by A mixed day, with some moments of frustration, loss and futility and some great success and serendipity as balance. .
Today was the first business day of the new year for many businesses intown.
My mother in law came off her farm bike just after Christmas, twisting a knee rather badly in the process. She is as tough as nails and so driven to work she won’t sit still. She had an MRI in Dubbo prior to new years and has been waiting for the local GP to reopen for results. Called for an appointment at nine and got no answer, tried again a few minutes later to be told “no appointments today” and “we are so busy we are not taking appointments for days in advance”. Some bloody triage. We are thinking N may have to go wait outside the office in the morning to secure an appointment by polite force of will.
We missed the bloody bin day. I don’t even want to talk about the complete lack of recycling.
The hardware store in particular I have been hanging out for. It turns out that their prices on timber are so preposterous that the chook tractor I want to build will have to wait for a trip to a big box store in Dubbo. The local’s shelves are more than half empty and they only had two of the five things I went in for. You very much get the impression that they have given up and are just trying to empty their stock before the end.
We joined the local library today and I’m pleased to have the first local hire of the new Neil Stephenson.
F has effectively toilet trained himself since arriving. Today we’ve had to introduce some baby sign for 1’s & 2’s as he can’t yet say what he needs. The end of nappies looms, hooray.
I dug a trench, carted bricks to cover the conduit with, fought with and eventually fed the phone cable from a coil on the water meter back into the house. Throughout all this thinking that it was likely wasted effort. When at nearly ten o’clock tonight I managed to get dial tone I was delighted. When the modem connected, ecstatic.
But… My laptop is dead again. Froze up after login this morning and hasn’t made it past the password screen without crashing since. I have backed up all important docs and both hard drives are likely in working order but the machine itself is currently irreplaceable. Spending $1200 on a desktop that can’t travel or $2k+ on a laptop that can prior to May isn’t very realistic. I seem to have found at least a partial stability fix for N’s really very good desktop at least.
The iPhone my cousin found for me arrived today. I’m so grateful to have a working phone again but I want my Samsung fixed. It’s interesting trying out the other dominant os for the first time. There have been some hurdles so far, none of the Google apps maps, chrome, mail, keep etc would install without an ios update which I’d been avoiding as I’ve heard it slows down older phones like the jesusphone 4 I have been given. Also the update is a gig and a bit and until the internet came good I was struggling to think how I would achieve that. All working now though I’m still wondering how people survive without the back button. I’ll try for a fair comparison in a week or so as this phone is of about the same generation as my now limited samsung.
Creative out put limited to hanging some art.