jayneandmarty.com

Thought I’d share how I attempt to keep all our appointments, contacts, to-do list, data and so on in order.

1. Neither of us have jobs where we need to have our work contacts, emails, to-dos, appointments etc with us on a device when we’re moving around during the day, so we can let our desktop Outlooks handle all that. If there’s something that either of us need to work on at home, we email ourselves at home. So, work items are separate from home items.That makes things heaps easier.
2. The MacBook is the master.
3. Friends and family information. All this is stored in Address Book, including phone numbers, addresses, emails and birthdays. The birthdays stored in Address Book automatically show in our calendar (iCal) and the email addresses automatically show in Mail. You can’t add a reminder alarm to the birthdays so I’ve set a recurring alarm for each Sunday to check iCal for upcoming birthdays.
4. Appointments. We put these into iCal. We set reminder alarms for some but not all.
5. Syncing. Each week I use iSync to transfer data from the MacBook to our phones. This means that our contacts and appointments are identical across all three devices, including reminder alarms. If there’s a new contact in my phone iSync imports it to Address Book.
6. At some point to-dos. I use Microsoft Entourage to manage these as it lets me set up projects and add tasks to them. For example, I have a project called Muchacha and a list of 18 things that I’ll get around to doing one day, including “replace fuel hose and fit fuel/water separator”, “install bilge pump” and “paint name on side”. None of the items have a due date so I use Entourage’s categories to tag them as “Now”, “Soon”, or “Later”. This really helps me to declutter my brain and prevents procrastination. No longer do I gaze out of the window thinking about how good it would be to install a depth gauge on the boat – I’ve previously thought about that and tagged it as “Soon”, behind 8 items marked as “Now”. If I think of something new, I add it to the list and tag it. When we complete something I delete it. The system’s working so far. There’s no need for reminders or phone syncing as there are no due dates.
7. Immediate to-dos. On Fridays and weekends we make lists on a notepad for what we plan to complete today, e.g. “Food shopping, buy fuel hose, conveyancing email, wash car, pick up dry cleaning, dig holes for patio”. Sounds a bit obsessive I suppose but I can tell you there’s nothing like seeing everything crossed off the list at 6pm. Jayne thought I was a loony at first but she’s seen the light now.
8. Everything gets backed up each fortnight.

So. There you go. MacBook, 2 x phones, notepad. Done.

ANZAC day and Australia Day are my two favourite holidays of the year. I love this country and thoroughly enjoy anything to do with “being an Aussie” – Jayne and I deliberately try to be as Oz as possible on these two days. On Australia Day this year we drank stubbies out of the esky, ate pies, had BBQs, wore thongs, went wakeboarding, camped, abused noisy campsite neighbours, cheered at a bloke who was holding an Aussie flag whilst waterskiing, wore boardies, didn’t shave (well, I didn’t anyway), swatted flies and mozzies, spent time with family, got woken up at 5am by screeching cockatoos and got sunburnt. Not bad.

This year’s ANZAC day was a little quieter than that but we still had a great day. I woke early and drove the short trip to Torquay for the dawn service at Point Danger. I overslept, actually. I would never have made it in the military. I’ve never been to an ANZAC day service before, let alone a dawn service, but I knew that I’d be moved even if it was simple. Jayne said the reason she didn’t go is because she knew she’d cry. (I say that’s the best reason to go. She’s promised to come with me next year.)

Anyway, the hairs on the back of my neck were up as soon as I approached the Point. It was cold, windy and dark but all I could see were hundreds and hundreds of heads silhouetted against the ocean. It was clear that there were thousands of people there. The service was already under way when I arrived, but I found myself a spot where I could see the ocean, the Aussie flags and the speaker and just tried to take it all in. The Last Post got me going, the national anthem brought a lump to my throat, and watching the diggers march past finished me off. I don’t really know why. It’s not as if I’ve been directly affected by war. I guess I’m just proud to be Australian, and when you’re standing side-by-side with other proud Australians honouring what the Aussie servicemen and women have done for this country it’s hard to keep emotion out of it. Maybe it was the bagpipes. Bagpipes have a strange effect upon me. If you ever want to distract me, hire a bagpipe band.

