Argh! Uni stress

Why I even thought I'd be able to do this is beyond me at the moment. My high school English teacher is probably to blame, she always told the rest of the class that if they didn't know how to write an essay they should just look at mine because, according to her, I'm very good at blathering on about nothing while making sense at the same time. However high school was literally half my life ago and the essays were much less than 2500 words with a life to distract me and a minimum of 6 discovered references apart from the required reading though. Interestingly my ways of avoiding works are somewhat similar, my bedroom was never as tidy as when I was doing my Higher School Certificate and my house is cleaner than it has been in years. The difference of course is that I have to clean a larger area, which means more time spent avoiding work.

I can probably get it done before the due date and time of midnight Perth time tomorrow, but it won't be up to the standard I know I'm capable of. One of the many parts of my life that disappoint me is the fact that rather than work at something frustrating me I will deflect, procrastinate and excuse myself. Tonight's deflection involved watching School of Rock for the first time and my excuse is that my sons have used up all of my monthly broadband download limit watching YouTube vidoes so all my searched pages load so slowly it seems hardly worth waiting for them.

This is of course all a nonsense. The truth is that I should have started this essay earlier in the study period. There is no excuse for my procrastination and it is definitely something I need to work on if I am going to be both studying this university course and learning MYOB for a potential income stream during the next part of my life.

Back to the wet

I think the wet season may finally have started after 2 months of oppressive humidity and extreme sweatiness. But the rain falling on my roof right now has reminded me of the one thing I didn't like about last wet season - the fact that heavy rain knocks out the satellite reception for the Austar pay-tv. It's bad enough that they run ads these days, it's even worse when you are watching a movie and through no fault of your own the weather suddenly stops the movie and you miss the end of it. I still don't know what happened at the end of Girl Interrupted.

Someone told me once that in Singapore the pay-tv companies place a larger satellite dish as standard equipment to help stop the disconnections during rain storms. Why Australian companies don't do this is beyond me, except of course for the fact that it would probably cost more.

In other news, the my sons miss their sisters (who would have expected that result? Certainly not me) and I am running behind on my 2500 word essay due on Monday.

Half the children, double the fun!

Yesterday my husband ran away from home, taking two of my children with him.

Ok, not really. Despite what the newspaper reports would have you believe my husband T will actually be at sea (on his Navy boat no less!) on Christmas Day so he had to take his Christmas holidays early in order to be back at work on Dec 15. I decided to go and stay with his parents for Christmas because:

1. they don't live in Darwin which means it's definitely not going to be hot compared to here


2. they have a pool


3. it's basically free food


4. it's my father-in-law's 60th birthday 2 days before Christmas and I thought it would be a little unfair to fly down for the party and then fly back to Darwin for Christmas.

Hang on, I may have gotten that list the wrong way around...

T told his parents that he wouldn't be able to come down for Christmas due to the whole being-at-sea-for-work thing (yes, they did ask again after the newspaper reports if he was still going to be working over Christmas) so they pushed the 60th birthday party back to early December so T, their oldest child, could be there. I figure they probably want the rest of the family there as well so I decided to pull the kids out of school a week early - nothing ever happens during the last week of school anyway - and fly down on December 5th for the party on the 6th.

T then worked out that he could take holidays from Nov 24 and promptly booked a plane ticket down to his parents.

Since our older daughter is only in her first year of school and our younger daughter is only in preschool he thought it would be nice if they went with him to Qld, so yesterday I put all 3 of them on a plane headed south. That means the only two children I have at home are the boys, currently aged 9 and 8, which means......
I don't have to get dressed in the morning because they can take themselves to school!!!

Oh happy day

I have my laptop back! It only took 2 weeks. Turns out that the person I talked to on the telephone twice was either asking about a different laptop or misunderstood what the technicians were telling her. The lady who rang me today said that the reason my laptop took so long to repair was the fingerprint scanner, and it still doesn't work despite having been replaced with a new unit. You know what, it doesn't matter. Having the fingerprint thing was nice and convenient but I'd far rather just have my laptop at this point. So that's what I told her and she said I could come and pick it up.

Now I get the joy of turning it on and keeping my fingers crossed that the woman who told me they'd "swapped the drives out" wasn't right because if I've lost all my stuff I'm going to be more than a little cranky. Especially since it's Friday.

Just tell me the truth

I'm becoming convinced the computer repair shop is lying to me.

First - the background. On the 30th of October my oldest son spilt a glass of water next to my laptop, which pretty promptly stopped working. The next morning I rang HP to tell them my laptop wouldn't turn on and the tech support guy walked me through a few things to get the laptop going again. It did start up so I was all "yay!" and then I asked him if he could help with something else I'd been having trouble with, the fingerprint security thing that had stopped working a couple of weeks before. Whatever he asked me to do didn't work, and each step didn't work through several restarts of the computer until finally the computer just stopped working again. At this point he declared the job required more help then he could provide and told me it would need to go to a repairer. Since the repair shop is pretty near my house I decided to drop it off, so I have a receipt for the laptop dated 31 October at 12:04pm. I was told at this point that it would likely take a week because they were pretty backed up but they would order the parts that day so when it came up on their job list it would be pretty quick to fix.

Friday last week (so exactly one week later) at around 2pm I got a phone call from the repair shop asking me for my log-in password. The lady who rang me told me that they'd had to order a second part but they'd finished installing it so after a few tests they should be calling me back later that afternoon. Except they didn't. Yesterday (Tuesday) I was going to be in the area anyway so I popped in around 1pm to ask what the status of the job was, I was told that it was on the guy's desk and they would be probably returning it to me later in the afternoon. Except they didn't.

Today I just rang up to find out what was going on after starting to experience moderate panic about the whole looming-end-of-semester-with-all-relevant-information-saved-on-that-laptop business. Today the story is that the tech who was working on it yesterday was called away for an emergency, he wasn't there right now but one of the other techs believes that it should be ready by either this afternoon or tomorrow.

Now I don't know about anyone else, but this is starting to look a lot like I'm being fobbed off. Either they've lost it, they are incompetent, or I keep getting bumped down the priority queue. No matter what it is, I would far rather they told me the truth than keep getting my hopes up. Not to mention that this is a warranty repair and their stated service standard is 2-4 working days for warranty repairs. I almost hope HP send me out a customer satisfaction survey if I ever get the laptop back.