Went to the city

This morning I got up early because the cleaners were coming to do their thing but they were quite late arriving, which upset my plans because I had told a friend I would come to his office in the city in the morning. Before they arrived I lay down in bed and finally they buzzed at the intercom. They came upstairs and unpacked and started on the bathrooms. I went to the living room and lay down on the couch to wait until they had finished. When they had completed the work I gave the head cleaner the envelope with the money in it and let them out the door. Then I went back to bed, asking my friend if I should come later.

Unfortunately, he didn't reply until the early afternoon, by which time I had had a further nap. I got up then and went across the Pyrmont Bridge into the city. The girl phoned me while I was still on the bridge and asked me if I wanted to have lunch; she had just done an interview for a job and wanted to debrief. I went to my friend's office and signed the papers he wanted me to sign, then I left his office and headed south toward the QVB, where she was waiting for me on the street.

We went to the Westfield complex and sat down at a table at an Italian restaurant. I ordered lasagne and she ordered ravioli. I also ordered a beer. While we ate we talked about her interview, with her asking a dozen questions in the time it took me to answer one. After I had paid for the lunch we went down to the street and I headed off home, and so did she to hers. When I got home I checked the mail and found a letter from my compulsory third party insurance company and the renewal notice for my car registration. I took everything upstairs and then went to bed to have a nap. When I got up I had a glass of wine and opened the mail. I went online and paid the CTP insurance cover for the car - mandatory in New South Wales - and had a look at another insurance letter I had received recently. This letter turned out to be insurance for the car itself; I had thought it was CTP as well. I had filed this letter and having read it again, put it back in the folder. There was nothing I had to do with it.

Later, I made some cheese-and-tomato-on-toast and ate it in front of the computer. I had a conversation on Messenger with a friend overseas about a dog I had seen in the street today (she has a dog of the same breed), then I went down to the convenience store to get more cash so that I could put money in another white envelope for the cleaners for when they come in two weeks' time. I then took a call from the girl, and went back to social media. It has been a slow day for me online with the main news being the US president's combative phone call with out prime minister over the matter of refugees currently in tropical detention centres. There's not much to say about this phone call, partly because the outcome - will the US take the refugees or not - is still to be decided in the future as there has to be an extended vetting process first. So we don't know how many - if any - refugees the US will take from Manus Island and Nauru, or when. It's still all up in the air.