By the way, what is with the people who bag our national anthem? I think it’s fantastic. Like all good national anthems it can be inspiring when sung by a child, can create anticipation and suspense when sung by a crowd and is reassuring and happy whoever sings it. It’s about us and our country, not our meaningless queen (to single out one particular anthem from a different country). I like it.

But back to today. To be honest the rest of the day seems a bit insignificant. We had a big breakfast, worked on the boat and in the garden, walked at the beach with Maxy and watched some of the footy. We weren’t as Oz as we were on Australia Day but perhaps that’s the difference between the two days. Both celebrate Australia and its people but while Aus Day is loud, parochial and hot, ANZAC day is more refined and calm.

We’ve just finished watching the final moments of the eBay auction for Muchacha’s old boat trailer. On Friday night I set up the auction and put a starting price of $150 on it. We thought the trailer was probably worth a bit more but that’s what we’d have been happy with.

By Sunday night it was at $250 after six bids with around 20 watching it. Fantastic.

Then this morning it was up to $300 with more than 40 watchers and at 12pm it was at $400. Double fantastic.

By 2.30 there were 17 bids, eight different bidders and it had jumped to $535.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

$535!

Supply and demand, I guess.

P.S. Jayne “watched” the last 14 minutes of auction by hitting refresh every 20 seconds. Then she had to have a cup of tea and a lie down to recover from the stress of waiting for new bids and seeing none.

Rob beat me to it, but I’ll add a couple of our photos anyway.

Sim had his rally drive experience today. Family and friends had tipped in a bunch of cash as a 21st present for him. Rallydrive is located near Rockbank in Melbourne’s west and lets members of the public ride in a rally car at speed with a pro driver and also drive it as fast as you like for as many laps as you can afford.

With light rain falling to help bed the dirt track down a bit Sim certainly went for it on the course. No spins but a fair bit of sideways action and plenty of snarly engine revving. His car was a tiptronic Magna AWD, and before you say “Magna??????” here’s what the Rallydrive web site has to say:

These cars were driven by Ross Dunkerton and team mate Bill Hayes and secured 1st and 2nd place in the Australian Cup.

The Rally Drive cars have not been altered or de-tuned in any way and produce over 280hp. The cars are full FIA spec which means you could race these cars in any rally anywhere in the world.

When he’d had his 10 laps or so he was taken around for another 4 laps by one of the drivers at top speed (the last pic). It’s fair to say that there was triple the sideways action and quadruple the snarly engine revving.

Looked like great fun.

I have to say, though, that it would be hard for anyone to not look back on it and wish they’d gone even harder. Still, I suppose that’s what keeps you coming back for another go (and another $500) …..!

Through the chicane:

Too fast for me in this pic:

Trying to catch the slowpoke in the Suby (he did):

Sliding around on one of the hot laps:

We’re battling the lurgy here in Geelong. I’m still suffering from something I picked up just before Easter (I think I caught it from Georgia and Lindsay), and while Jayne was OK for a week or so she finally succumbed and had to take this Wednesday and Thursday off work.

To make things worse, Max developed a hotspot on his tail on Monday. Hotspots sound a bit gameshow but actually they’re moist eczema and not that great. They usually develop when skin is broken or not dried properly, then the dog licks the spot which causes the moisture to remain, and subsequently bacteria spreads and the lesion gets worse.

Anyway, they’re fairly easy to treat so on Thursday he went to the vet – he had a cortizone injection and we have some cream to smear on the spot. Also he had to have some of his hair shaved off so now he has a bald spot and looks like a mangy flea-bitten mongrel. It’ll grow back at some point (hopefully).

Seawater is good for it so I took him to the beach early this morning. These pictures show that it hasn’t affected his energy levels. He sure loves that frisbee.

A few pics from our weekend with John, Bec, Iao, Kate, Damian and special guest star Matty D at Mulwala in late March.

