0705 Must be Friday the 13th

REAL LIFE always involves the mundane. After the yesterday's excitement, we were ready for some ordinary business.

There was shopping to do. And Chris had forgotten to bring her camera's USB cable, so we couldn't transfer her pictures to the computer. Sadly, my laptop only reads a few types of cards, such as SD, and her camera uses Memory Stick cards. We nearly lost her card inside my computer's card reader.

So we had breakfast at the local Maccas and then I started driving around looking for cables or card readers. I wasn't having a lot of success.

Chris was sitting in the car listening to a CD while I was searching the shelves of one of the shops, and, when I restarted the car, I thought it cranked just a trifle slowly considering how much the battery had been charged over the previous day, and the fact that the car was already warmed up.

I tried one national electronics supplier who had a multi card reader for $40. I thought this a bit extreme when I had seen similar devices at Woolworths for about $12. So I went to Go Lo and the Reject Shop, to no avail. Finally I found a rather nice computer shop just opposite the Coles Carpark in Short Street, where I bought a reader labelled $19.95 but supplied to me for $15.

I returned full of good cheer, clutching my bargain, and jumped into the drivers' seat.

The battery was totally dead.

"One hour to ninety minutes," said the cheery lady at the NRMA.

She was spot on. Exactly one hour, and the van arrived. Fortunately, the alternator was charging fine, but the five-year-old battery had reached the end of its life. $140 later, we were underway again.

"It's a good thing this didn't happen at Ellensborough Falls yesterday," I said to the NRMA man.

"It wouldn't have been me who had to come out," he told me. "That would have been for the Wauchope fellows. But you wouldn't have seen them as quickly as you saw me."

By now it was time for a late lunch, so we went off and had something to eat.

Time was getting away, so we went out to Settlement Point, a new development on the river near where the car ferry crosses to the North Shore, and had a look around before heading home again.

Photos taken at Settlement Point and across to Pelican Island...

I can't remember whether it was that night or some other, but we went to a Mexican eatery called Poco Loco, where I had enough delicious Nachos to keep me going for a day or two.

When the woman (the shop's owner) brought us the menus, she also gave us a second menu, but not for drinks. "This is a double sided pizza menu," she said.

"I have never had a double sided pizza," I replied.

She went of laughing aloud. "No one has ever said anything like that to me before!" she said. She seemed quite tickled by the idea...