Currently entering day seven without hot water…
I really don’t know what the strata company are up to. They managed to get the water flowing again yesterday (after being off since Monday) but far from being hot it’s ice cold. I strongly suspect that the plumbers forgot to turn the heaters on once they were finished – I mean the water’s had all night to warm up so why hasn’t it? Come 9:00am I’ll be making a very disgruntled phone call.
I can’t remember when I last blogged, so probably it’s been a while and this is the first entry I’ve written about the water crisis. Or at least this water crisis – we seem to have one every two weeks at the moment. It began on Thursday night when the supposedly hot water turned distinctly chilly. This state of affairs continued until Monday afternoon when it stopped flowing completely. Hence we arrive at the current juncture.
A week without hot water. Did we lose a war?!
I haven’t had a shower since Sunday (at my parent’s place). As I have my sleep study tonight (for which you need to be clean and showered so the electrodes will stick) and a date with Purdey tomorrow night, this is a problem. I’ll have to boil the kettle and do the sponge-bath-out-of-the-sink-thing I guess. Bah!
Anyway, I supposed I’d better record what I’ve been up to. Wednesday evening last week I headed around to Purdey’s new place in Rivervale for dinner and Smallville (on tape). It’s a really nice complex right on the river – we hung out for a bit down at the riverside listening to the wail of bagpipes floating across from the police complex on the far bank while the non-spaghetti spaghetti was cooking. We watched the video, listened to some music and spent some time cuddling on the couch, so a most enjoyable evening all up 🙂
(We’re going to the Red Orchid tomorrow night, which would be our… fifth date? I should probably stop counting now 🙂
Friday. Friday was the Good Friday public holiday. Normally a combination of Catholic Guilt and maternal dissaproval would have me spending the entire day kneeling in the dark starving myself – but I decided to go to work instead. Got a fair bit of work on the new page editing system done, which is good because it’s been a monkey on my back for months now. A few more days should see it finally done.
Saturday was a day for recovering from the awesome effort of working on a public holiday, and watching Firefly and Wonderfalls on DVD, my Amazon order having finally arrived. I’m trying to pace myself on both of them because there’s only one season of each – damn network execs! Even so I find myself talking like Mal (or possibly a character from Mark Twain), so I reckon I’d best go cold turkey for a spell.
(See!? SEE!?)
Sunday was church in the morning then off to the folk’s (folk’s – I’m not kidding on the talking like I’m in Firefly people!) place for the yearly Easter get together (I almost typed ‘shindig’). It went pretty well, even if my brother did give me a can of SPAM rather than chocolate. His justification was that I’d said I didn’t really want much chocolate because I’m trying to lose weight – apparently SPAM Lite is an acceptable low fat substitute. *sigh* 🙂
On Monday it was into town for lunch with Rebecca and Dom. We met at the Art Gallery then headed over to a Korean place on Barrack street (located in the old Hungry Jacks). I had a sort of seafood fried rice thing which was good – although not spectacular. I’ll certainly go back to the place, but I’ll try something else next time.
The restaurant has two notable features. Firstly the background music which seems to be the Korean equivilant of… well I don’t know what skinny teenage girl is at the top of the pop charts at the moment (an advantage of not listening to commercial radio) but whoever she is, they were playing the Korean equivilant of her. This isn’t as annoying as it sounds because mindless pop songs sound a lot better when you can’t acrtually understand how banal the lyrics are (example – Ricky Martin singing in Spanish is almost listenable).
The other is the rather strange poems written on the wall hangings. I quote – “Such a fine time to dine, With fine food and wine, Melodious chime”. We were just puzzling over the ‘melodious chime’ bit when a loud “DING!” came from behind the bar – I’m not entirely convinced that the staff don’t have a bell back there merely to justify the poem.
After lunch we went for a wander around the city looking at all the closed up stores. We were under the impression that they might have opened up in the afternoon (they often do on public holidays) but no such luck. Which was a pain because we all had things we wanted to buy. Once the entertainment potential of wandering was exhausted we headed back to the train station and went our seperate ways. On the train however I ran into Katie, which was great because I’d been meaning to catch up with her. We scheduled in lunch for Friday.
On Tuesday everyone went back to work after the Easter break. Except for me because I had the week off. Yey! 😀 Justin was meant to be dropping around in the morning to pick up some books for a uni assignment, and to hook up his mobile phone to my computer (long, complicated story that doesn’t need to be gone into here). As is quite often the case he didn’t show up. In the afternoon Ryan was meant to be coming around with his van to help me recover my old filing cabinet from the folk’s place. He didn’t turn up either. All this dissapointment got me in such a foul mood that I thought I might as well make it fouler by exorcising the fridge (when your fridge gets as bad as mine was, you don’t merely clean it). I set to with bell, book and candle and eventually got it cleared out – or at least disposed of all the stuff that was no longer edible, which basically left some cheese.
Ryan eventually turned up in the evening, just as I was cooking dinner. We watched the Firefly episode Bushwacked while I ate, then went and retrieved the filing cabinet – which required quite an effort getting it up the stairs. It’s now safely ensconsed in the spare room though and shouldn’t have to be moved again until doomsday.
Speaking of doomsday however… well, once we got it in to the apartment we naturally had to take a look inside. And in the bottom drawer we discovered a remarkable relic of the last century. My emergency Y2K stash! 🙂
In the run up to the fake-millenium (or willenium even) I thought it prudent to put aside a bit of food just in case there was any disruption to services. I’m not talking about the collapse of society – I just figured that there might be some shortages or price rises – mostly from people panicking and rush buying or maybe some trucks not making it over the Nullabor for some reason. So a few months out I spent about $50 on assorted tinned and preserved goods, just as a precaution. I put these in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and – when the change over all went smoothly – forgot about them. On Tuesday they emerged into the light of day for the first time in six and half years!
Some of the stash seems to have survived quite well. The rice and pasta look good enough to cook up and eat. Most of the tins are a bit faded, but seem intact. The main exception are the two tins of beans, which have swelled up like small cannonballs. It would be an interesting experiment to open some of the cans and examine the contents – I’m not quite that nuts though. After a suitable period of contemplation they’re all going in the bins – possibly labled with biohazard stickers. A waste perhaps, but it’s got to be better than salmonella poisoning 😀
Wednesday morning I spent organising broadband and grocery shopping. I’ve signed up for ADSL with Westnet (don’t tell Eftel!) but because Telstra did something Really Clever(tm) with the phone lines back in the late eighties I can’t actually get broadband at the moment. Telstra needs to go into the exchange and sort out whatever kind of unholy mess they made first. And it’s going to be 6 to 8 weeks before they deign to even say if they can be bothered or not. So, until then I’m stuck on dialup. But at least the wheels are in motion (Telstra are very bad men! Very bad men!)
The grocery shopping was a trip down to Maylands to replenish my now empty fridge. Nothing interesting happened at all, so I don’t know why I’m mentioning it.
So we come to today. I’ve actually called up the strata company now and it turns out that the plumbers have no idea what’s going on, which is reassuring. They’re coming back though, so maybe we’ll have hot water by the end of the day. Maybe. *sigh*
I’d better go get cleaned up. As best I can.
