The 1st of April, Mum’s birthday in 1924. Nearly her centenary, wow. She died in 1996, I should add, at age 72, so I’ve beaten her.

I haven’t seen any April Fool’s Day jokes today, except the one about Voltswagen. Stale already. I haven’t even bought any hot cross buns. I should avoid them, being type II diabetic, but I wouldn’t mind having one or two, toasted with butter. Yum!

Crikey, it’s 35deg today, starting the second month of autumn, and the hot weather is scheduled to continue for several more days. It was 39deg last Monday. Crazy. Yet it rained at 4am on Tuesday morning. I happened to be awake at the time and heard it coming down hard, but only for a couple of minutes. It was enough to soak the gardens and lawns, though. Nice.

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I had the second bladder CAT scan on Tuesday at Joondalup Hospital. Crikey, the queue just to get into the parking area stretched right out onto the main road. It took me 15 minutes just to get to the boom gate. Luckily I’d seen a car pull out and go, so I had a space immediately. My point is, that parking area is atrocious. There are always long waits for a space, and when you’ve got an appointment, no matter how early you try to be, it never seems to be enough to stop the anxiety rising.

Anyway, the scan was simple and I await a call for the results. I think it was “an abundance of caution”, otherwise known as CYA, (Cover Your Arse), on the part of the GP. At least with bulk billing it’s cheap (like, no cost to me).

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It’s good to see house prices rising again. Good for me, that is, as an owner. Not so good for buyers, but with interest rates so low they don’t have the worry of never ending mortgages, even though they need big loans.

For me, as a reverse mortgage case, at last the value of the house should be increasing faster than the interest rate on the loan. That’s what makes a reverse mortgage work. I want my house to increase in value.

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Why did Coles remove the swing “gates” from their supermarkets some years ago, but reinstate them about a year ago?

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Coles are testing me; they stopped stocking my favourite Vietnamese Pho Noodle soups a few months ago. Then a few weeks ago they stopped stocking my addictive favourite cashews with the skin on. Now they’ve stopped selling my favourite frozen pizzas, McCains Sourdough varieties.

Given that Woolies sell the pizzas and have much a nicer range of ready cooked meals, I may have to switch. I used to complain on this blog about Woolies being very unreliable on their checkout scanning but I have to say, it seems to have been fixed. I’ve done a bit of shopping for my groceries at Woolies in the past year and I’m not noticing any errors any more. Good for them.