Charlie Don't Surf

I started my little PC repair business about 7 months ago now. It’s been fairly steady so far, but there are periods when it’s dead on its arse and periods when I’ve got five PCs on the go at once and I’d like to smooth things out a bit. To this end I’ve been out flyering the surrounding towns with a leaflet I designed. The first place I flyered was Broughton and the results were excellent (20+ jobs and 10+ referrals from those jobs), so I’ve started on places like Gilmore, Belfast, Sandy Point and, of couse, my home town of the Bay.

It’s a genuinely enjoyable thing to do if I’m being honest. I can be a very lazy bastard, but I really like getting out and about with my MP3 player on and a bag full of leaflets to deliver. When you walk around neighbourhoods you see them in a whole new light and I heartily recommend it if you really want to get a feel for a place.

Last week I was flyering in Belfast, about 10km down the road from here. It’s a satellite town of Swindon and has a mixture of posho houses and down-at-hells fibros. I was working my way around a new estate, happily lost in my thoughts listening to an audio book on my Sony. As I was walking up the verge I noticed that the posties tracks, which I had been following all afternoon, had sunk down a bit into the grass. The somewhat obvious reason for this did not occur to me and I gayly strolled into a patch of swampy mud and sank up to my ankles in goop. The only up-side to this was that I was wearing Crocs.

The car was a good half a kilometre up the road so, cursing as I went, I squelched up the road. I extracted my Crocs from my feet and put them on the rubber matt in the boot. Then, having wiped the excess mud off my feet on the grass, I drove to the IGA. I bought a large bottle of water and some kitchen towels and then sat in the carpark cleaning up both my Crocs and my feet. Deep joy.

The Last Patrol …
With the temperature falling to British summertime levels and the leaves starting to turn brown, so the surf lifesaving season draws to a close soon. I had my last patrol of the season last Sunday – a gorgeous day, with excellent surf and about 10 punters all day long. For the most part we just sat in the radio room, watching the surfers make the most of a nice south-easterly ground swell that had chugged up the coast from Victoria.

Patrol Captain Richard decided it was a good time to get my IRB skills tweaked and so we did some runs in the boat. He was less than impressed by my technique – in fairness, I do suck – and so we did repeated runs off the beach, out through the surf, round a can and back in again. By the last run something had clicked and I was a lot more comfortable driving the boat.

About 30 minutes before we were due to pack up for the day, an extended family showed up on the beach and I sat on the shoreline on the quad bike watching ‘em until two o’clock. With everything cleaned and stowed away, I headed home and put the red and yellow uniform away for the season.

Cut out the middle man …
I’ve been using a little local printers to produce the flyers for my business. He charges me $90 for 2000 A5 flyers – not the cheapest, but I like to keep it local. Anyway, the other day it occured to me that I would almost certainly be better off printing my own flyers on a laser printer. So I sat down and did the sums and, even taking account of the fact that I’d have to buy a laser printer in the first place, it would still cost me a quarter of what he was charging. I can get my toner cartridges nice and cheap through our distributer ($40 in fact), paper costs bugger all and I get full control over what gets printed when. Serious old markup he had on that print job.

So I nipped down to Harvey Normans after work, knowing they had a winter sale on in their electrical department. They had just the sort of printer I needed – it was a Brother HL-2040, marked at $199. I asked the sales guy what his best price on it was and he came back with $129. Bargain. Said printer is now installed and working brilliantly and I’m busy producing all the flyers I need to continue my global domination.

Scooters …
The other day Liz reversed out of the garage and right over the top of Jack’s scooter. It being her fault (she’d put the scooter there herself), she nipped down to Kmart and bought him a new. Very pleased he was with it too. Unfortunately Jack left it outside the garage the other morning and yours truly reversed over it. Considering it had been twatted by a Toyota Kluger, it wasn’t in too bad shape – unrideable of course, but largely intact. So I have another trip to Kmart to make and Jack has learnt that when daddy says to put something away, it might be useful to listen to him occasionally.

Knackered …
Jack comes back from a day of crazy golf with his little mates yesterday and promptly turns his nose up at the feast Liz had prepared for him. Jack likes his food and it’s usually pretty serious when he’s off it. Sure enough he starts complaining that his tummy hurts. He spends some time in the bog but can’t ‘go’. We tuck him into bed a few hours later.

We went to bed at about one in the morning and I had just dropped off when Jack reappeared crying, saying he felt bad. We got the camperbed and set it up next to ours and armed him with a bucket. Ten minutes later he starts chucking up. He continues puking for the next couple of hours. We all finally get to sleep at about four in the morning. Needless to say we all felt bloody knackered this morning, but there hasn’t been a repeat of the puking, which is good. He didn’t want to go to bed tonight but we mentioned that my parents have offered to take him to the aeroplane museum tommorow if he’s feeling okay and he fair ran down the corridor to his bedroom.

