Last month

Today's funny story about the footy game is not about the game itself. It comes from Jenny (the team trainer & medic) needing to strap Eemeli's ankle for the game, as he had done something to it at training last night. After we got home & chilled out for a while, & Eemeli had taken a shower, he needed to take the strapping off. He has hairy legs. Julie assured him that the pain he went through getting the tape off is akin to what women go through to get the hair off their legs. Heh heh.

Next funny story comes from last week's footy training session, where the boys buddied up & shared with each other, & then with the whole group, funniest moment, best footy moment & most embarrassing moment. Several of them said that their best footy moment was when they were playing in the under-14's, & they came through the season from the bottom of the ladder to win the Grand Final. Eemeli's was his first game of footy. But his most embarrassing moment was back when he was playing Ice Hockey, & during a penalty shootout, he tripped & banged his head into the goal post!

Meanwhile, the month has been tough for us. With our debt almost paid off but not quite, we got to the point where we were dependent on the sale of the property in Perth to regain any cash flow, & we have been really struggling for the last 2 weeks, with the credit card sitting right on its limit & no other cash available. It's been incredibly stressful, but has also drawn us closer, as we fight the common enemy, so to speak. Even so, we will be on bare minimum spending for a long time.

Today, Julie & I went to the Organ Donors Thanksgiving Service. I was very surprised to see the "Ode to Doris" that I had written for the service back in 2006, together with the special box containing her handprint & a lock of her hair, that I had given to the local Organ Donor Coordinators some time ago as part of my "moving on" process. Fortunately, I am now strong enough to recover quickly from that sort of emotional shock & be in a position to "be there" for others for whom the grief is much more recent. I sat at the front for the first part of the service, as I had volunteered as reserve speaker, "being there" just in case any of the speakers found it too hard.  This time I got a really good photo of the two life streams merging into one, as well as the "Tree of Life" with leaves attached to it, each one representing a donor. The service itself was very strong in the emotions department & had quite a few people in tears. At the end, there was a symbolic laying by the Donor Coordinators of 298 individual flowers representing the 298 donors since the program started in Canberra 11 years ago. Julie took one home for April.

The final property in our string finally sold today. MAJOR kudos to Julie at Project Settlements in Perth for going above & beyond the call. I was so impressed with the service that I offered to pay the full rate instead of the discounted rate & they refused to accept my offer. We didn't gain as much cash out of the sale as we had expected, but the loan on our home in Canberra has been reduced instead. As above, we'll be on bare minimum spending for a very long time, but the relaxation we get every time we take the bus out is worth all of the pain & frustration we've had over the last 9 months.

One consequence was that we were able to pay the auto electrician for his time in solving the problem of a faulty regulator allowing the alternator to over-charge the 24V batteries. Turns out that the awful smell we had been experiencing was hydrogen straight off the batteries & that we were very lucky not to have had any sparking near them or we would all have gone up in a very large explosion. The sparky finally sourced a genuine Japanese regulator, so that he did not have to make any changes to the alternator, something about switching to earth instead of switching the power. We also were able to replace the four 6V batteries that make up the 12V house battery system, the one that runs all of the internals in the "home" component of the motorhome, such as fridges, lights, radios, inverter, etc. They are now fully charged & we are ready to roll again. Our next outing is to Grenfell over the June long weekend for the Henry Lawson Festival of the Arts.

The highlight of this exercise was we got to have a close look at the Governor-General's 1970's Rolls Royce that was parked in the workshop of the battery place. Yes, photos will follow when I get the time to pull them off the camera.

Meanwhile, this last week has been a rough one. On Monday, while Julie was preparing to leave for work, before heading down to the coast for 2 days for a training course, the car decided to have a flat battery. It was days later that we figured out that one of the remotes for the car was causing it to go into a cycle of locking & unlocking the doors. Doing this all night, combined with a Canberra winter, was what killed the battery. Got that one solved & off she went. While she was on the course, & unknown to her until she returned to work, the Branch Manager resigned, so that became Thursday's big shock when she got back. Then on Friday, 2 people close to the people at work died, followed by the revelation that the contract that the company has been living on in Canberra, via month to month contract extensions, expires at the end of June & the office may have to close. She has done a huge amount of processing this weekend! Bring on the getaway in 2 weeks' time, so that we can relax a bit.