Third and last day of the advance cleaning mission. There’s some great sunset views from out front of the house, I’ll have to take some pictures soon. We’ve moved quite a few small boxes by now, but the house still feels eerily empty. Armed with dustcloths, we pad across the expectant floorboards attempting to spread our presence into every corner.
Moving day tomorrow!
We picked up the keys yesterday. Surprisingly, I felt much less anxious than last time. I think it helps that the new place is in pretty good move-straight-in condition, none of that oh-my-god-I-didn’t-see- that-huge-crack-before feeling. Also because this one is going to be OUR place, I’m not wondering “did we pay too much” but only “will we be happy here?”
Cleaning there after work again today. Its nice when the previous owners actually do a job of the place! It’s more psychological than anything else, though I’ve managed to get my cloth satisfyingly dirty from the top of some doors and cupboards.
Getting to know the quirks as we go. Things like the dishwasher not having a dedicated power point, so you’re meant to pull this ruddy long extension cord out of the cupboard and plug it into an above-bench socket! We had to laugh at that one. I guess that was one of the jobs on their “saving it up for when an electrician visits” list… well its now on mine too.
Driving down South Rd around the St Mary’s area I noticed a purple splatter across my driver’s side window, about 8cm by 2 cm. It was a pretty thick consistency and it took a few tissues to get it off.
I’m sure it was a paintball. Pretty shocking if it was. My window was a few inches open at the time, and it could have caused some serious damage if it had gone through.
I wonder if there’s another “rock-thrower” type on the loose in the area?
The one good thing about packing all your worldly possessions is that you get to see exactly what you have. You get to find all those tools you lost. That nice warm jumper you used years ago but completely slipped your mind this winter. The board games. The books. The stuffed toys. That box of stuff you meant to throw out last spring, the contents of which you can now add to the new box of stuff you mean to throw out.
Eventually you wind up with an eerily empty house and a rather brown wall.
And a freezer containing nothing but some ice blocks, corn, luncheon meat and some frozen apricots you never got around to blending.
Settlement tomorrow 
Insightful quote from an American watching Nicole and Keith’s big day :
Ann Lee, 62, of Los Angeles, was perched up high. “The one thing that’s interesting is there’s no vendors here,” she said, surveying the scene. “If this was the US, there’d be Nicole T-shirts, at least. Somebody’s missed an opportunity.” (Original Article)
When I woke up this morning, an image flashed into my head crystal clear… “2-0″. So of course I had to race down to the TV to confirm it. By all accounts the Soccerroos put up a good show, they were just outclassed by Brazil in the end. But good luck to the ‘Roos for the next game against Croatia — win, draw or bust!
Precisely 11 months ago I put up the Fijian Lovo Page, a detailed description and photo journey of our underground cooking feast. Looking at the statistics, it seems to have garnered some google juice in that time.
The top 3 search keywords used to arrive at my site are “fijian”, “lovo” and “feast”. The top phrase is always “fijian lovo” followed by other permutations involving the words “feast”, “cooking”, “methods of” and “how to”. I hope the person who wanted “dirty piggy” was satisfied! And someone came asking the riddle “what do you get if you cross a pile of dirt and a pig?”. To the person wanting “midori and oysters”, I’m sorry I can’t help you and I don’t think anyone else can either. A small typo also misdirected the person looking for “had core blonds”. Someone asked “will there be another magic mountain at glenelg”, the very thing we all want to know. And finally, the person searching for “dirty bathroom”, try here.
Going back to the source of these searches, it turns out our lovo page is the number 1 hit on Google and MSN. Yahoo even with their money tourism bias has us at #2! So to my Dad who was the researcher and brains behind the whole operation, and helped me document the entire adventure, congratulations, you’re now a world authority on Fijian Lovos.
As if things weren’t busy enough this year we’ve gone and bought a new house.
Pictures here : http://www.carr.id.au/house
We didn’t mean to, honest! We had intended to wait till next year, but we went to some opens last month and we both loved it (which doesn’t happen often!)
We’re moving in 3 weeks from today!
The comment spam was really starting to suck. I just upgraded WordPress from 1.5 to 2.0.3, wow. It includes the Akismet anti-spam plugin. A lot of interface and layout improvements at the back end! I really like the side panels in the Write Post page. The resizable editor window rocks! Not sure about the way it handles graphics in the editor now - I like to work with the original HTML code, but I suppose I’ll get used to it.
Unless I’m missing something, there still doesn’t seem to be a way to automatically create a thumbnail graphic along with its link to the larger picture. I still have to handcode the nested “a” and “img” tags. Perhaps there is a plugin for this…
7 June
Someone was talking about this restaurant they’d been to. It’s a bit posh so I won’t be going there any time soon, but boy, the website is well done! Excellent use of Flash, full of Dynamic Attention Captivators, congrats to the designers.
FYI - I just invented that term, it doesn’t exist anywhere on the internet, consider this prior art!