Diary of Another Day

Friday 23rd of June 2000 was a particularly good day. I awoke at 8.30am, which was late, as I had had trouble getting to sleep the night before and had ended up taking a Normison tablet. As soon as I got up, I spent about an hour on the Web looking at my email etc. as I usually did at that time.

I then rang a Real Estate agent to put my house at Forest St on the market. The land was zoned for home-units (or condominiums as Americans call them) and a big block next door had just been put up for sale so selling mine at the same time would give a developer a chance to consolidate a big site. So my land was worth more at that time than it would be worth at any other time. The property cost me $130,000 eight years earlier and was worth at that time about $165,000 by itself.

I had my usual breakfast of two bread rolls with cheese, lettuce and onions on them and the agent then arrived. He estimated that I might get as much as $220,000 in conjunction with the place next door. Conveniently located inner-city land had become very hard to find for unit developers. The price pleased me greatly.

I then went in to my Moorooka GP and had three skin cancers frozen with liquid nitrogen. Such treatments are painful for only about 15 minutes and they then heal quickly.

While I was there, Jenny rang to say she had a migraine so I went and picked her up from work and took her home to her place. I then read the papers for a while and left for my daily trip to the Ipswich boarding house at 12.45 instead of my usual 1.30pm as I had a prospective tenant who was in a hurry to get a room.

When I arrived at Ipswich I first went to the old Metropole Hotel and collected his rent off old Reggie (my longest-staying tenant) as he is a habitue there. I then went to the boarding house and my new tenant turned up promptly and took a room -- bringing occupancy there to an all-time high. I also collected a fair bit of money from tenants whe had got behind with their rent -- leaving me with no problem cases for the moment.

The electrician was also there installing 10 amp circuit breakers on all the power circuits -- thus making it fairly impossible for my tenants to use electric heaters and thus run up huge electricity bills for me. I was very pleased to have that job done and paid him $200 cash out of my pocket for it.

I then went to the Police Station and asked for Robert Fogarty (from the Aboriginal house 2 doors down from the boarding house) to be charged with trespass as he kept disobeying my warning to keep out. I took two Statutory Declarations with me and that seemed to make some impression on the Police.

I then went home, finished reading the papers, watched some programmes I had recorded off the TV the night before and then at about 5pm decided to write a FORTRAN program to track my share investments. That was of course a great pleasure and I had basically finished it by the time I left for G**'s place at 6.10pm.

G** gave me a very pleasant dinner of sausages and that great Northern Italian favourite -- Polenta. We went up to bed at 7pm.

We listened to some very good Baroque music during the evening -- including lots of Bach -- and I went home at 9.45pm. I then put the finishing touches to my shares program. A very fulfilling day!