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Had a pretty huge weekend. And one that involved very little handyman work finally!

Although, Saturday was pretty busy with house stuff. We had Debbie’s friends and their partners coming over in the evening, so I spent the morning and part of the arvo cleaning the house up properly for pretty much the first time. And I’ve loved walking into the lounge room everytime since – it looks so clean and awesome! Everything has its place and is put away.

I did do a bit of handyman work though – I bought a $10 outdoor light from Bunnings to hang overlooking the table and BBQ. I screwed it up into the carport, and then ran a cord across to the shed where there’s a powerpoint. All looked fine. I turned the light on at dusk, and then noticed about 20 minutes later that it was off. Confused, I headed out to work out what was going on. Essentially – the light is dead. And there’s a smell of burning around the light. Not cool. Could be the light… but given that the power running over to the shed doesn’t actually have any earth (not really an issue, cos it’s just powering lights), I reckon there’s a chance the powerpoint might’ve been wired badly.

But Saturday night was great. It was the first time we had a proper formal gathering of people at our place. We BBQd some meat, people brought salads, and Shell Keith brought awesome brownies. And then we played some Spicks & Specks board game too.

And then Sunday rolled around, and Sam and Lachie arrived at our place for a fun Blue Mountains adventure! We picked up Debbie from her milkshake date with Grant, and we headed up to Leura for some lunch. We wandered around Leura for a while – no one else really cared where we ate, but for some reason, I was really picky yesterday. Eventually we sat down at the Post Cafe. Had a really nice club sandwich that arrived very, very quickly, which was impressive considering how busy they were. We went for a wander in the Leura Lolly Shop, and then went for some driving around the back of Katoomba. And then it was time to head back to Sydney.

Can’t wait to head back up there in a few weeks. I won an auction over at travelauctions.com.au about 6 weeks ago for 3 nights’ accomodation up in Blackheath for only $250. But in the moving of houses, I misplaced the voucher! But just got an email back from the company with a reissued voucher – they’re a good bunch.

Guess it’s that time of a Monday when I should start doing some work. There’s a lot that needs to get done if I’m going to make my overall financial year target – it’s not out of reach, but it’s gonna be hard.

Another weekend has arrived. The second weekend in our new place… and enough is unpacked that there’s all little jobs here and there to do around the house.

Our awesome wooden outdoor setting needed to be assembled. It needs to be soaked with water so it can ‘bleed’, and then be oiled. So I thought seeing as there was a lot of rain, let’s let nature do it. So this morning in a break between showers, I got out there and assembled the four chairs. And then then sun came out. Super annoying. BOM says there should be a shower or two today – I just how those 2 showers haven’t already been this morning… that would suck.

We’re heading off to Ikea shortly to find a small set of drawers to live in our built-in wardrobe. Don’t know what it is with us, but our places don’t have drawers! In Normanhurst, there was none in the kitchen. In Westleigh, none in the bedrooms.

And apparently, there’s a full band version of Rock Band for the Wii out at Hervey Norman Belrose for just $149. Wonder if Debbie will let me get it…

It’s a pretty special week…

It marks 5 years of me being employed at Telstra! 5 years ago sometime this week, I began 3 days a week in a warehouse out in Granville… getting orders from sales reps in the city, picking mobile handsets on the shelf, connecting sim cards, and sending them out to some of Australia’s biggest corporations. Since then, I’ve had 7 different roles within Telstra! Fun times.

It marks 1 year of me owning Micky, my Mini Cooper S. It was a very exciting day when I picked up that car. And I’ve had a very enjoyable time with it since. I’m pretty confident it’s the best car I’ve ever owned. 32,000km in 1 year – that’s how much I love it.

And it also marks 2 years of me being on Twitter. This is a pretty important milestone to mark. Cos if I hadn’t been on Twitter, I wouldn’t have gotten a message from Jenny/Howie to hook me up with my now wife!

Enjoying a pretty tops quick holiday up north at the moment. It was very cool to close of April yesterday, make target, and then head up here this morning for the weekend.

We had to be up early though – we caught a plane up here at 7:30, but it meant that we were here in Hervey Bay at 9. Picked up our hire car and headed down to Enzo’s – that glorious cafe down on the beach that I love so much. Before long though, I headed back out to the airport to help ferry people who arrived on the later flight to the hotel.

You see, we’re up here for my sister’s wedding this weekend! She decided a few months ago that it would be a cool to have her wedding up here, near our grandparents, and just in a town that we all find so relaxing and enjoyable. So that’s happening tomorrow afternoon down near the water. And it should be awesome :)

And now, we’re all heading down to the Boat Club here for dinner. Seafood overload, here I come.

