Waiting for payday

Funny how it doesn’t matter how much you get paid, or how often, you always seem to be painfully ready for it whenever it is almost here. For the last week or so Beloved K and I have been in one of those pre-payday holding patters. There’s food in the cupboards, petrol in the cars, everything is still working…….we’ve just stopped spending any money. Are we worried? Not really, because K gets paid tomorrow and me two days later (mmmmm…..monthly pay) but it still has us feeling on edge because, well, the bills have stacked up a tad and we haven’t done many of the things that we promised ourselves yet (garden shed, insulation, deck sanding and sealing). We have just started tracking our financeds using Quicken again, which is another funny thing because we never seem inspired to track our money properly unless we don’t have much of it. When we are in plentiful supply, we don’t seem too scientific about tracking it at all! As I’ve said for a long time, whether you’re rich or poor it’s nice to have money.

Yesterday I had an interesting “wow, fancy that” moment. I was at a historical society-run museum set-up for some work research, and I saw a clock just like the one that takes pride of place on the dresser in our dining room. Mine, of course, was a wedding present given to my great grandfather, William Taylor, on the occaision of his wedding in 1914. The one I saw yesterday was the closest I had seen to the exact design, although it had been left (or made) in natural wood tones rather than painted a shiny black. I have to say it was also in nowhere near as good a condition as mine. Suffice to say mine still makes noises like “tick” and “ding”, whereas yesterday’s had obviously not done so for many a year.

Just a month to go before my brief jaunt down to Melbourne for Cousin M’s wedding……looking forward to it actually. My brilliant plan has me getting in to Avalon Airport around 1pm on the day of the actual wedding, then conniving a friend to come and pick me up, grab a quick cuppa and a chat and then drop me off at the wedding before it starts at 4pm. Risky? Maybe, but you have to have some adventure in your life, and I had already promised to take Child A and Child S to the footy the night before, and I didn’t want to let them down. Flight home will be at some ridiculous hour on the Monday night, leaving me looking for taxis around midnight. Just for good measure, I took the Tuesday off to avoid problems like suffering concussion when I went to sleep and banged my head on the desk.

Musical update – I still can’t play a note. Besides that, however, we have decided to drive the kids an hour each Saturday back to their old piano teacher. Potential new teacher just wouldn’t return calls….most annoying….but old teacher was over the moon at having them back. Upside is that old teacher lives close to Jury, and we’ll be able to visit just that bit more often than we have managed as late. Woo-hoo!

Cheerio

So NOW I get busy

My job has involved a lot of planning, negotiating, persuading, influencing, calcualting and estimating. This last week or so an interesting new development has been added…..doing. I had really enjoyed being an influencer, planner, persuader, calcualtor and estimator……but I’ve enjoyed it so much that I must have gotten out of the habit of all this doing. This has made me feel a bit rusty in this department, but there is nothing like pressure to shake the rust off. This week everything (to do with me anyway) on our three projects was progressing according to plan until the goalposts moved. Week three’s project has now been moved to week two, and vice versa, leaving my timing and allocation of resources somewhat out of whack. The only viable fix was to take on much of the actual week three work myself in order to get it done in time for week two. Suffice to say that I will most likely be spending Saturday researching the history of a place I’ve only been to twice, let alone know anything about! By contrast, getting the week two project under control by week three will be a breeze……and hopefully that means the third week of the project will be a little easier…more like coasting to the finish line when you know you are well in front.

Great to see the piccies of Brother Joe’s new house……sure, he has work to do, but I bet he’s going to love every minute.

Sorry to hear about Sister Nell’s recent injury re-occurrence. I hope it’s not restricting her too much.

Hmmmmm……..now why can’t I find Nicki’s blog?

Great to see another flurry of blogging from Beloved K………we still haven’t answered that avatar question though.

Cheerio!

