mykrocosm

Went to the Bridal Fair down at Adelaide Shores this morning. Urk… amazing how much cr… accoutrements there are for a wedding.

Went to a real simple wedding tonight. It was a registry job followed by a backyard party. Everyone had a great time. Despite having both their families present, the bride and groom managed to stave off all kinds of pressure and do it just the way they wanted, and hang what anyone else thought. I was impressed, it was really gutsy of them. Somehow I don’t think we’d get away with the same thing!

We’ve had four different plumbers through in the last week, all from the same company, trying to find the source of a blocked drain. Every single time, we have to explain the situation, and every single time they run the same tap and drainage tests, and perform the same unblocking operation with the hose, before saying they’ll have to come back another time. Is it too much to ask that the company at least try to send the same plumber out each time? Could it be that for every unsuccessful visit they’re divesting the property manager of another couple hundred quid? Surely not.

They finally decided to do some digging and managed to open up this rather impressive hole in the footpath which then remained like this for two weeks until they ran out of paying jobs and decided to come back and fill it in. Fortunately we’d warned nearby parents of toddlers and kittens, and tried to cover the hole as best we could, so no accidents occurred.

Google Calendar came out recently. It’s great! I’ve set up 9 different calendars on my account, 3 or 4 of which are public calendars such as holidays and AFL fixtures, and the rest are my own for things like birthdays, events and to-do reminders. Obviously it’s a beta, but there’s one thing that really bugs me about it. It’s the search feature, which is especially irritating since it comes from Google, the king of search.

Set up an entry called “John Smith’s birthday” (note the apostrophe), do a search on “Smith”, nothing shows up. You have to search on the literal text, “Smith’s” for it to appear. This is totally unintuitive and I use it (or attempt to use it) often enough for it to be annoying. It’s so disappointing since the real Google search page doesn’t suffer this problem. I hope they fix it soon.

We just got back from Mt Gambier! It was great to spend the weekend with the family again (last year Flea and I did that crazy road trip around the Eyre Peninsula instead) and of course we ate far, far too much As well as all the usual tennis and walks around the lakes we got some golf in too. Here’s some pics of the others :

(click for larger photos)

And a shot of me below. I hit some sweet drives, though the accuracy was a little off. I managed to hook one right into a cow paddock and ended up wriggling through the barb wire fence so I could play a 9 iron back onto the fairway. And a few other shots stayed on the course, but only just…

(click for larger photos)

What beautiful weather. What a great weekend!

So little ol’ Adelaide finally gets its own Swedish furniture store, or if you’re of a Tylerian bent, Evil Corporation number #231.

Last night was their preview opening, a kind of test run. Despite it being invitation-only, they managed to seriously underestimate the number of cars arriving, and the carpark was chockers in minutes. We got sent out all the way out to Adelaide Shores to park, and had to wait for a charter bus back. That was a real drag, though once we got to IKEA we didn’t mind.

It was great fun looking at all the furniture and room layouts, and observing the design principles that go into every product. The store was extremly busy obviously, but it didn’t seem all that crowded. I imagine it’d be quite comfortable during normal trading, with plenty of space to circle your prospective purchases. With 24,000 square metres, it’d want to be roomy! We’d picked up a few things by 8pm and tried to get out before the closing rush but we’d left it too late. There was already a massive queue through the warehouse.

That damn queue. We were stuck in it for two and a half hours! Thanks to all the shop girls for handing out bottled water and Swedish chocolates up and down the line, it certainly was appreciated, but after a while there’s only so many chocolates you can eat. A couple of those Ikea hot dogs would’ve been a lot better, eh?

As our stomachs rumbled, we thought several times of dropping all our purchases and hotfooting it to the exit, but then the queue split into 17, and they all started moving a lot quicker. All except ours, which seemed to be heading (without moving) right for register 11. As we inched agonisingly closer, the cause of the delay became apparent.

Picture if you will, this enormously fat woman, squeezed into a tiny slot at the front of the cash register, which incorporated some sort of mini folding seat. She’d help you take your purchases out of your yellow shopping bags and with great determination pack them tightly onto the conveyor in some elaborate three-dimensional Tetris configuration, sweating profusely and stopping frequently to drink from her water bottle. Your jammed purchases would then scrape down the length of the conveyor, a grand distance of two feet, where the cash register girl would carefully extricate each item from the conveyor trying not to cause a collapse, locate its barcode and scan it. Then she’d place it on a second conveyor behind her, which in turn would convey your purchase another whole two feet to the third girl, who would pack your purchases into the bags you’d provided. Oh, you didn’t put enough of the 20c paper bags or $1 plastic blue bags on the conveyor with your goods? Then the message would come back from the packing girl to the cash register girl, and forwards again to the conveyor loader, who’d help you select some more bags, and send them down the conveyors again.

A quick glance at the other registers soon revealed two things. (a) Most of them were operating with 2 checkout chicks, having foregone the luxury of the convey loader for the simple practicality of having customers place their own items on the conveyor, and (b) Of the other tills that were operating with three checkout chicks, the conveyor loaders were sensibly loading items onto the conveyor ONE AT A TIME, with all barcodes facing the same way, thus allowing their scanning coworkers to do their work much, much faster with the minimum of handling.

As we watched the sheer incompetence in front of us, and the enormous queue behind us shrink and shrink and shrink until it was all consumed by the other faster moving registers, and despite joining the queue a full HOUR before those people, WE were going to be last to be processed, it was all I could do not to scream at this grossly idiotic woman. I wanted to lunge out there and tell her to get out of the damn way so we could load the conveyor properly.

When we finally left the building and tasted fresh air again, we realised in dismay that we still had to wait in the freezing cold for the charter bus to come along and return us to our vehicle. By the time we got home it was 11pm and our stomachs had given up for the day. Pretty soon so had we! Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

A friend just upgraded his home office. Sweet setup!

(click to enlarge)

We’ve been racking up the miles for two weeks, scouting for locations for the big day…from McLaren Vale to the Hills and up and down the coast. Think we found a place today…. finally! Only a few million more things to do…