A week of woes... and some bright spots

We've had what you might call "a bit of a week". You may recall me moaning back in December about how dearest husband's clients haven't paid us. Guess what? They still haven't paid us, although Australia's second-largest bank (you know, the one that delivered 30% cash earnings growth to $3 billion to May 2010) has now sent us a contract. They didn't like our contract (you know, the one we sent to them in November 2009. The one they lost. The one we re-sent in July 2010), so they've now sent us a new contract: 20-odd pages of legalese including their promise to pay invoices within 30 days (even though our payment terms have always been - and still are - 14 days). Meanwhile the Irish contingent appear to have trouble using a telephone, and the Canadian insurance company? Well, who knows. What with the severe winter weather around their UK Head Office and the fact that they've probably all been on holiday to see Santa and his elves we have made no progress whatsoeover in even finding out whose desk our invoice is on... So we're down to our last $35.

Meanwhile.... back in the real world (you know, the one in which bills have to be paid), darling daughter went ice-skating for her pre-birthday treat last weekend and fell over.

We went from this:





















To this....














In about half an hour. She fell minutes before we were due to leave the rink, and was so quiet about it that I didn't even know until her friend mentioned it in passing. Having recently done my Senior First Aid Certificate I know all about Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation and did all the right things and it didn't seem to hurt much but the next day it was significantly worse and we went off to hospital for an X-ray, which confirmed a buckle fracture of her right distal radius and resulted in a plaster cast... Of course we spent the next day in hospital for a couple more hours having the cast split because it was too tight.

The upshot of darling daughter's fractured wrist is that she can't attend Camp Creative this week, where we'd managed to score a place for her on the highly desirable Spaghetti Circus school. This was her birthday present (her birthday is tomorrow) and she's been looking forward to it for six months, since I had to book and pay for it last June. One broken wrist = no Spaghetti Circus = one devastated daughter.

Then we had the amusement of waiting for dearest husband's plane to arrive on Monday evening. He'd been flown down to Sydney to do a promotional video (yes! He's going to be a techie internet star! I'll post the YouTube link just as soon as I get it!), and was flying back on the last plane of the day. For European readers I probably need to explain that Coffs Harbour Airport is unfeasibly small: we're only just beyond the point of being able to meet your friends and relatives on the landing strip (OK, slight exaggeration)...

The last plane of the day touches down at about 7:50pm but hadn't arrived when we got there. The weather was FOUL: driving horizontal rain and howling winds so you couldn't see anything. Instead we listened to the aircraft's engine as it came in to land... saw the lights briefly... and listened to it aborting the landing and taking off again... THREE TIMES.

Poor darling daughter was beside herself: tired, her arm was hurting, the weather was horrid and now it looked like Daddy's plane was either going to crash and burn or fly back to Sydney. Sometimes being almost 9 years old is very hard. After the third attempt at landing someone wearing a sou'wester (haven't seen one of those in years) wheeled out a big flashing red light onto the tarmac which was apparently meant to enable the pilot to see the ground. What we really needed was Bruce Willis to leap out from under the runway and light flares. Anyway, we went for a little walk to see if we could find anyone who could tell us what was going on (answer: no, they were all barricaded into a room behind the check-in desk and wouldn't come out), and when we came back the plane had miraculously landed. Hooray!

So the week hasn't been totally dark: we had a lovely evening with friends yesterday to celebrate a birthday, the sun is actually shining today which means I've been able to put on some washing, Daddy got home OK and I've been out in the garden weeding and planting. But I have to say that my stress levels are only going to normalise when someone pays a bloody invoice.