Category: Daily Life

A friend sent me a cute birthday card, on the cover is a fairy with sparkles wishing me a “sparkly birthday”. Inside my friend has written “the cover reminded me of you all sparkly and cheery”.

I felt sparkly the last time I saw her, but since then I’m still trying to get back into the swing of things after the recent disruption at work, and feeling decidedly un-sparkly.

I am about three weeks behind on my uni studies and still procrastinating. This week I have to start organising an invigilator for my exam at the end of November (about six weeks away, OMG!). There is nothing for it but to FORCE myself to get stuck into it, no ifs or buts. Once I get into it again I know that I’ll keep going.

Saw my brother yesterday, first time for ages. Hubby and I “gatecrashed” my nephew’s birthday, I think they were just about to serve cake! We have a habit of doing that, must be annoying – although the kids don’t seem to mind! We spent a couple of hours chasing kids around and giving them piggy back rides before my brother started ushering us away (he had to go to work poor bloke).

Prior to this, Hubby and I had spent an hour wandering around Toyworld looking for a cool prezzie for our nephew. A bit disappointed that we couldn’t see anything so in the end opted for a gift voucher. Pretty boring, but we thought our nephew would appreciate it better than a daggy toy from his old aunty and uncle!

Hubby is trawling dog rescue websites looking for a dog. We still have Sashy of course, who is a great little companion for me but not much chop as a guard dog! Hubby also misses his ‘little wolf’ who used to follow him around the yard and with whom he felt a special bond. She was also a brilliant watch dog and since she’s been gone, we’ve all felt a bit unprotected – particularly at night when Hubby’s on night shift.

Hubby has always had a soft spot for dalmatians, we both also like shepherds. A belgian shepherd would be nice. Two important stipulations though. It must get on with Sashy and not try to eat the local wildlife! We’re waiting for a call back about a shepherd.

My feet have blisters. I’ve been wearing a pair of sandals that mum had bought for Jo, they didn’t fit her but fit me. Nice sandals. Not the best shoes to wear when playing with nieces and nephews. I must have looked a right site yesterday, hair all mussed up, red in the face from all the running around. It was fun though!

It is now week 7 of SSK12, I’ve submitted my first assignment and I am struggling to get back into a solid study routine following the aftermath of a narrowly avoided disaster at work.

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Well it was my birthday more than two weeks ago but I had to give my family birthday lunch a miss because something major came up at work.

Our bloody supplier had been playing silly buggers for a couple of days, and ended up going into liquidation. So we had to switch all the customers over to another carrier. Why oh why didn’t we listen to the little warning signs (because we were tied into a bloody tight contract, that’s why!)

Just a bloody nightmare for the entire two weeks. Settings had to change, ADSL broadband had to be churned and every customer wanted to talk to us at the same time. We were getting something like 400 calls a day at one point.

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Well, the crap hit the fan at work a few days ago. Our wholesale carrier network had a major outage, no-one could tell us exactly what was going on and customers were offline for over 48 hours. The rumours have been flying thick and fast, particularly on the Whirlpool broadband discussion site. More recently there has been a news follow-up by the Sydney Morning Herald.

At this point, some of the services are back online; there has still been no communication from the carrier. We have over 800 calls on our messagebank, a vague plan underway to shift customers onto another network, and very fortunate to have a recent backup of all our customer records.

I’ve been meaning to write about my visit to the local university on the recent open day, Sunday 27th August. My primary objective was to find out whether I could do my OUA exams on the campus there. I also wanted to satisfy my curiousity about the place, which I’ve driven past countless times on the Warrego Highway and back roads.

It is a sprawling campus and seemed deserted as I drove up the access road shortly after midday. That was until I arrived at the carpark, which was full. I drove on and found another carpark which was almost full and practically needed four wheel drive to access (not quite). Within the perimeter of the main buildings there were people everywhere, of all ages. There was a huge slide and attractions for kids, information tents, displays, tractor-train tours, food stalls and live music.

I enjoyed learning about the history of the campus, and took some time to read the tourist info signs in front of the mess hall, the foundation building, the flagpole. I poked my head into the museum and perused the photographic displays of students past and present. I asked a couple of questions about various historical landmarks – idle curiousity which became embarrassing when it was apparent no-one on hand knew the answers!

Extricated myself from the museum and continued looking around at some of the displays. The environmental department display was interesting, a lot of posters on various issues – woody weed supression, protection of endangered species (the Bilby), classification of the dingo.

I had an interesting discussion with an honours student about echidnas – she was presenting her findings, including her sighting of the “echidna train” (the only reported sighting in Queensland) which occurs in mating season with a line of male echidnas following a female. I asked whether she knew anything of whistling noises made by echidnas: she said it seemed familiar, at the back of her mind she could recall hearing something about it but it had not been included in any formal studies. She gave me her contact details.

Finally I came to the academic advisers tent and I asked the question about exams for external students. The adviser misinterpreted my question, assumed I was an external student of the college and I did not persevere. There are other options for my exams.

As I drove past the college again a couple of days ago I was intrigued at the culture of an agricultural university, with its applied science of raising cattle, growing crops and managing the land.

We’ve had some lovely rain over the past week – amongst one of the driest years in memory, water restrictions all over the state.

Everything in my garden looks so clean and refreshed, and green. The grass.. well in the parts where grass still grows, it is green. Islands of green!

Everyone talks about the weather; even the general manager of the carrier who rang to talk to my boss the other day commented that we are better off on tank water than in Brisbane, where the water pressure has been turned right down and they are on level 4 restrictions!

My boss in northern NSW is getting lots of rain too.. they are on flood alert! Same thing happened last year (end of year clearance floods – when a lot of businesses in the CBD at Lismore got wiped out).

I hope oneday we will learn to manage our water resources better so that everyone has enough water, and no-one has more than they can cope with!