On Top of the World

We got a call the other day saying that the dining chairs we ordered during the Easter weekend are in. Yay! Unfortunately, we have to pick them up from the warehouse, which is only open Monday - Friday fom 9 until 4. What kind of useless hours are they? So that means we’ll have to leave work at around 3 or so to pick them up. It’ll probably be Thursday, unless M wants to go by himself tomorrow to get them. It will be nice (and strange) to walk through the dining room and see chairs there. We’ll have to have a special celebration dinner on Thursday night.

M is planning his business trip to NYC, which means that we’ll have to decide whether or not I’m going, because if I am, we’re going to stay an extra week, but if not then he’ll only be gone for 1 week. Over the last couple of days I’ve been looking at accommodation for the second week. It seems that November is a peak period, because all the hotel prices tripled for the time we’re going to be there. We could only guess that it’s because there are a lot of trade fairs and conferences on at that time. We thought that surely November wouldn’t be so busy, so it would be easier to find somewhere nice to stay but not spend too much, but it seems that it’s not the case after all.

Regardless of the hotel issue, I was leaning towards going - after all, it seemed a bit odd to turn down an overseas trip for which one airfare and half the accommodation is paid by work. But then Jack peed on the laundry floor again yesterday. He’s been on his strict diet and I really thought it was helping because he hadn’t been on the floor for weeks (I was finally able to approach the laundry without being gripped by a feeling of apprehension), but out of the blue he did it again. So I feel bad for thinking about going away, particularly as we’d be asking my mum to take care of the cats while we’re gone and it’s not exactly a nice thing to clean up someone else’s pet’s wee (let alone your own pet’s wee) off the floor, even if that pet does belong to your daughter. I don’t like the idea of putting him in a cattery, either, mostly because I don’t particularly relish the thought of getting him there, given his feeling on going for nice little drives. I don’t know what to do. At the moment I think it would better for me to stay at home.

Just in case I do go, though, I’ll be on my own for a couple of days while M’s doing his work thing, so do any of you have any suggestions on what might be nice to do by myself? I don’t necessarily mean touristy stuff, either. What do you like doing if you’re on your own? I guess it would have to be something fairly straightforward in terms of getting around - of course, I’ll have a map and don’t mind looking like an obvious tourist if I have to, but I’d rather not be sitting on a bench somewhere turning my map in all directions trying to work out how to get back to the hotel!

I’m feeling quite weary at the moment, because M and I spent a few hours this afternoon painting. We have so many things we’d like to do to our house, and one of those is extending the deck out the front. Since the deck upstairs is a bit spongy, we’ll need to get it replaced, and at the moment we want it to be a slate grey colour. So with that in mind, we thought we’d change the balustrade on our balcony from white to a dark grey.

We sanded and painted the first part with rustproof paint towards the end of April, then did the second part towards the end of May, so it has taken us a while to get the top coat done. It was actually a bit cold today, and the paint became tacky quite quickly, but it’s only going to get colder from here so it’s good that we did it today while there was some sun around.

So… here are a couple of ‘before’ photos:

And this is what it looks like now:

And here’s a picture of my cat, just because he’s cute and he was interested in what we were doing.

It took a lot longer than we thought - it was quite fiddly painting the front and under sides of the rails. We’re mostly pleased with it - it looks ok, although the finish isn’t exactly what we wanted. The cold weather didn’t help. But considering we’re going to extend the deck and replace the fencing anyway, it’s only an interim modification. Goodness knows when we’re going to get it done though, so most likely we’ll be looking at our grey balustrade for a while yet.

Studying 3 nights a week means that I don’t really have as much time as I’d like to post. OK, well that might not be quite true because there are still 4 nights in the week, but I always seem to be doing other stuff. I don’t know what, but there’s a lot of it.

Last weekend was a long weekend for the Queen’s birthday. On Saturday, M and I drove to Dublin. Alas, not Dublin, Ireland, but Dublin SA. Not comparable by any stretch of the imagination. The idea was to go there to see whether it was an up and coming area that we could buy cheap real estate in, and then the area would be developed and the value of our investment would skyrocket. That plan was unfortunately laid to rest when we arrived and saw that there really was nothing there, and a good amount of faith and foresight would be required in order to invest. We drove to a nearby beach, but that didn’t look like a worthy investment prospect either. So I think we have to shift our holiday house dreams back to Ardrossan, which is still my idyllic getaway spot after the last time we visited.