Till next time, later ‘taters …

When we moved into our house about 18 months ago, we didn’t give much thought to what would go where – we just went with the way things were. However it has been bugging Liz and so, in time honoured fashion, she has been bugging me. She wanted a big move around and the long easter weekend seemed like the obvious time to do it.

We live in a two storey house – the kitchen, living room and bedrooms are upstairs. Downstairs is the double garage, a large room we used as an office, utility room and sun room. When we moved in, the obvious place for our office (since we both work from home) was the large room downstairs. So that was the way we arranged things.

Of late, however, we’ve been tripping over ourselves in our bedroom (funny how you get used to the extra space) and Herr Oberleutnant wanted a change. So we decided to move Jack into our old bedroom, our bedroom into the large room downstairs and then we’d get an office each from the other bedrooms. So on Friday I began dismantling, removing, rearranging, shifting and otherwise humping various large bits of furniture up and down the stairs.

Fat git that I am, by 2am on Friday I collapsed into bed in a near-comatose state. So we now have a bedroom of hotel suite proportions, complete with massive walk in robe and en suite shower/bog. Jack has a much larger room from which to festoon the house in bits of lego and transformer legs and we both have our own offices. The simple joy of not having Liz look over my shoulder when I should be working and saying, “What are you doing at the moment?” is reward in itself.

The walk in robe (as it is now) was my little computer repair business’s workshop. On the Saturday I drove over to Bunnings and bought one of those wall mounted wardrobe/shelf boxsets. Naive twat that I am, I thought I’d simply have to line everything up, rawl plug into the wall and Bob’s your local cat burglar. I should point out that I am to DIY what Stephen Hawking is to extreme rock climbing.

On the instructions which came with the boxset, it told me first to locate the wall studs. These are, I was told, always either 16″ or 24″ apart. But how to locate the bloody things? I tried knocking the wall with knuckle, which produced inconclusive results. Then I phoned my dad and asked him if he had an electric stud wall finder. He told me did, and would find it and bring it over. Much joy.

About 30 minutes later he arrives and tells me that he couldn’t find his stud wall finder, but that it was crap anyway and that he and mum will happily drive over to Swindon and get a descent one from Bunnings. I say I’ll drive, because I need some more rawl plugs anyway, so we head over.

For those of you who don’t live in Oz, Bunnings is the equivalent of B&Q – massive shops crammed with everything you can possibly imagine in the whole DIY/home/garden arena. In fact there’s a funny ad on the TV at the moment from one of their smaller competitors in which they say, “We sell everything you need, not everything ever made,” in an obvious (but very accurate) dig at Bunnings.

So anyway – we consult one of the floor staff. Bunnings make a point of employing old bastards who know the difference between a mitre saw and a ballcock and so this wasn’t as futile as it might sound. The bloke we spoke to explained the difference between all the different stud wall finders they had and recommended a Ryobi one. We bought it.

So – back home. Read instruction for stud wall finder. Seems simple enough. Put finder on wall, let it initialise, start moving it over the plasterboard in search of wooden studs. Only the thing beeps continuously. Read instructions again. Try again. Same thing. Take batteries out to reset it. Try again. Same thing. “That’s what my old one did,” says my dad, “Guess they’re all just crap.” We spend about 45 minutes trying to get it working and in all that time – over a 12ft stretch of wall, we managed to locate just one stud. Yay.

I get online and consult the almight Google. Various videos explain how electric stud wall finders work, but in all the videos the things work perfectly, locating wood with pinpoint accuracy. Another tutorial explains how the plasterboard sheets are afixed to the studs with nails, which you can detect with a common or garden magnet. We try this … and it works. Only problem is that my wall appears to have been constructed from just three large sheets of plasterboard, afixed to just four studs, instead of the 14 or so I had expected to find.

So I resolve to anchor the top of the wardrobe thing to the four studs I know are there and use heavy duty 20kg plasterboard rawl plugs for the rest. I set to work and get the top wall anchor firmly attached with no further dramas. Then I had to ‘hang’ the shelf struts off this top wall anchor and afix them to the wall at the bottom. That goes swimmingly enough. Then I have to attach two extension rails to the middle two struts – to be afixed with two bolts each – top and bottom. By now I’ve run out of the heavy duty plugs and have to resort to bog standard ones. I consult the packet, which clearly states to use an 8mm drill bit and make my holes. I push the rawl plug in and it plops delicately down inside the wall partition. Great. Four fucking big holes.

