Car Woes times 2!

Well today, I had just settled at my desk at work when I realised I had not one, but four missed calls from my middle daughter Io.
I rang her back straight away, "I was on the way to work and the car has been pranged ," said a tearful voice, "I'm OK but I'm stuck by the side of the road."
Io volunteers at a St Vincent de Paul shop twice a week and drives there because she has just qualified for her licence and the bus trip is nearly three hours. She uses her older sister's former car which has kind of become the "spare car" for the two younger girls to learn to drive. It has 300,000 km on it but has been reliable so we have kept it on the road.

I was in the city at the wrong end of a 90 minute train ride and half hour drive after that to help. So it was obvious I couldn't help much myself. So the first thing was a call around to see if E our eldest or Deb were at least near enough to lend moral support.
E wasn't reachable, she left early for one of her clinical pracs for her speech pathology degree. Deb was still near home having decided to start late.
So Deb headed off in the direction of the scene, while I began phoning around for tow-trucks and the like.

After an hour or so the car was on a tow truck on the way to the shop, the next thing is deciding if it is worth fixing. Deb said it didn't look too bad but the driver's door wouldn't close properly. If we're lucky it will just be a door from a wrecker's.

So all that sorted and I went back to a rather demanding set of tasks at work.

So this afternoon, as I am just about to get ready to head out of work, E, our eldest phones and says, "Dad, I've got a flat tyre and I'm stuck by the side of the road."

So my piccie of the day is a transport themed one - the Bolte Bridge at Port Melbourne.

Bolte Bridge Melbourne

Wish Me Luck!

I have had an interesting possibility come up regarding my manuscript. In a case of who you know rather than what you know, I have an editor from a UK publishing house reading my manuscript.
Oddly she is the daughter of a colleague of my other half. Does that make sense?

She is home in Oz to see her family and the cheeky approach has paid off.
There are still a lot of if, buts and maybes. Firstly, she has to like the book. Secondly, although she is in publishing, her field is not fiction. So even if she likes it, the most she is able to do is suggest me as a possibility to some of her colleagues. Still this is the closest I have got to getting someone on the inside to read the piece so I am happy.

And of course nervous

Cold, cold, cold again today.
Once I came home from work (among other things I run a breakfast service for homeless people) our eldest was bouncing around saying "Let's go to the snow today. There's bound to be snow on Donna Buang."
So after warming up with a cuppa' we piled into the car and drove about an hour up to Mount Donna Buang.
There was snow, I took a photo of it (of all of it I might add) just to prove it was there.
And just to prove it here it is! See it does get cold in Australia.

The sign in the picture (which I accidentally cropped) says "no tobogganing", I suspect there is not much danger of that rule needing to be enforced at the moment.
It was cold and wet, but apparently not enough for snow. What was there has well and truly melted.

So after waiting in the cold for someone who shall remain nameless,

we piled back into the car and drove back to Warburton at the bottom of the mountain for the much more civilized pursuit of drinking hot coffee in one of our favourite cafes.

This evening, for a change I went out in the cold again. I have been wanting to get some shots of the city at night. Tonight was a first experimental foray. I spent a lot of time driving around looking for places safe enough to stop (traffic, even on Sunday night is quite busy around the city).
I was moderately happy with some of the results, but I think two things will improve my shots:
I had the ISO set too high and most of the shots are over exposed; and a darker sky would give better contrast, tonight there was low cloud hence a lot of reflected light from the buildings below.
Anyway I was happy enough with what I took to try again another night.

Just a couple of photos I took tonight to finish off.

This one is St Patricks Catholic Cathedral, just east of Melbourn CBD.

This is the Bolte Bridge down at the docklands area of Melbourne.