Posts imported to Wordpress from my old LiveJournal
So we finally got a dog on Sunday! His name is Beanie and he’s a one year-old dachshund/maltese cross. kungfupolarbear took some photos yesterday.
He’s house-trained already, though he’s a bit clingy at the moment and we can’t leave the house for very long without him getting all anxious, but overall he’s such an adorable little thing!
The treadmill mentioned in my previous entry was able to fit fine, thanks to some clever rearranging by kungfupolarbear! We had it delivered on the 23rd of last month, and I’ve been giving it a good go since then. I’m using C25K to do a Couch to 5K program, and am using one of the treadmill’s built-in workout routine thingies in between (just walking, basically).
I’m still on holidays next week, and we’re going down to Canberra on the 9th and 10th to see the Mapping Our World exhibit at the National Library of Australia, and also visiting some relatives who live there. Canberra is only a three hour drive from our new place, which is nice.
In short, woot!
So Lily’s mother is now moving to Lismore. For those not familiar with Australian geography, it’s about a nine hour drive north of Sydney. I’m guessing they’ll be coming back down for school holidays (I haven’t asked yet as I don’t want to open that can of worms). I’m not particularly concerned though, as it’s all but guaranteed that they’ll be back permanently within a few months. The same thing happened when they moved out to Wagga Wagga a couple of years ago.
In better news, we had a company come out to finally get all the crap out of the back room (all the detritus from converting the garage back into an actual garage), so it’s actually usable as a normal room now! At the moment it’s just storage but we’re going to go look for a desk this weekend. Once that’s done, I will actually be able to paint my miniatures again!
We’re also going to invest in a treadmill, and a good one at that. Both of us want to get fitter, but kungfupolarbear can’t go walking outside if it’s smokey or polleny due to her asthma. We found one that we really like at Rebel Sport but it’s about 20cm too big for the space we had in mind, argh. We’re still deciding what we want to do there.
Woops. It’s been a while, time for a bullet-point multi-paragraph update!
• The house is still excellent. We had the air conditioning guy in a few weeks ago to fix the broken control box inside, and now the thing actually picks up temperature properly (the temperature sensor on the old box had been painted over ::facepalm::).
• In less good news, Lily’s mother decided that she’d try to get us to take Lily full-time, with no warning, claiming she was a “bad parent”. This despite kungfupolarbear having stalked her on Facebook and seen that she was busily hanging out with a bunch of new people and going to parties. Lily seems to be living with her grandma most of the time, from what we can tell. Which I’m mostly okay with, because it means I don’t have to deal with her psychopath mother. Anyway, we shut that idea down pretty hard, and she gave it up. But jesus fucking christ.
• Yesterday night was a total clusterfuck of EPIC proportions. We went to Newtown to have dinner with tannymonster and her girlfriend (which was lovely), but then someone committed suicide via train at Waverton and the ENTIRE train network fucking MELTED DOWN. We left Newtown at 8:17pm, and got home at TWENTY MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT. For some unknown reason they had trains running semi-regularly out to Penrith, but absolutely nothing on the Richmond line. We ended up going to Blacktown and sitting there for 45 minutes before a train came down that was apparently just going back and forth between Richmond and Blacktown. And even then we actually sat on the train for 15 minutes before it even started moving. Just unbelievable.
• I worked last Sunday so have today off, and I’m currently all snuggled up inside while it pisses down torrentially outside:
We’re right at the “C” in “Castle Hill”.
• Speaking of work, it’s been busy but is still good! There’s a big push to get us doing things other than the direct support queue, so I’ve been putting on my developer hat and have been doing a bit of coding, which makes a nice change. The aim is to get us doing 50% proactive (i.e. non-queue) work by December next year.
• I’m having three full weeks off over Christmas, which is going to be goddamn AMAZING because I don’t think I’ve had holidays over the Christmas period for I’m not sure how long.
• Lots and lots of photos have been taken, including our Halloween party and Melbourne Cup day. One of our office organiser girls actually messaged me the other week to ask if they minded if my Melbourne Cup photos were used in an article in Business Insider!! I said yes and asked for the photos to be credited to me. Eeee! Lots of other photos too, take a look at my Flickr page.
…I think that’s about it, though I’m sure I’ve probably forgotten something!
No posts for the last month, mostly because there’s not been anything of note happening. Yesterday, though… phew!
So, the path to the back room was pretty bloody awful.
kungfupolarbear had found a photo of a nice path design, so we decided to go to Bunnings and get the supplies for it. Long story short, about five hours and many sore muscles later, we have a new path!
As per pretty much everything so far, it took more work than expected.
And today we had an electrician come to replace the god-awful ceiling lights that were in the lounge room and kitchen, and to wire up some ethernet for us too. It’s so nice being able to put our own little touches on things now!
In other news, our annual bonus ended up being 12.5%! \o/ Of course, 45.6 cents in the dollar of that went to tax, but that was still a nice chunk of change. So I’ve ordered a NinjaBlock. Should be fun to play around with.
Oh man. What a productive weekend!
