Veuve Clicquot

Our daughter Helen, gave us a bottle of Veuve Clicquot for Xmas. We never got to open it at Xmas and last week I opened it to share with Helen and James. It was ‘skunked’, so much so it was undrinkable. Whenever we have had a bottle of cheapo bubbly in the past which was flat or undrinkable, we merely returned it to the bottle shop and took another one off the shelf. Bottle shops don't take back their Veuve without a cash register receipt. You don’t get a receipt with a present and in any case you don’t expect to get a dud bottle of $90 wine.

No amount of googling will bring up an Australian agent for Veuve, but a local bottle shop has promised to do some investigation for me later today. I might be lucky yet.

Helen and James haven’t been too lucky though. They signed up for PhotoVoltaic panels at the same time as my brother Graham and I did and we all had the panels installed on the same day. At the time the sales person faxed off the applications for the 40c per kilowatt power input to be sold back to the energy company. Bro and I got ours acknowledged, but Helen and James heard nothing and when they contacted the energy company they were told that as they had not submitted their application before the government subsidy cutoff date they could only get paid 7c per unit into the electricity grid...no arguments thanks. That makes the expense of the solar panels pretty well useless as it will take a couple of decades to pay off the panels etc at 7c per.
Fortunately my cousin Edward is the man who has volunteered his services as a mediator and he has forwarded all the documents including a Statutory Declaration saying that the application was faxed before the closing date. Hope he can get the decision reversed. Cousin Ted has an impressive track record of winning over lots of government and commercial businesses.
Don’t sell Ted a car unless you are very sure it has absolutely no defects.

Just after lunch today I noticed a Channel7 TV transmitter vehicle near my house front. I’m guessing that something of import has happened in this estate and we should see something on tonight’s 7 News.
The cleanup and repairs etc are progressing in Martin’s unit. A few days ago we opened an inspection door to check out the condition of the electric hot water system. The HWS is housed in a vertical space which services three floors of apartments. It was inhabited by about 300 Australian cockroaches (Periplaneta australasiae). They are a large species of cockroach, winged, and growing to a length of 30–35 millimetres. Martin hit them with a couple of cans of insecticide and yesterday we gave them another jolt with an insect bomb. Martin made sure that the tenants above and below knew when he was going to ‘bomb’ them so they could go out for a couple of hours. I am guessing the bottom unit has heaps of dead cockies next to their HWS.