emma_in_dream

First of all, happy Christmas and happy new year.

Also, I attempted to update my Word and Excel... and it has gone into a frenzy and now wants me to sign up for Office 365 for an annual fee.

As far as I am concerned, I have paid for the software so this seems like some kind of ransom.

Advice on returning to my previous Word and Excel for Macs?

So the NBN is rolling out in my area. Is it a good idea to try to upgrade? Or will it just all end in tears and enormous cost? (Eg. my parents’ experience where their phone bill increased significantly and Telstra outsourced workers had to spend 8 hours trying to get it to work and yet it still falls over repeatedly.)

My current calculations and obsessive reading of the meter show us using 529kw over the last 6 weeks, which is a lot more reasonable than this time last year. The testing point is when the next bill comes.

Can anyone recommend a good and cheap plumber?

We will be moving next week. The sad state of Australian telecommunications means we will be inaccessible by most means for some time.

Once I have a new phone number and can read emails etc, I will let people know.

1, Lovely weather over the weekend.


2, Ruby informs me that she is a ‘fan of bottoms’. She has an ad from Lush showing a whole lot of women with no clothes on facing away from the camera. She wants me to photocopy it so it can go on her wall. I am going to assume this is some typical developmental phase.


3, The electrician who came by on Friday was both competent and cheap. And reassuring! My daughters said I was ‘milking it’ when I demanded sympathy after receiving an electric shock from the outside light. But the electrician was concerned and Western Power wound up calling the strata agents to inform them that other original light fixtures would all need replacing as the earthing line on mine has corroded. About half the units probably still have the original lights. So I have a working light and we’ve warned others about the possible dangers.

1, I am really enjoying the television series of *Tomorrow, When the War Began*. I understand the criticisms of it falling in the yellow peril genre, but what I really want is the *Billabong* series to be made into a TV series and since that’s never going to happen (because it is racist in that special 1910-1940 way) I’m happy to have *Tomorrow, When the War Began*.


2, Still contemplating *Captain America* and mentally fixing the bits I found problematic.


3, I’ve bought a new printer, hopefully one that can handle more than one page at a time.

I know I am not very good with computers, but it does seem counter-intuitive that hitting the button marked ‘Process this invoice’ should mean that the invoice is logged out and must be re-entered by Accounts Payable.

So I got Netflix to work and watched *Dare Devil*. However, there's nothing else in there that tempts me so I have turned off my membership until there's something else I want to watch.

I am reading her biography and she apparently had a childhood nurse who had previously worked for Dorothy Wordsworth.


You know what I would like? Some kind of three dimensional computer program that you could use to show the relationships between writers in the nineteenth century.