Tooth update

I drove up to the city on Monday for my consultation with the oral surgeon (see my Expensive date post for why I needed to visit the oral surgeon in the first place). Yes, the tooth has to come out.

The good:

• My appointment was for 11:45 AM. I expected to wait at least 30 minutes as that’s the norm with every medical specialist I think I’ve ever seen. But no. Right on 11:45 he came out with his previous patient and I was called in.
• The oral surgeon is a nice chap. Very warm and friendly. Looks you in the eye. Treats you like a human.
• He had a cancellation for this Friday, so I was offered that spot for the surgery. It was that or February 2010. I took Friday.
• He had no problem with my request to be totally knocked out for the surgery, though he did say that under local my brain wouldn’t process the sounds I was hearing. Um, I think it would!

The not so good:

• The consultation was $100 and his fee for the surgery will be $450. The anaesthestist’s fee will be around $435, and then there will be the hospital fee. My medical insurance will cover parts of some of these bills, but I’ll still have to pay the rest. Add in the cost (time and money) of driving to the city twice in the one week, plus an overnight stay in Perth after my afternoon surgery.
• Driving to and from Perth in one day (about 5 hours round trip), including a visit to the oral surgeon and a potential client is tiring. Having to come back again on Friday is a pain, but it has to be done.
• Having mouth surgery means a certain amount of pain plus eating only soft foods for a period of time. No steak for me for a while…

This is only the second stage of the process (the first was the temporary filling done on the day I bit into that date). In some months (after the gum has healed) I need to decide if I want an implant or a bridge. If it’s an implant, that means more surgery; a bridge would be done by my dentist. Whatever I decide means more trips to Perth and a lot more cost.

They say that as you age, your health starts to go. In our case, it’s our teeth! No-one mentions that. BTW, my husband has to return to Perth next Tuesday for his new crown — another trip for him plus an overnight stay.

Maybe the tooth fairy will help with the costs!

Strike one

How many opportunities do you give a new business to ‘prove’ themselves? I’m about to give a new business in town one more chance.

After receiving their flyer in the letterbox, I called them last week. We  made a time for them to come around ‘on Tuesday afternoon’ to assess our garden/landscaping situation (I want fire hazards removed), and to discuss with me what I want done and to give me a quote. I waited, and waited, and waited. At 6:30 PM I called the guy. No response. So I called his wife’s mobile — she answered.

She apologised and then called to her husband (I could hear her side of the conversation). Obviously he had totallyforgotten about the appointment as she said something like ‘You remember? You made the time when we were at so-and-so’s place last week…’ then she must’ve put her hand over the mouthpiece as I didn’t hear any more until she came back on the line to apologise again with the excuse that they’d been helping someone move house today.

She didn’t actually say that he’d completely forgotten about the appointment, but I suspect that’s the case. I was ready to give them quite a bit of work too (other gardening stuff after the fire hazards are dealt with). Now I’m not so sure.

We’ve rescheduled for tomorrow morning ‘after 8:30 AM’. So we’ll see if they turn up. If they don’t, that’s it. They will have lost my business.

Not a good start when you’re trying to build a new business in a new town…

Controlled burn at last

Finally! While we were in NSW, the local fire authorities did a controlled burn of the bush block behind our house.

My local contact reckons it’s been 20+ years since it was burned, based on some of the rubbish they found on the block when they burned it. That’s a BIG fuel load. I feel a little safer now, though if fire gets into the crowns of the trees…

10th Etsy Treasury

One of my olive fabric items from my Etsy store was just listed in a Greek-themed Etsy Treasury — my 10th! Here’s the link: http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list_west.php?room_id=74792 and here’s a screen shot (Treasuries are only ‘live’ for a few days, so the link won’t work soon).

NSW Trip: Day 4: Getting to Cessnock and the Hunter Valley

We left Dubbo and headed out on the Golden Highway, retracing some of our route from yesterday (as far as Dunedoo). We stopped in the little town of Merriwa for lunch at the bakery. My husband’s pie was ‘ordinary’ and my BBQ chicken wrap was horrible (cold, made with Chinese Hoisin sauce, and tiny chicken squares that looked preserved!). Then it was back on the road via Denman and Branxton, just south of Singleton.