I sit down and look again at the package that the wall screws came in and note these small plastic gromit things. I idly squeeze one and it folds up into a plastic bullet shape. Suddenly their purpose dawns on me (told you I was crap at this DIY lark) and, lucky bastard that I am, the holes I’ve drilled are the exact right size for this plastic plugs. Extension rails installed, I put all the shelves and hanging poles up and collapse in a heap on the floor.

Liz appears at the door with the first ironing basket full of clothes and sets about filling up the shelf space in a meticulously organised fashion that I will undoubtedly ruin the first time I put clothes on the shelves.

It has now been about 56 hours since I put that wardrobe system up … and it hasn’t fallen off the wall yet. That, my friends, is a miracle.

Later ‘taters ….

Liz’s Grand Final …
Last year, one of Liz’s friends asked her if she’d like to join her in a local touch footy team. She initially resisted the idea, but after some cajoling, started going along. She hadn’t previously played any form of team sport, let alone touch footy, so the beginnings were, ermm, painful. But she stuck with it and became one of the diehards that was there week-in and week-out.

The team has its up and downs, but by mid-season they’re starting to get their act together. Then, after a run of five straight wins, they make it to the grand final of their division. This was thanks to the efforts of just five players, though all the other slackers who’d done fuck all for the rest of the season showed up for the possible glory of the final. I had promised to come down and cheer Liz on for a bit with Jack and so we showed up at the Broughton playing fields on the allotted evening to find the match already underway. Things seemed pretty evenly matched and at half time the score was 3-2 in favour of the other team.

As I chatted to Liz during halftime I noticed a single bloke in amongst the opposing team, seemingly discussing tactics with his yellow-clad team. He was dressed in a flouncy white shirt, black britches (only way I can think of describing them) and had an immaculate Doberman on the end of a short leash. “Who’s the dick with the dog?” I asked. Liz explained that he was that team’s ‘coach’ – the only coach, it might be added in the entire division. Case of someone taking a friendly knockabout a tad too seriously? The bloke looked like a right nonce – if I’d pulled up at some country retreat in Gloucestershire for a bit of huntin’-'n’-shootin’, I wouldn’t have been shocked to see someone like him pulling an antique Purdey shotgun out of the back of his Range Rover and handing it to his man-servant, Simpkins.

The game got back underway and I noticed that the other team had a plentiful supply of players and that barely 30 seconds passed before one or other of their team subbed out to suck on a bottle of water like they’d just run a half marathon. It had the effect of Liz’s mob playing an opposition of 20, instead of eight. This was all the more ironic when you consider that Liz’s team had four members over 40 and not a single player under 30, whilst they other side were *all* under 18. They had supporters who were taking things a bit too seriously too, so I started chanting, “Who’s the bastard in the shorts,” and “Green’s mean, yellow smellos” (I know, dead grown up, me).

I had to leave before the end to get Jack home and to bed – it being a school night – and so Liz phoned me from the pub to say that they’d lost by a single try. Not only that, but a try that had been disallowed by the ref because Liz’s team tagged the player before they got to the line, was allowed after intervention from Captain Gaylord the team coach who had ‘seen’ that there’d been no tackle!! What a twat. Despite the loss in the final, Liz’s team still finished top of their division – no mean feat for a bunch of old farts.

The whole local touch footy division met up at the pub a week later for the awards ceremony. As the cheating yellow team went up to get their trophy, Liz told her team how I’d described the nonce as the ‘dick with the dog’ and they all pissed themselves laughing, just as he was handed the trophy. I’ve told Liz that next season I’ll show up in full hunting regalia complete with horn and coach her team on the finer aspects of manipulating match officials.

Anyway – Liz got a lift back from the pub at close to midnight and was, understandably, completely wankered. It turned out she’d had many chardys followed up with a couple of tequilla slammers. Wine and tequilla? The outcome was inevitable. No sooner had she done the traditional, “I’m really hungry can you make me something to eat,” cry of the pisshead, than she was hugging the toilet and yodelling for Australia. I gave her a pint of water, put her in the shower, made her brush her teeth and then put her to bed with a plastic bin in close proximity in case of night chunders, but she woke up next morning feeling none-the-worse for wear. Git.

Patrol …
Another Sunday, another patrol. Things are winding down now though, because the season’s coming to an end and as a result only three of us showed up. That was the bad news – the good news was that we were all grown-ups, which meant things got done properly and in a timely fashion … and we still got to blat up and down Seven Mile beach on the quad bike.