On Monday I decided that I needed to get some warmer clothes, so I went shopping at one of those clearance shopping centres - I can’t think of what they’re called now, but you know what I mean. The retail shops that have the same stuff as the normal shops but are a lot cheaper. Anyway, I tried on quite a lot of stuff considering how much I hate clothes shopping, and bought a few things. Not many warm things, but things I can wear to work anyway so it was still productive. The one purchase I was especially pleased with (and the one warm thing I bought) was a Dolce and Gabbana top reduced from $235 to $49. I saw it there and thought it might not fit, but for $49 I was going to give it a shot anyway. And it did fit, so that was even better. So my wardrobe now contains one ‘designer’ item. Just let me think I’m cool even if I’m not, ok? They had lots of other designer stuff, but nothing that met both my criteria of being in my size and not being ridiculously expensive. That’s the problem with outlet stores - even though they’re meant to be cheaper, often they’re not really that much different. Or maybe I’m just a tight-arse who doesn’t want to part with money.

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I downloaded the new version of Google Earth and have been enjoying looking at pictures of places all over the world, and marking spots I’ve been. They’ve got new, high resolution photos now, so you can zoom in enough to see our house, whereas before it wasn’t on the maps. I was looking at various parts of Australia and have decided that I’d like to go to Uluru, Alice Springs and Darwin. I’ve seen virtually nothing of the country I live in. Maybe a trip on the Ghan (the train which goes from Adelaide to Darwin, through Alice Springs) is in order. When I looked up Uluru, I was actually a little surprised because I never knew it looked like that from the top. All the pictures I’ve ever seen of it have been a nice, regular-looking rock shape, so when I saw it I initially thought that it couldn’t be it. But now I realise what part I’ve been seeing in all those photos. I’m actually a bit embarrassed and ashamed that I didn’t know something so basic about such a major Australian landmark.

My mobile phone battery has been flat for the past few days and I haven’t been able to recharge it because I can’t find the charger anywhere. Not that I’ve looked in terribly many places, only the ones it’s usually in. No luck. So I bought a retractable USB charger cable on eBay today for $1.50. Bargain. Postage is $6 from Hong Kong but $7.50 is still pretty cheap. I’ll be able to keep it at work so if I do find my charger, it’s not like I have another one that’s totally unnecessary.

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Jack (my cat) is on a special diet for his possible UTI. This means that we have to feed both cats separately, as he is absolutely not allowed to eat anything other than the diet food, and the vet said it’s not a good idea for our other cat to eat that food unless it’s necessary (which fortunately it’s not because the food costs nearly $30 for a 1.5 kg bag and he has to be on the diet for another 5 weeks). So I’ve got two separate containers with their food in them, and I have to hang around while they eat in the morning, and then put the lids back on the containers so they can’t eat any of the other’s food during the day while we’re out. It makes life rather difficult, particularly because they are used to being able to graze during the day and night whenever they want, so Jack especially is quite vocal when we get home from work. And because they can’t eat anything during the night either, Jack has started the somewhat annoying habit of jumping up on the bed right next to my head and placing his face right up close to mine while I’m asleep, in an attempt to get me out of bed. I’m looking forward to the end of the diet.

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It’s now winter. Apparently this was the coldest May since 18-something-or-other. The past few nights I’ve had to leave my electric blanket on all night (which I virtually never need to do) because by morning, the sheets are feeling a little cold. I don’t exactly feel cold, but I don’t feel all snuggly and warm the way you should during winter.

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M is going to New York for a conference at the end of November, and it’s slightly possible I’ll go with him. The conference goes for 2 days, and we were going to spend a couple of weeks there, but I probably won’t go. Well, I don’t know. On the one hand, of course I’d love to go (duh!), but on the other, it’s going to be pretty expensive for such a short trip, even though M’s flights and some of the accommodation will be paid for, and we thought that maybe we should keep the money so we can do boring stuff like eat, and pay our various bills. But also interesting stuff like possibly go on a holiday to New Zealand sometime. If we can get a cheap flight and find some not-too-outlandishly-expensive accommodation, I may go. We’ll see.

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In other M news, we’re splitting up. In a work sense that is. I’m sure most of you know that we work together; well, there are too many people in our current office, so some of us (including me) are being moved to a different location. It’s pretty close to where we are now, so we’ll still go to work together, but it’s not convenient walking distance away, so we’ll have to be like normal couples and go to work in separate offices and only see each other at the end of the day. It’s going to be really weird. I told a friend of mine at tafe about it and she said that there’s no way she could work with her partner and couldn’t stand seeing him all day every day, and before I met M I was also of the opinion that I’d never get into a relationship with someone I work with, but now that I’m in one it’s actually pretty nice. We don’t work on the same project, and we work in separate rooms in the same building, so we’re not under each other’s noses. But we have lunch together, and smile at each other when I walk past his office to get a coffee, and we occasionally pop in and say hi during the day. I know we’ll get used to being in different locations, but that’s the thing - I don’t want to get used to it.