Category: Diary

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.

 

 
 

It was a dirty day today, more so for Rae than me but we both got involved. It’s the continuation of the deck induced back yard work. When you have such a lovely deck you really can’t have it surrounded by dirt and weeds so over the past week we’ve flattened the back yard and today had a huge mound of top soil dumped out the front. Over the course of the day that mound has been moved, barrow load by barrow load, and spread over the back yard. Tomorrow we’ll flatten the new top soil out and then, with showers forecast for Sunday, we’ll toss some grass seed down and cross our fingers.

It’s amazing how different the place looks now, and it’s almost impossible to believe that with a bit of luck (and a bit of rain) we may even have a lawn of sorts for the kids to play on before winter hits. We’re getting there, slowly but surely.

You know, six people living in the house make a lot of dishes. Think breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks for the young ones in between, they all add up to a mountain off dishes. I stood at the sink washing the lunch dishes the other day and though ‘we need a dish washer’.

One of my sisters had already offered to lend us the money to buy one, but trying to keep debt down we said no. Still, it was great to know the offer was there and I was getting tempted to take Kate up on her generous offer. However my little sister rang yesterday – she found one for us that someone was getting rid of ‘only because my wife wants to get a stainless steel one’. Apparently it’s a give away but because I’ve done a fair bit of web work for her drama school in Shepparton she’s not telling me how much.

We’re going to pick it up some time this weekend and thanks to the kindness of my sisters we’ll be saving over half an hour of hassles every day. I’m a lucky brother.

The police helicopter spent the better part of yesterday afternoon chuckin’ laps around the neighbourhood. I wonder if we can dob in a hoon…

If you dropped by early this morning you may have noticed things looked a little odd around here, that’s because I’ve moved hosts for this site. The old host was bought out by a new company and that company has been nothing but hassles so I’m moving all of my sites.

I’ve had a quick look around, everything seems okay so fingers crossed. Daniel, you’ll be pleased to know that after 7 years I’ve finally moved it out of the WordPress directory too.

UPDATE

Of course, as soon as I typed this and hit Publish I found a problem that meant I had to move the site back to the WordPress directory. One day when I have time I’ll move it out.