You can’t wipe the smile off my face today. My lovely amazing wife bought me an iPod Touch for my birthday (and gave it to me early). I have no idea where she got the money from - maybe she won it on a horse ‘cos there’s certainly four-fifths of nothing in our bank account. Maybe we’re not eating for a fortnight or something.
Anyway, back to the toy. It’s gorgeous. We tried to take some photos but they don’t do it justice. In fact no photo taken by anyone will probably do it justice because the killer feature of this thing is the user interface, i.e. the touch screen. But here are two of me using it anyway. I’m checking my gmail.
It is soooooo slick to use. I love it! I’ve loaded 100 albums onto it and 10 podcasts (just under 5gb), 180 of my favourite photos (116mb), an episode of Summer Heights High (100mb), and four video podcasts (44mb). I tend to keep podcasts that I’ve watched or listened to rather than deleting them but won’t store them on the Touch, that’s what my external HDD is for. I’ll use iTunes to automatically download and sync up new podcasts when they’re published. It’s covered in fingerprints already but I don’t care about that. They wipe off easily enough.
We decided to be backyard bandits this weekend, what with the weather being all warm and sunny, like.
After ordering some road base and fine gravel from Flintstones we moved some mulch and rocks around, made another step, then started the shovel/wheelbarrow/carry up steps/empty routine. Again.
It’ll be finished this afternoon and we’re pleased with it. The gravel has a fair bit of give underfoot, which I’m not a huge fan of, but Max loves it (see the photo) and it looks good. If it really irks me we’ll buy some big pieces of slate or something and make some stepping stones.
The bathroom can wait until another weekend.
Sometimes it’s all a bit too much for Maxy so he goes for a lie down in the shrubbery ….
After we packed up all the garage sale stuff (I took a carload of the non-tip stuff to an Op Shop) we decided to go out for the afternoon. We thought about going across to Sorrento on the ferry but decided to go to Amaze ‘N Things instead.
It was fun. We got a bit lost when we tried to get out and when we tried to find the flags that we had to find but we stamped our cards all four times at all four colours. The colours were red, yellow, green and blue. After that we had mini-golf. Georgia came first, Jayney came second, Marty came third and I came last but I had a good try. There was one hole with lots of water and I kept getting my ball wet and Jayne and Marty said you’re getting sandy and wet even though we didn’t go to the beach!
We had a garage sale this morning. Well, actually Jayne, Lindsay and Georgia did all the work and I went surfing.
After my surf I checked my phone for messages and was amazed to see a text from Jayne at 8.39am (39 minutes after the start time) saying that she’d made over $100 already. I was a bit worried that nobody would turn up, but clearly garage sales are a popular Saturday morning pastime down here in Geelong.
There’s still a bit of stuff left over that we’ll take to the Salvo’s shop, but Jayne’s really happy with the amount of stuff that she sold. Georgia and Lindsay were good helpers and looked after Max too.
Here are some pictures.
There are a couple more photos on the Picasa page.
Also, here’s a photo I took last night of Lindsay playing the organ. I tried to make it look the same as the photo we have of Jayne playing it when she was about the same age (which is resting on the top of the organ).
The other day I wrote that the can of worms was officially open regarding our bathroom. That was true, but perhaps a more apt description is Russian doll. You know, those dolls that you break in half and there’s another one inside.
We started this whole bathroom reno thing because we wanted to buy a new mirror to replace the old plastic one we’d put up with for 12 months after we ripped out the even worse mirror cabinet that was there when we moved in. Then we decided to repaint the room, as the current paint was a bit old and flaky.
All OK so far, a lick of paint wouldn’t cost us much and wouldn’t be too much trouble to complete. However, as you may have read earlier this week, we couldn’t find a paint colour that would go with the tiles and the fittings without looking boring. We don’t want boring - this is our ensuite and we use it five times a day. So we reasoned that if we replaced the tiles there would be a strong chance that the look of the fittings would be brought up to near-new status. Easy.
Now we’ve realised that although the bath and toilet are fine, the vanity unit is crap. New tiles and a new coat of paint will simply highlight its crapness. We thought about keeping it, tiling above it, then replacing those tiles when we remove it in a few years, but we agreed that we’d regret not replacing it every time we looked at it between now and then. So it’s going too.
And while we’re at it, all the towel rail/toilet roll holder/coat hook things are going too. And maybe the shower screen.
Like I said, Russian doll.
At least I’ve finished removing the tiles around the bath.
