Forgetful me?

Can't wait till Easter to catch up with everyone at St.Helens. Looking forward to some Karaoke at the Bayside and a Seafood Feast at the golf club on the Saturday night. Really can't wait till Easter gets here actually. I went to St.Helens on business the other day and stayed overnight in our cabin at the Big4 holiday park. Now, normally I only take a change of clothes with me to St.Helens for an overnight stay, we leave everything else we need down there, like toothbrushes, deodorant and some other basic necessities. But....... I had a special party to attend in Longford on my way home the next night and wanted to look my best. So, on this last trip to the east side, I took my good Hair straightener, my expensive hair spray which glues every single strand of hair in place, all my good make up, my favourite deodorant and my Kylie Minogue showtime perfume. AND I LEFT THE WHOLE LOT BEHIND IN ST.HELENS !!! Talk about a frumpy-fortnight coming up I know I packed everything to come home in a bag with my library book that I was half way thru (Stars over Shiralee by Sheryl McCorry) I was so looking forward to getting back into that book. Oh well, at least I won't have to remember to take a book with me at Easter (actually if anyone is looking for something to read at Easter, I do in fact have a pretty good library of my own at the caravan park!!) I think I've read each book half a dozen times already (insomniac much ) Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing all the girls at Easter, Lisa, Margie, Sarah, and I get to meet Meegan for the first time and lots of others. So excited. I will be leaving home on Good Friday to drive down there with my Krissie and her dog, Maxi. Peter is going on Thursday afternoon as he has half the day off work. I can't go until Friday as we have booked Krissie into Warrawee B&B because she can't bring the dog to the caravan park. We will stay there with her Friday night (get to use the spa)!!

(photo below : Krissie when she was little)

Then on Saturday my other daughter, Angelina is coming down to St.Helens and she will stay at Warrawee with Krissie for two nights (till Monday)Peter will go home on Monday and take Krissie and Maxi as they have stuff on back home. As I don't have to work until the Wednesday I'll stay until then and leave early to get me back to work in Launceston by 10am. Won't matter if I'm late, they can't sack me, I resigned and this will be my LAST DAY!!!

Thats me below, when I was growing up on the farm in the St.Pauls Valley

The weekend after Easter I also have another 'reunion' to go to at St.Helens. I'll be catching up with some people I went to primary school with at Avoca Primary School in the 1960's. We all recently became reacquainted with each other on Facebook and this weekend after Easter we have all arranged to catch up on the east coast. None of us live on the east coast, in fact none of us live near Avoca anymore either, but St.Helens seems like a good place to meet up!! John lives at Devonport, Danny lives at Deloraine, Veronica in Hobart, Mandy lives in Perth. Apart from John who lived with his Aunty in Avoca (she was our school teacher), the rest of us grew up on neighbouring farms up past Royal George.

My familys farm was called Merrywood. Down the road was Red Rock, Veronica's family owned that, and Danny's family lived and worked there. Across the river from Red Rock is Lewis Hill and Mandy's family lived and worked there too. So its all been great to reconnect again after all this time. I'm sure there will be lots of reminiscing

Thats me on the Tractor on the farm

Calvin

I just heard that an ex-employer of mine, James, was fined in court the other day in Melbourne for importing counterfeit brand name clothing.

I helped the federal police get this guy to court!!

Back in 2007 I was recruited by James to manage his website. He had a shop in Melbourne and wanted to put his products online.
At the time, James was 23 yrs old and wanted to be a millionaire by the time he was 25.

I answered an advertisement on the Internet for someone to work at home managing his website, applied, and got the job.
He sold homewares and kitchenware, soft furnishing, home decor and ornaments. He also sold Calvin Klein underwear. He sold it very cheap.
I think around $5 for a pair of mens undies or a singlet.

The Calvin Klein items were his biggest seller, we would sell them to buyers all over the world in bulk, hundreds of dollars worth at a time.
I think most of the buyers were buying them to resell in menswear stores.

