Winter is here

Monday 31st March 2008
Winter is here, and the weather forecasters have got it wrong, the temperature went down to about 18 degrees instead of the 25 degrees that were predicted, it rained all day with Perth getting a Months rain in one day, they didn’t state which months rain it was or whether it expected that month to be dry so that it could balance out over the year but it was still quite a bit of water.
We dropped the kids off at school and were told that we weren’t needed for listening duties today because the children don’t take books home over the weekend; they are allowed to play games instead.
Excuse me if I have got this wrong but it seems odd that during the week when time is tight, the children need time to play with friends away from an educational environment, they need time to have a family life, they need to sit down to a well balanced meal, they are expected to have an early night so that they are in top form the following day, they have then been given a book to read in the hope that they will either read it of their own free will or find another busy, time constrained person in the house that has got the time to encourage them.
The alternative would appear to be that you send the child home with a book at the weekend when it is more likely that there will be family around to help them with their reading, when time is less likely to be an issue, when it is not so important that they go to bed early, when the time available will generally be more relaxed and stress free.
If they did that the kids might enjoy it and turn up for school on a Monday with an enquiring mind, but there again that would be a pain in the backside for a teacher.
We had our interview with the management company that runs Busselton Boulevard Shopping Centre today in Bunbury, it seemed to go quite well and we think that they liked us and our ideas, if we are accepted the only thing that may hold it up is that we have asked for either an option on the current lease or a new 10 year lease which if agreed will have to be drawn up and may take time. The management agent didn’t think that we stood much chance but said that she would put it to the owners to see what they said.
When we came out of the interview we drove back to Busselton to check if we had received the mortgage documents, but when we got back we hadn’t received anything so we went to the Café to check our emails. After that we bought a couple of bits for dinner tonight and went home to find that the mortgage documents had arrived.
It was a mad dash then to get the house insured and the mortgage offer signed by 4pm when the bank closed, plus we had to make time to pick up the kids from school. When we got to the insurance office it was about ½ hour before we received our certificate of insurance which meant that it was almost 3pm by the time we came out, so Ian went to the bank to start signing the forms and to make sure that one of us was in there at closing time so that we could not be locked out before signing the documents and ensuring that they reached the lending department with enough time left for the sale to go through on Friday. Carolyn went to school to pick up the kids and came straight back to the bank to sign her bit and we left with about 15 minutes to spare.
The Realty agent has been on the phone suggesting that we withhold money and use it to pay for the outstanding works to be done so we had to pop in to see our settlement agent to see what he thought. He was quite happy with the idea and said that it was quite common in Australia; basically it means that we get the work done to the standard we want and then bill them for it. We are quite happy with the idea because it means that we can have the cooker that we want and only have to pay a portion of the cost, plus the installation will be paid by the vendor and we can get the decorating done before it is fitted.
In the evening the kids went to bed early and we panicked because we thought we had lost lumps of this blog and at one point thought that we had lost the whole lot because of a glitch in the computer that decided to change the name document. We eventually found most of it and saved it to a different memory stick which will hopefully be more reliable, after that of course we had to run a system scan so we ended up having a much later night than intended.