Latest in the house saga (well, not really a saga as such)… all the paperwork is done! Excellent :) We went to visit our conveyancor on Thursday night to do the first home stamp duty exemption form. It was very painless, and done in 10 minutes. And that marked the last bit of signing and sending and certifying that needed to be done.

So now all that is left is to get our internet moved, electricity hooked up, and then pack. And then move! Quite exciting. But I really would just like to be moving in the next few days so we could be done with it. I’m so anxious about it all!

This weekend has been a pretty good one. Hanging out with the Howies yesterday, and then Debs and I headed out to Dee Why for brunch with Lachie this morning. And this arvo I’ve actually finally made a move on packing. Not exactly packing… but sorting through some crap in our study/music room and trying to cut down the junk that I haven’t even touched since moving to Normanhurst.

And I’ve just put some ricotta in the oven to hopefully bake. We had it on Friday night at Zoë and Tom’s place – just flatten some ricotta on a baking tray, with olive oil and herbs, and then bake for half an hour. It makes for some very yummy stuff on top of biscuits. And seeing as we had a massive brunch… it will make a perfect dinner I think.

God is very loving. And He sacrificed a lot. Let’s not joke about or belittle that. That is the #1 reason why Easter is awesome.

However, the second most awesome thing about Easter is that there is 4 days straight off work. And I am so very excited about it! I actually can’t believe it’s already 4pm – the day has gone quickly.

It started out down at church where Debbie sang with a few others, and I played guitar with a few other musos for this morning’s service. Quite fun it was. And then, after hanging out some washing, I napped. And then it was off to my Aunty-in-law’s place for lunch with most of the other in-laws. Howie and I BBQ’d some chicken, and I got to enjoy some very nice red wine (the remainder of which I got to bring home and will certainly enjoy over the next couple of days).

As for the rest of the weekend – there isn’t a lot planned. Sunday night at Church is about the only thing. We do have a kerbside garbage collection on Sunday… so Howie might be a good brother-in-law and come over tomorrow and help me get our dead fridge out of the house and onto the nature strip.

But aside from those two things, I will be doing a lot of nothing. I’m keen to do a lot more with my computer and keyboard and MIDI. And I would like to try installing a seed of Mac Snow Leopard onto a virtual machine on here to see what it’s like – mostly just for a “cos I can” thing.

Right now, I might go join Debbie for another short nap.

It’s only taken 5 months. But this evening as I left the house to wait out the front for Debbie to come past and pick me up for church, I closed the front door behind me and then my stomach sank as I realised both Debbie’s and my house keys were inside.

We drove down to LJ Hooker, but of course it was empty. I called their office number, got the mobile number of the principal from their message (for urgent queries), but am still waiting for a call back from him (4 hrs later). We headed back home to see if the owner downstairs had a spare key, but he doesn’t finish work til 1030.

So we decided to head to church, albeit 30 min late. I’m glad we did go. It was a tops evening. And as we sat there, I just suddenly had a feeling of “who cares” wash over me. It does suck, but I just had this feeling of, ‘God will provide a way into our house somehow, and I just don’t need to worry.’

So now we’re hanging out at the in-laws, have had some food, and I’m about to head back to the owner’s place to see if he has a spare key. Hoping he does, but if not, guess we’ll just sleep here for the night and worry about work in the morning!

Interesting evening, to say the least :)

edit: And our landlord did have a spare key when he arrived home at 1030. Hooray for sleeping in our own bed last night!

It was a pretty huge day:

• 3 months of being married
• Exchanged contracts on our new house
• Playjerise’s new album came out and we saw them in concert

So it’s been a huge few days. And now, Wednesday evening, I’m feeling shattered.

We got a bunch of info from our mortgage guy on Monday morning, and then spent Monday night working it all out, doing sums, and realising that we were gonna be able to afford this thing, and sent all the info back that he needed. And then the cool thing was that at about 9:30am on Tuesday, he emailed us back saying that the bank had basically automatically approved our loan cos of our pay and savings. Very cool!

So we put an offer straight on a house that we loved. It got knocked back, and I reckon the real estate agent might be playing with me a little – she told us about another offer that they were considering, and this offer was a bit higher than we wanted to go. But we put another offer in anyway, lower than the offer they were supposedly considering, but still within our budget. So we’ll just wait and see how real this other offer is.

This is going to be a long game. As a salesperson, I’m loving this bit. As James Noble, Mr Impatient, I’m hating this bit.

