Rhonda Bracey: At Random

I drove up to the city on Monday for my consultation with the oral surgeon (see my Expensive date post for why I needed to visit the oral surgeon in the first place). Yes, the tooth has to come out.

The good:

• My appointment was for 11:45 AM. I expected to wait at least 30 minutes as that’s the norm with every medical specialist I think I’ve ever seen. But no. Right on 11:45 he came out with his previous patient and I was called in.
• The oral surgeon is a nice chap. Very warm and friendly. Looks you in the eye. Treats you like a human.
• He had a cancellation for this Friday, so I was offered that spot for the surgery. It was that or February 2010. I took Friday.
• He had no problem with my request to be totally knocked out for the surgery, though he did say that under local my brain wouldn’t process the sounds I was hearing. Um, I think it would!

The not so good:

• The consultation was $100 and his fee for the surgery will be $450. The anaesthestist’s fee will be around $435, and then there will be the hospital fee. My medical insurance will cover parts of some of these bills, but I’ll still have to pay the rest. Add in the cost (time and money) of driving to the city twice in the one week, plus an overnight stay in Perth after my afternoon surgery.
• Driving to and from Perth in one day (about 5 hours round trip), including a visit to the oral surgeon and a potential client is tiring. Having to come back again on Friday is a pain, but it has to be done.
• Having mouth surgery means a certain amount of pain plus eating only soft foods for a period of time. No steak for me for a while…

This is only the second stage of the process (the first was the temporary filling done on the day I bit into that date). In some months (after the gum has healed) I need to decide if I want an implant or a bridge. If it’s an implant, that means more surgery; a bridge would be done by my dentist. Whatever I decide means more trips to Perth and a lot more cost.

They say that as you age, your health starts to go. In our case, it’s our teeth! No-one mentions that. BTW, my husband has to return to Perth next Tuesday for his new crown — another trip for him plus an overnight stay.

Maybe the tooth fairy will help with the costs!

How many opportunities do you give a new business to ‘prove’ themselves? I’m about to give a new business in town one more chance.

After receiving their flyer in the letterbox, I called them last week. We  made a time for them to come around ‘on Tuesday afternoon’ to assess our garden/landscaping situation (I want fire hazards removed), and to discuss with me what I want done and to give me a quote. I waited, and waited, and waited. At 6:30 PM I called the guy. No response. So I called his wife’s mobile — she answered.

She apologised and then called to her husband (I could hear her side of the conversation). Obviously he had totallyforgotten about the appointment as she said something like ‘You remember? You made the time when we were at so-and-so’s place last week…’ then she must’ve put her hand over the mouthpiece as I didn’t hear any more until she came back on the line to apologise again with the excuse that they’d been helping someone move house today.

She didn’t actually say that he’d completely forgotten about the appointment, but I suspect that’s the case. I was ready to give them quite a bit of work too (other gardening stuff after the fire hazards are dealt with). Now I’m not so sure.

We’ve rescheduled for tomorrow morning ‘after 8:30 AM’. So we’ll see if they turn up. If they don’t, that’s it. They will have lost my business.

Not a good start when you’re trying to build a new business in a new town…

Finally! While we were in NSW, the local fire authorities did a controlled burn of the bush block behind our house.

My local contact reckons it’s been 20+ years since it was burned, based on some of the rubbish they found on the block when they burned it. That’s a BIG fuel load. I feel a little safer now, though if fire gets into the crowns of the trees…

Finally, the first warm day in months! It was a long hot summer extending almost into June, and it’s been a long cold winter, extending well into October. Today we had the first fine, warm (but pleasant), sunny day in months. And it was my day off! So after I’d done some gardening, I packed a picnic lunch and we headed out for a drive. Everything is still really green at the moment, though in a few weeks the heat will dry it all out and it will turn yellow/brown and the weather will get too hot for a picnic in the bush.

We stopped at a picnic spot on the Blackwood River for lunch, and saw a couple of bobtail goannas (we’d seen a live snake on the road just before we got to the picnic spot), as well as some blue wrens. Only three or four cars crossed the bridge in the hour or so we were there so it was incredibly quiet except for the birdsong.

Blackwood River on Winnejup Rd

View of Blackwood River from picnic shelter

Spot the blue wren

Bobtails were enjoying the spring weather too!

