Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Today was another busy day - and would you believe it, the sky was cloudy and it didn't change all day - what's with that? :-)  Last night, it actually poured rain and the 'natives' (our landlords and their neighbours) shouted for joy in the morning when they saw that it had rained.  It has been ages since it's rained and now the grass in many areas looks green - it's amazing how fast the rain worked.

Julianne picked us up in her car today and, after dropping her off at her work, we dropped our videos off at Blockbuster's and then headed to Bunnings (like a Home Depot).  Mike wanted to check out the cost of a few things we have at home to decide if he wanted to bring them to Australia or not.  The two big things he checked out were a generator and an air compressor.  He has decided to bring the generator, but not the air compressor.  The cost of the air compressor is $200. and by the time he built a crate to house the compressor to move it to Australia and added the cost of moving it, it would be around cost to buy it here.  The cost of the generator is $500. so he will likely have that shipped over from Canada.

While we were looking around the store (I think this will be one of Mike's new stores to go and stickybeak around when we are here), we saw this nice outdoor set that seemed to be a reasonable price.  We found a guy who worked in that department and he showed us an even nicer one (yes, a little bit more expensive, but not too much) and we really liked it.  It included a glass table with an umbrella in the middle of it, six chairs with  reversible covers, a two seat swing, and two loungers.  We are going to keep an eye on it when we get back to see if it ever comes on sale.  A girl we talked to said that things are so low in cost there that they rarely go on sale, but we will keep an eye on it, just the same.

When we arrived in Sydney in October, Mike bought a cell phone with a pre-paid plan: he paid $49 for this plan and for that he got $350. worth of calls to any cell or land line and $350. to any Vodafone phone (that's the name of the cell phone company - like Fido or Bell Mobility).  Since we hadn't used the phone as much as we thought we were going to, there ended up being tons of money left on the plan.  So, Mike went online last night to figure out how much it would cost to call the girls from the phone.  It turned out we could talk with each of them for about half an hour.  So, in the Bunnings parking lot, I called Terri-Ann (no answer), Krystal (no answer), Jennifer (bingo - answer :-)  When I got a hold of Jennifer she told me that Terri-Ann had just called her.  When we were finished our call, I asked Jennifer to call Terri-Ann and tell her that I was going to call.  Terri-Ann had heard the phone ring when we first called, but they were in the middle of Family Home Evening and so she didn't answer the call then - she did when I phoned back.  When I finally got a hold of Krystal, it turned out that she had been at her acting class and had just returned home when I called the second time.  It was really great to talk with the girls and get more caught up on what is happening with them. 

Our next stop was to the Council offices (like City Hall) to find out what they could tell Mike about starting his own business.  They were only able to supply Mike with information regarding the types of business allowed in the various zoning areas.  This mostly deals with if you are allowed to have employees, if you require additional parking, or if you are allowed to put up a sign, most of which will not apply if Mike decides to open his own handyman business (which he is thinking about).  The woman there wasn't too sure where Mike could go for more information, but suggested he try the Office of Fair Trading for more assistance.

Last on our list for today was to do the grocery shopping at Woolworth's.  We chose to do it there as opposed to Coles (which is where we went last week) because we had to buy our Vodafone refill from Woolworth's (they give a 10% discount there).  We checked out the produce there and it's not as nice as Coles and there wasn't as big a selection in the bakery section there, either.  However, we do get frequent flyer miles at Woolworth's.  We are going to check if Coles does something similar to the air miles - if not, we might be shopping at both stores.

By the time we were finished with all the stops on our list, it was almost 2pm and way past lunch.  So, we decided to use a coupon on the back of one of our dockets (receipts) to get a pizza from Domino's.  It turns out that since it was Tuesday today, they had a deal on (Cheap Tuesdays) and it was cheaper than the deal on the docket.  We ended up getting a large Double Bacon Cheeseburger pizza (they don't know what large is over here - their large is like a medium pizza in Canada) with ground beef, shredded bacon and mayonnaise on a barbecue sauce.  While we were waiting for the pizza to cook, I realized that I could have asked for thick crust at no extra cost (that is what I'll get next time).  The pizza was very tasty - we like the way they have barbecue sauce as a choice over here.

When we were finished eating, it was time to go and pick up Julianne from work.  We were a little disappointed that the time had gone so fast as we were planning on spending some time at the beach today.  What we have decided now is that we will do a quick shop on Friday (when we will have a loan of Julianne's car again) and then spend the rest of that day on the beach - it will be something for us to look forward to all week.  I just checked out the weather for that day and it's going to be 31C and sunny - a perfect day to go to the beach, don't you think? :-)

We spent the evening playing lots of games of cribbage (winner and loser crib), added some more entries to our cruise blog and watched a movie.  The movie was called 'Wicker Man' and it starred Nicolas Cage.  It's about a police officer who is asked to go to a secluded island to investigate the disappearance of a local girl.  It sounded so good on the cover, but it ended up being fairly creepy.  We gave it a 6.5.  We have three movies left from the library to watch over the next week.