virtualwolf – Page 15

It’s like we’re grown-ups or something!

14 March 201322 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournalLeave a comment

On Monday this week we went to see a mortgage broker to see how much more money we’d need to save in order to buy a house, and to generally get some more info on the whole process.

As it turns out we have enough saved up already, and the minimum payments we’d be making on a $475,000 place (our maximum limit) is less than what we’re paying in rent right now! We ended up applying for pre-approval for a home loan, and today we found out that it’s been granted (despite us not expecting it until next week some time)!

Holy shit we’re actually going to buy our own house! Even better, the mortgage broker showed us that if we put $1500 a fortnight extra payments on the home loan, we’d have it paid off in under nine years. Woah.

We’re looking at places in Quakers Hill, Marayong, and Kings Park. We’ve already been out to check out the area, and it’s quite nice… suburban, quiet, and on the train line. It’s 47 minutes to Central for kungfupolarbear and would be about 55 minutes to Wynyard for me, which is quite acceptable. We’ve got an appointment scheduled this Saturday to go look at a place. We’re certainly not going to be rushing into anything given our current disaster of a place. We definitely wish we’d known that we could have afforded a place this soon… if we had, we’d have just stayed in Turramurra and wouldn’t have spent a bunch of money on moving, and then another bunch when we eventually break the lease here. :\ On the slightly bright side, the lease for this place has a “lease break fee”, which basically boils down to us giving them a bunch of money but being able to end the lease whenever the hell we want.

So yeah. An actual place that we own. Exciting! 😀

The current place is still loud and obnoxious and everyone here needs to die in a fire. Poor kungfupolarbear has been at her wit’s end pretty much the whole time. But with any luck it’ll soon be over.

The move

16 January 201322 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournal2 Comments

So we moved from our old place in Turramurra to a new unit in Waterloo on Saturday last week.

It was a pretty rubbish move.

Firstly, the lift in the old place broke on Friday night (after we’d brought a bunch of boxes down to the carpark so the movers would be able to pack them more quickly, at least). I called up the emergency number and they said they’d send someone out, the guy came at 7am on Saturday morning (which is exactly when the movers arrived) and got it going again, but after he left it decided to occasionally just stop working for several minutes at a time, leaving us waiting on our level of the building with giant things like the fridge. We didn’t end up having to bring much down the fire escape, but jesus fucking christ.

Then we got to the new place. The first place we were meant to unload everything was at one of the entrances to the carpark (the truck doesn’t actually fit into the carpark), and it was a ramp sloping downwards. The moving guys said they couldn’t unload anything like that because things could very well just fall right back out of the truck. There was also a good two minute walk from where the truck was to where the lift up to our level was.

We moved around to another carpark entrance which was flat, but still wasn’t anywhere near the lift. We eventually managed to get everything moved in, but it took seven and a half bloody hours all up.

We’ve also had the fun of dealing with the useless real estate for the old place. The guy wanted to schedule an open house on the Saturday that we were moving out, I told him it’d need to be in the afternoon (3pm or so) and that there’d be stuff there still because we were coming back on Sunday to do the cleaning. I went in on Monday to drop the keys off, and he asked if we’d cleaned the unit because when the inspection was on there was still stuff there. YES I KNOW YOU DIPSHIT, WE TOLD YOU THAT WOULD BE THE CASE. Then he didn’t have the original form showing which keys had been given to us, and when I looked at the one he did have I realised it was from the previous tenants back in 2011. After that he said that there should have been two garage door remotes instead of one, because there were two cars spots. I had to say that no, we only had a single car spot. And now I’m suspecting we’re going to need to harass them to get our bond back.

Arggghhhh.

We’re all moved in now though, and are slowly unpacking things, so it’s actually looking like our place rather than a temporary crapshack filled with boxes.

Merry Christmas!

25 December 201222 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournalLeave a comment

For the first time in I’m not sure how many years, I actually have the period between Christmas and New Year’s Day off work! We don’t get very many issues logged at work so we only need one person on, and one of the guys on my team offered to work over that period, so huzzah!

I picked up Lily at midday for our regular Christmas lunch, and dropped her back at around 5pm. Christmas itself was very nice, I took a few photos and am seriously happy with them. kungfupolarbear bought me Halo 4, which is by all accounts a brilliant game, and my parents bought me a Paul C. Buff Extreme Silver PLM — basically a very fancy reflector umbrella that you shoot a flash into and it produces really amazing quality light. I’ve not given it a proper go yet, but I’m very much looking forward to it!