Basically what my job entailed was: James would photograph the products and email the pics thru to me with a short description of the item.
I would edit the photos and make the ads for each product to go onto his website. I would also manage any email enquiries from buyers, plus track payments for items when they were sold.

Once items were paid for, then I would email James with the buyers postal details and a list of what they had purchased. He then would get his staff in Melbourne to package and post the goods.

Firstly, he overcharged massively for postage, if for instance an item cost $5 to post, he would charge the buyer $18 for postage!!
So I would get a LOT of complaints about the cost of postage (even though the price was set out before the buyer purchased anything)!
Anyway.......

I had never physically seen the products, I'm in Tassie, his shop is in Melbourne. But it didn't take long to work out that the Calvin Klein mens wear he was selling, were not the real deal. Complaints were coming in thick and fast from disgruntled buyers when they received the goods, they could tell they were cheap imitations. The workmanship for a start was a dead give away apparently (I also would have thought that the cheap price would also have been a give away - but plenty of people got sucked in)

Some people emailed and asked for comfirmation first that these were genuine items, I checked with James and he said they were definately genuine and that they were a 'parallel import' (whatever that is )! So, I assured the buyers they were buying the real thing. So you can imagine the tone of their emails when they received the items.

They were NOT HAPPY JAN!! They wanted refunds. I told James and he said yes sure, tell them to send them back and he would do a refund in full.
Great. No worries.

So they did. It was not only the Calvins that people returned, the home decor products were never packed adequately for postage and most got broken, James said he would refund.
Did he refund? Ever? NO!! That started another wave of abusive emails, people had returned shoddy goods for a promised refund, but he never once refunded anyone. I couldn't action a refund from his bank account.

Talking about bank accounts..... James had never had a credit card, when I set up his website, he needed to pay the webhost by credit card, plus we sold a lot of his items on ebay too (which I also managed for him) he paid ebay something like $5,000 a month in fee's because he was selling massive amounts of goods on the site. He did not want to get a credit card, didn't like them. He talked me into using my credit card to pay his fee's.

He transferred the money to my bank account first and then I paid his fees. The great thing about this is, I had a credit card with Reward Points that I could use for travel. You have no idea the amount of points I racked up in the time I was working for him - it took us years to use them all up!! (free holidays)

But, I could see the writing on the wall with this job, he was going to come undone eventually because his customers were now threatening to take him to court. I knew that flogging counterfeit goods was a federal offence, I also knew that you could be tracked via your Internet Service Provider. Which means that my ISP would be recorded against his website everytime I log into his page. I knew I was gonna go down with his dodgy business.

In the meantime, I was planning a weekend in Melbourne. James said he would take us out to dinner at a flash restaurant. I was helping him turnover 30k a month with his online sales, so thats the least he could do!
During the day we went to his shop in Melbourne, he wasn't there and none of the staff knew us.
That night he picked us up in his Audi sports car and took us to dinner at Crown Casino. His girlfriend Alana was with him, she was very very thin and went to the bathroom after each mouthful of food
We had a nice evening and when he dropped us off later he took off screeching his tyres, being a show-off.

I had been trying to talk him into getting his own credit card so that I could remove mine off his ebay page - because I needed to resign to get away from his dodgy business practices. James banked with the Bank of Melbourne, and as I'd been recently working for Westpac, I was able to advise him to get a visa debit card - Westpac owned Bank of Melbourne and the BOM had a visa debit card, where, at the time, westpac didn't have that product, you could only get one if you were a resident of Victoria. I was quite pushy about it and he finally got around to filling in an application and he got one. Once I'd put his card number on to his website/ebay and removed mine, I wrote my resignation letter to him. I told him I could no longer work for a company that was ripping off their customers like he was.

