In which I buy shoes

Hi everyone,

It's been an uneven sort of day here.  The weather's stayed humid and damp pretty well all day, but the rain was confined to a short downpour in the afternoon.

Work was reasonably busy, or at least steady, and frankly I'm grateful to have things to actually do all day.  Although it was a little tiresome to be spending a decent whack of the day working on budget-and-expenditure reporting for my unit.  It's a task where we inevitably wind up needing to call someone in from the finance team to explain it all.  This is because (a) my predecessor didn't get around to explaining this part of the job before she left, (b) I have no training in accounting save for a unit on trust accounts as part of my law degree 15 years ago, and (c) the company's accounting systems have been rather unevenly merged, split, retitled and bodged together over many years and have a fair degree of mislabelled or overlapping data, all of which means that (d) I find it difficult to make much sense of it and even more difficult to explain any of it to my boss.  Frankly, reporting time at the start of every month usually gives me a Calvin & Hobbes moment -

Image from here

On the plus side, I was able to attend to another matter today.  As I've mentioned, this weekend is the first half of the rescue boat crew course, which will involve quite a bit of time on the Waranga Basin.  Boat duties require us to wear sneakers instead of our usual boots.  Rather than wear my runners, I went up to the opp shops to see if I could get a pair of second hand ones that can be used, drowned and generally destroyed.  Because both shops happened to only have football boots (not really suitable) and women's sneakers, I found myself doing the Cinderella thing, trying to find a shoe that looked like passably neutral (rather than, say, very pink) and then pulling off my boots to try them on.  Happy to report that I was able to get two pairs (which should take care of the next weekend as well) as well as an extra use-it-and-lose-it cap for the princely sum of $7.50.  I'm happily calling that a win!

Not much more to add.  The old boy has gone down to the Peninsula for a clearing sale, but Little Sister is coming up so there's someone here with mum during the day while I'm on the course.

Hope all your days are starting well.  We have a late finish tomorrow evening so I may not get a chance to post tomorrow night, but hopefully I can get you some good photos while we're out and about.