At Branxton we turned south to Cessnock, where we’d decided to stay for two nights to make our trip to the Hunter Valley wine region worthwhile. We checked into the Best Western Wine Country Motor Inn ($110/night for a standard room), which is right in the heart of Cessnock. Very convenient! And surprisingly quiet.

Right next door to the Best Western was the Cessnock Rugby League Supporters Club, so we wandered over there to play some pool, and discovered that they had meals for $10 a head, including a glass of beer or house wine!

We couldn’t go past the pork roast… The red wine I had was from a cask of de Bortoli Cab sav, and was perfectly acceptable. And for $10 a head, it was a really good deal. The $3 per game pool table was a bit rich, though.

NSW Trip: Day 3: Dubbo

The whole reason for going to Dubbo was to visit the Western Plains Zoo (now part of Taronga Zoo). We’d always said that we should do this trip ‘one day’ — especially after we visited the San Diego Wildlife Park at Escondido some years back — and now that day had arrived.

The zoo is just on the outskirts of Dubbo, so is really easy to get to (once you’re in Dubbo, of course!). But it’s pricey. It costs $45 per adult for entry to the zoo. This is for a two-day pass, but there’s no option to purchase a single day ticket — you can only purchase a two-day pass. On top of that are charges for bike hire (min. $15 per bike; $21 each for a bike with 3 gears; $69 for a golf cart-style buggy), and all hire charges are for a minimum of 4 hours, so no option to hire for an hour.

You can drive around the zoo in your own car (about a 5 km loop) and get out and walk to the exhibits, or walk the entire loop, or hire a bike or buggy. We hired bikes, but because the sun was out and had some heat, we had to purchase peaked caps and sunscreen too (another almost $50). All up our trip to the Dubbo zoo cost us around $200… And we were only there for about two hours.

Why two hours? Well, to be honest, that’s all it took. We drove around slowly on the first pass, stopping for me to get out and take some pictures. Then we bought the caps and sunscreen, filled in all the paperwork for the bike hire, then rode around the loop and some of the inner trails, again stopping to take photos etc. It really only took two hours. And we’re not at all fit. A fit rider would so it in much less, even allowing for stopping and taking photos. (Pictures are here)

We considered our expenses for those two hours our charitable contribution to the zoo…

So, what to do for the rest of the day? It was around lunchtime, and we’d booked a room for two nights, so we couldn’t check out. The bike hire attendant had suggested we go to the Hunter Valley and do a ’slight detour’ via Dunedoo to see Gulgong and Mudgee, so we decided to do that drive this afternoon.

Gulgong is a very historic town, famed for its connection to Henry Lawson (famous Australian poet), and is know to most older Australians as ‘the town on the $10 note’… that’s until they redesigned the notes back in the 1980s and took it off the $10 note! Gulgong has narrow streets, massively high kerbs, and a so-so bakery where we bought pies for lunch.

Next stop was Mudgee, where the streets were much wider. Pretty town, though we didn’t stop for any length of time. If we’re out that way again, we’d stop there and perhaps check out some wineries in the region.

From Mudgee, we headed in a loop back to Dubbo via Ulan (a dot on the map and nothing more when you get there!), then towards Wellington, then took the Goolma road direct to Dubbo.

A comment about the roads out here in western NSW — they are narrow, have narrow shoulders, have a LOT of truck traffic, and are really potholed, patchy and rough in many places. They need serious work. I thought some of the country roads in Western Australia were bad — they’re far better than the NSW roads we travelled on.

We had an early dinner when we got back into Dubbo, at a place we’d spotted earlier — SSS BBQ Barns. My husband had the full rack of BBQ pork ribs ($28.95), and I had a half rack (more than enough; $12.95). They were delicious! The meat melted right off the bones and you really didn’t have to handle the bones at all. Bonus points for the country music they played too!

NSW Trip: Day 2: Getting to Dubbo

Monday 26 October was a wild, wet, and cold day. Some parts of Sydney had 110 mm of rain that day (some 5+ inches)…

It was time to test out the GPS! We had to get from the airport, out of Sydney, and on our way to Dubbo, and we expected to take much of the day getting there. My work colleague is called Susan, so my husband decided to call the Garmin GPS ‘Susan’. I fired her up, entered Dubbo as our destination, and sat back to let her guide us through Sydney and up and over the Blue Mountains. Sounds easy, right?

