melvania

I'm not sure if Darrin's uploaded those pictures yet, but on Saturday he & Caleb went to a train museum at Port Adelaide. Unfortunately I was home sick with gastro (also known as stomach flu), which was actually part of the reason I think they went out - so I could rest uninterrupted.

Anyway. He notices any moving thing that's out on the road, or sky, or train tracks, and knows them all by name - bus, train, truck, car, airplane. So it may just be a vehicle obsession at the moment, but he does seem to like trains more. We're just under a kilometre from the train line, and he'll tell us every time he hears a train blow its whistle/horn. He also does this sometimes when a truck blows its horn from Salisbury Highway.

So yeah, they went to the train museum, and saw lots of engines & carriages, and rode on a little train, and Darrin got lots of pictures of him looking at all the trains.

And what else is going on...well, he cut another molar last month without us even realising it till it was well and truly out. I suspect that's going to happen with most of the rest of them, simply because he won't let us get fingers into his mouth without biting down. Can't blame him though; I'd probably do the same thing!

Oh...and don't tell him, but he's getting a swing set for Christmas. Shhh.

And Wednesday night he finally had his first fever, and a really nasty cough that sounded like it might've been croup. So I was up half the night with him, trying to hold him in a position so he could sleep AND breathe. Unfortunately this meant I didn't get much sleep, but Darrin stayed home Thursday so I could try to catch up. He's still got the cough, and a little bit of a sniffle, but it's sounding much better now.

So remember that loan we were paying off? About a week before our scheduled payment, we made a bulk payment because Darrin got paid for a job he'd done with Josh. I wasn't sure of the actual amount because I think the bank calculates interest on the average daily balance (which I can't be bothered working out) instead of the balance on the last day of the statement period like our old bank did. So I just guessed, and left what I thought was about a dollar balance on the loan.

So last Friday came and went, and there was no loan payment showing up on our accounts. Strange. I thought maybe they'd tried to deduct the full amount again because that was what was scheduled, and that we might have to go into the bank and stop the automatic debits. And we'd only had enough to cover what I thought the last payment would be, so that would've caused them problems trying to deduct it.

So then yesterday I was checking online banking again, and it still hadn't shown up on the account. But there was an extra $198 in one of the other accounts, without explanation as to what it was (sometimes it takes a day or two for that part of it to show up). And then this morning I looked again and it said "Loan overpayment." Well. I'm not complaining about that in the least.

So five years ago when we were planning our wedding and my move to Australia, we ran up heaps of debt. My credit card was nearly maxed out, Darrin's was nearly maxed out, and we had to borrow from family too. This was all just a little bit more than we could manage being newlyweds, even though we lived in a cheap dump & drove a cheap car. Plus we had immigration fees to pay as well. So. Rather than have two credit card payments every month, we got a personal loan. We paid off both credit cards, got our car serviced, and did a few other things I can't remember. When we changed banks two years ago, we moved the loan over too.

The original loan was a seven year loan. The loan at the new bank was a three year loan.

Today we make our LAST PAYMENT on that loan. Two years early by the original plan, one year early by the amended one.