Then on top of that, I’m having a pretty awesome month at work, and so many really decent sized IP networks are close to signing for a bunch of customers. So I am just insanely busy with adjusting contracts, and repricing links and bandwidths and such… at one point this evening, I was doing some repricing for a customer, and I totally priced up the completely wrong network cos I had another customer’s network in my head! But it’s all great stuff… all my efforts in previous month to get the account managers to find these opportunities is really paying off. And I reckon I’m well on the way to a head start for April… and hopefully May as well.

Weekend is over. Debbie came home again, and it was nice to have some company in our house again.

We had a chat with a mortgage consultant who really knew his stuff. I was impressed that he didn’t really bring any computer or calculator or paperwork out with him – he just came out to find out about us, ask lots of questions and let us do all the talking – sales 101, really. Good job buddy. So we’ll hopefully have an email tomorrow letting us know some figures and what decisions we need to make in order to get pre-approval happening sometime soon.

Seeing as that didn’t take all that long, we had time to head over to the open house of a place we saw last week. Visited it this time with Debbie’s parentals and had a bit more of a thorough look around. We still love it. It would be awesome if it’s still on the market when we’re ready to buy.

And then it was off to Laser Skirmish for me with some other of Grant’s mates for his Buck’s Day. And that was awesome fun – it was like Quake, but in real life. And you didn’t die. I won the first game, but the following two games, I sucked hard. It was still awesome fun. We made Grant do all sorts of fun things – the standard dress wearing was called upon, and then he had to busk for money to get home, and we also made him do some surveys of passengers on the train… all while still in his stunning dress. It was a pretty fun afternoon :)

Today was eating large amounts of food at Debbie & Jenny’s Aunty’s place, and then I headed out to Toongabbie and watched the V8s with B2… where we both slept for at least half of the race.

Tops weekend in all.

I think this week might be a bit busy too – with work, as well as with finance stuff, as we hopefully get things sorted on the money side so we can look at buying a house soon.

It’s been quite the crazy last 7 days.

We started last weekend by looking at some houses (actually quite exciting!), and then visiting Debbie’s grandparents for lunch. We headed round to Shell & Ez’s place on Tuesday and joined in the surprise birthday party for Shell, which was great fun, but we didn’t stay too late – had to get up super early the next morning to take Debbie up to school for camp. And then while she’s been gone, I’ve still done heaps – I’ve had to gather up some paperwork ahead of a meeting with a mortgage broker on Saturday, visited Cathy & Grant’s new house (and got more excited about having our own house soon), and last night B and I grabbed some pretty awesome pub food down at the Toonie pub, before retreating to the House of Bach for some Urban Terror fun with some of his Morling buddies.

And it doesn’t quite slow down yet – like I mentioned, we’re meeting with a mortgage consultant tomorrow to nut out a home loan, and then we have Cathy’s hens’ day and Grant’s bucks’ day for the arvo and evening. And then I’ll be coming home from that to watch Saturday’s Clipsal 500 race ;) There will be lunching with the Howie’s at our Aunt’s place… but I might try and escape that earlyish so I can head out to Toonie to watch the V8s with the boys.

Maybe I’ll get to relax sometime in a couple of weeks…

I thought we were good friends. For years now, me and technology have got on so well. And even when technology didn’t want to be nice to other people, when I’d get there, he’d be ok with talking to me. We had a great relationship!

But clearly, I’ve done something to offend technology. All of a sudden, he’s turned his back on me; he’s taken the nearest knife and driven it fair into my back.

On Saturday night, our ADSL decided to just die. No particular reason. 15 minutes on the phone to iiNet didn’t get too far, except for her telling me to factory reset my modem. And then the call dropped out. By this time it was nearly midnight and I was tired. So Sunday morning I spent another 20 minutes or so on the phone, and after resetting some settings that weren’t put in place after the factory reset, everything was working. But I was sceptical. And then Monday arvo, the internet was down again. I called iiNet and tried to explain that we hadn’t changed anything and that it was most likely a problem on their end. But after much back and forth, it did seem very possible that my modem was faulty. So there was no internet til I could get my hands on another ADSL modem to check.

But upon arriving home from parentals’ place last night, I glanced at the modem and noticed the ‘ADSL’ light was on. A quick check on the laptop, and sure enough, everything was back up without any effort on my part! But that’s actually more annoying than helpful, because I have no idea what the problem was.

While all this was going on, yesterday morning, the fridge didn’t seem to be very cold at all. But without being sure as to whether the door was actually closed or not, I didn’t think much of it. But again upon arrival home from Mum & Dad’s place last night, it was pretty definite that the fridge wasn’t working at all.

