The fastest I’ve seen it so far!

Having myself some steak and chips - man food - to prepare for the killings. :)

• last weekend sometime: James notices a minor scurrying in the roof. Doesn’t think too much of it immediately, but will keep and ear on it.
• [scurrying gradually increases during the week]
• Wednesday night: James notices a fairly large bubble in the paint on the loungeroom wall, coming down from the ceiling. Only appeared in the last 24 hours, which presumes it was caused by recent rain. Email to real estate.
• Friday night: scurrying in the roof becomes much more obvious and large… almost possum sized. Email to the real estate agent.

And then tonight:

I arrived home about 15 minutes after Debbie, to find her in a little bit of a worried state about the corner of our lounge room. You see, there’d been some pretty huge rain the last couple of hours, a lot more around the Hornsby area than Toongabbie, seemingly. And driving home along Pennant Hills Rd was interesting as I drove through moments of aqua-plaining. As I drove home, I actually wondered how that bubbling on the wall would be doing after all this rain…

It hadn’t faired well at all. That bubble was bigger and was leaking and soaking the carpet, and a second bubble had appeared just beside it and was soaking the window-sill and saturating the curtains. We moved our DVD cupboard that was filled with DVDs no less than 6 hours before (thankfully, only minor dampness, and an hour in front of a fan has fixed that), and put some towels down to try and soak up the carpet a little. It’s stopped raining now, and so the leak has stopped. But if it rains again tonight, then it will leak again.

I’m pretty sure that the scurrying is a possum, and that the possum has dislodged some tiles in the roof, or damaged the roof in some way, about a week ago. So that has meant that any rain this week has leaked through into the ceiling. I’m glad I’m not the owner, cos this will surely cost a bit to fix.

Tomorrow I will be onto the real estate agent pretty much straight away. Our property manager won’t be in, but hopefully the Sunday admin person will deal with it promptly and not try and fob me off to Monday because it’s too expensive. In the end, it’s their property that’s gonna get further damaged the more they put it off.

Could be an interesting few days if this rain keeps up.

Oh, and this all after we’d pretty much just finished setting up the loungeroom - it was the most organised room in the house. It’s now very messy with chairs and DVDs everywhere! Oh well :)

I had a semi-lazy morning, but was soon off to grab a coffee with Sam. He is such a tops mate; it’s been really cool to get to know him this year. I went for a brief wander in JB Hifi, but was successful at not buying anything. Then it was home to hang out with Debbie a bit while we waited for the Harvey Norman people to deliver our bed. It was exciting to see them arrive - and now we just have to assemble it :)

We went for a trek out to Ikea in search of some DVD and CD storage. We already had a nice bookcase type shelf that Debbie has from Ikea, but an extra shelf would turn it from a bookcase into a DVD case. We found that, almost by fluke, and also found ourselves Benno, a good looking, tall CD case to match the DVD case. We bought two Bennos, because between us, we have far too many CDs.

Getting it home was, well, interesting. As I loaded the Benno CD case box up onto the trolley in Ikea, looked at it and wondered if it would fit in the Mini. The answer was no. Well, not easily anyway. This was the end result - diagonally across the car with a few centimetres hanging out the passenger window. And Debbie sitting in the back. Praise God that it didn’t rain on the way home :)

Mental note: two metres is the absolute maximum length for objects that can fit in Micky.

The additional shelf made the existing case absolutely perfect, and now all my DVDs have a home in and are in alphabetical order… Debbie’s are soon to be added. The CDs may have to wait until we get a chance to build the Benno units sometime into next week.

I’m off to hang with he the b tonight, and looking forward to it. I think some Yam’s Happy Inn is in order for dinner, and then some Urban Terror - much looked forward to on my part :)

Anyway, I’m here in the city early. I was wondering what I was going to do with my time… but my boss has quickly fixed that by giving me some spreadsheet work that needs to be done before our meeting at 9:30. Sometimes I wonder if she forgets that I’m a salesperson, not a PA/sales reporting person.

We had our first proper dinner in our new house last night! Mum & Dad came over to visit and share more stories from their UK travels. Made me quite jealous - I hope to get over to the UK sometime in the next decade. But it was the first time even Debbie and I had eaten at our table. It was a great night, and forced us to clean up the house quite a bit too, so it looks pretty awesome at the moment :)

And Monday night was pretty exciting - aside from heading into the airport to pick up Mum & Dad as they flew back into Sydney, Debbie and I headed to Harvey Norman in Castle Hill. Aleesha had sent me an email about a special VIP sale - one of those ones sales where retailers try and get word out via word of mouth. This was Harvey Norman Castle Hill’s first try at it… and it wasn’t overly successful - the store was pretty empty at 6pm when Debbie and I arrived :) But after some catch up with Kate & Aleesha who were sitting out the front… the bed hunt began.

It was good to have a couple of hours to do it all, cos we were just able to go from bed suite to bed suite and not feel rushed. We found an awesome bed suite which we were both happy with (which included a bed frame, bedside tables, and a dressing table & mirror, and then it was onto the mattresses. That was fun too - lying in all these different ones trying to work out whether this one was more comfortable with that one over and over again. But we found one, and were happy with our combination. And then it came time to price it up.

The guy came over with some prices written on paper, and all my salesmanship training went out the window and I got all excited about the first price they gave us (it’s good not to seem excited about a good price or a good offer - it’s all psychological games). We ended up getting about 35% off the mattress, and about 25% off the bed suite (which was already reduced by about 20%). Incredible savings… and it makes me wonder about just how much markup there is on bedding and furniture!! But twas a very, very good Monday.

