Back from The Long Dark

THE END OF THE TRENCH
Well, one step closer to having a domestic internet service now that the phone cable is laid in place. Now all I have to do is wait until someone at Telstra can muster up the heroic level of energy required to flick a bloody switch and ACTIVATE OUR PHONE SERVICE! I'm interested to know why it takes 3 weeks for the phone to be connected (we ordered it be connected on Jan 22, it's going to happen on Feb 12), and why it's going to cost $300.00 for the privilege. The service provided by a couple of Telstra's sub-contractors was speedy and efficient (which probably explains WHY they were speedy and efficient), with mere seconds past an hour and a half passing from the moment they turned up to dig the trench and lay the cable to the time I was paying them for a job well done.

Hey Troll Doll (my affectionate term for the chucklehead in charge of Telscrape). Do pieces fall of your "workers" when you ask them to do something? Fingers? Toes? Other appendages? Are they that precious, that fragile? Or have you worked out that being an infrastructure monopoly is yet another opportunity to gouge all and sundry at whim? Here's a thought, provide a quality and efficient service and maybe your share price won't suck wet granite through a straw, and maybe the public in general won't regard you personally as being fundamentally bad value for money.

What do you spend all that money on anyway? It sure as hell can't be on improving the search engine behind Whitepages.com.au and Yellowpages.com.au, because I've used both and, frankly speaking, the bucket of crap infesting Sensis is more appropriately labelled as a "search, search and search again" engine, and any positive results produced by it are probably the result of obscure planetary alignments and the disembowelling of a large number of chickens. What's next? "This search result proudly brought to you by Steggles" at the bottom of the page listing businesses in Brunswick and East Kew after I've asked for the telephone number of a financial adviser in Brighton?

Bah! Enjoy the $300.00 while it lasts you tick, 'coz we're jumping to another carrier just as soon as it's hooked up.

A change of name is in order.

SURVIVING SUBURBIA
I've come to the conclusion that I am not going to grow old, and so this blog must therefore change in name from "Grow Old, Not Up" to something more suitable - or at least something less unsuitable. It's a pity that "Surviving Suburbia" is the best that I can come up with because, sooner rather than later, one of the many forces ranged against me is going to be successful in their efforts of doing me in (as embarrassingly as possible) - and so I'll not have survived suburbia anyway. Oh well, what are you going to do? Kill Me? Take a number mate, take a number... Please be patient.

OF TRENCHES AND FENCES
The trench is gone, cut down in the dawning spring of it's youth; the victim of people who want to put a fence around our property. Pity, I was feeling rather good about the (limited) progress of the digging of The Trench (please note, it had a title), given my feelings towards physical labour of all kinds and my (even more limited) semi-muscular physique. Then I was told that the pile of dirt that used to be solid ground, before it was moved to make way for The Trench, was in the way of The Fence and had to move forthwith. With heavy heart and heavier shovel (and much swearing out of hearing of impressionable young minds) I filled in The Trench and surrendered to the inevitable - Telstra's coming in on Tuesday to dig the bloody thing for me...

NO E-MAIL, AND NO SNAIL-MAIL EITHER...
It's a sad state of affairs when the only thing in your e-mail inbox is spam. It's sadder still when the only thing filling your letterbox is junk mail. Australia Post, it seems, has taken to hating me too. Why else would they decide that it's just not worth their while to deliver our mail to our letterbox, and instead keep it for collection at Hoppers Crossing Mail Delivery Centre? No doubt they tried letting me know about this rather interesting turn of events prior to being asked about it in person by my wife, and being Australia Post they did it by letter...
"Mail Delivery Centre" in this instance is a highly amusing choice of words given their performance since late December, which is to do everything possible to avoid delivering anything at all. Complaints fall on deaf ears, along with appeals to reason and questions regarding the physical and mental suitablity of various members of their staff to operate heavy machinery or (worse still) breed. After today's (non-productive) session of pain on the phone with their customer (dis)service line I have been advised, as a "temporary" measure of course, to hire the use of a post-box (KA-CHING!) and then re-direct the mail that is currently being re-directed from our old address (KA-CHING!). I now know why postal workers go on shooting sprees, it's a case of "Get them before they get you"...

The weekend that was...

The votes are in, and after an intensive round of voting it can be declared that I am the "Household Wuss of the Year" for 2008. I'll have to get a bigger trophy cabinet to hold these things in before too long I think.

INJURY ADDED TO INJURY
If it were anyone else it would be noteworthy, tragic even - for me it's just another day in the life. Maybe it's karma, maybe it's fate, or maybe it's the universe toying with me for shits and giggles (again). My toes seem to be a favourite target of everyone around me, including my children (who claim to love me) and my socks (which are supposed to be inanimate objects anyway). My current tale of toe woe starts on Friday night, with the (painful) removal of the sock on my left foot, which had become caught on the nail of the little toe. Tug... TUG... RIP!

