Not My Mother

Still, it’s a lovely surprise, even if my statement says I’ve got unpresented cheques (unlikely, since I’ve always had direct deposits done), and that Dave’s dividends are supposed to go to the account that he closed a couple of months ago. Oops.

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Christmas was a great success. Everyone had a lovely time (or at least lied and said they did), and I got by with the minimum of screaming matches with my mum. We got some lovely pressies too. My favorite was the complete boxed set of Friends DVDs from Dave. When we lived in London Friends was on about 4 times a day on various channels, and during my 2004 Summer of Despair before I met him, I got in the habit of watching every single showing. So after that it was a joke that Friends was always on. But here, it isn’t! So he bought me the DVDs so I can watch them while nursing the baby, and I cried because really, he is the most thoughtful person. I got him a book on forbidden Lego models and half a Crumpler bag for work (the other half was his family Kris Kringle gift) and he was happy too.

Mum stayed with us from Christmas Eve through to Sunday when we drove her back to my home town, and it was mostly okay. Our relationship is… frustrating, is the best word I can come up with to describe it. Frustrating, for many different reasons and for faults on both our sides. Remind me to tell you about it sometime. It’s hard to explain without giving you the full story but the full story would probably take up the whole internet so it will have to wait. Anyway, we had a few issues on Christmas day, but afterwards we were mostly okay and Saturday was actually successful. And then she went home :-)

Yesterday (Monday) was Boxing Day holiday here and we went to see Avatar in 3D, which I thought was absolutely brilliant, and then we went to Myer and bought a Dyson handheld vacuum cleaner. I have been lusting after one of these for ages, we really need one because of the budgie and the new baby and I just don’t want to have to haul the big vacuum out every day. It has a power head! Myer only had it 15% off, but we also had a bunch of reward gift cards that have been hanging around for months, so we ended up getting it for $200 instead of $349. And I thought that was absolutely brilliant as well.

And then Dave’s sister and her boyfriend came over and we had a BBQ and played a couple of games of Ticket to Ride until midnight, and now I’m exhausted and I don’t want to see a single other person for a week at least.

I hope your weekend was as successful!

Attention Aussie readers: Via my pureprofile account I’ve discovered Quickflix is having a special offer of 2 months’ unlimited trial for $5 (their normal trial is just 14 days free, which I don’t think is long enough to be useful at all). For those who don’t know, Quickflix is an online DVD rental like netflix in the US and Lovefilm in the UK: you add a bunch of movies to your queue, they post some to you, you keep them as long as you want and when you’re done you post them back and they send you something else from your queue. There are no late fees, it’s all done on you having a maximum of 2 or 3 out at a time, although most of the plans do have a limit of how many you can rent in a month.

I was signed up to Lovefilm in the UK for a while and really liked it, but hadn’t bothered doing it here. For a start, it’s more expensive than it was there, plus Australia Post doesn’t have the next-day delivery times of the UK, so you’ll have more delays in getting your films. Also, the drawback is that while you can prioritize your DVDs, you are still at the mercy of what they have available so if you’re trying to watch a series you could be waiting for the next disk for a while. Or what if what you get sent doesn’t match your mood on the day? Bummer. So since we’ve not really been watching that many movies we’d been sticking to the local video shop instead. (And yes, I know you’re also limited by what your local video shop has, but ours always had dozens of copies of new releases and was reasonably cheap, so we were happy)

But we haven’t yet got around to finding a new local video shop, and $5 for two months was a bargain to try out their service. A bargain! So I signed us up and gave Dave the login details and by the looks of it we’ve just spent the last hour putting every single blu-ray DVD they have on our list. Currently our list goes: Tudors series 2, chick flick, chick flick, action, chick flick, action, action, chick flick, chick flick, chick flick… and everything Hayao Miyazaki has done tagged on the end. (I’m expecting Dave will reorder those chick flicks to their rightful place real soon!) I’ll be interested to see how they go, it seemed every newish release I put on the list was tagged as “long wait” (unlike the local video shop) – hopefully it isn’t too bad.

So anyway – if you’re interested and like watching DVDs, it might be a good thing to sign up for. The code you need is AMS_PUREPROFILE_2FOR5. Just remember to cancel your membership before the end of your 2-month trial if you’re not interested in continuing; I have a feeling they’ll stick you on their most expensive plan otherwise.