It was funny to see that my first instinct was to power-cycle the fridge – to turn it off at the powerpoint and wait a few seconds and then plug it back in. I’m clearly a child of technology. I had a laugh to myself as I realised that without any intelligence in the motor of the fridge, power-cycling it would do absolutely nothing.

What a fun house.

But I must say, in the first 3-4 months of living there, aside from the hot-water/possum issues, there has been almost nothing go wrong in that house. So we’ve had a good run.

It’s true I guess… everything goes wrong all at once.

More weddings! While we were there today, we were thinking what’s ahead too – there’s at least another 5 or 6 in the next 3 months alone. Golly.

Today’s one was just a ceremony. But it was up in the Mountains, which was a really nice drive. It was for Carly and Josh. Carly’s a friend who I have kinda lost touch with over the last few years, but in our teens, we were good buddies. It was great to see her marrying a guy that clearly has made her very, very happy, and who has such a desire to look after her, and that she and him together are holding close to God. Very cool indeed.

Was hoping to catch up with the Three Tops Toonie Chicks for a coffee afterwards, but the boys are playing in the cricket semi-final this arvo, so they headed off for that. And now Debbie and I are back home. Debbie will have a brief nap I think (hoping she isn’t getting my cold), but I don’t know if I will or not. I have keyboard ideas rolling around in my head that I want to try.

And then tonight we’re heading round to Chuckie’s place with a few others to hang out, have pizza and watch a movie. Should be a great evening.

I’ve been pretty slack at regular blogging lately. I remember once upon a time I was in a habit of blogging daily….. but then again, I blogged a lot of crap then.

A pretty tops weekend was had a few days ago. Debbie and I both had pretty busy and full-on weeks, so we didn’t have much “us” time during the week. So we wanted to make sure our weekend was tops.

Saturday was some pretty fun times indeed – Shell came round, and then the three of us headed into Bondi to catch The Cat Empire playing a free outdoor gig. It was only about a 40 minute set, and it was quite unlike their concert stuff, but it was great to sit on the grass above Bondi Beach on a gorgeous Sydney day and see them play live again. It was unlike their concert stuff because most of the songs were quite short – so the long solo bits in the middle were cut down quite a bit. I guess it was aimed at a fairly public audience, as opposed to a fan-dom that would see them at a paid concert and would love the long solos and fun bits in songs.

The evening was Debbie & James date night. I took Debbie out to the Moonlight Cinema in Centennial Park to see 7 Pounds. We had a really nice picnic dinner and then both tried to stay awake and watch the movie. As it turned out, 7 Pounds was a pretty intense movie. It was very awesome (although not understanding the full story until they revealed more bits as it went on was a bit frustrating), but I don’t know if I could watch it again. Just the idea of watching a guy try to redeem his wrongs on his own merits to a huge extreme is just very painful to watch.

And now I’ve kicked into March, hoping the sales will be awesome in comparison to last month. But having a sore throat and feeling bleh today and yesterday hasn’t helped that.

Fridays are usually pretty awesome days. Today they are living up to their awesomeness.

The acct managers smashed their target this month (even though not a lot of it was data, so I didn’t make my target), so their boss let them have today off. And because there’s no one in the office, there’s not really any point in me being there. I logged on and did some stuff this morning, but now I’m just enjoying some relaxation.

I didn’t make my target this month, but the frustration I was feeling earlier this week when I last blogged has subsided – essentially, my boss understands that there isn’t much more that could’ve been done this month. And the bottom line is that there’s already a lot being lined up for early March… so I should have a pretty huge month in March. Fingers crossed anyway – I have some serious gaps to make up from the last few months. So that has made me feel slightly more relaxed toward the end of this week.

But back to today being awesome… this arvo’s relaxation has led Howie and I over to Y-Yes Cafe in Hornsby. There’s free wifi here. And I’m having a Chili Hot Chocolate. I’ve never really taken chilli chocolate on… but I actually am not minding my hot chocolate having a bit of a kick. It’s only mild though, and I’m a bit worried about how full on a full strength one would be.

And the most awesome bit of today begins in a little over 3 hours: I’m heading out to pick up Kate, and then we’re heading into The Enmore to see The Cat Empire! She bought me a ticket for my birthday, and I am very excited. I was trying to count last night, using the tickets that are stuck to my wall as a starting point… and I think this will be the 10th time I’ve seen them live. It could be more, but it’s definitely at least 10. And then tomorrow The Cat Empire are playing some free outdoor gigs – one at Bondi, and one in Circular Quay! So we may get along to those as well… which would make for a pretty spectacular weekend.