I did some wandering around The Rocks while I waited for Sam. And I stumbled across a really nice wine shop on the cnr of Argyle and Harrington. Not your average bottle-o - the cheapest bottle of wine here was $30. The nice lady who ran the shop started having a chat to me about some nice reds they had. All Australian wines too. Basically the “best of” for Australian wines I reckon. She then suggested that I head next door…

Next door was basically a wine bar. But it was one super cool wine bar. You could do the usual thing where you sit in the restaurant type area and have some food and match it with some awesome wine (same wines that were in the bottle shop)… but you could also do some sampling and tasting. You left your credit card with them, and they gave you a little “bar tab” type card, except electronic. And you could then wander round a room where they had 44 of their wines on tap basically. And you put your card in beside the wine you wanted, and then selected whether you wanted a tasting (25mL), half glass (75mL) or a full glass (150mL). And most of the tastings were $2 and $3. But ranging up to $11, and then $28 for 25mL of a Grange (I didn’t try the Grange).

So I got to try some of these most awesome wines that were next door. And they were pretty spectacular. I tried a sangiovese, which I’ve become fond of recently (it’s quite rarely grown in Australia, but usually nice), a pretty tops shiraz, and then moved onto the one the lady had said was the best she’d tasted - a qunitet. Yeah, I’d never heard of it either. But it was sensational. Very different flavour to any other red I’d tasted before. Loved it. But at $145 a bottle, there was no way I was going to be able to buy a bottle and still get married on the 3rd January.

Sam and I wandered off to find some pizza for dinner and have a coffee. But we soon came back and just chatted more in the wine bar place while I had a half glass of one of my favourites [the sangiovese] from earlier. And then I bought a bottle of that which I will enjoy sharing with my Dad soon.

Very cool concept.

[Wine Odyssey]

Today was quite the busyish day. I headed over to the House of Bach for one last time - cleaned up the room ready for he the b to move into next weekend (I left it dust free and vacuumed for you, buddy), and took my old loft bed frame up to the Salvos.

That took a while, but after that, and catching up briefly with b for some KFC lunch, I headed over to Thornleigh to do some shopping. Now this shopping intended to be a couple of extension cords (due to the severe lack of power points in our lounge room), some soap, and perhaps a few basic food things. $180 and one hour later, I left Thornleigh Woolies, well stocked up on all the basic things that a house should need. And somehow, I still forgot things. Scary… but good that we have all the basic things like pasta and peanut butter and sauces etc.

After doing a little bit of moving things in the lounge room, I realised that we needed an antenna cable extension, and a couple of other things. So round two was Kmart. Again, just a quick stop for 3 things. Again, it turned into something much longer and bigger. But again, they were things that were good for our house. And I’m excited about the funky whiteboard that is on our fridge now where we can write messages and lists and such :)

I had myself a nap in the arvo after all my hard work. :) And then trotted off to Pemulwuy to Vulcano to celebrate Kate’s 22nd birthday with all my buddies. I got a chance to talk to Mum & Dad on the drive over - they’re in Ireland at the moment and were just waking up. But they were having a great time, and having been away for 6 weeks, it was wonderful to hear their voices. Looking forward to picking them up next Monday.

And now I am home. Internet gets installed here on Thursday… hooray! No more plug in modem thingy - I’m finding that quite annoying.

Debbie’s family were keen to see it tonight… but Debbie and I wanted to head there on our own first. We got there, and headed into the lounge room. We just sat and prayed. It was really important for us, because we want our home to be a Godly place; a place where God’s love is shown through our hospitality. And so we prayed for His blessing over our house. It was cool… I really enjoyed that being the first thing we did in our new place :)

The Howies and Debbie’s parents arrived, and we moved a bunch of stuff that was in Debbie and my cars. Micky had a heap of stuff in him… it worked really well. And so that stuff was kinda just dumped in the lounge room. Howie and I rebuilt my tv cabinet while we waited for Normanhurst Pizza to make our dinner.

Then there was the fun of getting out of the driveway. Wow, that’s gonna take some practice. Not quite as easy as I’d thought.

But I’m looking forward to tomorrow! The big move, and then the fun of finding a place for everything.

Leaving is much harder than I ever thought it would be. I dunno that I’m dealing with it all that well. Currently, it’s hugely overshadowing the excitement of what’s ahead for my life…

Yesterday was out to get a haircut, and then off to the Howies’ place for a fun BBQ. Howie whinged about my chicken marinade dirtying his BBQ… but it tasted damn good. We had many laughs with chilli Skittles (yes, such things do exist). And then it was off to LJ Hooker in Thornleigh to sign our lease! That was all smooth, and I’ll pick up the keys on Thursday lunchtime. Plan is to do a little bit of moving Thursday evening, and then Debbie and I both have Friday off work to get stuck into things.

This morning was being a good son, and heading down to mow Mum & Dad’s lawn while they’re still away in the UK. The lawn looks beautiful… even if I chose the hottest day of the last fortnight to do it on. And then this arvo was beginning the whole moving thing - I thought it would be a good start to tidy my room. Which I did. Then tomorrow Debbie is coming round here, hopefully with some boxes, and we can start packing everything of mine.

It’ll be sad… but it’s awesomely exciting having our own place. And tonight I think it’ll be my last after-church at the House of Bach hopefully. Fun times hanging out with everyone! But firstly… I’m heading down to church to play bass. It’s been so long since I got my bass out, and so I’m very much looking forward to it as well.

I will need to blog about the new Tobymac album. Well, it’s not overly new - it came out in 2007 - but I was a bit slow on the uptake and only discovered it this week. But it’s amazing.

It was also the week when he eclipsed 20,000km.

Going strong. Love my little car.