Category: Diary

Slowly but surely we’re getting a lawn.

Every have one of those mornings when you wake up and feel that something isn’t right? This morning is one of those days. Everything feels a little off kilter today. I mentioned it to Rae before she left and she said she was feeling the same way.

Hmmm. I wonder what’s out there?

Remember when you were growing up and you were constantly warned of the dangers of peer group pressure? Don’t get sucked in just ’cause everyone else was doing it, don’t follow the pack, be your own person – all of those wonderful pieces of wisdom heaped upon our teenage selves?

Well, they still hold true when you’re, well, not a teenager any more.

As we left to go to the market today the neighbours (no, the old ones) were out the front planting shrubs, moving top soil and generally making the front of their house presentable. I looked at the huge mound of dirt we still have, noticed the tiny bits of construction crumbs still embedded in the dirt and began calculating in my head how much longer they had been in than we had and how much time this meant we had to get our house in order.

I guess these days it’s not the evil PGP, it’s keeping up with Jonses. Either way, it’s evil.

Just met the new neighbours again, this time both of them. They’re moving in tomorrow and they seem lovely. Thanks to the fact we have no fence between us they have spotted the deck and asked who did it for us as they want to put one in. They’re happy with what we’ve arranged for the aforementioned fence so things are looking good there.

Melbourne Ice lost their first game last week, maybe I’m the kiss of death. If you want to see what a committed group of people can achieve check out the results page for the game against Newcastle. We have scores updated from the rink, the game sheet uploaded, video highlights, the game broadcast and a report – all done by volunteers.

The computers in this house are being shuffled around. Rae’s old laptop has gone to her mum, the kid’s PC is back in one piece and I’ve moved my old PC to the theatre room. I’ve put the release candidate of Windows 7 on it to use it as a media PC. Any media file I download here is automatically synced via a wireless connection to the media PC, ready to watch as soon as it’s downloaded. No more converting to DivX or burning to DVD – straight from the hard drive to the telly. Bonus is you can use the 110cm telly as a widescreen monitor too. HQ clips on YouTube look fantastic.

Grass. We have more grass, and it’s green and growing. If you sit at the kitchen table it’s an optical illusion but the whole backyard looks green, I really can’t wait for the day where we say ‘go for it kids’ and let them run all over it. It’s a while off yet but we can see the (green) light at the end of the tunnel now.

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!