Over the Tasman

I’m all out of blog at the moment. We had a great three weeks in Australia and our three Murder Mystery Evenings were a great hit and raised nearly $5000 for various charities, thanks to a huge amount of effort by the locals in Canberra and Sydney As well, we had an interesting and relaxing time doing some very different things from home. It was good to spend time with the Aussie rellies and to see some new parts of the countryside in NSW.

Coming home was bound to return us to the problems with our old No 1 computer. Its replacement was almost ready for duty. But Windows 7 was not happy with the most important programs I use and getting printers to run with them has been a nightmare. Lots of my most commonly used applications and systems have died. Not surprisingly, it will be some time before everything is running reasonably well. So things are a bit stressful around here at present. However, as the fellow said after accidentally swallowing a peach stone, This, too, will pass. It’s just an uncomfortable process.

And by the way, if anyone still hankers after getting NZ wages up to Aussie levels, they had better price a few local commodities and look at basic wages in that country before making a commitment. We expected things to be dearer but, in some supermarket areas, costs were well above what we might have expected. And the price of prosperity in tearing resources out of the ground has yet to be calculated. The grass, or what is left of it after droughts and floods and fires, is not all that greener on the other side of the Tasman fence.