Author: awmalloyadmin

Who at Powercor or CitiPower decided that Mother’s Day would be a really good day to knock out power from 9:00am to 4:00pm? I understand that the work has to be done, no problems with that at all, but on the one day in May when a higher percentage than normal of people are likely to be home wanting to cook?

Congratulations to Veronica and Steve on the arrival of Hannah yesterday. Well done guys, can’t wait to meet the latest Blues member.

We’ve been here four months today, wow, a third of a year gone already. Four months since Rob, Zita, Jen, Daniel and Darren were silly enough to volunteer to help us shift, thanks again guys.

In this time we’ve come a long way but one area we hadn’t really progressed in was meeting neighbours. A nod here, a wave there but not much beyond that. This all changed on Saturday when Tweety and Sylvester flew in to our back yard. It was an incredibly windy day, gusts over 100k apparently. I was working when I heard Rae say “I tawt I saw a puddy tat.” and sure enough, there they were, on the side of a kids tent that had blown in to our back yard.

We battlted it inside and pondered what to do. When the rain stopped Rae took the kids and went for a walk to ask the houses around us if they were missing a tent. She got to meet several of our neighbours, with perhaps the most interesting being two doors up. They had just moved in and commented that when looking at the street they were particularly stuck by our house; no, in a good way. Instant bonus points to them.

Conversation continued and eventually arrived at the neighbours who have just moved out after two months. It ends up the guy next door has sold his house and after barely two months his tenants have been given the heave-ho. This is the guy who refused to acknowledge our fencing notice and ignored two letters requesting his presence at mediation to try and get a fence built. Yes, we are still missing one side fence because this guy wanted to avoid paying while he tried to sell his place for an unrealistic amount. He refused to answer phone calls and was a general pig about the issue.

The good news is that we know who has bought the house. It’s the brother of the nice people two doors up, and he is going to ask that a fence be constructed before settlement. What goes around comes around my friends.

Later that afternoon we had a knock on the front door, it was our neighbours on the other side, those of the bubbling spa fame Ren. It ends up the tent belongs to them. We did the neighbourly thing and invited them in to collect it. Every neighbour secretly wants to know what the inside of the house next door looks like and here was their chance. I wonder if they did what we would have done on the way home. “Oh, I didn’t like the colour scheme. Did you notice the lounge? So that’s what that room is.”. If it was us we’d probably still be going over what we saw.

So now we know who lives in a few of the houses around, that the people next door are actually really nice and that we will soon have new neighbours and a fence. All thanks to a flying Tweety and Sylvester tent and some chatting by my wife.

So, your team failing in every respect? Winter weekends filled with dread? Sick of crying your way in to a new week?

Try something new,  a real team in a fantastic sport.

After we built our deck we barrelled on and cleared the backyard. We then had it flattened, brought in some top soil and with more hope than anything else we sprinkled some lawn seed and left it the vagaries of the weather.

That was almost two weeks ago and we had all but given up hope. We had a pretty wild storm last week and it seemed to blow/wash away or drown most of the seed so we thought we’d have to give up and try again. Until today!

There they are – incy weeny blades of hope. That’s all we have covering 70 square metres, but it’s a start. Our very own grass. With rain forecast over the weekend it should get a little boost along.

And what’s more, ‘they’ are wrong – watching grass grow is fantastic!

I was sitting out on the deck this afternoon playing with the kids when I glanced up.

I’m fairly sure, given Rae’s reaction, that many ladies, and a few gentlemen readers of this blog, will like what I saw.

(Get a proper look)

Framed prints available on request.

Rae and I love our movies, it’s one reason we settled on the design of our house (our own theatre room) and helped us decide where to get married. Now I don’t know if it’s genetic or maybe they’ve watched Nemo and/or Cars one too many times but just now when I finished reading all three a story Bert piped up “can I see the credits of the book dad?”.

It’s too many, even for me. I’m getting a new PC tomorrow as my production machine is all but dead after a few years of hammering. It’s pretty well spec’d beast – quad core, 4GB of RAM, 640GB on the hard drive and some nice features. The thing is that when it arrives it will be the 7th computer in the house, and that’s obscene.

I have my old production machine (3 years old), my new production machine, my Windows laptop (3.5 years) and my Mac laptop (4 months). Then there’s the kids PC (about 5 years) and Rae has her new laptop and still has the old one, which is on the way to her mum before too long.

I’ll keep both my laptops and the new machine but I’m wondering what to do with the old desktop. I might wipe it and turn it in to a file server or keep it as a backup. Hmmm, it runs pretty quietly so maybe I could turn it in to a media PC for the theatre room. Whatever happens this new one will be the last PC for quite a while.

Mid April and the temperature gets to 28.8, just wonderful. What made it even better was Rae had taken an extra day off so we packed up the kids and took them down to Altona Beach. It was a great day for a walk along the pier, play in the park and stroll through the market.

Surely this will be summer’s last gasp, the BOM say it should be, so we’ll file away these memories to get us through until September.

It’s amazing what a difference hanging your own stuff on your own walls makes. Our major project for this long weekend has been to make our home feel more of our own, and a major part of that has been finally putting up our own stuff on the walls.

First off we have hung this massive old mirror in our entrance way. It’s directly opposite my office door so it’s a bit scary seeing myself every time I leave the office but it looks great.

I had an idea ages ago and I’m so pleased that it turned out as well as it did, even if it is on a different wall to what I imagined. We chose 16 photos of places and things that meant a lot to us, photos that we had taken. We then had them printed in black and white, put in to frames and they now grace the dining area wall. Eventually we want to put a buffet underneath them, but they’ll do for now.

And we’ve finally started getting our theatre room in place. The three movie posters (one a bit damaged ‘cause we didn’t store it properly) are along one wall. My pride and joy sits below Ferris – a ‘This theatre is equipped with Dolby Digital’ plaque that Rae bought for me five years ago. It’s been in storage waiting for the day we have our own place and now it’s up.

Next I’ll be taking a photo of the Astor’s neon sign and another of the Sun’s neon sign. We’ll have these blown up and put on the wall either side of the telly to complete the theatre room.

We’re still working on ‘homifying’ but we’ve made great strides this past week with planting seed in the backyard and getting our pictures up. There’s still a way to go but it’s really beginning to feel like our own place now.