jayneandmarty.com

Had a great time at Lindsay’s party for her 7th birthday today: rollerskating at Caribbean Gardens Rollerama.

We hired some very stinky rollerblades (could have hired rollerskates - maybe next time) and hit the rink with 15 or so of Lindsay’s friends and Georgia. The place was a bit like Oakleigh ice arena: probably built in 1976, updated in 1983 and not touched since.

That’s OK though, it had character. Carpeted walls, cool orange arrow tiling in the bathrooms, a really old light-up sign to indicate “gents only”, “experienced skaters only”, “under 12s only” and so on, and the sort of staff and regulars that you’d hope to find in every roller rink in the country:

• an MC dressed up like Jake from the Blues Brothers (pork pie hat, white shirt, black tie … no sunnies though) who thought weird death metal music was good skating music even though it was kids party time on a Saturday arvo,
• a girl who could really rollerskate - totally retro-smooth forwards, backwards and sideways,
• a couple of nutters whizzing around all the 8 year old beginners freaking them out, and
• a speed skater in an Team Australia lycra outfit who was quite good but we couldn’t tell if he really was international level or had just bought the merchandise,

We had a great time blading around with the kids. Neither of us have bladed since we sold our blades in 2004 so we were chuffed that we could still zoom around. Thanks for inviting us Lindsay!

When I next have a spare $300 or so I’m going to make one of these for our kitchen. I’m undecided about whether it’s ultra-geeky or simply the way of the future, but there’s no doubt it would be very handy.

It’s a cheap laptop mounted in a case with a touchscreen, a fold-out keyboard and wireless internet. The only application it needs to run is a web browser. You could use it for:

• Recipes
• Calendar
• Notes, to-do list, reminders
• Email
• TV guide
• Weather
• Paying bills
• Baby-watching (with a webcam)

Cool or geeky?

Spent some time this weekend planning some holiday time for later in the year. We hope to wakeboard at Mulwala as much as we can before it gets too cold, and would also love a weekend at the snow (we haven’t been since our wedding in 2004), but I mean a lengthy holiday. A three to four weeker in maybe October or November.

Overseas is out of the question and so is flying any distance within Australia unless we sell our block of land for a REALLY good price. We can’t count on that, so we’ve narrowed it down to these touring holidays.

• NSW north coast via NSW south coast (i.e. rather than the Hume Hwy route). This would be a great trip. It’s about 3,000km return if our final destination is somewhere like Coffs Harbour.
• Drive around Tasmania. We’d take the car on the Spirit of Tasmania to Devonport and I reckon we’d do about 2,000km.
• The Murray River from start to finish. About 1,200km from Corryong to Goolwa, plus 400km to get to Corryong and another 800km back to Geelong via the coastal route.
• Vic east coast and NSW south coast. Haven’t calculated distances but I reckon on about 2,000km again.

Of those, we’d most like to go to Tassie. It would be the most expensive, as even though we’d save a heap of money by taking our car over (and not having to hire one) the ferry tickets are about $300 each return for a normal allocated seat. You can do it cheaper if you get a day sailing and stroll around the ship for 10 hours but the day sailings only run in summer.

Tassie would be awesome though. We’d start at Devonport, head west along the north coast through Burnie, Wynyard and Stanley to Marrawah, then take the dodgy road from Arthur River to Zeehan, make a quick trip north to Waratah and Cradle Mountain, then backtrack to Strahan. From there we’d follow the main road to Hobart, Huonville, Bruny Island and Port Arthur, then track up the east coast to Freycinet Peninsula, Bay of Fires and Binalong Bay before a bit of inland trout fishing, then Launceston and the Pipers River wine region and finally back to Devonport.

If we can somehow save the extra $600 that this trip needs over the others we’ll do it. I loved my four days in Tassie two years ago and Jayne keeps saying she’d love to take me to see where she grew up. Hopefully we’ll find a way.

We’re trying to teach Max to speak at the moment. Well, bark on command, anyway.

He’s going OK but sometimes gets a bit confused and jumps up, runs around in circles and bolts across the room instead.

So it’s interesting, to say the least.

Apart from picking up the new car on Friday (I named it Siegfried because the numberplate is SGF - if we buy a second car we’ll have to name it Roy) our week was quiet, but one thing is worth mentioning - some good V-Line customer service.

Travelling to Melbourne each weekday really isn’t an effort for us, despite what most (Melbourne) people would assume. We leave home at 7.05am, drive for 9 minutes to South Geelong station and get the 7.16am train. It stops at Geelong and North Geelong, then goes straight through to North Melbourne and Southern Cross (Spencer St). If we get the tram up Collins St instead of walking we’re at work by 8.20. Not bad for an 80km+ journey.

Sometimes (though not very often) the train is delayed. Presumably some of the other daily Geelong/Melbourne trains are delayed too. In fact, it turns out that V-Line didn’t meet its punctuality targets for September, October, November and December. To be honest we didn’t really notice (perhaps we simply don’t care) , but you can’t argue with statistics.

Anyway, Jayne knew that if the targets aren’t met then monthly ticket customers can apply for compensation, so she wrote them a letter last week enclosing copies of our tickets for those months. I wouldn’t have bothered, particularly after she’d tried ringing them, going to the counter, then finding out that you have to write them a letter.

So, when Thursday’s mail included a letter to Jayne from V-Line enclosing 10 single Geelong/Melbourne ticket vouchers (two for each month, and two for the day when we were stuck near Newport station for 2.5 hours because the pesky suburban trains were stuffed - we got home at 8.30 that night), we thought that was pretty good.

Then in Friday’s mail there was a letter addressed to me enclosing another 8 single vouchers. Not sure why there wasn’t 10, and why it came on Friday, but who cares. We now have almost a week’s free travel each (worth almost $150 to us) thanks to Jayne’s pursuit of justice and V-Line’s customer service policies.

Nice.