Category: Diary

Honestly, I don’t have an addiction to Sharpie pens.

I can stop buying them any time I want.

Perhaps the cleverest decision I ever made was asking Rae to marry me.

For the past day I’ve been hobbling around, convinced I did some damage to my foot on my last jog. Icing wasn’t helping, anti-inflammatories didn’t help, massage didn’t help, stretching didn’t help. Still I sat, prodded, pulled and hobbled away.

This morning Rae looked at me and said “could it be gout?”

It hadn’t even crossed my mind because I’m on anti-gout medication. Thankfully Rae is smart enough to realise that, gee, maybe it wasn’t working. A few capsules of Indocid later and I was feeling good enough to go for a jog.

We’ve had two great nannies for the kids, one for five years and another for the past three. The amazing thing  is they are both named Rita. Yep. New Rita and Old Rita and they have never met.

Until today.

The last day of having a nanny.

Happy Gravy Day everyone.

Feb 1 the twins started kinder and then in a blink of an eye it was today, their last day.

Kinder was fantastic for them, especially Mr Henry as his confidence grew throughout the year, They’ve made good friends who are going to the same school next year too, which will make it a lot easier. Now we start getting them ready for Prep. Kennedy can’t wait, Henry isn’t so sure. It will be interesting to see if that changes by the first day next year.

I received my phone bill yesterday. Yes, we still have a fixed line coming in to the house because at the time we moved we could only get an internet connection with a fixed line. We could go naked adsl now but that would involve disconnecting our number and waiting for a port to become available and when your very livelihood depends upon being connected to the net that’s not really an option.

Any way….the bill.

There was a second sheet with an announcement that Telstra were discontinuing their wake up and reminder service, The fact that the date had already passed 10 days before they sent the bill tells you just how many people must have still been using it. I have very, very vague memories of dad booking a call once but why I have no idea – even back in the early 80s it seemed an an odd thing to do.

I remember other phone services in the phone book. Dial a Prayer was one, Dial The Weather and there was Dial A Song where you could ring a number to listen to a song. I never did ring any but each year I’d check the numbers to see what new services had been added, and this was in the days before premium call rates were introduced.

So now I can’t get a phone call to wake me up I wonder what I’ll do if ever I’m stuck somewhere without an alarm clock. I guess I’ll just have to use my phone.

Well, never a dull day in Derrimut.

I went to pick up the kids from kinder today and as I was signing them out I heard a teacher say “Kennedy, let’s go and talk to dad.”. My fist thought was ‘oh god, what have she and [best friend] got up to?’ but shame on me, the poor thing didn’t look that well. Apparently after I dropped her off this morning a rash started on her wrist and grew up her arm  over the course of the day. I was surprised they didn’t call me earlier.

Then they showed me a piece of paper. Apparently Henry was doing a mountain climber impersonation, but a not a very good one. He had come a cropper on the climbing steps and has a wonderful graze next to his eye.

Moo was scratching and said the rash was burning so we ran next door, grabbed Bert from his class room "(“but dad, we have free time!”) and headed off to the doctor. We were lucky it was so quiet and we were seen almost straight away. He has diagnosed a contact allergy and prescribed some items to calm it down.

Now we start the process of elimination that may never end to try and track down what could have caused the rash in the first place. As it started soon after arriving at kinder we don’t know if it was something there or something here. As for Henry, if he’s like his dad then this may be the first of many such uncoordinated incidents.

Moo has her first princess party today. She’s been counting down the days since the invitation arrived.

Earlier this year we had our solar panels installed but, thanks to confusion, we only recently began to feed energy back in to the grid.

We received our first bill today with a credit and, wow, the investment looks to have really paid off. At first I was just impressed that the bill had dropped from $380 to $145 (comparable usage) but then I realised they had broken down usage in to pre and post feed in.

For the time we were feeding back in to the grid our bill was $175, usage and supply. In that same time we were credited with $155. Wow. If our bill was for only these two months it would have been for the princely sum of $20. The system will pay for itself in a few years if we can keep this up.

I did notice today that the inverter was in an error state, somehow the fuse in our main fuse box had been tripped so there’ll be a few days where we weren’t contributing. I’ve set myself a reminder to check it each week and will try and get in to the habit of checking it each time I leave the garage. Our system is also set up so we can add another four panels when have the funds. If we did this it looks like we’d cover all of our electricity costs.

My son, the Lego nerd.

If anyone out there doesn’t believe in genetics then this should be more than enough proof.