Nippers was taking place for the first couple of hours of our patrol and Nick offered to let me get some driving practice in, in the IRB. The surf was unthreatening, the water crystal clear and the sun shining. We dragged the boat off the sandbar and into the surf and putted out beyond the break. Then Nick and I swapped positions and I started driving. After about five minutes of this, he said, “I reckon it’s time for your first solo,” and rolled backwards into the water. Ermm … thanks for the warning mate.

I putted around and immediately realised how very different those boats are with a single person in them. They corner woefully, they steer completely differently and they’re very prone to flipping over, because there’s no balast at the front of the boat in the form of a crewman. After a bit of tooling about and a couple of figure eights, I putted back over to pick Nick up. He spotted the tow rope was loose and started stowing it whilst still in the water. I saw a wave coming towards us and gave a little squirt of the throttle so we were face-on to the wave … which had the effect of sending Nick towards the rapidly spinning prop. “Kill the fucking motor!” he shouted and I yanked the emergency release clip off. Ermm…. whoops. I let him drive the boat back to shore – think it’s going to be *some* time before I get my drivers badge.

Tribal council …
At the weekend I attended another gathering of my franchise co-workers. There was plenty to discuss, because John (whose franchise it is) had employed a general manager, marketing bloke, SEO guy, graphic designer and book-keeper. Anyone would think he was getting serious about it.

The meeting took place at a small modern chapel in Port Kembla. For those of you who’ve never been there, Port Kembla is where the steelworks are situated in Wollongong. It’s a truly massive bit of industry which takes up most of the foreshore for a good 10km in either direction. The building we were in looked over the dock and the back of the steelworks with smoke billowing from one massive chimney and flames from a smaller one.

Anyway – the meeting was tedious, but productive. Lots of issues got aired, problems either resolved or actioned to be solved. Turned out that the general manager, the marketing guy and the graphic designer were all poms too. I also noticed that the young lady taking notes and bullet points on the butchers pad was not a local either and in my half-asleep state thought she might be French. That was until I was talking to her later (she turned out to be the marketing guys girlfriend) and it turned out that like him, she was from Leeds. Fuck knows how I could have mistaken a Leeds accent for a French one but there you go – boring meetings on a very warm Saturday have that effect on me.

Here comes the sun…
While Adelaide breaks temperature records and Perth enjoys an unrelentingly hot summer, here on the east coast we’ve had one of those ‘blink and you’ll mis it’ years. Ironically, now that it’s officially autumn and the leaves are starting to fall from the trees, it has warmed up. In fact the last three weeks have been pretty bloody nice.

As soon as I saw the weather was on the change, I got down to the pool shop to have our water tested and get it ready. Just as well, because we’ve been using it a lot – after school swims and weekend with Jack’s mates round. Very nice too.

The long easter weekend approaches now and that means another influx of city-siders to our little part of the world. I checked the 7 day forecast and it said that it was going to get cooler and wetter by the weekend, just in time for the holidaymaking weekenders. Some things really don’t change wherever you are in the world …

Schoolmate…
Jack has a new classmate, he tells us, who I shall call Brian. This new boy is disabled and (according to Jack) all the blood dried up in his brain meaning he can’t talk. Jack revealed that Brian speaks by shrieking and that the first time he did it in class, all the children laughed except for Jack, because Jack just “knew it was the way he spoke and therefore not funny.” Funny how the Jackster can swing from the amazingly childish to the buddha-like mature within the space of minutes.

Aldi…
For those of you who live near an Aldi and who are interested in getting a new computer, may I direct you towards the offer which starts on the 20th of March. They’re flogging one of their excellent German-made Medion branded laptops for $1500. It comes with a phenomenal array of bells and whistles, not least of which is a new high-end Core 2 CPU, 3Gb (!!!!) of RAM and a 512Mb Geforce graphics card. It’s got a 250Gb hard drive, 17″ widescreen display, Bluetooth, WiFi and Ethernet builtin. It even comes with a built-in webcam and a DVB-T television tuner so you can watch (and record) free-to-air terrrestrial digital TV shows. If you know fuck all about computers and are in the market for one – then take it from me – those things are going to walk out of the door. Seriously considering getting one myself, despite already owning two perfectly good laptops and four desktop PCs.

No Country …
… for Old Men. Downloaded it about three months ago, but only got round to watching it the other day, having seen how many Oscars it got … and thought it was a load of arse-biscuits. All the pace of a game of Crown Green bowls and an uber-killer who’s about as menacing as the lead singer from St Winnifreds school choir. Don’t get me wrong, I like the Coen Brothers, I think they’ve made some great movies, but I found No Country to be mind-numbingly dull and the wrong side of stupid.

Enough …
Right – didn’t enjoy retyping that little lot – hope you enjoyed Yesterday 2.0. Later ‘taters ….