After a very busy Solstice Day, Rita awoke with a bit of a headache, and so we decided to play hermits and have a bit of a lazy day, and leave Lottie and Roger to explore Moissac with Juiia. This was reinforced when the first of the scanned Monash exams arrived, and were awaiting grading.

During the day I realised that I needed to pay one of our workers over here who had done work on the house but not been paid. I planned to do this by transferring money directly into his account via OzForex. However, since this was the first time that I was paying him by OzForex, I realised they would phone me for confirmation. Trouble was they would phone my Australian number, which I would not answer! Sure enough, within a few hours I got an email saying they had not been able to contact me. So I replied to their email, explained the situation, and within a few hours they had confirmed the deal based on what I had been able to explain to them. That’s what I call Service!

Now all I had to do was send the money to OxForex via BPAY, which I had done many times before. However, when I tried to do this from my Westpac account, I found out that they had introduced an SMS Security Code verification recently (without telling me), and their SMS Code was being sent to my Australian mobile number (which again I could not read). However, unlike OxForex, Westpac had no easy way for me to explain the situation. The best that I could do was to get Rita to email a friend of hers who runs the Westpac sub-branch in Yea and try to get her to intervene on our behalf. Time will tell.

In the afternoon, I heard a knock on the door and found my self talking to another Aussie, Tony Backhouse, who was about to become the new owner of another Piper barge, Reverie. He had been in and out of barging for many years and after two smaller barges (Betty B and Betty B II), he was about to upgrade to a 3-year old Piper barge. What he was particularly interested in was registering the new barge under the Australian flag. So we exchange details and I promised to send him an email with the details of how I had done it.