Gordon St Gossip

I don't keep a diary but Cheryl and I both use a shared Google Calendar to keep track of our week, so I can use that to work out what we've been up to these last few weeks.

We went to a friend's birthday at Piya Wat a couple of weeks ago. It was the first time we'd been in a very long time.. Cheryl went there for her hen's night, so as a couple it was from before 2004. It hadn't really changed :) The food is good, exceptional really, and a very reasonable price. Be warned, though, I got a salad and it was spicy! You'd want to check with the waiter if spicy is not your thing. But yeah, it's a fancy eating experience at a good price :)

We also finally got the car serviced this week. Mum, the guy you recommended was great! Really nice, good service and very affordable. Our poor car has a few things that need fixing, so no doubt he'll get repeat service from us.. but yeah, the last time we got it serviced they ended up doing an extra $1,600 in work which may or may not have been necessary.. in retrospect I should have told them not to and got a second opinion. I know we asked them to fix the boot cable and they charged us $20 to inspect the bonnet cable and say it wasn't broken (with an additional note that the boot cable was) so that particular garage will never get any more work from us or anyone who knows us.

The reason we wanted to get it done (apart from that it was about 6 months overdue) is that we're going to be visiting Adelaide in August. We've been looking for an excuse, to be honest, since our good friend had a baby recently, and I know I miss the Chinatown food court. Then the head dojo emailed me about a 2 day seminar they were running for instructors, so that gave us the final excuse. The plan is to head up on a Thur/Fri, stay for a week while I work at the GDD offices, have the weekend seminar, then come back Mon/Tues. It means 4 days of not working, which is a fair bit, but then I've been working a lot recently and a mini holiday would be nice. Plus this way Cheryl and the kids get a holiday while I work, which will be nice. Good to see everybody as well.

Oh, speaking of working a fair bit, this week we had a mad push to get a site launched by Tuesday US time (Wednesday lunch for us). I had built the original templates (well within budget I might add) and then passed it off to someone else to finish up. Then it had to be converted to a CMS, which essentially meant rebuilding the site in a slightly different language.. this was passed back to me on Thursday, with the launch Tuesday. That's not enough time! Still, I worked on the weekend, pulled a couple of rather long days and we got there.. and the additional benefit is I only have to work 3 hours today! I'm going to go to Kinder with Cheryl and the kids this morning. Should be fun.

Oh, one other thing - I took Ossie to Kindy yesterday morning. As we entered a little girl (Lillian) said to a boy sitting next to her (Foster) "Here he is!" and Foster said "Hi Oscar". Os somewhat mumbled a reply and went off to play with a wooden train set, at which point Lillian came over to join in. If you ask Ossie he says his friend is Abby, who is Foster's sister.. but I suspect Lillian and Foster consider him a friend as well, even if he's not aware of it. Of course when I asked him about it he couldn't remember who Lillian was and claimed that she -was- Abby.. so who knows :) Anyway, it's really nice to know he's making friends. Hopefully they go to Specimen Hill next year as well.