Not so much. Here are some problems I found with my first-ever GPS user experience:

• GPS units want you to know where you’re going. They REALLY want an address. A specific address. Not just a city like ‘Dubbo’. I learned later that you can enter a highway number and it’s happier. But when you don’t know the highway numbers either, that’s a problem!
• GPS units want to take you onto toll roads. Which is not a problem if there are cash booths for people like us from out of state in rental cars and without fancy electronic passes. But when there’s no cash booth (as announced prior to the M7 Motorway), we tend to freak out. What will happen? Will we be fined lots of money? How can we avoid the toll roads? Will some barrier come down and crush us if we go through a tool booth without an E pass? (we don’t ahve toll roads in Western Australia…) We exited the M5 before the M7, but Susan kept wanting to take us back on to the M7. I was trying hard to figure out where we were using a street directory; we were in some industrial area… Fortunately, I spotted a service station and the lady there very helpfully gave me the toll road phone number and told us that we could go on the toll roads as long as we called the number within 48 hours and paid via credit card over the phone. That was a relief! So Susan got us back on to the M7. I later found out that there’s a ‘Detour’ button on the GPS and pressing that means that the GPS recalculates the route based on the direction you’re currently going in.
• GPS units take you in directions you don’t expect. I had a mud-map of the area (a single page map that encompassed much of NSW), and I expected that Susan would direct us off the M7 on to the M4/Highway 32, which goes up over the Blue Mountains via Katoomba. A nice, wide, dual carriage highway that I’ve seen from the train to Katoomba. Nope. Susan decided that we should go past the M4 exit and on towards Richmond, where she then took us on a circuitous route via Kurrajong over the Blue Mountains on a weirdly named road called ‘Bells Line of Road’. I’m sure it was very scenic had the clouds not been covering much of the road and had it not been raining buckets! It was a narrow, winding, tree-lined, single-lane road, with no shoulders for the most part. We eventually got to Lithgow, bypassing Katoomba altogether… Another thing I found later — I could have changed Susan’s settings to avoid toll roads and to take the most direct route.

Once we got to Lithgow, we were out of the heavy rains and only encountered patchy showers. It was still cold though. We were also on the right road from Lithgow onwards (Highway 32), and so we drove on through Bathurst, Orange, and Wellington, before finally reaching Dubbo late in the afternoon. It’s pretty countryside — more undulating than I expected. I guess I expected flat plains, not rolling ones!

We booked in to the Cattleman’s Inn in Dubbo for two nights ($115/night), then had a lovely — but HUGE! — meal in their restaurant. We both had the steak — a 600g ribeye on the bone, with peppercorn sauce, mashed potatoes, and a side salad (for only $2.50 extra, not $7 like some places charge) — along with a 2008 PepperJack Cabernet Sauvignon. Yummy!

Next stop: Dubbo’s Western Plains Zoo (the reason for going to Dubbo!)

NSW Trip: Day 1: Getting to Sydney

We left home around 6 AM for the 2.75 hour drive to our friends’ place in Perth, where we parked the car and from where we caught a cab to the airport (our friends were at an event so couldn’t take us like they usually do).

It was SUCH a relief (and a novel experience for me) to not have a laptop bag! I could just walk right through the hand luggage screening and not deal with the hassle of pulling a laptop out and then getting it back into my bag while others were also clamouring for the limited countertop space.

After hanging out for an hour or so at the Qantas Club, we caught the 11 AM flight to Sydney. There were quite a few police at the Gate — several members of the Finks motorcycle club were on board, heading back from some sort of gathering they’d had in Perth the previous few days. They were sitting quite some rows back from us, and as far as I could tell, were absolutely no problem to anyone. When we got to Sydney, there were NSW police waiting at our Gate too — probably for the same reason.

