You will need to open this link in a new window, and when its loaded, click and drag the map down so you can see the whole picture.
Thats our drive way right here……… How cool is that. I have spent the last 15 minutes looking at different places and reading about how the whole street view thing works…. Pretty much Google has paid someone to drive a goofy looking car/truck with a camera on the roof down a whole lota streets and record the images with GPS info attached……. Crazy. They say Australia will be launched some time this year, I wonder if Ballarat and Buninyong will be in the first lot of images……Anyway, we park our car (yeah yeah, car photos coming) on the left just after the first white speed hump you see, and our apartment is on the right.
Ok, the link is here….
Apart from this, things a going well. Work has gone ballistic. I hope Tom is having a great time in Jordon, we sure do miss him around here! Between the phone and the training guys, there is hardly a moment to breath…… Its pretty cool, you just never know what you are going to work on, measuring strain on the anchor cables of deep sea drilling platforms, spill gate control of hydro electricity dams and geothermal power plants just to name three…… You just never know what you are going to get when the phone rings!
The kids are going well, Amy never seems to have any homework, Terry seems to have it every night and sometimes struggles to keep up with it. (This is a good thing…. for Terry, not Amy).
Freddy is going well, she seems to have settled down rather well and is getting used to shopping and swimming though the days. She finally has seen a few humming birds, but none real up close. We are still yet to buy a feeder and figure out how to mount it on the deck (we are not allowed to screw anything to the walls).
We still think we need two cars, but are stilling trailing having just the one for the next three weeks. The way it works is that Amy and I leave for school/work at 10 past 7 each morning (except Mondays, when Amy has a late start so she walks, or Freddy takes me to work and has the car all day), I start work at 7:30 and go till 4:30ish….. I say ish, because two times that Freddy has come to pick me up, I have been late, once, 50 minutes late….. we need two cars.
Went to the bank today to try and sort out the secured credit card thing. We can do it, but really need our cali drivers licenses to do it right, so its on hold for another 3 weeks. Much the same deal with the cell phones. Speaking of cell phones, I see that on my business card, its marked as ‘mobile’ not cell, so thats pretty neat.
Checks, the whole place runs on checks…..its driving me nuts. You stand in line at the supermarkets waiting for the person to pay for 10 bucks worth of groceries by writing a check. I pay for my cable internet by check, I get paid by check….. on and on it goes….. They all admit that its totally daft for a techo nation to be tied to bits of paper, but they cant give them up. I think its the only thing that the mail system still carries. If you transfer money between banks, they write a check, if I pay the church any money, I can write a check and send it, or, if I do it though the bank, ie, if I go into the counter and swipe my card and ’send’ the money to the church, the bank then raises a paper check and sends that to them…… duh, what up with that???
Ok, enough blogging, bed is calling…….. perhaps one little night cap of ‘port’ and lemonade is in order……. (shut up Matt W and Gary!)
