On Top of the World

I’ve added something I think is really cool. As some of you may remember, I’m studying Auslan (Australian Sign Language), and I found a fingerspelling font! So what I’ve done is put the day of the week above each post in the new font. I also changed it so that the day of the post is written there, so you don’t have to look at a calendar to see which day is being spelled out. Anyway, I thought it was kind of cool!

Banks suck! I deposited some change (around $60 worth) into my credit card account last weekend, and I found out today that I got charged a $5 ‘coin handling’ fee! I was NOT impressed, since M had bagged it all up in those little bank bags, so all they had to do was weigh it and empty the money out later. So I wrote them an email complaining about it, since the teller didn’t tell me that I was going to be charged almost 10% of the amount I deposited, just for them to empty a couple of bags. I didn’t really expect anything to be done, but later on, a woman rang me and said that they were going to refund the fee. Yeah! See, it pays to complain if you’re pissed off.

Oh, and for some reason I’m not sure of, I can’t seem to be able to post comments on some blogs with Haloscan. I don’t know whether it’s me or not (probably is), but the window doesn’t pop up! But I will be back to try again!

I’m writing this on my PDA. Ha, I’m way too sophistocated for email posting - pfft! Straight from the source, baby. WiFi rocks! Except it’s taking ages to write & I’m tired. Goodnight.

We have a dishwasher! It was finally installed today, after it sitting in the kitchen for 3 days. Ever since we moved in here we wanted to get the Fisher and Paykel double drawers. So we went out a couple of weekends ago, and got a price somewhere, and then went to another place to see if they could do better.

The guy there was an absolute tosser. We asked what their best cash price would be, and he asked what the best price was that we’d got so far. We didn’t want to tell him, because we didn’t want to give him any hints. He then just stood there grinning at us, not making a move to give us a price. We just looked back at him, and M said that he didn’t think it was very ethical to give him the price of the other place, and he just wanted to hear what price they could do it for. This continued for a few minutes of the guy trying to get our best price out of us, and us saying that we weren’t going to tell him.

I was getting really pissed off, and I came this close to saying that if he didn’t want to give us a price then that was fine, we’d just go back to the other place, but I chickened out because I wasn’t sure whether M would follow me out the door. I would have looked a bit of a twit if I’d flounced off in a huff, only to have M still be standing there waiting for a price! He said afterwards that he would have come with me, but at the time I didn’t want to take the risk.

When he finally realised that we weren’t going to do his job for him, he went off and got a price, which wasn’t as good as another place we’d been to. So we said that it wasn’t as low, and he tried to get the other price out of us again. Grrr. Anyway, the guy said that the F&P drawers weren’t very good, as they had them in the kitchen at the store, and there had been a lot of times he’d open the drawers to see cockroaches swimming around in the bottom of the machine, as they could get through the gaps.

Great, not only was this guy a dickhead, but he was saying that the dishwasher we’d had our hearts set on for two years was crap! So we left there feeling very frustrated and disappointed. When we got home M looked up the drawers on the net to see what people thought of them, and found bad review after bad review, with people saying that they were unreliable and often broke down etc. So we ended up abandoning the F&P dishdrawer idea, and got a Miele instead.

We’re very pleased with it (at least, for the hour that it’s been installed), but we didn’t get any dishwashing tablets/powder with it - ripped off! But we finally have our dishwasher and it’s so quiet! The installation guy did a test run when he’d installed it to make sure everything was ok, and we could hardly hear it. Eeeexcellent.

The other thing I am yay about at the moment is that our holiday is booked! Well, M’s flights are booked (we’re using frequent flyer points for his tickets). OK, most of his flights are booked Once we have confirmation of his booking we’ll send the details to the travel agent who will book my tickets and our accommodation.

We’re going to London, Dublin (and hiring a car to drive around Ireland), Paris, New York, New Orleans, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY! I’m so excited! What’s weird is that my boss is going to be in London at the same time we are. D’oh - we just can’t get away!

We got a wireless modem yesterday, so I did my first ever PDA websurfing. Very cool! I was going to look up ‘poo’ as my first ever PDA Google search, but I thought that was very immature so I tried to load up my blog instead. This was a mistake, as it is hardly optimised for PDAs and ended up freezing it. Ah well. I still went to a few other sites and it was pretty cool. So now I just have to set up my blogging program so that I can post from downstairs while I’m watching tv, or while I’m lying in bed on the weekend. Swish!

It’s been raining virtually all day today. It’s great being all snuggled up in bed with the electric blanket on when it’s pouring outside. What sucked was having to get up when it was still dark, and drive to work in said rain.

M and I went to a travel agent on Saturday to get a quote for our holiday. It sort of came in at what we were expecting, but we should be able to get it cheaper, especially considering some of the hotel prices I’ve seen in the brochures we have. It’s all so exciting - the last time I went overseas was almost 17 years ago, so I think I’m ready to go again now! A little over two months, and we’ll be off… hopefully. Yay!

Lately I’ve been getting into the bad habit of having a cake for breakfast :/ I was doing this for a while some time ago, then M and I bought some cereal to have instead, which was much better. But I’ve been working at our other office for a little while, so I’ve been going and getting a cake again. Now that I’m back at my usual office, we’re getting back into the cereal habit, so we’ve got a jumbo box of Sultana Bran at work, and we have some when we get in each morning (I don’t have breakfast at home because we like to get out the door ASAP to try to avoid peak traffic).

So I opened the box this morning, and look what I found…

I must say that the cocoa-dusted truffles that came in one of those eggs absolutely KICK ARSE. Any thoughts I had of going off chocolate were totally blown away when I tried one of those. Mmmm.