You know, I’ve been thinking (always a dangerous practice!). I’ve been thinking about how there have been some very overt means of stimulating the Australian economy in the past 12 months. And recently I’ve been thinking about some less overt methods that haven’t been advertised and promoted as economic stimulators, but which really are.

Specifically these two:

• The free swine flu (H1N1 virus) injection available now to ALL 22 million Australians.
• The Australia Post competitions for a Toyota Corolla and a Plasma TV.

The swine flu injection ‘stimulus package’

Just think about it. The Australian government has paid around $100 million to get this vaccine made, which has helped the drug companies and related industries no end. That’s the overt bit.

The less overt bit is what comes with the ‘free’ vaccine. The vaccine is free, but unless you go to one of the (few) free immunisation clinics (and I think you have to be in a high risk category for that) you have to pay your normal consultation fee to get it from your local GP. 

Our local medical practice charges around $50 for a standard consultation, so I’ll take that as an average. Let’s say only 10 million of Australia’s 22 million citizens take advantage of the free swine flu vaccine from their GP. At an average of $50 per visit, that’s just put back some $500 million back into the economy — perhaps money that was lingering in bank accounts not doing anything. If 20 million get the free vaccine, that’s $1,000,000,000!

And not only does that ‘stimulus package’ keep the medical practices ticking over, but all the associated industries including Medicare as well. And it frees up some $500 million or so from bank accounts and puts it back into the economy. I don’t have any problem with that, but maybe it would be more honest if someone really called this for what it is — a stimulus package aimed at getting money from ordinary people’s accounts.

Australia Post

When I was in my local post office today, the nice lady behind the counter offered me two coupons for competitions that Australia Post is running — one for a car, the other for a plasma TV. All I have to do is complete the entry forms, put stamps on them and send them in.

Whoa back there! Put a stamp on it? For a competition run by Australia Post and for which the entry forms only seem to be available from Australia Post post offices? So what’s really going on here? I’d expect that a competition run by Australia Post would accept entries into a box inside the PO. But no. We have to whack a stamp on the entry form!

So, who is this benefitting? Well, Australia Post and the companies offering the prizes will get a big database of potential customers they can market to. And Australia Post gets the revenue from all the extra stamps it sells. At 50c a pop, that’s $1 for each different form submitted.

And does Australia Post actually deliver the entry forms via the normal mail service, or do the forms go into a big bag in the PO waiting until the closing date when they are bundled up and sent as a special delivery to the Australia Post address in Victoria? In other words, is my stamp purchase paying for a normal delivery at 50c a time, or for some special ‘behind the scenes’ delivery method that perhaps costs Australia Post 5c??

Call me paranoid… But that looks like a stimulus package of Australia Post’s own, right there!

Wow! I went to Perth on Monday to do some training courses and drove for the first time on the new Perth to Bunbury highway, which opened just two weeks ago after a few years of construction. Pretty impressive!

The road is smooth, and fairly flat and straight. It’s wide (two lanes all the way plus a good paved shoulder), has a cycle path running alongside it all the way from Perth to Mandurah and quite some way beyond, has rumble strips on the sides, has a massively wide median suitable for a future train line (I have no idea if one is planned, but they’ve allowed plenty of room in case they want to put one down the middle of the highway), and has very wide shoulders to the fence lines with sufficient easement for widening to three or perhaps even four lanes each way in the future. It’s good to see that some thought has gone into projecting future needs beyond perhaps 20 years.

And this new highway cuts about 30 minutes off my drive to Perth — it now takes around 2.5 hours instead of 3 (assuming good weather, and no traffic or roadworks holdups). All those 20 or so traffic lights and the up and down speed limits around Mandurah are a thing of the past now — hooray! Coming home, it took exactly 90 minutes from the Narrows Bridge to the big roundabout at Bunbury.

My only complaint: The poxy speed limit. What’s with dropping the limit from 110 km/h to 100 km/h around the Mandurah exits and then all the way to Perth? This is a brilliant wide road, with no trees on the side, no chance of hitting oncoming traffic, few entrance and exit ramps, limited crossovers, and limited likelihood of hitting wildlife such as kangaroos.

