Last month

OK, we are now into the first week of September & it APPEARS that we MAY be settling on the loan on Tuesday. Late on Friday, I got an email from the bank to say that the mortgage that they had prepared for the 2 Brisbane properties was wrong & could we please get these new ones signed & witnessed. My reply was VERY restrained, compared to what I really wanted to say, because I had spent hours on the Saturday (2 weeks ago) copying & pasting to get them right, & we had sent everything back, both wrong & corrected. I just LOVE fixing someone else's mistakes! But, like good little vegemites, we got the new ones printed, signed & witnessed, ready to take to the local branch on Monday morning.

Meanwhile, yesterday, while Julie was working a full day shift at the NCC, I was busy doing "stuff" around the place, the gate was open & the dogs were "around". Then when Julie got home, Angel was nowhere to be seen, at which point my parenting skills were brought into serious question. Turns out, someone had picked her up & dropped her off in one of the drop kennels at the RSPCA & we got a call when they opened on Sunday morning to say she was there. So Father's Day turned out OK after all. And thank you to my kids who sent me messages today.

The wonderful piece of recent news is that Julie increased her line of credit with the Credit Union in Seattle, to allow us to pay for tickets that April then secured at a spectacularly cheap price, for the 3 of them to join us in November for the trip to Melbourne for Brooke & Paul's wedding. Very exciting! Although actually paying for the tickets turned out to be a major fiasco, as the company only accepts US-issued credit or debit cards. OK, we have one of those, but it has an Australian address, so of course the zip code (postcode) didn't match. It took numerous phone calls & most of the weekend to finally get the transaction processed.

Meanwhile the loan saga continues to just drag on, with the latest drama being me finally convincing the brokers that with AMP wanting to dramatically reduce the lines of credit, we did not have enough cash in the process for the loan settlement to proceed. We are now acquiring private finance, using the motorhome as collateral, for that to happen, hopefully on Friday of this week, over a month since we flew to Melbourne & personally delivered the documents. Financially, it has been a total disaster for us, but we also have to admit that we made those decisions & it ultimately comes back to us. But we still think the bus is worth it. Every time I get in & go for a drive, everything else just melts away.

Meanwhile, I found that I had enough credit card reward point to get a digital SLR camera. It's a Canon EOS 1000D & I am impressed! Many of this month's photos have been the result of me playing with it - close-ups, auto focus, depth of field, continuous shooting, ......

And another revelation, discovery or thought process ( pick any category). I read somewhere that the yeast in beer does nasty things to prostates that are already enlarged (which mine is). I have also heard that a glass of red wine in the evening is beneficial for overall health. So I figured I would put those 2 pieces of data together, & have switched to one (large) glass of Cabernet Merlot every night. Large, because I can. One, because any more than one turns me into a gibbering idiot. The good news is that it's working. I feel better & I can pee at night & in the morning. To REALLY understand this, you have to have been in the position of busting to go but not being able to do anything. Painful, I assure you.

This newsletter hasn't been updated for a while because I've been too damned depressed over the ongoing saga of the finance & the horrendous rate of interest that we are STILL paying because we have not been able to come up with enough cash to pay it off. And we can't settle on the new finance package with the Commonwealth Bank because we need to put too much cash into the settlement to make it happen. Ugh! Apparently, we're not the only ones to have been caught out by the drop in property values.

However, we have managed to escape early for the long weekend, to visit the kids in Melbourne. We left at about 3 on Wednesday afternoon, making Bombala for dinner at the RSL before going on for about another half an hour in the dark, to find a perfect spot about half a mile down the Imlay Road. We turned off onto a forest road & right there in front of us was a perfect flat spot with a straight run into it. Which is more than we can say for the forest road that was supposed to wind around & rejoin the Monaro Highway. It stopped dead at the closest creek crossing, which wasn't a crossing at all! Backing up out of there was not a lot of fun.

BTW, enjoy the new website theme. It was time for a change!