Things that threw me off course

Golly gee, look at me: a blog post after almost a month. It's been so long that I've put it off even longer thinking about how I should start a new blog post after so long. Apologise? Explain myself? Just blog a new post as if nothing happened?

I personally yawn and roll my eyes when I read a blog post that starts with "Wow it's been awhile, I'm so sorry, I hope my readers are still here?!.."  So I won't do that.  Except I kind of just did.

I was on a good roll in December-January. I was pretty organised, life was rolling along, and blogging was fun and easy. So what dire things happened to throw me off?

Here they are:

1. School started again. I know, I know - I work, my KIDS are in school, what's the difference? But it makes a difference. Lunchboxes. Homework. Notices. Trying to attend meet-the-teacher events. Somehow school holidays can be easier to manage while you're working than school is.  I love our kids' school, and it's very exciting having the kids in Grade Three - but there has been a flurry of busy-ness this last month.


2. Heat. Oh my god, the Melbourne Heat Wave of 2014 will surely be written about in history books. If this is what our kids and grandkids will be living with every day due to global warming, then can I just say to them all, I'M SORRY!  I know, it's summer, and summer is hot. We get taken by surprise by this fact every year. But as every Melburnian knows, though summer starts in December, December and January are variable, and the real heat hits in February. Except this year it hit in January, and it kept going all the way through February, until ... three days ago when it suddenly turned cold and rainy.

Literally three days ago I was sitting slumped at the kitchen table saying to Y, "I'm so sick of the heat!" - and verily the gods heard my call of despair, for the next day, weirdly, it was suddenly over.

But the heat, my god, the heat... it affected everything, sapped our energy and left us discombobulated for weeks. You couldn't do housework - it was too hot. You couldn't go out - it was too hot. You couldn't blog - it was too hot.


3. Broken door. I'm saving this story for next time, but suffice it to say for now, we had an incident, and our door got broken and needed to be fixed. These things take up time and mental energy!


4. Telstra. F...ing Telstra. Ever since we've been in this house, we've had recurring phone faults. Usually after rain, sometimes after nothing at all. Our phone will go crackly for a couple of days, and then dead. It has happened easily six or eight times, and each time I have to contact Telstra and go through the same old crap to get it fixed, until next time. Last year in June our phone was out for two weeks. This January it was out for a week. Then it was fixed and two days later it went out again, for another 3 days.

Last June I "escalated" the problem and insisted the history be looked at and the underlying problem addressed... yeah, that clearly didn't happen.  This time, when I reported the fault, I escalated it straight away and every time I called I asked the operator to look at our phone history and please fix the underlying problem.

All up technicians visited our street or our house four times. And that's not including the time one came round unknown to us while we were at work and Telstra sent me a text saying "A technician visited but was unable to gain entry to your house to fix the problem. If you still have a problem please report the fault to Telstra."  I got that message and just about went through the roof. I called them - sitting in my car, melting in the heat - and honestly I struggled not to cry huge fat tears of rage and frustration and self-pity, while still being polite and fair to the operator, because the phone operators are young and keen and always lovely and helpful, and it's not their fault.

You might think a dead landline is not a problem these days, but it is. For one thing, what about people who don't have mobiles? There are still some. How on earth do they get on if this happens? What about older people living on their own?  For another thing, it knocks your ADSL internet out, and being without the internet these days is unreasonable! I complained to Telstra about having to use our mobiles to make local calls and they adjusted my mobile to landline rates for the duration, but what if my mobile was with a different carrier? Our broadband is through a different carrier, so we still had to pay for our internet while we couldn't use it. Also, when you lose your mobile, you can't use the landline to call it to find it!

As it turns out, we had two problems: a faulty outside line (duh - we knew that much) and a faulty phone socket.

But finally, after the last technician visited, I was happy. Do you know why?  Because that fourth technician finally told me the truth. It turns out our street has a very old, frayed phone cable that really needs replacing, and Telstra have no immediate plans to replace it. At last! Honesty. It was a kind of relief.

So those have been my first world problems this summer. 

How have YOU been? 

sixninepixels / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Edit: unfortunately, I accidentally deleted this post last week, and lost all the lovely comments!  I recovered the post from Google Cache but had to re-post it, so I will try and recover and copy the comments below as I find them.

Thanks to everyone who visited and commented and welcomed me back!

 

Sunday Selections #155

It's time for Sunday Selections!
Sunday Selections is a weekly meme hosted by River at Drifting Through Life. 

The rules are very simple:-

1. post photos of your choice, old or new, under the Sunday Selections title

2. link back to River somewhere in your post

3. leave a comment on River's post and visit some of the others who have posted and commented: for example:

    Elephant's Child

    Andrew at High Riser

    Gillie at Random Thoughts From Abroad

    

This week I have no theme; these are some recent photos I like.

What else to do during last week's record heatwave, than to head to the beach every evening at 8pm?  Heaven.

The week before last we went as a family to see The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. The kids loved the adventure of going to a grown-up movie with Mum and Dad, and coming home at midnight. Here they are skipping happily through the carpark after the movie.

From one extreme to the other: last week I took them to The Cat In The Hat (play) at the Arts Centre. It was very well done, but too young for the girls. I knew it would be but it was fairly cheap and I thought they'd still like it. Their verdict was pretty much "meh" - but they loved the free show on outside (The Chipolatas), which were excellent.   

An unknown rapt audience member

Back home:
We've been in this house 9 years, and I had never noticed till now how the back of my beautiful kitchen window looks. Huh.

You learn something new every day.


Lastly, some more tiny flowers (one a weed but it's still a flower).

Sand Sculptures: "Under The Sea"

So these are cool.

