What is it I refuse to change?

The most noticeable thing would have to be my use of eptpos. I love eftpos. I find that having cash in my purse just makes it disappear. I don't make it disappear, I only go to the shops to buy food usually. Any cash I give to my husband to look after, I did have a secret purse, but my daughter needed a purse recently so now I don't have one. Hubby bought me a little Italian leather coin purse in a shop in Prahran for only $5. I take it no one has a use for a coin purse. It was on sale. Hubby gets to go to the city for work sometimes. I think last time he went to Melbourne University where I once worked. It was a lovely place to work.

Some shops here have credit card only. You get pointed to the atm machine over the road. There was only one when we first came here I think, hard to remember now. I think there are at least four now and one of those supermarket ones. The supermarket didn't have cash out to start with, so I found it hard not to be able to get cash smaller than $20 notes, which come from the atm machines. It is nicer than our hometown in some ways because it took quite awhile to drive up the street just to get money out of an atm machine.

We even have coffee out on the street now too. I will drink coffee when out for lunch with my Mum or something but that is about it. Mum hasn't been for 3 years, but she did visit our new house this year, and we do meet up, though not sure if we have been having coffee. I did get to have lunch with my husband a few months ago and we had coffee then. He and I were buying hardware in another town, he took a day off because my back was very bad. I was able to go in the car, but didn't want to lift anything, it was getting better. Can you believe it the bank went down. Nothing. It wasn't a major bank, but we could only get an offline amount of $200 and wait until our pay went into our other account with another bank. So we had lunch. We bought the paint, then asked them to hold the rest until after our lunch. A very eventful day.

You hear comments about eftpos sometimes. Once in the town I shop for food in, I was in a shop and they said their eftpos wasn't working that day and they realised how many people used it. Another day in our own town the lady said I was the first person to use it that day. So change must have happened in the last few years, and our own town a little slower than others.

I still like plastic bags for carrying my purchased food items. I used boxes for quite awhile when the bags were taken away at the local supermarket. I am quite good at stacking them in the trolley, they work very well. I don't like putting meat in the box, and I don't like knowing that the boxes are brought back probably because of the price of taking them to the tip here, and knowing they had meat in them too. Maybe that was the decider.

I use the plastic bags for storing clothes, and really love doing that, and treasured every little bag in the end. I don't think I ran out.

Why don't I use green bags? I have seen that stuff broken down, and it turns into powder. Also I don't think the amount of food I buy would go back into the trolley and I don't want to try. I am also too lazy to wash calico bags.

The problem is that I have been here too long. I don't remember so much of my life before as I did. I guess one thing is that I am hanging on to my former doctors, and using them as a stick to measure the others on. I haven't been enough to make the change, and haven't asked enough questions about how the clinic is run. We have use of some aspects of the Flying Doctor service here in that they supply a female doctor, or that is where I was up to with the news last. We do have bulk billing, and yes it is nice. When I was at my hometown doctor last I got in a huge mess trying to claim everything back as we don't have a Medicare office for 1 1/2 hours. We do have an in-chemist one, but you have to ring up on the phone to access it. I was managing this change with the doctors OK in our practise seachange year near Melbourne, but then dropped the ball when I came here.

I had my opportunity to say something about this in a survey. The survey had identifying questions in the first page that the locals would be able to identify me by, so I didn't hand one back.