Rest for my weary eyes

I am fortunate enough to be able to work from home on Wednesdays ...well Wednesday nights anyway. A lot of the stuff I do involves spreadsheets and program code with lots of little text. The screen on my work laptop is good, but it was giving me very sore eyes and a headache after a few hours. So I decided it was time to get a new screen. After an extensive search of options and reading of reviews and balancing of the bank account we got a Samsung 206BW.

It's a 20inch widescreen LCD monitor. I was tempted to go bigger and get the 22 inch screen, but it was about $90 more expensive and you have to stop somewhere.

I bought the monitor from Aus PC Market. I've bought a few components from there over the years and I can highly recommend them. They are a little bit more pricey than some places, but most prices include postage (postage can add $40 to $60 for a LCD monitor), so they end up being good value. They communicate well sending out email when the order is received and assembled and also when the courier picks up the package and generally it gets delivered by courier the day after you order it as long as it is in stock.

This is not an ad for Samsung or Aus PC Market, but I figure when I get a good product or good service I might as well tell people about it!

I'm looking forward to being able to have very relaxed eyes.

Car Disaster!

The car is one month out of warranty and the automatic transmission has packed it in. What a pain! The car is going to be be off the road for a week and is going to cost a fortune. Fortunately the car is leased so that will soften the financial blow somewhat as the cost will be before tax and effectively spread across 2 years. Having no car for a week is a pain and having to fork out cash on a car that is one month outside it's warranty is a pain too, but there are worse things in life.

NRMA has a 15% off deal with Thrifty so we have hired a car for that period.

Apart from that all is good! In fact Meeks and I were just saying last night, that things are good. We are all coming out of our colds, although Mitch still has a bit of a cough. Meeks' working arrangements have changed a bit with her doing a bit more of what she was doing before she left which she finds more interesting, which is great and I just got a really good appraisal at work, which is also good news.

Mitch is walking more and more. He is almost able to get up from the flat and walk now. You can see him wanting to do it but not quite being able to, it's very cute. He's going through a very affectionate stage. He'll be playing by himself and then he'll look at you and come over and give you a cuddle and then go back to what he was doing. Very, very cute! I have tomorrow off so maybe I'll take some more photos.

In other news, we got a new notebook computer for home through work. As a result we're downsizing our study area. We sold our massive desk (no we don't know why we ever bought one so big) on ebay (our first ebay sale!) and are going to buy a smaller one and some shelving (to keep important things out of Mitch's reach) from Ikea and rearrange the study a bit to make better use of the space available.

New toy

Due to a price reduction ($100 off at Ted's Cameras) and a few other factors we were finally able to get the new camera we were hoping for. It is a Pentax K100D. Here is a link for a review. It's a 6 megapixel Digital SLR (DSLR). 6 megapixel doesn't sound like a lot, but when it's paired with a DSLR the jump in quality from even a 10Mp point and shoot is quite noticeable. 6Mp is enough for A3 sized shots, providing the camera is good enough.

Now the only excuse we have for bad photos is the photographer. There is a bit of a learning curve for getting the most out of it although it does have a very basic automatic everything mode. After that there are a number of picture specific automatic modes (like portrait, landscape, macro, etc) and then you get into the more manual modes. I think initially we care more about the picture quality. It's a pain to take a beautiful picture of Mitch and then realise there is heaps of noise and it's out of focus etc. We'll learn to use and appreciate the more manual modes as we become more familiar with the camera.

The timing is great because it's Mitch's 1st birthday next week!

More room to play

Now that Mitch is more mobile he needs more room to play. We quite often find him sitting at the back door looking outside or sitting at the front window looking outside. So we have explanded his play area to include the back deck. We would have done it earlier but were worried about him falling down the back stairs.

So after spending Saturday morning cleaning up the back deck including the mess from the accursed date palms (a piece of advice from someone who inherited a lot of them when we moved in - don't plant them. They just drop branches and crap everywhere and attract masses of bees when they are producing dates - and the "fruit" when it ripens falls on the ground and stinks up the place) we went and bought a little fence which is user adjustable to cover the stairs.