We stayed at Shoreline with the cockies, boarded the lake on Friday arvo and the river on Saturday, and had a couple of lazy nights at the campsite. Good fun.

It seems like whenever I write something about the garden it’s another story about us digging something up. Since last August we’ve filled two 4 cubic metre skips with unwanted and/or dead plants (and we need another one), pulled up half our balcony and railing and removed a pond. Well we’ve done it again. This weekend it was the lower bit of decking where our table and chairs were.

We were going to devote the weekend to the balcony (except for my excellent surf sessions each morning – nice and clean this weekend) but that required us to spend big $$$ on merbau decking and it isn’t pay week. So we decided to redo the lower area instead.

Job #1 was to move the table and chairs. As you may recall, they’re ironbark and extremely heavy. It took us some time, but we got there in the end.

Next step was to lift the decking. This is just after we started …

And about six hours later (across both days) this was the result.

The best bit was smashing the supporting beams with a hammer to loosen the rusty nails off. There’s nothing like a good bit of solid hammering on a Sunday afternoon to make you appreciate your weekend.

To be honest we’re really glad we pulled it all up. The support beams were starting to rot through (one broke when I stood on it) and given that we were asking them to support about a tonne of ironbark table and chairs we’ve probably done the right thing.

Next weekend we’ll flatten out the earth, put some redgum sleepers around the edges, fill up with some roadbase and sand, compact it all down, then lay bricks to create a sort of courtyard-y space. When that’s done we can plant some bushes and shrubs and landscape it a bit. The area will be about 5 square metres bigger than the decking, which is good, and the plan is to put a spa in the space where the table is (temporarily) in those photos. That won’t happen until later in the year but at least we’ll be building something new rather than just knocking another thing down!

Found out recently that Chrysler used to make boats as well as outboard motors. Check out this weird-shaped thing on the front of their glossy brochure from 1980.

Does that outboard motor look familiar? Yeah baby …. our Muchacha has got that 1980 style goin’ ON.

We took Maxy out on Muchacha this morning. He was amazingly good. I had to lift him into and out of the boat but he seemed to enjoy the whole thing, especially when we opened Muchacha up and the wind started rushing through his hair.

Don’t think we’ll take him wakeboarding though. He’d be straight over the side to fetch the rope as soon as we throw it in.

Finally.

On Tuesday, after many many months of inactivity, our real estate agent called me at work to say that he had strong interest in the block of land we bought in 2005. The buyer’s initial offer was $130k, which was somewhat positive, but we knocked it back as we were asking $140k plus and weren’t prepared to accept anything less than that, even if that meant turning away a serious buyer. There are only three other blocks larger than 800sqm in the area, all of which are $150k plus (one is advertised at $229k for 1000sqm – dream on!).

So the agent went to see the buyer on Wednesday to convince them that $140k was the lowest we’d go. They talked, the buyer said definitely no, the agent left. Shortly afterwards, the buyer called the agent back and said yes. Very soon after, the agent had a signed contract note, $1,000 deposit and agreement to a 30 day settlement.

Hooray! Hardball, I think that’s known as.

Our decision to buy the land in June 2005 wasn’t necessarily a bad one, at that time we wanted to live there and build a nice big house with a decent garden – even though the building experience we went through with our first home was painful. But we realised sometime in late 2005 that we couldn’t rationalise moving to a locality that was an hour from the beach and an hour from work (but close to family), when we could move somewhere that was 15 minutes from the beach, just over an hour from work and still reasonably close to family.

To put it another way, Geelong could offer us a big house, the beach, the bay and a country town atmosphere (albeit a large country town), while Wyndham Vale could offer us a big house (after another building process) and an outer suburban atmosphere. Mum and Dad, Rob and Nic and Sim and Bek are all happy in Wyndham Vale, Werribee and Hoppers, but their ties to the area (work, friends) are much stronger than ours.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that actually having a piece of Wyndham Vale helped us to decide that we didn’t want to live there. Sounds odd but there you go.

So bye bye 12 Glenmaggie Place. We mowed you once, paid someone else to do it the next time, and put a side fence up. May your next owners do far more with you than that.