On Top of the World

I was a shopping dynamo today! I bought pretty much all of M’s birthday and Christmas presents. I had to walk around for 4 hours to do it, but I did it! I’ll have to examine what I’ve got to see if it’s enough. I hope he likes his stuff

Now I just have to buy for my family *sigh* Family members can be so hard to buy for.

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.

My car’s stuffed again. Stupid piece of junk! The good thing is that it didn’t start when the tow truck turned up, which is what happened last time. Hopefully when the dealer gets it tomorrow it won’t start and they’ll be able to work out what the problem is. Unfortunately it decided to hail just before the guy showed up, and it was pouring while we were putting it on the truck. It was nice to get home and get changed out of my wet work clothes and have some food. I was so hungry!

We’re both having problems with our cars - M took his to a BMW place to get an annoying rattle fixed, and the mechanic called to say that he’d like to talk to M in person because he found some other stuff wrong with the car. I went too (although I didn’t need to - I don’t really know why I went!), and for 90% of the time the guy was talking about what had gone wrong with other people’s cars, and for the remaining 10% he said that he couldn’t do too much investigation with M’s car because he would have had to pull it all apart and he didn’t want to do that, but he could say that it was all going to cost a lot of money. Thanks for that. So M got charged $120 to hear about other people’s problems, and his car’s still not running any better than it was before he took it there.

Cars suck.

M and I drove to Peterborough on Saturday, and got back on Sunday night. Since most of you reading this live overseas, I’ve included a map to show you where it is - click for a larger view (map respectfully yoinked from the Clare Valley page, see link below). Peterborough’s a small town around 250km north of Adelaide. M’s parents are from there, and it had been a long time since he’s been there, and I’d never been. There are 4 pubs along the main street, all within a couple of hundred metres!

We were told when we were going that there wouldn’t be any events on there, and we could just walk into any pub and get a room for the night - in fact, the owners would probably throw their arms around us in welcome since they hardly ever have anyone staying there. Of course, we didn’t reckon on the wedding involving 200 people that was happening on Saturday night, and which the whole town knew about. The only room free in the first pub we went to was a box of a room with a bed and two bedside tables. No TV and no toilet - we had to use a communal toilet and bathroom. Maybe I’ve become a bit spoiled, but surely even just a toilet in the room isn’t too much to ask? The amenities were around the corner, and waaaay down the end of a corridor. And the bathroom was one in which I wouldn’t feel too confident in getting my kit off to have a wash. So we decided we’d have a look to see if we could find somewhere else before saying that we’d take that room. We went to the motor inn that we passed on our way into town, and fortunately they had a room with ensuite. It was nice - a lot more homey feeling. And, yes, it had both a toilet AND a TV. Aaah the luxury!

We dumped our bags in the room and thought we should grab some dinner before the pubs stopped serving meals for the night. We went back to the pub we initially tried to get a room at, and had quite a nice meal. As always when going to a pub, I had chicken parmigiana. Yummy. Not as good as the Fountain Inn used to be before they did everything up and started charging twice as much for half the food, but still good.

We were so buggered that we went to bed a little after 10:00. On Sunday we went for a bit of a walk along the main street. It’s such a quiet town - it almost made me want to move up there. It was just so peaceful, and everyone waves to you when they drive past. It was nice. We saw where M’s mum went to school, and we went up to the farm that M’s father grew up on. M took some great pictures, but later found out that there wasn’t any film in his camera. The poor love - ordinarily it might have been amusing, but it was a significant day for him, so to have to leave without the pictures was a real shame.

On the way back home, we called past a pub that M’s cousin owns and is renovating. It’s in the middle of nowhere, and every now and then you see a car zipping by, but other than that there’s nothing except paddocks with a few cows in them (which also belong to M’s cousin). It’s so quiet out there - but there are so many flies! It drove me nuts. I guess you get used to swatting them away.

We came back through the Clare Valley, which is a well-known wine region in South Australia, and which I’d never been to. It’s so beautiful there - so green and lovely. I’d really like to go back sometime soon.

The trip back to Adelaide was fairly uneventful, apart from the bit where we broke down about 10 minutes away from home. We had to be towed home, which was a bummer. But the plus side was we got to ride in the towtruck! Cool M’s going to fix up his car today.

So that was it! This is a longer post than I was intending, and probably a lot of you won’t bother reading it all the way through, but if you made it this far, then yay! And thankyou

Overall, the trip to Peterborough was good - I was really pleased to be able to see where M’s parents grew up.

I started writing a post last night, but I didn’t get it finished - it’s turning out to be a bit longer than I planned. I promise I’ll post it when I get home from work tonight!