Okay, technically we did make some actual present headway, but I'm once again ahead of myself.
First, the bees never stuck around beyond Saturday last week... whether it was just a passing new queen and her boys, I don't know... or if the lower temperatures scared them all off. But they never reappeared when it warmed up again this week, so it looks like they're gone, which is good.
And the saga of the dripping cornice seems to be at an end. I was a little concerned when the water started dripping again on Monday night, given that the plumber was supposed to come and fix things, then I had a call last week saying that they were coming to address the issue on the inside of the apartment. Turns out the plumber didn't actually do jack shit.
So hopefully the person who came on Thursday actually did do what was required (and, side note, I called my land agent, I said "can you please find out who was supposed to be doing what and tell me, just so I know"... and did they, no they did not... is it that much to ask, really?). And hopefully they were better at fixing holes then they were at painting and decorating, because they just slapped some very white paint over some much less white white paint, potentially filled in the hole with some polyfiller and called it a day.
But it didn't drip at all on Thursday night, so that was good. I'm just concerned because last time they said "oh that's fixed" at the old house, water collected in the light fitting and started dripping onto the carpet.
I'm going to cross my fingers, assume that people actually did their job and put the house back the way it's supposed to be.
Anyway...
Last Sunday I spent some time putting together Ma's calendar for next year. As I said recently, we haven't really been anywhere for a while, and I've done things with a high level of sea or beach images... so I wanted something different. Thinking about it now, I've been threatening to do a street art themed one for a while... but that's more pictures of other people's pictures... so instead I decided on sculpture. A combination of Sculpture By The Sea, the Brighton Sculpture contest and some other random bits and pieces.
Normally this is the point I would post the cover, but I'm just going to live with it for a little while longer first, see how I feel.
Sunday night I made stew... as in I started out with the intention to make stew, and made stew... it wasn't just a really thick soup that got away from me. And it was really nice... maybe a little in need of more salt, but nice.
I'd suggested that after a week and a half of insanity, our workload would even out this week, probably around midweek. But no, it remained nuts all week. Much less of the "life and death" stuff (which, clearly was neither life nor death) that required us to drop everything... but still a record number of jobs.
And you can always tell when other parts of the place you work are perhaps less than efficient... when people buy your team cupcakes and chocolates just for doing your job in a timely manner. It did mean that I spent a large amount of Thursday hopped up on all manner of sugar.
I got notified this week that the tool I use to publish my blog posts to Twitter is shutting down, so I checked out one of the two they recommended as a replacement and went with dlvr.it (because heaven forbid that the name of an internet company has actual vowels in it's name). So, if this post happens to appear in my Twitter feed twice, that's why (because I can't switch the old one off, and it doesn't stop officially until the end of the month).
I also called into T2 on the way home to pick up the "free gift" they'd emailed me about (something to do with them redoing their loyalty program)... and I walked out of there two two additional boxes of tea and one of their tea maker contraptions.
Because I was a little worried about the repair to the roof and the rain on Thursday night, I didn't sleep very well. In fact I woke up at around 4am (I think the rain woke me to be honest), got up to check the wall and then couldn't get back to sleep properly. So that made for a fun day.
Friday was my chiro appointment, so like always, after I'd gotten my adjustment I went for a wander around the city, stopping at all the usual spots... Zing, Greenlight Comics (to pick up the two graphic novels I'd ordered) and Dymocks. And then I finished the evening off with an early dinner at Burger Theory.
And when I got home I found the two Welcome to Nightvale books waiting for me. I'd forgotten that I had ordered signed copies, so that was a nice surprise.
Today, like I said at the top of the post, was kind of the start of Christmas shopping... but mostly we ended up looking at stuff for ourselves.
But, starting at the beginning...
I was actually up and organised fairly early this morning, if only because I was having a bit of a hayfever attack laying in bed.
When Ma arrived, we headed off to the supermarket. I'm not doing soup, or stew, this week... I'm going to attempt doing something vaguely interesting with chicken breasts, roast potatoes, beans and possibly either roasted tomatoes or just regular ones. You know, like those grown-up, healthy type people make and post on social media.
We'll see how it goes anyway.
After we'd finished we plotted out what to do with the rest of the day. The first part of that involved a stop in the city for me to take a giant bag of loose change to the bank to run it through the counting machine and drop it into my account.
Unlike last time there wasn't any drama this time around... in fact I probably could have run all of the coins through in one batch, but after last time decided it made more sense to do it in two.
Once I was done, the coins came to the very exact total of $1075. And more than $700 of that came from $2 coins.
From there we went down to Marion for a few errands and also to see what inspiration we could find for Christmas presents.
A lot of the things we ended up looking at involved DVDs... and while normally I would have consigned anything I bought to the abyss of "away for Christmas", I didn't bother this time around as none of it was exceptionally exciting.
I did replace my now defunct frying pan with a new one... and as always picked up one that was on special for half price... although I swear that those pans are probably never selling for full price. And if they are, you have to be nuts to buy one when you could get it at half price.
Then we finished up with a poke around Kmart... and accidentally stumbled on a good idea for packing presents for Princess T and Miss Oh... big "beach bag" totes. Normally we just give them their presents in something pretty but useless, but we wanted to find something more useful this year... but that was hard to do until we knew what else we were getting them. But that really only matters if it's a box where you'll see the stuff... with these bags everything will just be inside, and we can always stuff the bottom of the bag with filler if we need to.
It also gives us a general colour and design language for both of them, which I always like.
We pretty much called it a day at that point, because how much better was it going to get than that... but we stopped off to have a late lunch at HOKOPO, which wasn't bad, but next time we may have to try the bowls rather than the wrap (and skip the fried chicken part of the meal deal, which was very average).
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