boats and betas

Haven’t done a blog for a while — probably proof that we have truly settles into a routine. Here’s the latest and greatest…

The REALLY BIG news of the week was the delivery of our container shipment from Portland to Sydney. It took 8 weeks and about $4500 (we didn’t pay for it) and low and behold, we have our possessions. I’d say half of the twelve boxes we received were Julie’s clothing; two were my kitchen essentials; one was my stuff (shoes, exercise materials, a few clothes); and the rest were things like wooden hangers, bedding, towels, etc. Intermingled in the shipment were also family photos and a few keepsakes.

Of all of these boxes, the kitchen boxes made me the happiest. Sure it’s nice to have family photos and my wooden eagle carving, but the kitchenware was really impactful to me on a daily basis. The kitchen that came with our furnished apartment had most of the necessary elements though the quality of the same was pretty poor. It’s as if they stocked the gadget drawer with leftover Easy Bake oven items. Now…I have my wusthof knives, all-clad pots and pans, as well as my specialised gadgets for zesting, paring, squeezing, peeling… you get it! I never would have believed that I loved my kitchen stuff so much! Oh yeah…cookbooks too.

Julie scored a lot of wrinkled clothes that are all laid out on the guest bed ready for her to sort and store. STORAGE IS GOING TO BE A PROBLEM! Small apartment….

In other news, I made my first trip to a medical provider. I severely loosened a lower tooth while eating a piece of toast with a poached egg….I know, right!???!! In any event, I called a local dentist after researching a bit on google and was in within the week. Now, for all of you people that think a single payor healthcare system is bad, or it doesn’t work, or whatever, stand by to be educated. THIS WAS A SIMPLE JOY! You fill out a very brief questionnaire and fork over your health card and in you go for treatment. At the end of you visit they swipe your health card and your benefits are reconciled on the spot. There are no claims reports, no explanation of benefits, none of that wasteful nonsense that is really intended to let the insurance company hold on to your premium payments (also known as their investment) for protracted periods of time. It’s all done on the spot like a credit card transaction, and the balance is then paid by you…simple, easy, no fuss….so much better!

As for the dental treatment itself it was slightly different than US dentists. Many of the same tools are employed and certainly modern dentistry is modern dentistry…. the biggest difference was with the cleaning. They (sort of) sandblast your teeth with a baking soda (?) formulation after they have cleaned your teeth with a cavitron. Messy but good and fast. They also provide a routine fluoride treatment as part of the service to help keep your teeth healthy. All-in-all, a better experience than I have had in the US where I had some of the finest dentists around.

Other than all of this rather boring stuff, things are routine. Julie’s mentor, a lovely man named James Dewar, has asked for our assistance beta-testing an exciting new project he is involved with called lifetile. The testing script came in today and I am looking forward to spending several hours putting this new site through it’s paces to make the actual product rollout better. There are a lot of other beta testers that I am joining though I like to think that my experience working with eCommerce sites, web development, web programming and social media integration strategies (including marketing) will make my insights valuable and slightly different than most and will be at least a benefit to the team. Very excited to be doing this beta testing. Very grateful to know Jim Dewar too.

I’ve been trying hard to understand and “get into” Aussie sports. I was truly surprised to find that I love watching cricket. What a great and exciting sport. I’d imagine I will like it more as I learn more about it. I’ll also talk more about it in a future blog for my fellow sports fans. Nearby we have a lawn bowling club (10 minute walk) so we are anxious to give it a try to see what that’s all about too. Footy is our obvious joint passion and we are hopeful to get to another Swan game in the next week or two… Julie will never really endorse Rugby though I still enjoy watching it - have for years. I also enjoy soccer where Julie really doesn’t… I’m sure she is just waiting for Duck football.

It’s Saturday morning and we have yet to decide where we will visit this weekend. We’ll pick an area and I’ll see you back here tomorrow. Later blog stalkers.

One last note: our cribbage board was in our overseas shipment…let the competition begin anew!