I finally got my new phone yesterday, after ordering it three weeks ago. That was a long damn wait. It’s the Samsung D500, and I’m really happy with it. I haven’t read the manual yet (all programmers know that noone reads documentation anyway), so I’ve just been stuffing around with it myself. I guess I should read it in case there are some cool things that can be done that I haven’t discovered, but meh. Playing is far more fun than reading!

Last night M and I went out to dinner for my birthday. Yes, we already went out for my birthday, but the initial plan had been to go to an Indian restaurant, but since we couldn’t get a booking for Tuesday night, M booked it for Saturday instead. So the dinner on Tuesday was so that we did something on my actual birthday.

So we went to a place called Tandoori Hut in the city, and it was quite good. We ate fairly early, getting there at around 5:30. There weren’t that many people there, and I commented that I found it hard to believe that he couldn’t get a booking for Tuesday night if there were so few people here tonight. He merely said that they’d ‘had something on’ on Tuesday.

The meal was nice, and afterwards M suggested that we find a café on the riverfront for an after dinner drink. So we walked towards the Torrens River. I couldn’t think of any cafés offhand. As we walked past the Festival Theatre I saw big banners up for The Mikado, which had opened here a few days ago. I said to M, “Look! The Mikado!” since he knew that I’d wanted to go and see it. M replied, “BOOOORING”, but with a smile on his face.

He led me into the Festival Theatre, and I thought something was a bit fishy. We walked around to the stalls entrance doors, and I said, “Oh shut up, we’re not going to see The Mikado!” He said that he just had to get something out of his wallet, and produced two tickets for seats in the centre of the front row. Heeeee! I felt tears come to my eyes - this was just too cool. That’s the second time he’s given me a theatre-related surprise!

I love Gilbert & Sullivan, and it was fantastic to be able to see the show, especially since HMS Pinafore didn’t work out. Of course, it was great - I loved it! We bought a programme, as I always do when I see a professional show because I like to have a souvenir.

It was such a nice night, I’m so lucky to have a guy who gives me such wonderful surprises As it turns out, he’d bought the tickets at the end of November, and had to keep the secret all this time.

How is it that I’m in my 30th year of life already? I honestly don’t feel that much different from when I started at my new school in year 5. Well, physically I’m obviously a lot different that I was 19 years ago - SHIT - that was 19 years ago. Faaaark.

We had to go to work today (I hate working on my birthday!), but we set the alarm for 6:35 instead of 7:00 so that M could give me my present before we left. The alarm went off, but neither of us were terribly inclined to wake up! We dozed a bit until around 10 to 7, and then we had a shower. After our showers, I got my gift.

I have a digital camera! Yay! It was the exact model that I was going to buy, which is pretty amazing because M bought it before Christmas, and before I even started looking at digital cameras. I’d mentioned that it would be cool to have a camera, and he saw it in the window of a camera shop when we were in the city one day, and thought that it looked pretty cool. He did a lot of research, and bought it. So when I was doing all my camera research, he already had the thing! It really is quite flukey that I decided on the exact one that he found, with no help from him. Actually, I guess it’s not, because he just knows me so well that it’s scary sometimes.

I’d already decided to buy a camera with some money I received for Christmas and my birthday, but now I have to find something else to buy! I’ve decided on a fast 1 Gb SD card so that I can take video if I want to.

So I have been taking lots of photos, and have already filled the card that came with the camera, but I’ve got the SD card in my PDA, which has plenty of free space on it, so I can use that until I get my new card. It is just too cool finally having a camera!

It was another stinking hot day in Adelaide, and there are a few bushfires around. The smoke has been blown across the plains, making the view from our house very hazy. Of course I took some pictures I haven’t taken them off my camera yet, but when I do I might post some, depending on how well they turned out. I’ll have to take some more on a clear day to show the difference.

Tonight M and I are going to a Mexican restaurant for dinner, and then stopping by my parents’ house.

Hee hee, I’ve got a camera!

First off, the most important part - happy birthday to my love, M - I love you babe *mwah!*

M and I have been watching a lot of Pimp My Ride lately. I love that show! If I still had my crappy Pulsar, maybe I could have got Xzibit and co. to pimp my ride. Ah well. One thing I was wondering, though, was how the hell would they get insurance for those cars? Most of the people whose cars are ‘pimped’ are under 25, and one of the standard questions that insurance companies ask when you’re looking for insurance is whether you’ve made any mods to the car. “Umm… yeah… my Ford Escort has been converted to look more like a BMW, and it’s got 3 Xboxes, 6 TV monitors, a coffee machine, a water fountain and a chandelier. Is that going to make my premium higher?” How the hell could you afford to insure all that! I know, I know - I’m such a party pooper

The car situation has turned into a huge farce which is just too frustrating to think about, so I won’t bore you with all that rubbish. Instead, I’m going to tell you about my trip to the Christmas Shop!

Down the road from my work, there’s a Christmas Shop that sells… errr… Christmas stuff (duh). I’d noticed it before when I was walking to another shop down that way, and I’d said to M that we should go there, because he wanted to get some more Christmas lights. That was a few weeks ago, and we finally went yesterday. They have so much stuff! We wanted some LED lights, and they had heaps to choose from, which was great because pretty much every other shop we’d been to either didn’t have any, or they had one type and that was it. This place had all-white LEDs, and multicoloured ones, and all-blue ones. And then I saw some star ones that change colour - COOL! So we got some of those to put on our tree, and I thought it might look good to have some white LEDs on there too. We were going to try it out last night, but with all the crap with my car, by the time we got home we couldn’t be stuffed. So hopefully we’ll do it over the weekend.

I’m really looking forward to doing the tree. We didn’t get around to doing one last year, and I hadn’t really thought about it this year until earlier this week when I read Steph’s entry about her tree. If it looks good enough, I might take a photo and show you how it turned out.