But there was still the problem of all those customers who said they were starting legal action against him. My ISP would connect me to his business once investigations began.
So, I decided that I had to be one of the first to report his fraudulent activity to the authorities.
The federal police contacted Calvin Kleins reps and they got a private investigator to follow it up. I had lots of phone calls assisting them in their investigation.
They did an anonymous visit to James' shop and came back to me for confirmation about a few things, like who owns the black Audi out the back and whats inside the shipping container out the back.
Next they set up a sting on his shop. The investigator rang me afterwards to let me know that James was a very terrified young man and agreed to dob in his suppliers!!
They said I would not need to give evidence in court and James would never know that I helped them in their investigations. There were plenty of other people who could have dobbed on him.

He is still in the import business apparently. I just hope he is not falsely representing his goods and giving refunds where refunds are due.

:: MARCH 2011 :: The year so far

JANUARY:
We both had the whole month of January off work,  I was on holidays and Peter was on health-leave.    We spent most of it at the caravan at St.Helens.
We've really transformed the look of the caravan now with the new deck.
The weather was great and having the verandah helped keep the sun out a bit which helped keep the van from getting too hot.  We practically lived on that deck,  so its been one of the best things we've ever done.  Its something we have waited years to do. 

Below are a couple of Before and After photos. 


AFTER   RENOVATIONS

  

BEFORE

On Australia Day we took the tents and went camping at Arthurs Lake for three nights.  Our friends Sally and Fred came too.  We set up camp at the Pumphouse Bay camping ground.  The first night was windy and cold,  but after that it was quite warm.  Peter caught a fish which we shared for entree that night.   Another fisherman camping there had caught a lot of fish and he smoked one for us.

On the saturday night,  Danny and Alison came to visit for a BBQ.  They have a shack near the Great Lake.

FEB::

The first two weeks of Feb we were back to work again.

Then Peter had two weeks long-service leave that he had booked last year.  I'm only working in Launceston two days a week now and paid to work at home 5 hours a week,  so as long as I have the laptop with me,  I can do those 5 hours work anywhere that I can get an internet connection.  So we took off again on the days that I didn't have to work.

One weekend we went up to Arthurs Lake and stayed at Peter Rasmussens shack.  I planned to leave there early on the monday morning to drive the 90 minutes to work.   It snowed all night ....... this is what we awoke to the next morning!!

Arthurs Lake Winter wonderland in Feburary

I left Peter at Arthurs Lake and managed to drive to work.  Then I went home that night for two nights.  Peter was spending more time at Arthurs Lake as Peter Ras was going to join him for a couple of days fishing. 

The wednesday was Launceston Cup Day and I only had to work half a day,  so I got away at 11am to go up to Arthurs and pick up Peter.

He had caught a nice trout so we took that with us to Queenstown

On the way to Queenie we stopped at the Iron Blow look out.  They've built a new steel walkway out over the old Iron Blow open cut.  Its awesome ......  photo below .......

When we got to Queenstown we called in to see Margie, then we went around to Janine's place where we were staying for the two nights.   Peter cooked the trout for our dinner that night.

On the way to pick up Peter earlier in the day at Arthurs Lake,  I had to stop on the side of the road for a telephone interview for a new job with Salmat.   Before the interview ended they told me that I had got thru to the next round of interviews and they wanted me to participate in a 2 hour conference call tomorrow with three others.   Yikes!!

THURSDAY:
  We were up early to go on an underground tour of the Mt.Lyell Mine with Anthony Coulson.   The tour went for about 3 hours,  we saw all the workings of the underground,  then he took us up to where the ore is brought out to the surface.   What an experience. FANTASTIC

Then it was back to Janines as I only had 20 mins until my phone hook up.
I had to be sitting at a computer and logged into Salmats server as well as be on the phone .  I took the laptop into the bedroom and used Janine's cordless phone.
Peter went to play golf.    I was still on the call when he got back from his round of golf.
That evening I got an email to say that I got the job !!!!
I will do the training in March while I'm still employed by the City Mission,  then I will leave to start my new career in April.

Next day we headed home via Burnie and Ulverstone.

Peters sister Heather was home that weekend.  Her Mother-in-Law,  Audrey was not well and she came and spent a day with her in the hospital before she passed away.    We all got together for tea at the Centennial while Heather was here.

