Liz was stressed to her eyeballs because we went for an overnight vaycay in Narromine to appease our daughter, only to wait an hour to see anyone at the motel's reception, then we find out the room hadn't been cleaned. I've learned my lesson and will look at reviews from now on because I've never seen a worse dump. Liz got a refund and we came back to Dubbo, but our daughter wasn't having it, so we told her she could spend $100 on toys instead, we thought it would still be cheaper than a hotel room for the night. Liz explained to her she could get a few of the things we'd normally tell her were too much, we ended up coming home with $240 worth of junk from Big W including a toy guinea pig in a cage with three babies that cost $120. We were weak because we had just found out from the handyman, as we got into Dubbo, we had a termite problem at Furlong, it turned out to be a leaking shower which was causing the wall frames to rot. Liz dealt with everything including getting a termite guy to go around there. Once she got home she was anxious as fuck and needed consoling so I explained to her that the shower problem was actually an opportunity and if we had got a room in Narromine she wouldn't have been able to handle the house issue, and if we hadn't of moved out we wouldn't have discovered the shower issue, and it would have gotten worse, and that we had the money to cover the issue and still be in the black ready for the next problem. It was the one-eyed goat problem I explained, which is our family variation of the Chinese story of the farmer who had good and bad things happen to him and every time people would say that's bad luck or that's good luck and each time he'd say 'maybe' or something to that effect. The one where the son breaks a leg, but then because his leg is broken he is not conscripted to join the army. Good times. #stories #reflections Published 12-2-2025 Written on https://freewriter.app