Daily Archives: July 23, 2006

I celebrated my 40th birthday last Monday in low key style which was my wish, and had a fun morning with Joanne and the boys down at the National Railway Museum. It's only about a 15 minute drive from our place to Port Adelaide where it is located and every July holidays, they hold a Thomas and Friends week aimed at getting the younge age bracket interested in trains and all of the accompanying history. Joshua who turns three in about two weeks loves Thomas and he had a blast riding on their small Thomas train around the complex, looking at the restored locomotives in the main shed and looking at some models of the Ghan and the Indian Pacific in the video room while his brother just watched the videos. Aaron was more interested in the trip to KFC for lunch afterwards. Anyway, at the end when we were leaving, we just had to make one last stop at the souvenir shop on the way out. Joshua's eyes lit up because there was the most complete range of wooden Thomas models a child of his demographic could want to see. He ended up choosing Mavis, the quarry train (I've become quite the expert, y'know) to add to the 15 others he's got at home.

And now all of this is directly related to the fact that in the afternoon, I rang my broadband provider to upgrade from a 256 mb speed to a 512 mb. This also entails a download limit increase from 500 mb to 12G, which has become a necessity. Why? Well, usually I get an 80 % download usage email in the last week or so of the month that indicates I've managed my quota well before the compulsory slowdown. That was until the Thomas the Tank Engine website was discovered.... It had everything a nearly three year old could want - little games, galleries of all of the trains (and there's a lot of them) and movie clips as well. So the last two months have had both boys requesting and using this website after tea on many weeknights. The end result was that the 80 % download usage email arrived in the inbox much, much earlier - about a third of the way into the month. Luckily our account just slows the MB flow instead of charging for excess but the writing was on the wall - time to upgrade. Now I can download podcasts, video and other resources freely instead of being limit conscious. That is - until the boys are old enough for online gaming!