On the Monday Peter came to work with me, then went off and did his own thing until I finished work.
When he picked me up we went off down to St.Helens.  I'd had a lot of sales on my website the previous week from customers on the east coast,  so I had a busy couple of days delivering parcels to my customers and catching up with friends over coffee.   Two days wasn't long enough.
I was meant to go back to work on Thursday morning,  but we had had no sales all week so there really wasn't much to do at work,  the rest can be done at home on my laptop.   So we left St.Helens a little later than we planned.
My sister Sandra was in Launceston for the day we so caught up for lunch at Mortys on our way home.

NOW ITS MARCH
My friend Sally has also scored a position working for Salmat too,  so we got together to organise our telephony equipment.

Online sales at the City Mission are not going too well this year,  so I think I will be doing them a favour when I resign later this month.
Today I have the day off and Sally and I are going over to Port Sorell to see my nephew Shaun,  he also works for Salmat so we are going to see him at work to see what the job involves.
Tomorrow is my birthday.  Nothing big planned this year,  just Rotary dinner tomorrow night.  But I've just had a text message from Tracey and Alana to see if I want to go out to lunch at Belle's tomorrow.  mmm yumm
:)

:: 2010 Updates ::

Mid 2010 :: We took the car and drove to Western Australia


We have a very detailed blog about the trip here - WA road trip

The rest of the year was spent working and surviving the Tasmanian winter when we got home.


The highlight of the later part of the year was the building and extending of our caravan at St.Helens.

We got Kevin Barker to put a roof over the caravan, while he was at it, we got him to put a roof over the deck. The old deck needed replacing, so we raised it slightly and extended it on two sides.

What we have now is about double the living space than we originally had

Progress photos of the renovations at St.Helens are on facebook - The Caravan

CHRISTMAS 2010 :: This year we went to the Newstead Hotel for lunch.
Christmas photos on facebook


We were up early opening presents then we headed off for Launceston. First stop was at Grandma's place so that Krissie could give her gift.



Then it was out to Hadspen to Angelina and Joe's place.

Then back to Launceston for pre-lunch drinks at Diane and Wayne's new place with Heather and Martin and Bev and David. Then we all went down to Newstead for lunch.


After lunch we popped out to Youngtown to visit Debbie and Guy.

From there we went out to Hadspen again and collected Krissie. After we left there we headed out the Illawarra Rd to Longford to Bev and Davids to catch up with the rest of the family.

Then it was back to the GTown

Next day we packed up the car and the dog and headed down to St.Helens

Maxi was booked into Wagabouts kennels for the week. He went really well, but he was so tired by the end of the week . I think he stayed awake all week waiting for us to come back and get him.


NEW YEARS EVE 2010, as usual we spent it at the caravan park. We went up to the party at the games room and got some food the park provided. We then went to visit Tony and Jenny Waldron.

from there we moved down to Fee and Jason's caravan to see Gideon and Di who were down for the night.

We wandered back to our own van before midnight and waited to see everyone as they made their way home. A couple of families were worried they were going to get evicted from the park because their kids hijacked the parks golf buggy.

Next morning all was forgiven apparently.

Krissies Birthday - 28th March

A few photos from Krissies Birthday  -  Lunch at Belles Tearooms
then we partied on at home:

The Search for a Pound Puppy

Now that Easter is behind us,  the search for a dog for Krissie has gone up a level.

For the last few months we have put the word out that we are looking for a pet dog - hoping that someone might know of anyone who can't look after their pet anymore,  maybe moving or going into a nursing home etc.  But, no pets came to us.  Then with Easter approaching and a trip to the east coast planned,  we stopped looking in March.

Once home from the east coast we had three weeks to find a dog before we leave for WA.    So I started ringing the RSPCA's in Launceston and Devonport and the Deloraine Dogs Home.

