Its been a while. (Like I need to tell you lot that).
Honestly, I’m surprised that no-one, not one single person, has complained. I think its some kind of new record. Two weeks and two days with no blog entries, and no complaints. It must be a sign of the times, everyone is simply too busy… even too busy to complain…. Perhaps its finally happen.. no one checks my blog any more?
So Dave came and went and it was a super fast two weeks.
We did a bunch of stuff, but I’m sure that his mum (my dear sister) is super annoyed with the fact that I did not blog anything from the last week and a half, and so none of us remember what we did.
That said, we sort of remember what we did NOT do…. we did not get down to the HOA gym. Dave was supposed to work out a work out program for me, using my little home gym, and we were supposed to go down to the HOA gym and check out what gear they have and see if any of it would be useful in my efforts to lose the spare tire I am slowly inflating. Didn’t happen.
We were supposed to take some photos of Dave in different get ups in the studio for his mom. Didn’t happen.
We were supposed to get Dave an air soft gun. We only had time to get to a few local shops and they did not have any air soft guns, but they did have a range of BB guns. One of which Dave bought, and left at my place for when he comes back (speaking of which… I went out this morning to pick a grape fruit off my tree in the back yard.. one of them had a BB sized hole in it…. Dave, did you shoot my grape fruit?). Only sort of happened.
We were supposed to take photos of Dave playing street basketball. Didn’t happen. (The basketball did, but not the photo part)
We were supposed to take Dave for a drive around de Luze. Didn’t happen.
We were supposed to take Dave up to ‘sky high’ look out at night to see the lights of Temecula. Didn’t happen.
He was interested in looking at some RV’s. Didn’t happen.
Eat some real Mexican food. Didn’t happen.
Yeah, I think you get the point. Perhaps its a good thing he is planing to come back. (Now would be time time to break out the diary of all the things we DID do… oh, right.. there is none).
So Dave came and went and its been a super fast two weeks and two days since he left.
We paid our po box renewal, but they never got it, so when my mate went to check for my mail, he could not get in. Doh.
That said, I am sort of pleased because it started a bit of a chain reaction that I have been putting off for far too long……
With the box closed, I had to call a bunch of places and get the address changed…. Oh, how pleasant. Don’t get me started about how enjoyable it was for me to call the bank, the phone company, the superannuation mob, the amateur radio licence people and so on and change my address. They all treated me like a person, were chatty and helpful, and they were all Australian!!!!
Freddy has been at me for two things for a long while, an American home phone number and for me to cancel our Australian credit card and close the bank account. Reason? She wants to call her friends here and is getting sick of only having my cell phone number to give people to contact her (don’t get me started on how sick I am of having my cell phone number given out to all sorts of people that want to ask Freddy questions that I know the answer to but cant give it ‘because of privacy issues’… we have been married for 21.5 years, there IS NO privacy!).
So, I did. We bought a ‘magicjack’. Mostly because that what Alexi bought when she went to Australia so she could have a state side phone number for people to call her on (just like we have an Australian (Ballarat) number for people to call us on) and she is happy with it. Its running on the same computer that runs the weather station, an XP laptop. Seems to be working ok for the most part. We went and bought a cheap Wallmart cordless phone to put on it. The phone (both systems) has an answering machine on them, both are set to pick up after 4 rings, as luck would have it, the magicjack picks up first, which is not what we want, so we have to race to get to the phone in two rings before the Wallmart phone answering machine picks up… and no, you cant change the magicjack, but I do see there is a registry hack you can try, so I will get around to that at some stage.
Anyway, long story longer… The ‘only’ reason we have been keeping the bank account open was to pay for the Aussie phone and the PO box, so since I was getting address changed, I tackled the phone. Turns out that my mate Gary has the same VOIP company, and had a spare number. He kindly offered it to us, which moved the bill to his account, and at a cheaper amount. Thanks Gary.
So, now with the PO gone and the phone gone, we can now transfer the last few dollars we have left in Australia over and close the account.
Westpac were charging us 5 bucks a month account keeping fees (what a scam) and about 185 bucks a year credit card fees. So we have been leaking money for the past 3 years and not been super happy about it. Now, thanks to Australia Post and Gary, we can stem the flow and still keep our phone. Oh, and I should say thanks to Terry for letting me forward my mail to his place. For the past three years he has been clearing our PO box, scanning our mail and emailing it over. Great system. Its been working a treat.
Anyway, all that has taken some time in the evenings, but its mostly done (have not transfered the money and shut the account yet).
Bit of a change at work as well.
We have a new employee. Mary used to work for Opto in the past. Till she left for Hawaii, mostly for family and hubbies job. But, the big island calls and she came back when a job became open at Opto. Mary is going to be writing content for a while and then looking at where to take our training program. I’m really glad to have her around as I cant write for nuts. (And I love nuts). In her first week she’s settled in and written a video script on our energy monitoring unit (yes, its call an EMU). We should start shooting next week and can start editing things shortly there after.
Mary has moved into Davids cube. Which means that David moved into the studio full time. So there are two of us in there now.
Around the same time, Terry’s stereo (which was a dumpster rescue the first few weeks we got here) blew up, and since I cant really crank the stereo at work, I bought my THX system home. So now when ever we are not home, but Terry is, he tests the neighbors tolerance to dubstep. Sue will know what I mean, I sold the same THX system I had in Australia to Matt, my other nephew, because I knew he likes to feel his trance.
You cant code in silence, its against the computer coders association rules, so I bought a pair of Logitech wireless headphones. So now I can code to trance, not annoy David and not get tangled up in the cord. Does it get any better? Yeah, it does, the headphones have a mike, so I can skype as well.
Right, so thats 1344 words thus far.. I think I know why no one complains… No one reads all of it…. you lot deserve some sort of medal for reading all this drivel.
I will try and get back to short pithy blogs real soon.
Chow.