Friday - Swear in pain as part of the nail is ripped away from the rest of the nail. Swear again as you notice that you are bleeding on the tile floor of your new house. Swear once more when you realise that there are no tissues or paper towel (or anything else that will help stop the bleeding) within easy arm reach. Hobble across the room to the kitchen bench and grab paper towel, then jury-rig a make-shift bad-aid of epic proportions and apply to injured toe before hobbling back to the couch. Sit back on the couch and wait for the bleeding to stop ... and promptly fall asleep. Wake up sore (in several spots, the couch is rather uncomfortable for that sort of thing when you're just shy of 2 metres in height) several hours later and stagger to the other end of the house and fall into deep(er) sleep.
Saturday - Time to leave the house and, by logical extension, time for shoes and socks... The socks don't hurt the mistreated toe at all, and you find out that the pain of footwear has been saved for the runners you have to put on next. Uncomfortable... After a few minutes the pain dies down (almost as fast as you wish your foot would do the same) and you're able to leave the house on a day suitable for baking mud bricks in record time. Spend the majority of the rest of your time away from the house (and in the stifling heat) strolling from furniture store to furniture store looking for new lounge suites, dining room tables and so on while at the same time trying to stop your three children from moving fast enough to start travelling back in time. During this time feel the pain increase as your footwear is turned into novel shaped vices by the swelling of your feet in the heat.
Sunday - It seems that 12 hours whipped by without further injury being done to my toe (what injuries were done previously today involve the sun, a shovel and a needlessly long hole - see below), so it's time for the universe to rectify that imbalance right sharp-ish. I'm supposed to love and support my children in their formative years, but where in the rule book does it say that I'm supposed to have an already injured toe run over by an overgrown 8 year old in a pair of in-line skates, twice? For that matter I'm also pretty sure that there was no mention made in any of the pre-natal parenting classes I managed to stay awake in that my middle child would be expected to drop furniture on me.
Take the two older children out to play with their new in-line skates for the first time, leaving the youngest asleep in his bed. While events may appear to show that Graeme had managed to lose his balance and fall while wearing in-line skates for the first time I'm damn sure that independent video evidence would show be-wheeled footwear wielded with expert and murderous intent. The more deranged members of the public may call this experience "bonding time", but being of a more lucid frame of mind I choose to call it "cruel and unusual". He's my son and I love him dearly, but until I can get a pair of steel-capped boots on the end of my feet he's on his own.
The mid-day pain session ended, time to go home, have lunch and prepare for the job of cleaning out the kid's rumpus room of all the crap that was dumped in there during the unpacking part of the move. Leave the room while it is decided that Nathan, the middle child with all the repressed anger management issues that implies, should drop an office chair on my foot at the first opportunity. Drop a chair on my foot he did, with bonus points awarded for the pin-point accuracy shown in hitting the much abused toe of my left foot and doing so while I was barefoot on a tile floor. Any minimal comfort that the carpet of the rumpus room would have provided during this was a tantalising 30cm away (dare I say it, but 30cm equals 1 foot), so while I was not really permitted to call him a little shit at this point I was allowed to think it. One point in Nathan's favour, he did allow me to sit on the freshly dropped chair so I could work my way through the pain - There's consideration for you right there.

A TRENCH TOO FAR
Dirt hates me. Subsoil clay hates me. The shovel I have to use to move that dirt and subsoil clay around hates me too. Even the sun hates me. Yesterday everything that hates me combined in an effort to make me lose what will to live I had left. The unbridled joy of breaking through sun-dried mud and topsoil was as nothing compared to the experience provided by trying to dig through clay that seemed to be a 50/50 mix of clay and super glue. Oh, did I mention the random chunks and surprise layers of concrete that I had to contend with? I think that by the time I gave up for the day (after a healthy supply of sunburn and blisters had been laid in) I got all of 2 metres worth of trench dug to suitable measure. 2 metres down, something like 10 to 12 more (or even more) to go. I'll dig more tonight after work, or leap in front of a Telstra van - I'm not too sure which.

Found it! (Raiding the archives)

Back in the dim past of ancient myth and legend (I may be exaggerating slightly), I wrote an email to my friends and family describing the embarrassing (and entertaining to those who saw it live) breakage of my toe. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology (and a forum posting here) I am able to bring this email back to life for those few of my friends who had wished that they didn't hit the delete button back in 2005...