So now Mitch has room to crawl around and explore his new environment

Obviously the cover is over the spa and it is locked up!

Mitch went to the creche at church for the first time on Sunday morning. Normally Meeks and I go to the evening service and there is no creche, but this week we had to go to the morning service so took advantage of the creche. It was weird sitting in the service without him and being able to listen to the sermon properly without one of us having to go to the crying room or play room with him. Apparently he was a good boy, but it felt very strange leaving him in the hands of relative (although capable) strangers.

Mitch is thankfully over his cold which is great. After Mitch had it, Meeks got it and then I thought I was getting it. Fortunately it seems to have gone away and we are all mostly healthy again.

New toys

After a few dramas the Dishwasher and hotwater heater were put in and connected yesterday.

The dishwasher needs some carpentry done to make the cupboard fit it properly. I hope my skills are up to it! I just have to reattach the door on the left and put in a little shelf thing. I think I can manage that. It's kind of sad to be so excited about a dishwasher, but after 2 years of washing dishes, we were both pretty sick of it. Especially if you're entertaining. You get to the end of the night and think, "Oh no! Now I have an hour of washing up to do!" either that or you leave it until the morning ... no one wants to wake up to that!

The hotwater heater is super. Apparently they delivered the wrong one, it was bigger than the one we wanted. So anyway, now we're never going to run out of hotwater! It was so nice in the shower this morning having full pressure hotwater, old one used to dribble out. Add to that it has a temperature throttling valve thing which means it never gets hot enough to scald. This is great news with Mitch.

The other toy is my new backpack which I got for my birthday. It's a Booq laptop bag. The idea being that next year when Meeks goes back to work, I will be working from home one day a week and transporting my laptop will be easier. Add to that my brief case was falling apart anyway. The backpack is very cool. Here is a link to the web site. They take their backpacks very seriously!

The Nursery

We went shopping last night for nursery things. We had already decided to get the cot and a few other things from Ikea, so that wasn't too hard. It's really exciting and fun putting the little things together and thinking about how our little baby is going to sleeping in them, or storing their toys in them, or putting their little clothes in them etc. The only thing we wanted but wasn't in stock was a little wardrobe which is part of the Diktad antique stain collection. We have to go back later to get an arm chair (it wasn't going to fit in our car) so we'll pick up the arm chair in a couple of weeks when the wardrobe is back in stock.

Here is a link to the stuff.

We only had time last night to put together the little toy chest we bought for the babies toys. You would think it would be pretty simple. There were only about 6 pieces and some legs. Unfortunately we got the back and the front upside down and didn't realise until too late so we had to pull the whole thing apart again to put them right. Eventually we got it done :) It's very cute. It has all the little toys that the baby has already accumulated - quite a few given he or she is still a few months away!

So now we have a nursery with a bunch of cardboard boxes and a toy chest in it. I'll post photos when we have assembled the rest - I fear how we will go with the more difficult bits considering how badly we did with the simplest!

Video killed the radio star

We bought a video camera yesterday (it's a Panasonic NV-GS150 for those who like the details). We bought it through an online company called camerastore.com.au which I can highly recommend. It was 30% less than what you would pay in Retravision, Bing Lee or Harvey Norman. I ordered it online, they rang to confirm the details 15 minutes later and it arrived the next day. Overall a very positive online experience.

It will be fun learning to use it! As well as recording video, it takes 2.3MPixel still images which are really easy to download onto the PC so we will actually be able to get photos on this blog. I'm very excited about that. Unfortunately to do video editing we will need an upgrade of the computer, nothing major, just new operating system, new hard drive, more memory, DVD burner, USB 2.0, and Firewire card ... okay maybe we'll just have to get a new PC it is 5 and a half years old after all! Depends on the finances I guess!

U2 here we come

We took the day off to try and get U2 tickets yesterday. For those of you who don't know, they sold out 70,000 tickets in a little over and hour. We tried to get on to Ticketek on the internet and via the phone for 90 minutes yesterday and didn't get through once. Fortunately we had registered for Mastercard Applause, Mastcard's preferred ticket thing, and were able to get a package through them which includes B Reserve tickets and a pre-concert cocktail party at Star City. So we have tickets yay!