Meanwhile, the primary school has asked me to do a few sessions of an introductory martial arts course for the kids there. I never say no to the local primary school if I can help it, so that's going on.
At the same time, the end-of-winter sniffles have arrived, and all three kids of gone down like tin ducks in sideshow alley. Even Elder Son, he of the titanium-plated immune system, is currently lying on the couch reading Calvin and Hobbes, and sniffling.
In the same vein, we hit the end-of-month patch with the Satellite "broadband" deal, and ran out of bandwidth. As usual. It's clicked over today, which is nice - but for some reason, the uplink seems to be a bit sketchy. It was running okay, and then it just randomly throttled back, and I started getting "site not found" bullshit warnings. Possibly Natalie's machine is busy downloading some goddam epic Microsoft update, or something like that. I dunno. I just know it makes working via the 'Net a painful process.
And -- surprise, surprise! -- the National Broadband Network probably won't fucking help. K-Rudd is proving ever more incompetent. He doesn't even know how to deliver a bribe properly. The two areas getting NBN first are North-West Tassie, and North-East Tassie, where I live. Not too coincidentally, both are quite marginal seats.
So, here comes the payoff for our electoral support, right?
Wrong. So far, it looks as though the so-called NBN "roll-out" is going to be restricted to places like Scottsdale, which have ALREADY F--KING GOT ADSL. So if you live, like, ten km outside Scottsdale, there will be no goddam change. Business as usual: shitty, expensive, unreliable, high-maintenance satellite, or even-more-expensive Next-G which doesn't work because of the poor coverage and the hilly terrain. Or dial-up. Yeah, wow... that's a good one, eh?
Thank you, Mr Rudd. Why don't you drop by sometime? If you're going to blow smoke up my arse, you might as well do it in person, eh?
All right. I've gotta get back to it. I've got two off-colour kids lying around the place, a monster pile of laundry to do, a Spanish lesson to put together for the afternoon, a flyer to write and print for the afternoon's martial arts class, and I still haven't written any goddam fiction since Monday.
This sucks.
