"Hello, IT... Have you turned it on?"

...Two out of Three ain't bad...

Australia Day tomorrow - bring it on. It's been a bit of a tough week at work. No air conditioning, level of busy-ness goes from crazy to background noise.

I recently started chatting with an ex-neighbour on MySpace. Hi, Poss, if you're reading. All grown up to be a gorgeous-looking young woman. Of course with her extremely fit parents (ex-Commonwealth athlete for a Dad) she was always going to be athletic and slim and terrific-looking. I could never get my head around "going for a run" as an enjoyable past-time but she manages it, I'm sure. I probably should have tried harder instead of reaching for a good book!

The only running I do these days is for the bus.

So, the washing machine arrived without too many hitches. As a precaution I forwarded the home phone to my mobile (now why didn't I think of that before?) although the company doing the delivery did call the house at about 6:45am just to reconfirm everything. When was I leaving? Oh, in about five minutes. And I would be back again, when? After 8:30. I may be earlier but I don't want to say so and then get stuck somewhere. Fair enough.

A lovely bloke dropped it off. I had the doors open and ready, again, and he wheeled it in, connected it up, had a chat about theatre and Cindy from Neighbours and the vet on McLeod's Daughters that he did a course with, as well as a bit of Shakespeare before he trundled his way down the drive again and my pocket is $30 lighter for the experience. (Have to say - $30 is a bit of a bargain to have a washing machine fixed.)

So guess what I'll be doing on Australia Day... I feel that it will need a good workout after its 10-day holiday and I think it's probably time to save up to buy a new washer in case this happens again.

I've also given the new modem/router-y thingo a go with some support over the phone. Apparently it's my computer that's causing most of the trouble. The problem is intermittent though so I'm going to persevere.

The next challenge is to go wireless.

...I want the world, I want the whole world...

Pear-shaped, it is

...Isn't it funny how you never really screamed at my face...

Well, the washing machine is fixed and it was due to be delivered back to me this morning. (This is my big news for the moment, sorry to be such a sad case.) Having to drive Logan to the train station I told the repair service people that I would be at the house by 8:30am to accept it back into the house, they confirmed that they would be there between 8:30am and 8:45am and I confirmed the amount I was to pay them and that, I thought, was that.

My plan for this morning was to take Logan to the train station, drive back home, finish getting ready for work (I usually have breakfast in my office as I'm usually there before 8:00am), the delivery would happen and I could put all our laundry back in the Laundry before dashing out to the car and being late to work by only about an hour. Possibly could fit in a bit more tidying of the house depending on whether the delivery was a bit later than expected but ultimately wouldn't be too long at home.

Ha!

I arrived back home at maybe a little before 8:00am (I had left time for possible traffic snarls), parked my car on the street so that they would have access to our back gate, and noticed a strange looking watermark on the drive. The pattern didn't fit the one that my car air conditioning would leave but I didn't think much of it.

So, I go inside, leave the front door open but the screen door closed so that I can hear if anyone knocks on it instead of using the doorbell. I dried my hair, had breakfast, put on my makeup, and it was 8:30. Great. I started doing the washing up from last night's dinner and Logan's lunch preparation. Hmm, 8:45. They're probably running a little late, I thought. I'll just go and open up the back gate and make sure there's a clear path to the Laundry for the machine when they do arrive.

9:15am arrives and I called Logan to say that the machine hadn't arrived. Called work to say that I would be later than I thought I might. I gave the company a call and went through to a messagebank. Left a message with my details saying that I was expecting the delivery at 8:30 and could I please have an ETA on the arrival so that I could let my work know how late I might be.

Kept doing housework but kept running to the front of the house every time I heard a car door; still nothing.

I rang again at about 10:30am and was told that they had already been at 7:45am, hence the water stains I had noticed on the driveway earlier, perhaps? They had hung around for ten minutes and had tried calling me but, of course, I was on the road and wasn't planning on them being there that early!!

Could they deliver at all today? I was thinking, maybe I could take the whole day off work if I needed. No, they only hire the courier once in a day. Right, fair enough. What about tomorrow morning? Again, I can only take delivery after 8:30am. We'll definitely be there. Delivering to someone else in your area at 10:00am so will either be before or after 10:00am. Okay.

So I locked up the house and left for work. Only took me 25 minutes to get there and happily found a free parking spot upon my arrival - bonus! I got to my office at 11:30am and I have to go through it all again tomorrow!!

At least I got the washing up done.

I could get used to a late morning start time...

Would somebody turn on the wireless?

...That's just paperless office talk...

Logan and I bought a new computer a little before Christmas. It was like giving ourselves an early Christmas present with all the boxes and wrappings and connecting up wires to the wrong spots and finding out you needed batteries of a peculiar shape and size before you can really switch the thing on properly and give it a red hot go.

Had problems with the screen first but eventually worked out that as I had installed a new operating system over the top of the one that the shop had used to do the testing I should reinstall all of the drivers for the motherboard, monitor, and all the other bits. It all worked a lot better after that; including the monitor which wasn't so good beforehand with the drivers you could download from their website...

The next mammoth task was to install our new modem. We didn't choose a plain and simple modem. We had to go with something fancy, didn't we? We got a complicated one that is a router and a wireless modem.

This took up an entire weekend.

Logan had to leave the room as he has not my patience (stubbornness?).

I had it going by Sunday night in time for a Skype call to the in-laws in the UK, but it wasn't perfect. Wouldn't turn on properly the next time we turned on the computer. Took me 30 minutes to connect to the internet. There's still something wrong (we have to reboot the router to connect although this takes only 2 minutes) and we're using an Ethernet connection to get by. We're not completely wireless yet. That's this weekend's task.

(Oh, and this weekend we're also having the washing machine fixed. Had to siphon out the water, as it wasn't pumping it out on its own, just in case we have to move it. Used a technique I learned by watching Scooby-Doo - Thelma sure had brains even if she always wore that strange orange confection of an outfit.)

Wish me luck - I'm not really an IT expert and it could all go pear-shaped.

...Where's a good sonic screwdriver when you need one?...