A cold and jangly week ...

For some reason, this week has been a discordant and jangly week, dominated by the weather.

Last weekend was cold and overcast, quite depressing really, and we had an unnecessary extra trip to Wangaratta - J had misread the instructions for collecting unsold artwork that had been in a gallery show, and got the week wrong.

Didn’t matter, we could have had a coffee, but everything in Wangaratta was closed due to the long weekend, and I’m guessing quite a few places had decided against opening, or indeed staying open due to the cold and depressing weather.

And just to add to the fun, one of my teeth broke apart leaving the old, and I mean old, amalgam filling standing proud from the broken stump of my tooth. It wasn’t painful, but clearly it was going to mean a trip to the dentist.

The next day, Tuesday, was simply appalling. Great squalls of sleety rain falling from a leaden sky. Normally it would be the day I went down to Lake View to work on the National Trust documentation project I’d signed up for but the weather was too bad to drive down to Chiltern, and I reckoned that I wouldn’t have been able to be productive once I got there, the light simply being too bad for photographing furniture and larger items in situ.

The one bright spot in Tuesday was that I managed to get an appointment with the dentist for Thursday afternoon, not with my usual practitioner but with one of junior partners.

Not going to Chiltern proved to be a bit of a bonus, as we’d arranged to collect our new car from the dealer on the Wednesday, and I could spend the Tuesday afternoon arranging car insurance, changing over tollway and parking accounts - it’s amazing how much cybercrud accumulates with different cities using different parking management apps - at least with the tollway you sign up for one and everywhere in Australia recognises your beeper - which is actually incredibly convenient as over the last year we’ve used tollways in Sydney more than in Melbourne.

And then we collected our car - after the Impreza it seems ridiculously big, though it’s probably not that much bigger than our old Forester, and having all the beepers and electronic doodahs, easier to park and manouvre through our narrow driveway entrance.

Thursday was another gloomy day, all the more so as I spent part of the afternoon at the dentist watching the SBS Food channel while they built a temporary crown over my broken tooth. One thing that has got better over the years is the technology used by dentists allowing them to rebuild damaged teeth - yes I might need a more permanent crown or implant down the track but for now my rebuild does the job, and hopefully will do so for a few years.

Friday was a nicer day, but cold. Friends and family overseas, especially those who have visited during the warmer seasons, simply don’t understand just how cold it can be here on the edge of the Snowies, to them it’s a land of perpetual warmth, of shorts and t-shirts, rather than fleece and thermals, not to mention the woolly socks.

Just to demonstrate how cold it is - when I went up to the Athenaeum, which was even colder, Stanley being about 300m higher up than Beechworth, one of my co-workers - well we’re all volunteers but we work together cataloguing material for the Athenaeum - said that she had had a flurry of snow that morning.

I didn’t do much, other than scan some old photographs, but it was a pleasant interlude. Next week I’ll need to add the tags to the t-shirts I’ve been working on.

Today is sunny, cold, but definitely sunny. I feel I’ve been pulled this way and that this week, but that’s probably because these days, unlike when I was working, I’ve been used to having a routine, and have lost the knack of managing chaos ...