Deloraine didn't have anything other than a 3 month old puppy.   Devonport had an 8 yr old Jack Russell but they had not done a behaviour test on him yet.   Launceston said they had a little guy called Maxi who was 3 yrs old.
A couple of days later they put a photo of Maxi on the adopt.a.pet website.  He looked a nice little fella.

On the Saturday Krissie and I went to visit him. When we got there someone was out walking him.  We waited for him to come back and when he did, it was raining,  so we tried to get to know him inside and there were lots of other people around, Maxi was very shy and would only look at the lady who had taken him for a walk.   I wish they could have left us alone with him for a while.

Anyway, Krissie was not too sure.  So the next tuesday we went back to see him again.  This time we took him for some walks and he was lovely,  Krissie even had him 'sitting' and 'dancing' on command.  He also seemed very affectionate too.
We decided we would like to adopt him and as he still had some vets visits to go thru, we said we would come back on Saturday to pick him up.

Well, he has totally blended in with Krissie so completely.  He is the most perfect little pet you could ever wish to have.   He is gentle, quiet, affectionate, clean and well behaved.  He is totally awesome.   He sleeps inside with Krissie,  and he has got her out of bed early EVERY SINGLE MORNING and they go for walks,  she is going to get so fit!!   

He is so beautiful, Krissie says she can't imagine her life without him now.

the Month of APRIL - 2010

First there was Easter:

We left home on Good Friday and met up with Danny and Alison Beer at the St.Leonards pub car park.   We drove in convoy out thru Blessington and on to Mathinna via Forestry tracks.

We stopped on a ridge overlooking the east coast hinterland for our lunch.

Then it was on to St.Helens.

We showed Danny and Alison where they were staying at the Sweetwater Villas.  Then we dropped Krissie off at Haylee's place before we settled in to our caravan.

That evening we all headed off to the Bayside Inn for dinner, then afterwards we popped out to Stielglitz to see Mandy Norton who was staying at the railway holiday house.

SATURDAY:   Went to the market and got some goodies to take on a picnic.   Ran into Rosemary Oliver who I used to work with for years when we worked for Australia Post.  They have inherited some land at Lottah and were camping there for Easter!!!
Met up with Danny and  Alison again and we headed off in the direction of Pyengana.  First stop was the St.Columba Falls before heading off to the Pub in the Paddock where we took some photos.   From there it was a short ride to the Holy Cow Cafe at the Pyengana Cheese Company.   The others had some cheese tastings and purchased some cheeses.

Next stop was the Anchor Stampers on the Blue Tier.   Took some more photos in there. Then up the hill further to Poimena, the site of an abandoned town (theres nothing left there now) We stopped and cooked some burgers and pancakes for our lunch at a 'culturally significant site'  No idea why it was culturally significant, perhaps it was once an aboriginal midden,  or maybe it was the site of the original blacksmiths shop?   Anyway, we had a yummy lunch.   Then it was down the hill again and out through Goulds Country and back in the general direction of St.Helens.

Before we got to the top of Long Hill, we took a left turn and ended up on the Ansons Bay Road.  Then we turned off up Reids Road which took us out to the Gardens Road where headed north up to Taylors Beach,   we also popped into Cosy Corner, but being Easter, the place was more packed than the caravan park we were staying in.

Then a quick trip back thru Binalong Bay and up the Dora Point Lookout and back to St.  Helens.

A quick catch up with some of the caravan park residents and it was out to Stieglitz again for a BBQ with Mandy and John Norton.  
Angelina, Joe and Jimmy had arrived at the Hillcrest Caravan park over the road so they joined us for a BBQ.

SUNDAY:
  Happy Easter !  
Picked up Krissie and went over to Hillcrest to have fish and chips with Ange and  Jimi.

Monday:

Took the back roads to come home,  this time thru Mathinna and up to Ringarooma.  Stopped for a picnic at Ledgerwood with Ange and  Joe before we all went our seperate ways to get home,  we took the Bridport option.  Up until then we managed to avoid getting stuck behind boats and caravans,  but once we hit the Bridport Rd we caught up with them all.

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