In other news, we got the unit in Waterloo that we were looking at on the 15th! We go in to sign the lease on the 2nd of January, and have removalists booked for the 12th. Walking to work is going to be SO GOOD. \o/

And with that, my photos!

Full set is here.

Sniff

17 December 201222 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournal1 Comment

So I finally got the last of the old car stuff sorted out today. Went to the RTA and got the plates from the old car swapped over to the new one, and called up a scrap car place to come and pick up the old car.

It was sad seeing the old car taken away at last. It’d been sitting there smashed up in our parking spot since the accident (so over five months now), but it being up on the back of the truck and it finally going away…

I know it’s only a car, but still. It was the very first and only car I’d ever had, and never gave me any problems at all. I’d have had it ten years come March next year.

Farewell, old friend.

🙁

Moving

15 December 201222 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournalLeave a comment

We went unit hunting in Waterloo today. We saw about seven places, one of them was particularly filthy, and a couple also had people in them still, but we found one that we’ve applied for. It’s a really nice layout, you come in the front door and the master bedroom is down a hall, and you go downstairs for the kitchen, lounge room, and second bedroom. It’s probably a little smaller than our current place, but it feels really cozy! It’s on the ninth floor too, which is nice. We’ve put our application and a “reservation fee” in, and as far as we can tell nobody else even saw it (we needed to specifically make an appointment, and the lady who was in the place already apparently wasn’t aware there’d been an inspection arranged, heh).

It’s available on the 4th of next month and we’ve gone month-to-month with our current place. It’d be about a 30-minute walk to work for kungfupolarbear and somewhere around 45-50 minutes for me (or I could catch a bus.

Crossing everything that it works out!

Also, construction of the NBN is scheduled to start in that area in the next year. 😀

Payrise!

13 December 20125 January 2024virtualwolfLiveJournalLeave a comment

I had my annual salary review today (yes, the last one was back in March but that was back-dated to the 1st of January… they’re being all organised and shit this time around).

The way it works is they have a “bucket” of amounts of payrises, and the people who’ve done especially well get the higher ones. My manager said she felt I was “undervalued”, and I got a 7.4% payrise!! She said that was the single highest of everyone, and a bit more than double what most people got (the usual rise is 3.5% IIRC).

So YAY! 😀

How things change

24 November 201222 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournal1 Comment

So I took Lily to her swimming lessons this morning (long story, the short version being her mother is back to be being flaky and Lily’s grandmother asked if I could bring her to swimming as they were going to be away), and while I was there I saw one of the guys I went to high school with. He was one of the “cool” kids, always smoked, acted all tough, just generally a jock (obviously I had nothing to do with him even in high school).

Now he has two daughters that he brings to swimming and is driving a Kia mini-van. If he’s happy with his life, more power to him, but the contrast between him in school and now is just highly amusing to me.

Our saga with the car is finally over, thank christ. Though unfortunately we didn’t get up getting any money, the insurance dropped the claims due to the lack of evidence either way, which is pretty much what I was expecting when the useless fucking witness never actually showed up. We just need to get rid of the old car and get the old plates swapped over to the new one, and it’ll be bloody well done.

In other news, we had our Melbourne Cup shindig at work at the start of this month (the 6th, specifically), and I’ve been borrowing a colleague’s Canon EF 135mm f/2L lens (for the non-photographers: it’s a very well-regarded and high-quality lens, and is especially good for portraits). I brought that along to the do, and got some photos that I’m really happy with. I’ve had three or four people at work use my photos as their Twitter avatar or the avatar on our internal wiki! 😀 The photos are here.

I had a heap of people complimenting me on them after I blogged about it at work, then had someone ask me if I wanted to take photos for the last Atlassian User Group (I couldn’t, due to already being busy that night), and someone else ask if I could take photos for our next ShipIt, which is at the end of this coming week! (I’m going to do that one, since it’s during the day).

We’re going to buy one ourselves, though not until after we’ve moved. We’re looking at trying to find somewhere around Waterloo, and if we don’t have any luck there, the lower north shore (St Leonards or thereabouts, and further south). Turramurra (where we are now) is a pretty useless suburb, my commute to the city isn’t bad but kungfupolarbear has an extra five minutes on the train and then another fifteen minute walk to get to her work.

And lastly, I was mucking around with DSLR Remote today, and got two photos that I’m really pleased with!

\o/

Ow

18 September 201222 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournalLeave a comment

So at work we have a thing called the Atlassian Foundation. Basically we get five days a year to take off work and do charitable things. We (by which I mean myself, kungfupolarbear, and a couple of co-workers) helped out at Monika’s Doggie Rescue last Friday.

