Something's actually gotten less expensive

A couple of my friends are planning a family. They've found a family planning centre and a doctor they like. Over a cup of coffee with the girls I learned that intrauterine insemination and IVF are much more affordable these days than I thought.

I'd heard from friends years ago that they'd pay around the $10,000 mark per IVF implantation. And I'd never really given any thought to the cost of insemination.

But it turns out the out of pocket expense for IVF is less than half that amount now and insemination is under $2000 a shot with BYO sperm.

This is one of my favourite Gary Larson cartoons :-)

There are actually six Mary Poppins books

The heading really says it all for this one. I've not read the books but enjoyed the movie as a little girl and the stage show more recently. I might have to read the books now too.

The six books are called:

1. Mary Poppins
2. Mary Poppins Comes Back
3. Mary Poppins Opens the Door (gee whiz, that sounds like a page turner!)
4. Mary Poppins in the Park
5. Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane
6. Mary Poppins and the House Next Door

There's someone worse with numbers than I am

Numbers aren't my strong suit but the prices below don't seem to add up.



Seems smarter to pick up a 400ml bottle of lemon scented Palmolive dishwashing liquid from the left and save $1.75 rather than the same bottle from the right side to save only $1.

 

Perhaps Coles should reconsider stickering their specials during the wee hours of the morning when their staff are perhaps not wide awake?

 

Woof! Woof! AAAARGH.....!!!

The medical term given to the fear of dogs is Cynophobia.

Slugs and centipedes

David Attenborough told me today that slugs are hermaphrodites while centipedes have males and females. Useless information really, but it was something I didn't know before today.

Apparently most hermaphroditic animals are fish (not all of them but a far few species) or invertebrates including snails, worms and echinoderms (a marine invertebrate).

As a small aside, on 8 May this year David Attenborough will turn 89 years old! He was married at 24, and had two children, Robert and Susan. From this I'm assuming he wasn't a hermaphrodite.

Black tie tampons

The first time I needed to purchase sanitary products after giving birth to my son, I grabbed the usual coloured box from the shelf.

It wasn't until I got home that I realised a lot had changed in the 18-odd months since my last purchase. It seemed the tampons now wore dresses. Pretty little white wedding dresses.

I was a little unnerved. They'd been the same design forever, hadn't they? Now all of a sudden they were totally different. I wondered just how long I'd been out of it. Was this some kind of dream? Had I gotten a dodgy batch?

Maybe they were meant to be ghosts. Was it some kind of Halloween promotion? No, it wasn't October.

Lettuce inflation

Today was the first time I've seen the humble iceberg lettuce cost $3.48.

Right after my eyebrows had settled back down into their normal positions, I was filled with a vague sense that our farmers must be going through some tough times.

I guess I figure the price of lettuce is like an unofficial barometer of the farmers' situation.

In an effort to learn more, I found some interviews with growers on the Coles website.

Undoubtedly engineered to generate positive PR for the supermarket giant, I still found them interesting.

I learnt it takes 6-10 weeks for lettuces to be ready for harvesting from the commercial farm, and their ideal growing conditions are cool nights and sunny days.