Baptism by fire

Among the things that well today was my new bbq.

After work my mate came around. He checked my putting-together-a-bbq skills and pronounced them excellent. He came bearing the gift of an old gas bottle.

Now the trick with an old uncertified gas bottle is to take it to a Zed (formerly Shell) service station. They happily swapped it for filled and checked bottle for $35. Sweet :-)

A beer or 2, home kill steak, corn, mushrooms and onions, and a salad. It was very good. I'm still wistful about the missing smokiness of a charcoal bbq. I have a plan to rectify that.

It wasn't the best of bbq weather and tomorrow doesn't look a whole lot better. That won't stop me cooking a butterflied chicken in it.

In the things that didn't go so well category today was the bungled broadband connection. Tired of the lack of customer service from my existing provider, and over paying for a landline I hardly use, I made a call to change pre-Christmas. 3 times I asked if I needed to be at home. "No". Were they sure about that. "Yes".

You guessed it, a technician phoned me at work. Would someone be at home? "No". And therein lies the problem. He needs access to inside my house but there was a complete failure by 2degrees and Chorus to work this out.

Happily I'm another job logged in an already busy schedule for tomorrow. Then it will be bye-bye landline, and another small slip for a technology we would never have imagined absent from our homes 10 years ago.