There are plenty of 110 km/h roads in WA (South West Highway south of Bunbury for starters) that are FAR more dangerous than this new highway, yet the boffins decided to cut the speed limit to 100 km/h for the last 80 km or so into Perth. Crazy.

Well done to the construction crews, and well done to ‘Alannah the Planner’ for making sure this project happened. And well done to all those who realised that planning for the future now is not such a bad idea. It’s much harder to widen a road in 5, 10, or even 50 years time if the easements haven’t been secured.

Back in May, my friend Bobbie decided some of us needed a challenge! (details here). The magazine I got from Michelle was on reptiles, and page 35 had some cute pictures of chameleons.

I agonised over what to make — a wall hanging? a tote bag? a stuffed toy? a cushion cover? something else? — and what techniques to use (part of the challenge was to use a technique we’d never tried before).

The first step was deciding what chameleon image to use — I found plenty on the internet, and of course, I had those in the magazine too. I didn’t *have* to use the images in the magazine — but whatever was on p35 was to be the inspiration for what I made. I thought I might do a chameleon’s eye or skin with lots of free motion quilting, but then wondered what I’d make with the eye or the skin as the focus. Nothing popped into my head.

Next, I thought I’d look at what fabrics I had to see if I could get inspiration that way. Go for a rainbow assortment of colours to reflect a chameleon’s changing colours? or emulate the bright green of some of those shown in the magazine? Perhaps the fabric choice would inspire the object I was to make… I settled on some greens and decided I’d start by making the chameleon itself, and let the creative juices do their thing as I was making it.

I have no idea of the name of the techniques I used, but they were new to me! I’d never done something that was free motion machine embroidered onto interfacing [new technique 1], and especially where part of it was double-sided, giving three-dimensionality [new technique 2]. I traced the outline and the general dark and light shapes of my chameleon onto tracing paper and then on to freezer paper [new technique 3]. Then I applied the freezer paper shapes to various green fabric — and got them all round the wrong way as I’d never used freezer paper before, so I had to retrace the shapes again but in reverse… [new technique 4].

I used a base piece of green fabric for the chameleon (whole body), then different green fabrics for the legs, head etc. which I loosely appliqued in order on to the base shape (old technique) so that the topmost elements, such as the legs, were appliqued on last. After loosely stitching on each piece, I used various stitches on the machine, as well as a whole lot of thread painting [new technique 5] to give dimension to the fabric.

But even after a few hours of thread painting and stitching, I still wasn’t happy – the chameleon just didn’t look oomphy (technical term!) enough. The greens faded into each other and unless you looked carefully it was hard to see where the legs were, etc. (Which some might say is the whole point of a chameleon…)

I added fabric to the underside of the tail so that it could float freely [new technique 6] on whatever I decided to put this chameleon onto, then decided to emphasise the body parts by turning the chameleon into a stained glass one, using black bias tape for the ‘leading’ [almost new technique – I’d only used it once before]. NOW my chameleon popped!

But I still didn’t know where or how I was going to use my little work of art. So I let him sit for a while (by this stage, he had acquired a gender, but not a name).

A week or so later, I had my answer! I was leaning toward a cover for the cushion I kept dragging from the sofa and putting on the back on my office chair to help support my back when I sat at the computer all day editing scientific documents. My chair is great, but leaning forward all the time isn’t what the chair is made for, and my lower back had been hurting. Then it hit me! Why not a bolster cushion that would sit right down low in the lumbar region?

Back to the internet to get a bolster cushion pattern (well, not a pattern – just ideas, really). Now I had a place for my chameleon! The last steps were to create some branches for my chameleon to sit on in his leafy background, and to create the sausage shape of the bolster cushion [new technique 7] and stuff it with a roll of batting. I didn’t even take the batting out of the roll — leaving the plastic around it meant it went in easier, and keeps it shape better. Then lastly I added some bright lime green ribbon as drawstring ties [new technique 8] for my bolster cushion so I can adjust it for the chair, and voila! My challenge piece was done!

That’s a long story to get to these pictures, but here you can see my chameleon in his rightful home — click on an individual image to see it in full size.

(I wrote this post in July, but it’s not ‘going live’ until October, after our weekend retreat where all will be revealed by the five of us involved in this challenge — one of the rules of the challenge is that we can’t let each other know what we’re doing! However, I’ve been using my chameleon bolster cushion since late June, and he works a treat!)