And then there were four.

One of the stranger concepts to get your head around while working for an Australian public hospital is that of the ADO (Accrued Day Off).  I am currently contracted to work 40 hours a week, comprising of five 8 hour days, so these are the hours I work.  But rather than do the simple thing of paying me for the 40 hours a weeks' worth of work that I have done, the hospital instead only pays me for 38.  Scandalous.  So what happens to these 2 hours the hospital owes me?  It is accrued.  Every 4 weeks, each member of staff is entitled to an extra day off.  This all sounds fair enough, but what really baffles me is that it is a struggle to get time off for annual leave as it is, so why develop a system which gives everyone even more time off, that then needs to be covered.  Surely paying everyone for the hours they work upfront would save this massive administrative headache of trying to cover all the gaps caused by excessive amounts of staff having to take an extra day of leave each month.  Needless to say, I was very grateful for the ADO I had last week.

As I work all day and Barnadi doesn't start work until the evening, it leaves Barnadi a lot of time to do stuff for the house by himself, such as working on the garden, decorating the rooms and shopping.  With the excessive amount of extra work I have been putting in recently, I have been feeling quite left out when it comes to getting things organised the way we want it.  Making the house feel more like one of Barnadi's projects than something we both have an equal hand in.  This I felt quite intently when I came home one day to find Barnadi had increased the occupancy of our fish bowl to four.  We now have an orange goldfish called Lila and a small yellow catfish called Stich.  Buying pets, even fish, should always be something that we do together.  So on my ADO it was good that we got to do some things together.

Lilo and Lila

We started the day bright and early, although still two hours later than I would normally have to get up for work.  After breakfast Barnadi made me join him in his morning kettle bell exercise regimen.  We then took a very short drive to Greensborough, partly to explore as we had not been there before and it is one of our closest neighbouring suburbs, and partly because Barnadi had heard that Target was selling a sewing machine at 60% off the RRP.  We parked at the plaza in the centre of Greensborough before going for a walk through a nearby park that ran along the edge of the Plenty river, while offsetting all this expenditure of energy by feasting on an almond tart.  The weather was unseasonably warm reaching a high of 22 degrees, and so it was actually nice to get back inside the air conditioned plaza and get down to the business of the day, shopping.  With Barnadi it is impossible to simply go shopping and come home with the one thing we planned to get.  In addition to the sewing machine we got 4 mugs featuring birds of Australia, a Tuscan plate, a 20" by 24" photo frame and maybe a present or two for my newest nephew who we will be visiting in August.

We got back home and Barnadi prepared lunch while I worked out how to thread the sewing machine.  The day was so nice we decided it was impossible to put off mowing the lawn any longer, so a trip to Bunnings in Mill Park was in order to finally acquire a lawn mower.  No sooner had we got to Bunnings than the heavens opened up and a massive thunderstorm hit the northern suburbs of Melbourne.  A boat would have got us home much more safely than a car.  We put off leaving Bunnings as long as we could, purchasing more than just a lawn mower along the way, before resigning ourselves to the fact, the storm wasn't going anywhere. 

The rain still hasn't stopped two days later, although the initial force of the downpour has eased somewhat.  The new lawnmower is trapped inside its' box, waiting to be assembled, while the lawn grows more and more unruly, mocking us and our lack of ability to do anything about it.