Not happy

You haven't heard from me for a week now because we were without phones and internet - along with a large proportion of our suburb.  Both the business phone and the home phone went off the air early on Monday morning, much to Bill's displeasure.  His work depends on email and internet access, so he was stymied.  Telstra assured us they were working on the fault and that it would be fixed by Tuesday night!  I rang every morning to be told a slightly different story, but thankfully on Friday the service appeared to be restored - well, the business line and  the internet was.  I had dial tone on the home phone, but when I rand my son who has caller display on his phone the number which I appeared to be ringing from was a completely strange one to us!  Back to calling Telstra again......oh, the techs are still working on the line and will have it fixed shortly............................What do I do about the number on my phone, can I use the phone?....Yes, go ahead, no idea who is being billed for it!  Well, that lasted for about an hour, then I lost the use of the phone again.. Grrrrr......Telstra is very generously allowing incoming calls to be diverted to my mobile at no cost to the caller or to me, but outgoing calls are a different matter.  Of course the call centre is probably somewhere in Malaysia and they are just reading off the screen in front of them so they don't really have a clue - they keep telling me our complaints have been lodged with their superior and we will possibly be compensated!  Bill is waiting till the home phone is fixed then Telstra will certainly get a blast, and there had better be definite compensation or he will be off to the ombudsman again.  He has already won two fights with Telstra in the last few years.

Having had my rant, I will show you a couple of photos.  our Botanic Gardens are ten years old this year, so we are holding quite a few events during the year to celebrate.  One of these is a then and now exhibition to show what a long way we have come from the green field site in 2002.

 These two are in the wrong order, with the lower one taken in 2003 and the top one quite recently

 This is what the site used to look like when we went walking there before anything was started

This is the closest I can get to the same position - lots of land shaping etc has gone on here.  If you double click on the photo you may be able just to see the deck and the building behind those trees!

 This is now a jungle almost, as you can see from the photo below.  There are very few exact comparison photos possible as everything has  grown so much over the ten years - and that is just the way we want it to be.

We have had lots of rain so the whole Gardens are looking beautiful and green right now, although the caterpillars are busy as well!