Author: Anne S

I don’t know about the Vanilla part, but there was plenty of the “ice ice, baby” this morning when I got up … I woke up totally cocooned in my duvet this morning, and had to get the hosepipe out to blast the ice from my windscreen before I could drive to work … bloomin’ heck it’s freezing!!!  Thank goodness I’m outta that flat, or you might have been chipping the ice off my body for a week! 😉

I’ve been a big neglectful of my computer over the last few days, as I’ve been ready to throw it out the window … not so much the laptop itself, but the associated problems of transferring files and doing jobs that are normally plain and simple on my old PC, but for some reason now require the braincells of a rocket scientist 😦  Hence last Wednesday I walked away from it and refused to do any more transferring until I was in a better frame of mind …

Thanks Ally for the link to the Vista tip site – I’m still having problems transferring my emails across, but I haven’t given up hope just yet … I am also having problems, though, with my old version of Outlook running on this machine (basically it won’t work) – and it won’t let me re-download all the security patches etc … I thought I’d be clever and download the 60 day trial of Office 2007, but even that version won’t play ball with Outlook, so for now I’m waving the white flag and conceding defeat until I’m ready to start tackling it again in a week or so’s time.

Now, where’s my draft email that I started drafting up a blog post last week …??  Aha, here we go … off to do a job of cut and paste, and a bit of editing, then I’ll finish up with the latest update of the week’s events (which are pretty few and far between) …

It’s been a while since I blogged (because the Photo Hunt was created an entire month ago now, I can’t claim the fame for blogging about that recently), and it’s been an interesting week overall.  I’ve been on some mixed shifts, and it tired me out somewhat last week … I did have a huge highlight of the week when I received some wonderful squishy mail 🙂

Nicki sent me a RAK that totally blew me away!  I received one of the charts on my wishlist, “Blessed with Happiness box” by The Cat’s Whiskers … Nicki thought the wording on the box were perfectly suited to my recent life dramas, and I’d have to agree I love the sentiments behind it 🙂  But not only that, Nicki also sent me the fabric, Dinky Dyes silks, Kreinik Blending Filament and Mill Hill beads to kit it up … WOW!!!  My jaw was seriously sitting on the floor for quite a while … thank you Nicki from the bottom of my heart 😀  My apologies it’s taken me so long to blog about it (I’ll explain why soon).

In fact it was Nicki’s generosity that finally geared me up me get my A into G and have a ‘stitchy weekend’ … I have to admit no stitches were actually done, but I dragged out the boxes of stitching goodies that I’d brought with me that all needed to be sorted out before going back into storage, and I’ve spent the entire weekend (well, my version of a weekend anyway – it was actually Thu/Fri) cutting up fabrics for dozens and dozens of projects.  Each project is in it’s own sealed plastic bag with the chart and fabric, and all I have to do now is to kit up with the threads (which is what I’ve been doing for the last 2 nights).  Then they’ll all sit in 2-3 boxes in storage ready for me to dip my hands in when I need something new to stitch.

Unfortunately with housesitting I don’t have the space and flexibility to travel with my full rotation, so I’m going to become a one-at-a-time stitcher.  I plan to have one project with me that’s a larger/more complex project (such as Bordeaux Sampler and Winter Queen etc), with a couple of smaller projects such as a needlebook or needleroll to break it up a bit. That way I should only have to travel with one set of scrollbars and one of Q-snaps.  I’m lucky at the moment in that I’m only a short drive away from my storage unit (it’s literally within 10 minutes drive from home) … but with future housesitting jobs I won’t have that luxury (for those who know Melbourne well, my upcoming jobs vary from Ringwood, to Airport West, to Seaford, to a ‘mystery location’).  If nothing else, it’ll show me different parts of Melbourne I haven’t seen before! 😉

Rightio, back to my scheduled yapping, now I’ve edited that draft …

The only stitching I’ve been doing has been a few stitches into KarenV’s Quaker RR – this is due to be mailed in less than a week’s time so I thought I’d better get cracking on it.  I just have one large motif plus one tiny one and my initials, so it shouldn’t take much longer to finish whatsoever 🙂 Unfortunately my very bad photo doesn’t do this beauty justice at all!

