Side of a freight train at Amsterdam’s Centraal Station.

Taken while eating curry and fritjes (me) and mayonnaise and fritjes (Justine). We were waiting for our overnight train from Amsterdam to Munich and grabbed a hurried dinner from a crappy diner.

This is the last photo I took in Holland.

Taken at around 12am (Bangkok time) while waiting for our plane’s departure lounge to open.

After hearing my failed story of obtaining some Krispy Kreme donuts, Lesly at work decided to try his hand at getting some. He very kindly offered to buy me some too, should he make it to the now mythical “front of the line”.

Well, after an hour-and-a-half wait in the regular line (not the drive through line), Lesly did manage to get to the front of the line, and purchased seven dozen (yes, 84 donuts) boxes for himself and various other people.

Justine and I received two of those boxes: one “regular” and one “mixed” dozen. The mixed dozen weren’t what we ordered — apparently they’re so busy you don’t really get much of a chance to complain if the order is wrong — but are a good overall reminder of Krispy Kreme.

Yum!

Last night Justine and I decided that we wanted some Thai takeaway for dinner; nicer than “regular” takeaway, but not quite as nice as going to a good restaurant.

Looking through our takeaway menus, we noticed that one of two restaurants in Glen Waverley offers home delivery! Since our favourite — Thai Village — closed down a few months back, we’ve eaten at this other restaurant once; it was not bad but not as good as Thai Village. The second restaurant is in the same location as Thai Village but we haven’t tried them yet and they don’t offer home delivery.

Justine placed our order at around 18:45 and was told it’d arrive “in 40 minutes”. Seemed reasonable, considering after we’d probably wait 20 minutes, drive there for 5-10, wait a bit, and drive home it would be about the same amount of time til we ate. I’m not sure how time is measured in their world, but it’s certainly not measured at the same pace as my world.

At 19:45 I called to ask where our food was and when they expected it to arrive. I was told that there were “many order” and that it might take a little while longer. I enquired as to whether they were willing to offer a discount or similar since, from tone of the girl on the other end of the line, I knew it would be another 10-15 minutes before it arrived. She totally ignored me twice, presumably pretending her English was poor, and continued to say it’d be there soon and sorry.

Ugh, whatever. We waited and waited.

20:10 and we hear a yell (not a knock) from near the front door, “Hello? Anyone there? I have food!” Right then, I suppose that must be our delivery!

After waiting for the delivery man to finish his twelve bows and “thankyou”s, I handed him my money and waited while he searched, and searched, and searched, and scrimped for change. Mentioning how disappointed I was that it’d taken almost an hour-and-a-half was again met with silence, whether he had ignored me or didn’t understand, I don’t know.

The delivery man pretty much backed up our driveway on foot, bowing and “thankyou”ing all the way. In our bag, we had everything we’d ordered (thank God), and two spring rolls with “Free” hastily scribbled across the bag. I have no idea if this was to try and appease us for the slow delivery. I suspect though, that it was, which leads me to believe that the food hadn’t even left the shop when we called the second time.

The food was still just “OK”; we probably won’t buy food from there again.

Everyone seems to forget about it; then, it suddenly jumps out at us and it’s prevalent for a number of weeks, then it fades into the background again.

At the start of every semester at work, the traffic is awful. If I get to work after 9am, I can sometimes have trouble finding a parking spot among the 1,000+ spots available. If I leave at the wrong time, I can be sitting in a massive queue of cars waiting to get out of the campus.

Yesterday was one such queue. At 4:50pm I looked out the window and saw no cars. Ten minutes later, the queue went from Burwood Hwy to our building, which is about 100-150 metres of road. I decided to wait and let the queue subside, which if often does after 30 or so minutes.

At 5:50pm I decided I didn’t feel like waiting any more. It took ten minutes to get out of the car park. After that, it took another thirty minutes to get from the car park to the highway outside of the campus. So, it took me forty minutes to travel maybe 150 metres… under four metres a minute!

After 15 minutes of being annoyed and frustrated, I decided to play Tetris on my mobile phone to pass the time and boy did it work well. By the time I got to level seven I was right at the front of the queue — about 25 minutes.

Amazingly, I caught a great wave of no-traffic on the way home and managed to make the trip from out the front of work to home in about 10 minutes — I’ve only ever been able to make the trip that quickly at midnight!

Since the weather’s been so nice recently I thought I’d jump in and buy a polarising filter for my big lens as skies using those filters can look fantastic. Not content with ordering it online and waiting around for a few weeks, we went down to Ted’s at Chadstone and I purchased one.

Imagine my excitement when we get home and the skies are grey, and the rain begins to fall. Great.

Imagine my second round of excitement when I go to eBay to jump in again and put in a Buy-It-Now “bid” for Kenko Extension Tubes so I can try my hand (cheaply) at macro photography (and saving about ninety bucks in the process) and see the same filter from the seller for a whole lot less than Ted’s asked me to pay. Great.

If I really wanted to, I could take the filter back tomorrow and could get the eBay guy (or girl) to send me one with the tubes but stuff it; I’ve made the commitment and this time I lost out. It’s too much mucking around and I bet I’ll end up worse off if I try to save a few bucks. Next time though, I will check elsewhere first…

So much for spontaneity, eh?

We’ve been waiting since November patiently and semi-patiently to see whether Justine will be offered a place in a Certificate IV in Patisserie. And at 7:30 this evening, along with around thirty other people at the Pinewood newsagent, we found out our future.

Justine was accepted.

Firstly, this means that Justine will be working less (dependant on the course requirements) so we’ll have less money. Not a big deal I suppose, we should be able to live modestly during that time. I am hoping that due to her existing commercial experience, Justine will be able to get a recognition of prior learning for a number of the modules.

Secondly, this could mean big things in the realm of me eating cake. And that’s very important.

Very important.