Wow. It wasn’t what I was expecting at all.

The dogs they take in were all a day shy of being put down, so they tended to be smaller dogs and with much more problems than your average dog. We took a few of them out for walks, and helped with the laundry that needed doing. The first dog I was walking had a problem where if he’d see another dog that wasn’t from his “group”, he’d start borderline screaming and would turn around and try to bite whoever was walking him. The person from the rescue place obviously warned me about this and what to do, it wasn’t like it was unexpected, but christ. Not a good start. And sure enough, we ran into some random dog while we were out for walks and the dog did exactly as described. It happened again on the way back to the place, fortunately I managed to avoid getting bitten, but bloody hell.

We did hung out some laundry, then took a second batch of dogs out, which were thankfully much better behaved and the walk was quite uneventful. The third batch, the dog I was walking kept stopping to look back and bark at the other dogs and I kept having to literally drag him to get him walking again. I ended up talking a different route to the others so he’d actually focus and start walking.

The reason this post is titled “Ow” is because I was wearing my regular boots and made the mistake of running, borderline sprinting on one occasion, to give the dogs a bit of a workout. I was thumping along flat-footed and the boots have no padding in them. The end result is that I think I bruised my hips or something because I was sore as absolute buggery on Friday night. We had Lily over the weekend, and I was sore but not too bad, but when I woke up on Monday morning I must have slept funny or something because I basically couldn’t bend at ALL. It’s currently just past 10pm on Tuesday night and my lower back is still sore as hell. I’ve been working from home both days, and will be again tomorrow, because owww. It’s getting better, but unfortunately Dencorub seems to be the only thing that actually does anything, and even then it’s not totally improved.

kungfupolarbear didn’t escape unscathed either, the first dog she was walking was solid muscle and kept pulling on the lead very strongly throughout the whole walk. She was leaning back to keep the dog in check, and as a result has sprained her leg and hip muscles. 🙁

\m/

1 September 201222 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournalLeave a comment

We went to see Apocalyptica last night. For those that don’t know, the band consists of a drummer and three dudes playing cellos. And holy fuck they rock the hell out! I was seriously blown away. They play the cellos like they’re guitars, and the speed at which they play is just astonishing. Check out this video for an example. They were on stage for a solid hour and a half and it was goddamn awesome.

It was definitely one of the most impressive shows I’ve been to. They really interacted with the crowd and you could tell the loved the hell out of being up there and playing. At the end of the show they were genuinely grateful to everyone for showing up. I find bands that don’t interact with the crowd to be boring as hell.

There were a couple of annoyances though. First was security at the place being utter dicks. Before getting in they pored through every nook and cranny of my bag and were asking about what was in my pockets too, then told kungfupolarbear that she couldn’t bring her water bottle in, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS EMPTY. Then when Apocalyptica were playing I was taking a photo with my iPhone and this dickhead security guard told me to put it away, and was standing right next to us for the next ten minutes standing over everyone and looking everyone up and down. Way to ruin the mood, fuckwit. I can understand not letting people in with DSLRs who aren’t part of the official press or whatever, but who the fuck stops people taking photos on their phones of the concert they’re at, especially in this day and age?! Ugh. Definitely not going to the Hi-Fi again if I can possibly avoid it.

Secondly, there were a bunch of drunk fuckwits in the audience who were talking loudly through the quiet parts of the performance in the middle of the show. I didn’t hear them until the quiet bit, but apparently they were talking through almost the whole first half, and kungfupolarbear was about to explode into a ball of rage. :\

But other than that, wow. That show would definitely rank up there with the best I’ve seen! We’re going to see Warbringer in October (they were the opening band for Finntroll when we saw them in Boston the first time I visited), and I just found out today that Nightwish is touring in January next year. Woot!

Boston!

28 August 20129 June 2019virtualwolfLiveJournal / Travel7 Comments

kungfupolarbear and I spent the last two weeks in Boston, for her 30th birthday!