Unfortunately my car woes have continued to my new place (mutter mutter mutter) … the dashboard light stopped working the night I drove Mum home after the big ‘move’, but I promptly forgot about it until I had to start driving in the dark again about two weeks ago.  I called Ace mobile mechanics (and yes, I’m giving their name for a reason) who did the original job, and asked if I could organise for Nick to come out to fix it during my days off.  He ended up cancelling on the scheduled day due to being stuck on a job, but eventually came round on Friday.  You may remember I got seriously duped and taken for a ride when I got my clutch replaced, well this time I stuck up for myself big time!  When he turned up he said he’d brought the dimmer switch, and it’d be just over $53 to install it.  Um, since when did we discuss installing a dimmer switch??  Apparently I was told if the job didn’t work with the normal switch he installed, then I would need to get the dimmer switch … Um, actually Nick no that’s not correct – the conversation we actually had was that you gave me a choice on the night – if I preferred to have the dimmer switch (which the car is usually installed with as factory standard), then he’d have to order it in … but I could use a normal switch which could be installed immediately, the problem being that you couldn’t then dim the light and the dashboard would be brightly lit all the time the lights were on.  No problem, I say, as I never use the dimmer switch anyway, so please feel free to use what you have to hand …

On completion of the job he tells me that if I change my mind and would rather have the dimmer switch, all I had to do was to call up and tell them, and they’d come round and install it – the only thing I’d have to pay for would be the parts themselves as the labour would be covered under the current job.  Now THAT is not a conversation I had in my mind or with an imaginary party during a dreaming session … admittedly I was under stress at the time, but I remember that conversation very lucidly and clearly, and it certainly isn’t something I could have made up.

So, going back to Friday’s conversation … Nick says I’ll just work out what the final cost will be for you – rightio, that’ll be $120-something.  Picture me turning purple, and just managing to mutter “I beg your pardon??” – where the hell does the extra money come from??  Oh, he says, that’s the cost of the labour … Yep, you got it, Mt St Annie erupted in the middle of the driveway – I repeated the conversation we had, but he declared he never would have said that blah blah blah.  Let’s just say I politely told him to take his dimmer switch away and remove himself from the property because he wasn’t getting another red cent from me!  I said I’d rather pay for someone else to come and do the job properly and he was a disgusting fraud … (phew!!)

Then I took the keys, locked up my car, and walked inside … and phoned Ace up to make a formal complaint about him, and tell them how downright angry and ropeable I was.  I’m sorry to say it, but as a female I’m sick to death of being taken for granted by bl**dy mechanics and thieves.  I may be female, but I no longer have “stupid” tattooed on my forehead … mutter mutter mutter.  Anyway, let’s just say the matter has yet to be resolved, as it turns out Nick hasn’t handed in his invoice for the old job yet, and apparently he would have remarked it with comments (I wish I knew where my copy was, as it’s now buried in storage somewhere hmmm) – hopefully I should hear back tomorrow from the General Manager.  Mt St Annie is still simmering under the surface depending on the outcome …  I have to admit, though, when Nick was playing around with the wires when he first arrived and was looking at the car, I think it might just have been a loose wire, as it’s been working fine ever since (for the last two nights anyway) – so with any luck it won’t be necessary to see his ugly mug on my doorstep again 😦  Karma is gonna get you one day, you big fraud!!

Wow, that was one HUGE vent off my chest … it’s amazing what a good moan does for you 😉  Now it’s time to settle in for bedtime – my hotwater bottle is sitting at my feet so hopefully that’ll make it easier to doze off to sleep.  It’s dreadful that the only place I can find a good connection for the internet modem is here in the bedroom – bless my laptop, it’s wonderful sitting up in bed doing my computing, it’s so much warmer 😉

Actually, the other reason I’ve been lax in posting is that I’ve refused to post until I could post my piccies of both Nicki’s RAK and Karen’s RR, and for some reason every way I’ve tried to download from my CompactFlash card I’ve had to give up. Every time I tried to load up a card reader (I bought a new one 1 1/2 weeks ago as my laptop doesn’t support that card type – the one thing I miss from my PC), and the system froze up and didn’t acknowledge the drive. Then Mum sent my old one from home, and that wasn’t working either … I finally gave up and started up my old PC and tried to download my ‘old way’, but it wouldn’t acknowledge it either. Well, tonight I finally fixed it … I ended up formatting the drive, and wiping everything off my card (losing all the photos in the process, but them’s the breaks), but I can FINALLY upload photos either from my camera directly or from the card reader … it seems the problem all along with the flash card itself 😦 I think it got corrupted during the data transfer cabling, as I’d forgotten and left it sitting in the PC cardreader at the time … but “it’s all good” now yippee!!

Rightio, I really MUST get off to bed, or I’ll be a cranky camper tomorrow 😉 Hope you are all having a good week – I look forward to reading your blogs soon! 😀