Christmas comes early

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So no electricity on Friday and same story on Monday - what a joke!

Claire was offered her first day of work today, so it really wouldn’t have been fair for her to stay in for yet another day and I couldn’t very well take a day off work after having only been there for a week! So I had a chat with the building manager, Frank, to see if he would mind letting the lecie bloke in, if indeed he comes. Frank was only too happy to oblige.

I’m not sure if I pushed it a bit much, but I also asked if he could let in the removal people who were delivering the stuff we had sent by air freight from Scotland and the guys who were delivering our suite! To be honest, I think he was delighted to help.

So I was kinda in touch with him on the phone all day. First up - the stuff we shipped from Scotland arrived safely. All 10 boxes and not one single thing was broken - unreal. They really did a top job of packing it up and I really ought to send them a quick thank you e-mail.

Second came the electricity man and got everything connected - Hallelujah! I was going to phone Claire there and then and tell her the good news, but decided to say I hadn’t heard anything and let her have the excitement of switching on the lights to see that they actually work - electricity, after all, was becoming quite an novel idea.

Thirdly came the suite. I knew it was too good to be true. Of course we were never going to come in from work and have electricity in the flat, all of our stuff from Scotland and a suite in the living room waiting for us to sit back on! I kinda had thought that the suite was the most likely thing to have been delivered - second the freight stuff and third the lecie!

So they did bring it - and, apparently, tried for 45 mins to get it into our apartment - but couldn’t. I later found out from Frank that when they realised they couldn’t fit it into the lift, 4 of them (Frank and his mates) actually tried lifting it up the stairs (we’re nine floors up!). They got as far as the third floor, but then the shape of the stairs changed and they had to take it all the way back down again. I kinda felt a bit bad for them - we hadn’t even considered that this might be an issue. And actually, the suite was quite small in comparison to others.

So we got home - Claire was delighted that the power was on but, as we didn’t have any where to sit (other than the patio furniture that we bought that, by now, I had realised sends 10,000 volts up my arm every time I touch the metal part of it) we headed straight out to get some dinner.

We found a restaurant called Rosco’s more or less outside our door. The staff were great - one of them, Gill, is from Selkirk as it turns out. A bottle of wine and some pasta later - we headed back home (with a second bottle of wine), sat on the floor opening our boxes and having the second bottle - was just like Christmas really!

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Photos

Our view of the ocean
Took this on the balcony the other week.

Fawkner Park
This is looking the other way on the balcony

Our stuff sent by air freight arrives!
We were like kids trying to guess what was in each box!