Hawker food, Singapore 1993 © PJ Croft 2013

Bloody hell! Someone’s stolen my letterbox. I’ve only had it about a month. It cost around $100 with the pole it was on. They’ve just pulled it out of the ground and made off with it. Damn!

I suppose the only thing I can do to prevent its replacement from going too is to set it in concrete. I just banged this one deep into the ground with a sledge hammer. Not enough to stop this low life thief.

PS: I’ve just been thinking – whoever did this is going to place it out the front of his house for me to see. It’s very distinctive – it’s bright red. I’ll do some driving around. But how am I going to prove anything?

When I get a replacement letterbox, I’m going to write my name on the inside. Or better still, get my name engraved on the front.

PS Tuesday morning: it’s occurred to me that the thief didn’t get the keys to the lock. Unfortunately, I hadn’t locked it, but if I found a letterbox the same, on the same skinny pole, and my keys fitted the lock … but I don’t think it would be enough proof for the police.

Lesson number 1 – lock your letterbox.

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This on top of the scam calls I’m getting on the phone. Five times today I’ve been called by people with Indian sounding accents in a very noisy call centre saying, “Mr Croft, this is Dave, I’m calling from Telstra in Melbourne.” I don’t believe them. I think this is a scam, but hang up and they call back again. I asked for a number for me to call him back and he gave me a 1 300 number, but I just don’t believe it, so I didn’t. Why have they all got Indian accents and why is the call centre so noisy and the line so bad? If Telstra want me, they’ll write me a letter.

Bloody hell, as I write this, I’ve just had another one! That’s six calls today. How do I stop this?

Seven calls. They just tried again, but hung up on me this time.

Eight calls. They’ve just tried again!

Tuesday morning: Nine calls – they called again about 5pm! This time I left the phone off the hook for about 90 mins, i.e. I kept their line open, I didn’t hang up. Meanwhile, Do Not Call register.

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I’ve done the beach stairs two days in a row. Today there was a cormorant sitting on the railing near the bottom. I thought it would take fright, but it just sat there as I slowly went past. I was only about 2.5m away. Nice.

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I bought two flat pack steel shelving systems 2m high by 1200mm wide by 500mm deep yesterday. I hope I’ll be able to get the pile of boxes into some sort of order with these. I need my Canon multi-function printer, but it’s buried too deep at the moment.