Work is feeling pretty sucky at the moment. I’m well and truly over the sales thing – I like my job, but I’m sick of the pressure to hit a sales target that, quite a lot of the time, is hard for me to affect. I know it’s my job, but when I’m not the primary point of contact for the customer, and I just have to push others to find the sales opportunities, it gets tough. Still, the whole techy bit where I get to design networks, integrate them with other technologies and other fun stuff is cool… it’s just the pressure to hit the target each month, and the frustration that is flowing through my mind now when I’m pretty sure I’m not going to hit it this month (third month in a row) that makes it crap.

My copy of The Cat Empire’s new live album, Live On Earth, finally arrived in the mail today. I have been looking forward to it. And am especially looking forward to giving it a good work out in the next three days before I head off to The Enmore on Friday night with Kate to see them live. It’s my birthday present :)

The album itself is pretty tops. I’ve only listened to two songs so far (it’s late as I write this and should be sleeping)… but it’s mixed pretty well for a live album. Sometimes they can be a flop, but this has been mastered pretty well, I think.

Debbie is sitting on her computer picking songs and planning Sunday night’s service at church. I’m excited, cos our band is finally playing. 4 weeks inbetween playing is going to take a bit of getting used to. But it should be cool. We get to work with a good bunch of people, including a drummer and guitarist who will be making their debut. Very exciting indeed!

I’d been putting it off for so long – for some strange reason – but I finally upgraded to WP 2.7 this evening.

It is awesome.

If you don’t use Wordpress, and you still use Blogger or something else… seriously, you need to consider Wordpress. It’s fantastic.

In other news, it’s Friday evening, and I’m very much looking forward to my weekend. My wife is even cooking pizza :)

Usually I would be very much enjoying weeks like this: something different on everyday, out of the office nearly everyday… it’s great.

Monday: had a 4 hour session at Blackberry HQ in Nth Sydney learning about their new Blackberry Server v5.0. Fantastic new features, especially the ability to install two servers (one a redundancy) from the one licence key! And then I finished the day working from home because it was already about 2pm.

Today: all day in at the Hilton in the city working with all the account managers in the sector I work in. They’re having a day of planning for the next 6 months and working sales strategies. And being the technical guys that work with them each and every day, the four of us are tagging along too.

Wednesday: was going to be pretty normal, but one of our newer dealers seemingly wants to sweet talk us technical guys (to get us to utilise them for bigger mobile and data deals)… and so they’re taking us out to Wildfire down at The Rocks. Yep, definitely looking forward to that.

Thursday: coincidentally, my direct manager (who looks after all the technical sales people in Sydney) wanted to have a planning day this week too, and for us to work through some new technologies and products, and just some vision for the rest of the fin year. So that’s all day Thursday.

Friday: well, I think Friday might actually be free. It might be the first time I get back to the office this week.

So usually, a week like that would be just about the best week I could have at work. And I am pretty happy about it all. It’s just that after January being one of the crappest sales months in ages, I’m chasing sales to try and get back on the way to making the yearly target. And February still isn’t fantastic yet. But hopefully that will change in the next 10 days.

I just opened the cupboard to get my coffee plunger out, and my packet of Dane’s coffee for a few cups of yummy coffee this morning… and in the heat, the sticky tape that was keeping it sealed shut had come off and air had been getting to it for goodness knows how long.

I still made a plunger up… but sure enough – bleh. I know I shouldn’t keep coffee for more than a week anyway… but it was ok last week. This week, not so. I just don’t drink coffee enough at home!

Yesterday turned out to be a pretty tops day, and we avoided the heat pretty successfully for most of the day. We met Jenny, Howie and Tom in at Rhodes, and they left Oscar with Debbie while I ran them across to the Acer Arena for their Top Gear Live show. I headed back to Rhodes and Debbie & I got to play happy families with Oscar. He did good at the start – he was whingy, but managed to fall asleep after only about 20 minutes. Very excitedly, we sat down to have some lunch in the food court, wondering if this is how easy it would be for the next two hours.

We were wrong.

He woke up about 10 minutes later. Frustrating. And then he proceeded to cry and whinge and be very loud for the next hour or so. He needed a nappy change, but that didn’t stop him being so upset. Eventually, we thought we’d try the bottle that Jenny had supplied to see if he’d drink it (he’d never wanted to before now). Debbie was awesome though, and got him to drink and settle just as I had to leave to go and collect mum & dad… very exciting!

And when we got back, we found that Debbie had not only got him to drink 3/4 of the bottle, but had put him to sleep as well! Top quality babysitter, she is.

But that was the end of the air-con’d Rhodes, and it was time to head back home. The house was hot, but it got better as the night went on. Just wondering how bad today is going to be…

This one is just awesome.