Mysterious Money

Following from Rhiannon bat ears overhearing our recent bicycle discussion, she'd twigged that there might be a chance that she could score some manga books for Christmas. She'd made a comprehensive list of the ones she wanted, but was whining mightily about the prices "in this crappy country". She does not possess her mother's ability to sniff out an Internet bargain. Diane found that Whitcoulls were offering 20% off, and promptly splashed out on the best part of $300 worth of books. This is where the rot set in. I'd noticed that there were two "electronic" transactions for similar but not identical amounts on our bank statement. As "electronic" is not particularly helpful with identification of the perpetrator of these charges, we could only guess that Whitcoulls had had a moment and charged twice. Looking at the amounts, one was exactly 95% of the other, which as we'd ordered 20 books, seemed to me like they had found one to be out of stock and therefore replaced our order of 20 with one of 19.

I rung up Westpac for more info - they couldn't tell who they were from either but promised that we'd know by the morning when the overnight transactions were updated. The Whitcoulls website has no contact number on it, only the branch numbers and the branches are unable to help with Internet orders. Grrr. The "contact us" form on their website was therefore used to the max, but we noted there was a "48 hour delay" due to "high email volumes". Hmm. Perhaps they're stuffing everybody else, too.

It being another nice sunny day (you are reading this in the UK, right?) we walked into the Mount to register Rhiannon with a new dentist. The school dental service apparently stops when you reach age 13 and move on from intermediate and you therefore have to register with a local dentist. This has to be one on the approved list. Having tried the one round the corner (who wanted $95 each to register me and Di otherwise they would not register the kids and generally looked down their noses at us) we settled on the imaginatively named "Tooth Fairy" dental practice, who seemed a lot more accommodating and were happy to take her on.

While in the Mount, I checked the backpacker's casual labour board. Noel Leeming (think Dixons) were after Christmas staff, but alas the advertisement was two weeks old and unsurprisingly all positions had been taken.

I spent the afternoon swatting up on the finer points of PHP security, most of which was stuff that was either self explanatory or I had an idea about already. Craig had been trying out at a bakery around the corner, and returned at about 3PM with a vast quantity of fresh cream doughnuts and cakes that were surplus to requirements. This being his trial day, we believed he had actually been given them. He has also been offered the job, which is much closer than Breakers, and is actually 30 hours a week unlike Breakers which seems to be infinitely variable. There were far too many doughnuts even for me, so Di wandered off to stuff a load down V&W's respective throats.

She eventually returned with news of Wayne's petrol lawn mower that would not start. This was an opportunity to fart about aimlessly and possibly even fix it. Alas, although I figured out that the "start" position resulted in no spark at the plug, something else wasn't quite right. I suspect it was fuel supply since the float chamber did not appear to be filling up. However as the mower wasn't actually Wayne's and belonged to the landlord, it didn't seem appropriate to take it completely to bits so we left it in its non-functional state and Wayne resolved to call the landlord.