The more I read about the loss of services on airlines, the more I appreciate Qantas. Ours was a CityFlyer lunchtime flight and we were served a hot lunch, with free wine and soft drinks. Here’s what we had on our lunch tray (just a reminder of what it was like for the Americans who have lost these services over the past 10 or 20 years):

• Soy chicken with rice and veges
• Bread roll and butter
• Cheese and crackers
• Small Toblerone chocolate
• Water
• Wine
• Soft drink
• Ice cream afterwards
• Tea/coffee

We arrived in Sydney as expected around 6:30 PM, but it was well after 8 PM by the time we left the airport to drive about 500 metres to the hotel. Why? Because Europcar tried to give me the run around! I had checked out car rental prices on the internet and found that if I booked via Alamo (US), the deal for a car supplied by Europcar was cheaper than Europcar’s internet price. I’d called Europcar Australia some weeks earlier and asked if they could match the Alamo price. They said they couldn’t and to book through Alamo, which I did (it was some $150 cheaper).

When we got to the Europcar counter, they had my booking for a standard size car (‘Toyota Camry or similar’) but wanted to put us into a Hyundai i30 (?) hatch, which they said was *their* standard-size car! No way. First, the hatch didn’t have a boot (trunk for the Americans), and I insisted on a vehicle that did as we would be travelling and I didn’t want our luggage to be visible. So then the Europcar agent tried to get us into a Hyundai Elantra. Um, no! That’s not a ‘Toyota Camry or similar’. So I insisted that we get a ‘Camry or similar’ as we were going to be travelling a few thousand kilometres in the country and needed a decent car for country driving.

Eventually we got what I’d paid for — a silver Toyota Camry. The agent (who was very nice, by the way) said that a Camry was their full-size car, and so he’d give me a ‘free’ upgrade for the price I’d already paid with Alamo. Oh, and I’d booked a GPS too, and while we were waiting for a Camry to ‘become available’, the agent showed me how to attach it to the windscreen, turn it on etc.

With all that hassle, it was close to 8:30 PM by the time we found and checked into the hotel (Quest Apartments, Mascot), which is right near the airport. We’d seen the Ibis Hotel just two blocks away and walked there for dinner (Quest doesn’t have dining facilities). The food was great but the service was poor, except for the trainee who was good.

The Quest room was good ($125 a night). Small-ish, but you expect that for an airport hotel. It was very quiet too — I thought the windows might be  double-glazed, but they weren’t.

Here’s the ‘barcode’ painting above the bed in our Quest room — I wonder how much they paid for that masterpiece?:

Next stop: Dubbo…

 

Journal covers

I found a great pattern for a journal cover in a quilting magazine recently. I’d been meaning to try one out after my friend Whitney suggested it a few months back. But I just hadn’t seen a pattern I was inspired by.

So this weekend, I took the plunge and decided to make a journal cover from that pattern using a piece of batik I’d cut up into curves and sewn back together again at our retreat at the end of September (thanks for teaching me that technique, Michelle!).

I really liked how the covers turned out, and so I made some more — five altogether, and I have plans for another five at least! They’re pretty easy to make, but it takes a lot of time to do all the embellishing and decoration. Also, the materials cost a bit — one A5-size journal cover uses up much of two fat quarters (one for the cover, one for the lining) plus a decent size piece of quilt batting. So each one costs around $15 before I even start.

Here are pictures of the first five journal covers I made (the Fall Flowers one is already sold — Whitney saw it and just had to have it!) — they are all available for sale from my Etsy store:

Spring weather

Finally, the first warm day in months! It was a long hot summer extending almost into June, and it’s been a long cold winter, extending well into October. Today we had the first fine, warm (but pleasant), sunny day in months. And it was my day off! So after I’d done some gardening, I packed a picnic lunch and we headed out for a drive. Everything is still really green at the moment, though in a few weeks the heat will dry it all out and it will turn yellow/brown and the weather will get too hot for a picnic in the bush.

We stopped at a picnic spot on the Blackwood River for lunch, and saw a couple of bobtail goannas (we’d seen a live snake on the road just before we got to the picnic spot), as well as some blue wrens. Only three or four cars crossed the bridge in the hour or so we were there so it was incredibly quiet except for the birdsong.

Blackwood River on Winnejup Rd

View of Blackwood River from picnic shelter

Spot the blue wren

Bobtails were enjoying the spring weather too!