Winner

Blimey. I got a phone call yesterday to tell me that I had won a holiday. A seven day, all expenses paid skiing holiday in New Zealand. It came as a bit of a shock, but a very pleasant one.

When I bought my digital camera I entered a draw. Well, what do you know, I won. Bobo’s reaction to this was to run around the lounge all of last night singing – "Andy’s a weeeeener" – I think she is quite pleased as well.

Of course, there had to be a drawback didn’t there. The holiday has to be taken before November 2002 and we leave the country on the 1st of July. So, it looks like we will be going in the last week of June. <monty burns>Excellent</monty burns>.

Blast from the Past

I was browsing through the racks at HMV at lunch time, whilst I waited for my passport photos to develop next door, when what should I find but a complete blast from the past. Winking at me from the "P-S" section was Wise up Suckers from the poppies. Well, at the bargain price of $10.95 (thats about four quid to you lot in the mother country) it was a steal. Its spinning in my laptop CD drive as I type this and its taking me back to old Birmingham town …

Wedding Update

The photographer has been booked. My sole contribution was to get him to round his price down by three pounds. Small, but worthwhile I think you will agree.

If you want an idea of what the snaps will look like, let me introduce you to Mike Browne.

Preparations

Things continue apace at Todd/Perry towers. Preparations for our imminent return to the mother country are slowly being completed. Bobo has managed to write some emails to her global human resources team advertising her availability for work (as long as it is in London of course) and I have started compiling a list of all of the people we need to notify that we have moved.

Normally its quite easy in this country, you just get Australia Post to redirect your snail mail to your new address for a period of between three and twelve months. They will even do this to an overseas address, a very useful feature of the service. The snag comes when people want to send you things, in our case wine. Its going to be hard to cancel our winery subscriptions.

Not to mention, how do you go about suspending your health fund membership? In this country its virtually obligatory to have private health cover if you earn more than two sheckels a year and there are penalties if you don’t. Specifically, if you are over 30 years old and don’t have private health cover the premium rises for every year you are not covered. So, we have private health cover.

But we are leaving the country for a bit so we don’t want to continue paying for it whilst we aren’t here and can’t claim on it. The clincher is that if we cancel the cover we are immediately penalised and will be liable for much greater premiums when we come back. So our choice is to continue paying for ineffective insurance or suffer greatly increased premiums when we take it up again. Time for some delecate negotiation with the people at NIB. Wish me luck.