I'm feeling glad that the main part of Christmas is now over, and that we're getting closer to a more normal state of things. There's something manic about Christmas that never quite improves, and this year was no different despite our intentions. Daile had everything wrapped in time, and had made lots of nice things to eat. The gargoyles had made some things too, and we were all decorated as far as we went. Then the fridge broke!
I read an interesting thing in a book about why inventions fail a couple of weeks ago that talked about an advert for IBM that heralded the 'intelligent' fridge. In this ad, a doorbell goes and is answered by a quizzical housewife. The man at the door says 'I've come to mend your fridge!' She says that 'It's not broken'... he says 'It's about to break!' The ad explains how fridges will be able to know when a part is about to break and call the engineer, how they' ll also be able to monitor their contents via code readers and order replacements on line etc. It's another one of those silly things that people envisaged for our future, like living on space stations and eating pills instead of food etc. The book goes on to say that the glaring hole in the plan was that fridges are so incredibly reliable that they only break on average every 20 years! I was thinking about this as I surveyed the slowly warming contents of our fridge (just out of warranty). Luckily, we have the old thing in the garage that Tilda and I were able to transfer everything into. The fixers want to charge us $88 dollars to pitch up, and then $100 per hour pro-rata plus parts after that! I mean its almost as if they're doing something complicated! Its a fridge!
Then the internet stopped working! I had to spend 40 minutes on the phone to Telstra so that they could confirm this for me... and then they suggested that I pay for a new router even though this one is still under warranty, because they 'don't know' whether its the router or their system.
Don't y just love it?
Anyway, we're still off line officially, and using my little usb router that costs about 10 times as much to run. Needless to say this will be at our expense in order that Telstra's massive profits are not adversely affected by their own performance eh!
The girls and their friends in the street put on a panto for Christmas. It was called 'The Disaster on Christmas Eve' They spent several productive and fevered days making all kinds of props, before they were willing to let me cajole them into actually writing the script.
In the event, they couldn't find half of the props, couldn't remember their lines, couldn't find the back drops, etc. But all the various parents were in attendance, and there were pre and post performance drinks and interesting buns, provided by the girls collective. It was actually very funny, a comedy by mistake if you know what I mean. We were very proud of them all.
They were making loads of different things in the run up to the big day... Here's a sequence of pics of one of the thing Matilda made (with a little help for the base). The glass is from the local bargain store. I think it's an improvement on the commercial variety don't you?
On Christmas day itself we went over to Wayne and Dettes, and had a wonderful spread of food. It was very hot, but very chilled... if you know what I mean!
Back row from left: Carlene, Lee, Macca, Andrew, Judy, Iggy (Ian)
then; Sandra, Jim, Leanne, The most gorgeous woman in the world (my wife of course!), Caitlin, Maddy
then; Luis, Dette, Feeb, Lil, Wayne,
then: Me, Johnny jetwash, Tild.
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