Banking
Banks can really be a pain sometimes. Personally, my banking matters are pretty simple. There's a home loan offset account, which acts in many ways like a personal account, and there's a credit card (paid off in full each month), which makes every day purchases considerably easier.

Everything works pretty well, until you try to bank a foreign cheque. The home loan just plain doesn't do foreign currency, at least they're honest about it. The credit card (with a different financial institution) is happy about doing foreign currency, but their banking system doesn't allow them to put a 28 day hold on the funds from the foreign cheque -- something about bad software on their behalf.

As such, trying to deposit a foreign cheque to the credit card makes the bank uneasy -- I might spend those funds before the cheque has cleared, and that would be terrible. I should note at this point that said foreign cheque is a bank cheque, not a personal cheque, and is covered in holograms and watermarks. I usually point this out to the bank, along with the facts that I pay off the card every month, I never go near the credit limit, and I've never been refused for the dozen or so foreign cheques that I've banked previously.

Usually, after much talk up and down the chain of command, the cheque is finally deposited. However sometimes it's refused.

Luckily for me, the following proceedure has always worked without fail:

foreach bank
    foreach teller
        say "Hi, I'd like to deposit a foreign cheque to
             my credit card";

Eventually, I'll hit someone who doesn't know there's supposed to be 15 minutes of ceremonial grieving by the bank before refusing, or just flat out doesn't care. Usually I succeed after 1.2 branches.

The whole thing does get rather tiresome, and as the whole matter appears to be entirely discretional, is highly dependant upon branch/staff/managers.

I'm investigating alternative arrangements, the most useful of which would be an account in US dollars.

Broody chook
Broody chook is still broody. It's been something like four weeks now. If we weren't able to steal eggs from her each evening, she'd be sitting on a mound of about eighty eggs by now, trying to make them hatch. Given that we don't have a rooster (and so the eggs aren't fertile), the whole thing is starting to get a little silly. I'm even considering going and buying her some day-old chicks to break her out of her broodyness.

She stayed off the nest long enough today (to eat and dust bathe) that I could change the straw in the nesting area. She had a huge sook about me doing that.