Rant About Interminable Roadworks Outside Our House

What follows is a summarised rant about the IMO totally unacceptable, and really poorly managed + executed + communicated roadworks outside our place, that have been going on for the past 3 months and counting now!  🤬

While I accept that roadworks sometimes have to take place, the manner in which this has whole process has taken place has been nothing short of appalling, and completely unacceptable IMO.  (It's all the more surprising, when the council had only just spent a bunch of money getting another bunch to resurface the whole road like 2 years earlier, to the point I thought that we wouldn't need any further works for another decade!)

It's also somewhat galling to finally find that the company ("Hunter Civil") who won that contract / tender, did so on a "Restricted Tender" project (i.e. the council, for all intents and purposes, could've effectively shoulder-tapped those bastards to offer them this "juicy nugget" project - covering a whole bunch of streets, over 6 months... to what extent that is / isn't true is not really something that can be easily found out just yet though - yeah, there's the LGOIA (Local Government Official Information Act) provisions for finding out such shit, but yeah... it turns out you have to pay them to hire / divert a staffer to gather that info for you... and then they charge *per page* copied in addition to their hourly rate around minimum wage-ish spent doing all that... 🙄)

 

First Impressions of New Ice Cream (Soft Serve) Machine

Tonight, I finally got around to trying out my "new" Ice Cream Machine (soft serve), having originally bought it over 1-2 years ago (i.e. it was on sale during a long weekend, and I'd always wanted a soft-serve machine).

 

Why then has it taken so long to get around to trying it?  Well, mostly being too busy to read the instructions to:

  1) set it up, 

  2) get the ingredients, 

  3) have enough time to set it all up and finally try it

This Easter weekend, I *almost* managed to do that, until I found that we didn't have Vanilla Essence (as called for by the recipe), having thought we did... Oh well! That was one of the "things not going well" that happened that weekend... 

Anyway, tonight was the night, when I finally got to see how well this worked (and/or whether I could say that it's potentially a better system than what two of my colleagues have using a different / newer machine they got at the end of last year).  (Well, on that front, I can say - yes, their one apparently is *really* noisy as it has to grind into solid-frozen ice, whereas mine churns liquids into semi-solids using a frozen bowl)...

 

A Very Good Day (for a Change)

 Today ended up turning out really nicely!  (Well, especially everything from this afternoon onwards!)  😊

* Got vaccinated for this year's COVID + Flu combo's  (**1)

* Got a bunch more cute Eugy models to put together, and the lady at the store let me grab a few of their prebuilt models for free (which was a nice surprise!) 

* The sun was out and it's warm  (25C, which was warmer + nicer than most days over the "Summer" that we've just had, where it just rained and stay in the low-mid teens)

* Managed to hear some silvereyes (going to feast in the "Autumn Birdy Berry Tree")!  (**2)

* Finally managed to try my "new" Ice Cream / Soft Serve machine - Technically I'd gotten it over a year ago, nearly 2 now, on sale one long weekend. But till now, I haven't had time to get around to investigating how to set it up, and gathering the ingredients to try making some!  (I'll have a separate post on this shortly)

All this was a very nice change + surprise, having been feeling rather err... "off" this past weekend from hardly anything going right (**3)!