We did some shopping yesterday prior to going over to gypocalypse‘s place and then the Bavarian for dinner. Sadly we had to leave at about 9:30 since I was starting work at 5am today (yes, it’s bullshit. Fortunately they’re going to be changing it, but apparently it’s taking a while for some reason). At least I was working from home anyway.
Also, I didn’t actually do too much working as such. 😛 It was pretty quiet so I spent the time tweaking my Magic decks and ordered some new cards (I’m currently completely obsessed with the Innistrad block of cards — think really grim dark gothic horror. So awesome).
At the start of the shift I was definitely thinking I’d need to take a nap after I’d finished, but apparently I got a second wind (and possibly third and fourth). We went to Bunnings, bought a nice powerful drill (we’d tried with our little one and it just didn’t have enough grunt to drill the screws into the wood) and some other bits and pieces, then wall-mounted the dryer and then proceeded to re-mount the cupboard that we’d taken off the wall in order to put the dryer on it. I actually ended up using several pieces of wood left over from when we turned the garage back from an office into a garage (they’re still sitting in what is going to become the games room, since the council won’t take building waste as part of the regular clean-ups).
kungfupolarbear was busy as well, she helped with the manoeuvring of the dryer up onto the mount, made an EPIC amount of gumbo, a slow-cooked beef stew, and also tidied up the hedge out the front.
It’s now 10:19pm and I have absolutely no idea how I’m still awake. I have tomorrow off due to working today, so I plan on playing video games mostly. 😛
Also, I decided to buy the books that Game of Thrones is based off (A Song of Fire and Ice), mostly because I can’t be bothered watching it and I prefer reading. HOLY SHIT IT’S SO GOOD! Wow. I’ve been reading it on the train to and from work, which is a good two hours solid of reading per day, so I’m ploughing through the first book. Man. I’m vaguely annoyed that I’d never read them up until now!
…I should probably stop typing and go to bed now.
PS: Have I mentioned how much I love our new house? Because it’s really really a lot. Just being able to do all these things to it as we want. So good!
We had our housewarming today, and it was fantastic. It wasn’t huge, there were nine of us all together, but it was just so nice being able to actually have people over again. We had a barbecue for lunch then played about three hours of Cards Against Humanity, everyone was impressed with the house, and we got $150 worth of Bunnings gift cards as housewarming gifts!
YOU GUYS, WE CAN ACTUALLY INVITE PEOPLE OVER TO OUR HOUSE. It’s so good! 😀
kungfupolarbear and I have been married four years today! And this is the first of many anniversaries from our new house. 😀 Like last year, it fell on a Lily weekend, but I mum and dad looked after Lily tonight so we could go have a nice anniversary dinner.
I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before, but srsly, our marriage has just been effortless… I can’t imagine anyone else being even a tenth as perfect for me as kungfupolarbear is. We’re completely on the same wavelength for basically everything, it’s amazing.
PS SQUEE
We went out to get some stuff at the shops, came back to the house and as I was opening up the garage I realised the air had that wonderful earthy smell you only get out in the country. It’s absolutely glorious here, still totally quiet at night, and the air is crisp and clean.
We’re making pretty good progress towards getting everything unpacked, and it actually looks like a house that we live in, as opposed to a house filled with boxes and crap.
Eeeee!
We’re all moved in! \o/
We moved on Tuesday last week (the 28th), and it was surprisingly pain-free. The removalists we used were a pair of exceedingly Kiwi guys, who were “choice”, “broo”, and “cuz”-ing all over the place, it was hilarious. They’d done moves from our building before and knew how utterly absurd the layout was, and the removalist company suggested we get a guy in a ute as well so we could just load up the ute and ferry it out to the truck.
All three guys were really nice, and we got the moving-out part done in only three and a half hours. The moving in at the other end was obvious even faster, because they pulled right up into the driveway and just went straight in.
We’ve not unpacked everything yet, but we’re getting there. The house is great, and the whole area is dead quiet at night, and even during the day there’s not much noise. It hasn’t sunken in yet that this is our house, and that we don’t have to move again in a year or whatever. Not sure when exactly that’s going to hit, heh.
Unfortunately we’re still having to deal with the old real estate, bunch of arseholes that they are, as we’re waiting for them to pull their damn finger out and do the final inspection so we can get our bond back.
We’ve already done some stuff to the house… the garage had been converted into an office, so with the help of my parents and some power tools, we demolished the false wall (after having had to get a friend who is an electrician in to disconnect all the power from it) and pulled up the carpet and converted it back into a garage. The wall had been massively over-engineered, there were far too many screws and bits in for what it was.
The previous owners don’t seem to have taken too much care with some of the plumbing, and there were some leaks under the sink in both the kitchen and the bathroom which I’ve managed to fix with some teflon tape. There’s a structure out the back that we’re going to use as a games room, where I’ll be able to actually have space to lay out my miniatures to paint them, but currently it’s filled with the detritus from the false wall in the garage.
We’ve also spent a horrifying amount of money at both Bunnings and Ikea, but at least it’s a once-off thing and the stuff we bought will last us for years.
So in short, YAY HOUSE!