I have officially survived my second week of my second year at Mt Doom Secondary College. In fact it is going really well, I'm enjoying it SOOOOOOO much more than last year it's hard to describe. My classes are all quite good - I don't have anything as horrendous as my shocker from last year, which is now causing all sorts of psychic mayhem on a new bunch of victims. The Goblin Powered Vehicle team is slowly coming together as I get my head around the various aspects of it (mainly paperwork and more paperwork). Just struggling a wee bit at the moment to get skool stuff done along with various other commitments like Boog's upcoming birthday.
Assorted exciting things have happened lately... we upgraded the intarweb connection to a new naked DSL thingy with VOIP. Took about a trillion years to be set up and for the modem to arrive, the universe had actually ended and then started up again. We were stuck with dialup for a while. The package eventually arrived at skool, and I brought it home to set up. The setup CD was useless, it kept on telling me there was an IP address conflict when there were no other devices connected, so I had to "kick it old school" as the kids say, and set it up the old fashioned way, which was fine. The connection is now running at about 6 Mb/s instead of <256 kb/s that we used to have, which is a bit of an improvement! It is t3h r0xx0r indeed.
Our slum landlord has put the rent up on us again, apparently the cost of cardboard boxes has increased. That's the problem with living in a nice area where house prices are going up by about 40% every hour. The cost of a house in this area actually exceeds the GDP of Australia, and soon the weight of the cash will exceed the mass of the known universe.
We parted company with Sleipnir, the old Corolla, who was slowly decaying in the carport with a couple of poxy electrical problems we weren't keen to fix. We were just keen to shift it and recoup some of the money we had spent, so I think we may have sold it a bit cheaply considering the condition of the car. After a couple of nibbles a guy who lives locally had a look and was impressed enough to buy it immediately.
Blogging has been a bit of a struggle lately, especially when the internet was painfully slow. That is a tad slack of me considering that we had an awesome trip to NZ at Xmas, and then I have done some truly heroic DIY stuff during the holidays. I will blog about these soon!
Uncle Pete popped in briefly last week, and the difference in the way Freya interacted with him was HUGE! She was showing him her toys, running around the house yelling "Boo to you!" and getting cuddles.
More on the Freya front, the changes at the moment are just fantastic. Her language is great, and her memory for things like songs is often surprising. After we got back from NZ, one day she started singing a line from "Meet James Ensor", by They Might Be Giants. We hadn't listened to that for about a month! She has been really enjoying jigsaw puzzles, and after we got back we did them each day but it was a fairly frustrating process, although she enjoyed it. Now she is finishing some puzzles entirely on her own. They have been doing lots of counting at creche, and she's good at that too. The carers always seem to say really good things about her, which is nice (although I wonder if they say them to everyone...).
The toilet training, which was toddling along rather slowly, seems to be working. We tried the pull-up nappy/training pant thingies and they were fairly unsuccessful, they seemed to have some kind of magnetic attraction to urine. Within about three minutes of pulling one on Freya had flooded it with wee. With her normal nappies she would often keep them dry for ages before having a big wee on the toilet. A few times we had put Freya in undies, and initially there was much pant wetting and crying (and Freya was upset too), but lately that had been going fairly well for an hour or so, possibly because we are all a bit more focussed! Today we had her in undies almost all day, and it was a complete success. We reminded Freya to go to the toilet often, but she also asked a few times too.
