to school or spend the day with us. A day at home by himself on his birthday was not an option.
He did pretty well sitting at the table playing games on his phone while listening in on our conversations. I took him out for a bit of a stroll and a purchase of some gobstoppers at the nearby lolly shop. I discovered that those things take forever to eat and are really annoying when you’re sitting next to the person sucking on them.
In the evening he had Scouts and I took a cake and some party food for him and his scout mates to share. All in all, he had a pretty good day – I think. He did say that he didn’t mind not having a party because I’d spent a bit of money on last year’s one. Bless him for even thinking that. It’s not something I’d said to him, although I have mentioned the cost of his attendance at Jamboree next year.
I’d heard about this event – the Balloon Glow – a couple of years ago and went to see it but was a day late.
This year, I heard about it again via a photography group I’m in and thought I’d drag the lad out to see it with me. A friend came along as well. I didn’t bother hooking up with the photography group in the end. Once I saw the amount of people I didn’t even try.
We got there about 5pm and realised that it was a very popular event by the amount of cars crawling the area looking for a park. I managed to find a park a few blocks away and walked there. While we lined up a very stressed mum walked past us with her baby in the pram and toddler whinging next to her. We heard her say, ‘Well we’re not going back. There’s so many rude and inconsiderate people in there.’ It didn’t bode well.
We paid our entry fee and walked in and saw queues of people surrounding us. I saw the longest queue for the toilets I’ve ever seen anywhere. We thought we’d get some fresh donuts but saw the queue for that and decided against it. My son and my friend bought a hot chocolate – surprisingly there was no queue for that – but I declined because I didn’t fancy queuing for the loos afterwards.
My first thought was that this event was really badly organised but then I realised that there’s no way they’d expected this amount of people as they obviously hadn’t catered for them. There were no portable toilets anywhere and there definitely wasn’t enough food and beverage stalls to cater for the crowds.
While we waited for the balloons to arrive on the oval and be inflated, the lad decided he was bored and would like to go and get some donuts so I handed him some cash and let him go. Bless him, he came back with some just as the balloons were being inflated.
We were told to not stand on the dog track so everyone moved back off it. Then we were told that we could indeed stand there, so maybe it was a bit disorganised after all.
All that aside, it was pretty spectacular. We had to stand back to start with and then were allowed on the oval to get up close. It’s then you realise just how big these balloons are, and how hot and big that flame is to keep the thing inflated.
There was no reason to hang around after the light show so off we went to buy some food. We went past the busy pub and settled for the not so busy one around the corner. I think they need Gordon Ramsay in there to roust them up. The service was abysmal, and the wait for the food was long. And the choice of food was schnitzel, steak or various forms of fried seafood. The one special – lamb shanks – were all sold out by the time we ordered so I had fish and chips.
So, it was an interesting evening in seeing how bad organisation is done with some pretty lights thrown in.
My lad started high school this year which means he catches the bus to and from so I got him a Metrocard to use on the bus.
Not even one school term in he lost his wallet and I had to replace the Metrocard and his student ID card. I didn’t replace the small amount of cash and docked some pocket money for my out of pocket costs.
I’d registered the Metrocard so that it automatically tops up when the balance gets low. It beats buying tickets every week. When you’ve registered your card you can see what usage its had one to two days after the event. You can also report it lost or stolen and cancel so nobody else can use it. I left his for a couple of days just incase it turned up like the missing PE uniform did (embarrassingly it was in a bag in his room).
His wallet did not turn up and as someone had used his Metrocard on the other side of town I figured it wasn’t going to appear in our house or his bag.
I rang up to cancel it and asked how I could transfer the remaining balance on the card to a new one and was told I would have to go to their service centre in the city or the main train station – inconvenient to do either when you don’t work in the city.
Luckily I have a day off a fortnight so at my inconvenience I went into town to organise his new card.
Last Friday night I heard a couple of mums talking about having to do the same thing and I remembered I was going to provide feedback about this. I duly filled in an online feedback form and to their credit they replied within a few hours saying that provided I gave them certain details the replacement card could be done over the phone.
I replied with a thanks, and another suggestion to pass this information onto service centre staff.
I’m taking bets on when I’ll have to replace the card again. At least I won’t have to go into the city to do it.