Without furher ado, I present that lovingly restored email:

OUCH!! (Holiday Update #3)

Those of you who know me best may have had some sort of sweep going as to how long it would take before I managed to do myself an injury while on holiday. The winner of the sweep is that person who nominated New Year's Eve as the date of my (literal) downfall.

We all (Jennie, the boys and Jennie's brother's family) went to West Edmonton Mall (the largest shopping mall in the world) to ring the new year in at the mall's water park. Yes, the mall really is that big, with a water park, an amusement park with roller coaster, a life-size replica of Christopher Columbus' ship the 'Santa Maria' and a dolphin show twice every day.

Jennie and I took both boys up to some of the taller waterslides and that is when things started to go wrong. Jennie, who was without her glasses and was therefore as blind as a bat, was (unreasonably) unwilling to send our overgown offspring down the first intermediate slide alone. I was talked into leading the way back down the (treacherously slippery) steps to ground level and then I would go back up to make a fool of myself. Graeme, who was holding my hand at the time, scooted a little bit ahead of me and I leant out to keep a grip on him while decending down a shortish flight of steps...

ZIP! My feet slipped out from under me and I landed on my arse and started bouncing down the remaining steps until my right foot was able to arrest my inelegant decent. My foot stopped achieved this by colliding with a post that held the (equally treacherously slippery) handrail up. The pain from this was enough to prompt all sorts of unseemly language that I won't repeat...

You can all stop laughing now.

I got to my feet (still swearing) and performed a quick damage check:
1. Moderately scraped left forearm.
2. Minor scraping on left side of lower back.
3. Amazingly painful collection of toes on right foot.

As I was able to bend all of the toes on the badly abused foot I figured that things were (while painful) mostly fine and the evening continued as normal - Which means that both Graeme and Nathan behaved in such an appalling manner as to bring to a premature end our evening's activities. A couple of painkillers back at the hotel and we spent the rest of the night in conversation. All was good as possible given the circumstances (Except for that incident where my brother-in-law slid a footstool in my direction, causing it to collide with my much abused foot).

The next day we all set off on our 5 hour drive from Edmonton to Fort McMurray where I experienced a windchill so amazingly cold that various delicate extremities retracted so far into my body that I had to swallow real hard in order to scratch them. It was here in what can best be described as the frigid hub of Hell that I first took my shoes off for the day (some 6 or 7 hours after putting them on) - I didn't realise that a single toe could have that many unpleasant looking colours on it. A couple of X-Rays at the local hospital revealed the truth, that my forth toe (the little piggy that got none) was, in fact, broken.

This sort of thing is, sadly, rather predictable...

Staggering through the haze to 2008

I write this feeling ... poorly. No, it's not the hangover from December 31 (that, such as it was, was yesterday's burden) - It's this virus that I've managed to pick up. Lethargy and the loss of most of my voice has followed. I would have stayed home in bed but it's time to pay out the quarterly commissions at work, and no I'm not getting anything even vaguely commission shaped. More's the pity...

MODE_FALSE_CHEESY_CHEER=ON
Happy new year! The tick over to 2008 was a little over 36 hours ago and I'm still feeling hyper about the all the promise and prospects that 2008 has to offer!
MODE_FALSE_CHEESY_CHEER=OFF

BACK TO REALITY
Ack! Who am I trying to fool here? 2008 is going to be much like 2007, only with a big slice of n=n+1 thrown into the mix. I'm still not going to be paid enough, my kids are still going to wage their ongoing campaign of terror against me and Big Brother is still going to be on TV again, proving once and for all that the desperate prayers of an avowed atheist counts for exactly diddly-squat when it comes to Australian television scheduling. (Actually that's something of a lie, Gretel Colleen has been axed from the show. The knowledge that I'll no longer have the threat of that lump of sheep off-cuts dressed as mutton lurching from ad break to ad break infesting my television is a source of great comfort to me).

LOST IN THE DIGITAL DESERT - WEEK 2
Seems we had someone from Telscrape over at our place last week, taking photos of our property in preparation to issuing a quote the digging a trench for the phone line. I'd do the job myself but for the fact that I don't know how deep the following items are buried on their way into the house, and therefore don't want to run into them with a shovel or backhoe;

• a water main,
• an electricity main, and
• a gas line.

Running into any one would be embarrassing, any two a cause for concern, and all three a potential for disaster unmatched outside of any book by Tom Sharpe. Knowing my luck (and potential for all manner of klutzy self-harm) I'd say that to even think about contemplating doing the job myself is to invite option 3, with the added bonus of large sections of the house (dislodged during the almost certain explosion promised by option 3) landing on my mangled, burnt, shocked and drowned body. No thanks, the Darwin Award can afford to wait for another year I think.