Sacrifices

Today my Beloved K is going to work. She has a bit of a commute this morning because she must be inducted in to the ways of her new employer, and they do that at a place other than that which will be her regular workplace. I know she will be good at this job, because she has done it before and been very highly valued wherever she has worked. I also know (it’s easier to tell when you live here) that she doesn’t really want to go. Since leaving her last job when she moved, Beloved K has grown attached to the time she has been able to spend with our children. Having had 5 weeks holidays myself, I have a small insight in to this, but I have been used to the full time work routine for a long time now, and a holiday still seems to me like a holiday rather than a new lifestyle trial.

What I do know is that going back to work does cause Beloved K some pain. No, she is quite physically capable of her work. It is the emotional pain of separation from firstly her children, and secondly the lifestyle she would prefer to have. If this sounds like criticism to you then read it again – it is not the rant of a husband who “doesn’t get it”. Deep down inside I wish I had the power to grant her the lifestyle she craves. Maybe this taps in to some old fashioned desire to be the great provider, I’m not really sure, but I feel this way anyway. I encourage Beloved K to follow dreams, to pick a job or career she could fall in love with (no matter how unreachable it seems) and to pursue them, but instead she has gone back to her previous field of work because she knows we need the money to pay for the things we want – karate and piano lessons, a pool by the end of the year, and holidays to see family, friends and amazing places. I hope she understands that I do understand her sacrifice, and that I want her to be happy above all things. I hope that, one day, she decides her dreams (work or otherwise) are still there, and that I will stand behind her every minute to help her realise them.

In other news, it’s raining……..and raining and raining. A certain monsoon trough mentioned in passing at jweg.wordpress.com is making its presence felt in our part of the world today. Dam levels have already risen from 16 per cent to 36 per cent in the last month, and the talk is all of easing our level 6 water restrictions. I reckon they should leave them in place for a while yet, but that probably won’t be up to me. Anyway, levels are expected to pass 40 per cent this week. Lovely!

Cheerio!

Bite me

Some people talk about life in stages. It seems we’re are all in one stage or another, depending on how we view the stages. I am, by some measures, in the “earning stage”, when I make money, progress through the ranks as best I can at work and be a good little capitalist business unit……spending most of the money as I go.

My son, Child S, is going through a completely different stage of life – the “look, I can poke my tongue through the gap where my teeth used to be” stage. The evidence for this is here:

It is not possible to see it in this picture, but he has actually lost three teeth, the two middle ones on the bottom, and one middle one on the top. The top one came last, and the one next to it is wobbly as well. The top one came out when he was eating dinner. Beloved K, either cleverly on purpose or blissfully unaware of the likely impact, served corn-on-the-cob with dinner. Child S went to take a bite, and the top tooth popped out and rattled across the floor. With blood streaming from his mouth, the unconcerned Child S said “Mummy, I don’t think I can eat my corn any more”. It was priceless.

In other news, Children A and S have both settled in to thier new school very well. They have started karate lessons at a new dojo that they really like, and organising piano lessons will come shortly (plenty of practice going on though!).

Beloved K sat a job interview Monday morning, was offered the job Tuesday morning, accepted it Wednesday morning, is visiting there Friday morning and starting work next Tuesday morning. I wonder what she will do with the afternoons? Seriously though, it is three days a week in a medical practice that is all of 12 minutes from home – perfect! There would not have been much point in moving house to get rid of my commute, only to give Beloved K a longer one. She doesn’t seem overly excited about having a new workplace, possibly because as a medical practice/treatment room job she has done it all before (recently) and doesn’t see much of a challenge in it. Hopefully the people will be great and she will enjoy the process of working with them.

Lastly, but not leastly, thank goodness it is almost football season. I am not much of a cricket fan at the best of times, but this summer’s contents have been particularly insipid and boring. Bring back the Ashes, I say. The Pies play a meaningless preseason game on Saturday night (in Dubai of all places), then it’s only six weeks to the real stuff. I’m looking forward to seeing more games this year – Pies V Lions on March 28, and Pies V Bombers on April 25.

Nice to talk to Jweg, Jury and Nicki over the last 12 hours or so….glad all are doing well.

Cheerio!