The flight there was horrific though… from Sydney to San Francisco there was a toddler who spent almost the whole flight screaming (and then proceeded to scream the whole way through customs too), so we got basically no sleep. United had kept bumping our connecting flight up, so we ended up with a two-hour layover, customs took bloody forever to get me through and then the TSA were a bunch of cunts and decided to take forever as well. We were literally running to the gate at the end and made it with about five minutes to spare. kungfupolarbear‘s friend Jen picked us up from the airport and we started our trip at midnight with a cheese steak from a greasy diner nearby (we stayed with Jen for the first two nights and for the last one) which may have been the greatest food ever. In fact, it’s making me hungry just typing this. 😛

The very first day we went shopping and bought a heap of stuff for extremely cheap (compared to what we could get them for in Australia). The next day Jen dropped us off at the place we were staying, which unfortunately turned out to be shit. We’d rented a room through AirBnB, and the woman who was living there was a weirdo. It had good reviews, but I have no idea how or why. The bed was broken in such a manner that unless both of us were lying in it, both sides were sitting at an angle and you’d almost roll out of it. Also kungfupolarbear had a weird reaction to the food or all the high fructose corn syrup in everything or something on the second day, and spent the night throwing up. 🙁 Fortunately there was a 24 hour pharmacy five minutes up the road, so I made a couple of trips there and she was pretty well recovered by the next night.

Despite the shitness of the place we stayed in, it was in a really good location. It was about half-way between Davis Square and Porter Square, both of which have a bunch of coffee shops and restaurants and such. They’re also on the train line, and it was all of about five stops from Porter to get into the actual city of Boston. I wish there was somewhere affordable in Sydney that was similar to that area. Newtown area is probably closest, but without the “affordable” part (also without the cleanliness, heh). There’s a coffee shop in Davis Square called Diesel Cafe, and we’d often go there at night just to sit around and be out of the house.

The weather was brilliant, it was humid as hell the first night we arrived, but after that it was a great temperature and not humid for the rest of the trip. We had a couple of occasions where there was about five minutes of light rain before it blew over, and that was it. We timed the visit really well, as everyone was saying that the weather had been utter crap for weeks beforehand, and the university students were only just starting to move in while we were there (the 1st of September is the big move-in date), so all the coffee shops and such generally had plenty of space available. It’s funny how compact Boston is compared to Sydney. We’d put together a list of things we wanted to see over the two weeks, and got it all done within the first week!

Second day we wandered around Harvard Square and the surrounds, and then the day after we went into some of the older parts of the city. The full photoset is here, there are some of my favourites.

On the first Friday we went into the North End, which is basically the Italian part of the city. It’s absolutely filled with Italian restaurants, and all the streets are narrow and windy. We picked a restaurant almost at random, and HOLY SHIT the food was mind-blowingly awesome! Got some good photos too.

For kungfupolarbear‘s birthday we had brunch with one group of friends, then dinner at Red Bones with another group followed by bowling. It was a pretty awesome day all up!

On Sunday we went to Rockport. We’ve been there each of the three times I visited Boston, and I love it! We had amazingly delicious crabcakes and stuffed clams from a shop that actually does the fishing of them out of the water too, and got a bunch of photos. It’s just such a photogenic place!

We also revisited the Boston Public Library on the last Tuesday we were there, and got some vastly-improved pictures compared to last time. After we were done with the library we walked down to the Charles River Esplanade and just sat in a shady spot enjoying the weather. A++, would relax there again.

Wednesday we went to the MIT Museum, and man, it was so cool. There was an exhibit of Arthur Ganson’s “kinetic sculptures” that did all sorts of interesting things. They made for some good photos too! After that we wandered back up to Harvard via Massachusetts Ave before meeting up with tattooankh for dinner.

Thursday was two of the Boston Harbour Islands, Georges Island and Spectacle Island. kungfupolarbear hadn’t ever been to them even while she was living in Boston, so it was new to both of us! Georges Island was definitely the more interesting of the two. There was a big military fort, Fort Warren, that had been built there in the mid-1800s for the defence of Boston Harbour, subsequently used as a prison during the Civil War, and finally sold by the military after World War II. You can walk through almost all of it, and there were a number of tunnels through it that were totally pitch black where I had to use the light on my phone to see where we were going.

Spectacle Island was less interesting, though there were some good views. It was basically a big park on an island. After that we had a wander through Downtown Crossing again, then met up with friends for drinks and pool.

And then finally on Friday we wandered some more through Downtown Crossing and hit up Quincy Market!

We stayed back at Jen’s on Friday night so she could drop us off at the airport on Saturday. We had breakfast on Saturday at the same diner that we started with the night we arrived. Bookended by diner!

All in all it was a really great trip despite the initial sickness and the awfulness of the place we stayed. I love Boston, and we’re going to try to go back again sooner than three and a half years! We’re also going to try to go in October so we can get some autumn weather in, and also so we don’t have to worry about finding a place to stay that has air conditioning.