The annual sand sculpting competition and exhibit is on, and we recently went to see them. The exhibit is at 'Frankston Waterfront', which is an actual place, not a vague term meaning on the beachfront as I assumed.   After traipsing for a bit through drizzle up and down the main beach, we got back in the car and drove further along and found the right place, and in we went.

I have to say the entry ticket for a family of four is a bit on the pricey side, but that's the way it is these days. Toys and "stuff" for kids have got cheap, and outings have got expensive.

But the sculptures are amazing and well worth a visit.

They're open until April 28 - you can see more information at the Frankston council events site here.

More pictures, and information on sand sculpting and how it's done, can be read at Sandstorm Events' website here.

Neptune

Mermaids (and a couple of family
members in the background)

Warm Day Pleasures

I don't cope well with hot weather. What I love are those beautiful warm days at the end of spring or the end of summer, where you feel happy and energized and life feels full of promise.

Days like yesterday and today, in Melbourne.

For instance, I love:

• Driving with the window open (instead of the air conditioning on)
• Having my hair stay dry and in style all day (not ruined by humidity or sweat)
• Not wearing or carrying a jacket
• Wearing sandals to work
• Painting my toenails and the paint lasts for days because I'm wearing sandals to work and no shoes at home
• Listening to my kids playing outside and feeling good about that
• Hanging out and bringing in washing without dying in the heat
• Waking up to sunshine and birdsong (and the cat meowing for breakfast and the dog scratching on the door to come in)
• The kids are happy to get up on time
• Waking up comfortable - neither groggy from dark winter sleep nor bathed in summer sweat
• Having the kids play ball with the dog and run him around till he's pooped so I don't have to walk him
• Icy-poles outside after dinner
• Hearing the neighbourhood kids playing ball in the street after dinner

 

Yesterday all these things came together. Y and I were both home and both available after work, and the four of us ate a marvelous picnic dinner together, then danced to some Greek songs the girls are learning*, ate icy-poles outside, and - the highlight for the kids - played hide and seek in the backyard until bathtime. Our backyard consists of about 3 possible hiding spaces, so God knows what the appeal is of this game in our house, but I do know that yesterday the appeal was playing with Mum and Dad at the same time.

"Best evening ever!" said A.

"My best bit was playing with Daddy," said M.

"The kids LOVED it when you played with them," I told Y.

"I guess they miss not having a brother," said Y.

"No, they want YOU!" said I.

Y is a good dad, but he's often tired from work so the evenings we tend to tag-team, with him snoozing after dinner and me going to bed earlier at night while he cleans up the kitchen. When he looks after the kids, he is often lying on the couch while they play, or they all go out "for coffee".

That's all fine, but this is also important: the whole family together laughing and dancing and playing hide and seek even if it means taking turns with the same two hiding spots down the side of the house and behind the barbecue. (There - now if you ever come to our house and play hide and seek with us, you will know straightaway where to look.)

So last night we did all that.

And because I'm a woman and a mother and a homebody and an emotional basket case, I had my happiest evening this year and had to stop myself sobbing with manic glee.

I held myself together heroically. (The kids already think Mum is loopy - no need to give them more proof).

What's your favourite kind of weather?

*Here's one of the songs -

N'Agapas - by Pantelis Thalassinos

Summer by the Pool

Aahh, summer by the pool. No expense spared here!
I learned this summer you cannot use a bicycle pump to short-cut blowing up a big wading pool - it has to be done the old-fashioned way. One hour and numerous dizzy spells later, the kids had their pool:

Hot

It's hot in Melbourne.
It's only the early days of summer, but as always in this fair city, the first few days of summer knock us for six and leave us wondering, Is it always this hot so early? Surely it wasn't like this last year? Imagine what February will be like...  and so on.

It's not actually that hot - I know - but it is humid, which is awful. Makes everything hotter.

I have to get used to the heat every year. I've been the same since I was a kid - useless at handling the heat.
At home I wander round opening windows and turning up the evaporative cooling, changing my clothes, swigging water and looking for something to fan myself with; my husband wanders round behind me turning down the cooling (or even turning it off - when he dares) while smirking at my suffering like the cruel heat-tolerant person he is.

When I was in my twenties I lived in Greece over 3 summers, working morning, day and evening seven days a week from May to October each year. I never got used to the heat in August. I remember walking the ten minutes to my house in the next village one year, literally and pathetically sobbing from the heat.
But May, June and September were gorgeous - mild, dry heat that even I could sit outside in. In Italy and Greece I discovered the joy of the beach.
As a child in Melbourne I didn't like the beach, hated the inescapable, burning heat, the march flies, the sand that got everywhere, the crashing surf, the inevitable sunburn, and the fact that everyone except me seemed content to stay there for hours.  In Italy and Greece for the first time in my life I enjoyed the beach. Swimming in gentle, warm clear blue waters, lying comfortably on smooth pebbles or large-grained crystals of sand, and the very civilised practice of lying on a reed mat instead of on one's beach towel (thus always having a dry, sand-free towel at one's disposal). And the sun: warm, gentle, dry heat, without the stinging burning sensation on arms and face, or the need to cover your face in zinc to preserve your nose's natural colour... I could happily lie sunbathing on the beach for hours, even in the middle of the day - unthinkable for me here.

One of my daughters has inherited my heat intolerance. By the afternoon she is red-cheeked, damp hair plastered to her forehead, while her sister, like her father, remains dry-haired and cool to the touch.


Nine o'clock this morning, the kids and I had icy-poles for "morning tea" - bliss, sweet short-lived bliss.

I am such a heat wuss I know - anyone reading this in Melbourne will be chuckling because as I am well aware, it is not even truly hot yet. But it is hot enough for me!

Oh, and "thirty minutes a day" has been on hold for the last 2 days - just...can't...do it.
But will get back on track in the next day or so - promise!