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Saturday 7th May 2005

The cooker finally got installed today. The installer turned up at 7:10 this morning - just a few minutes after I had got out of bed to see to Thomas. Thomas sat patiently in the back room watching a DVD, whilst I had to help the guy carry out the old cooker, and then scrape up the mess that was left behind. It looks like the floor in the kitchen has been changed three times around the old cooker, so I had to try and clean that up before the new cooker was installed. Once our shiny new stove was in place, we spent a bit of time adjusting all the legs to ensure that the top was level - and we found the the entire kitchen is leaning slightly towards the garden.

A little later in the morning, Liam came over with the wood that he had got cut and sized to go into the kitchen where we have the microwave stacked on top of the freezer, so that I can build a cabinet. We also found that the floor and wall are not square to each other, so after all of Liam's careful work to get everything square and perfect, I will have to cut a chunk off the bottom. Both of us are a little worried about trying to get it right, as we are unsure if the angle of the floor and the wall is the same on either side of the cabinet, and if the floor is flat. I guess that it's to be expected with a house built 40 years ago.

Ann had a manicure and pedicure treatment with Jurlique in Memorial Drive, and I took Thomas for a couple of hours around the city for some shopping. It was amazing how quickly the time flew past! Ann came out with a big smile on her face, and caught up with Thomas and me running around a park at the edge of the Torrens river, where Thomas was stomping on the dry crunchy leaves from some of the trees in the park - he did not want to leave...

We brought two pairs of curtains over from England, because my mother had lovingly made them (she is a professional interior designer) for the house in England, and we only used them for just over a year. We put up the bedroom curtains and they fit perfectly, and the curtains that we had in the lounge are a little too long for our lounge here. In Australia, the curtains are normally included in the sale of a house - which makes sense, because they fit the window... We will leave the curtains that came with the house in the lounge for now.

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Sunday 8th May 2005

Today is Mother's day in Australia. Thomas got Ann some pyjamas and a card that he signed himself. I am also really annoyed with him as he also got Ann a double Abba CD ('The Definitive Collection'), and that means that I have to suffer Ann singing and dancing to Abba - and Ann's singing is awful. The new pyjamas match Ann's favourite handbag (a pink Burberry), but we are hopefully never going to see Ann walking down the street with her handbag and in her pyjamas.

We had a barbequeue today for Shirley and Liam, which was the first time that we had a chance to use the new garden furniture. It was great, with fillet steaks, chicken kebabs, corn on the cob and our special recipie potato salad (sour cream and yoghurt with chives). The new table is really great, it's so large that we all sat on a side each, and had to stand up to get to the salads and sauces. Thomas slept until our main course was finished, and then was riding his bike up and down the patio and pruning the plants. I managed to get some good photos of him, and Liam and Shirley entertained Thomas around the garden.

I was starting to think that the TV on Sundays was going to get better now that X-Factor is finishing, but then Big Brother started tonight - I really hope that we don't get into Big Brother, as it can really be tiring!

There was a guy caught speeding at over 172Km/h in an 80Km/h zone. There are so many maniac teenage drivers on the roads in powerful cars, that they have brought in new laws to enable the Police to prosecute the hoons.

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Monday 9th May 2005

Typical. Just typical. This morning the water heater packed up and was spurting water from the top and gas from the bottom. It took me nearly half an hour to try and turn off the water supply to the broken heater, because another water supply pipe had been installed across the tap. And this was after I had over-slept, and felt groggy and was then late for work.
We got a quote for a replacement water heater, but the benefit is that we were planning to replace the water storage heater for a constant hot water unit, and move it from outside the kitchen window to the other end of the house. So, this failure means that we have the opportunity to do all the work and modifications that we want. It's not going to be cheap, but we had budgeted for the work in any case.

I had to drive to the Underdale campus of UniSA today. It's been nearly completely demolished now, but there is one department building still there and they have been having problems with their server, and so I had one of the team build up a new server, and we went take the replacement server to them at Underdale. The problem was that Ashley (the trainee) got us lost several times on the way there ('shortcuts'), including missing the main entrance. When we finally got there, we could see the building that we wanted to get to, but it was surrounded by demolition works, including the roads being removed. There was a small track that was leading to the building, and so I took my car up the earth track, only to find that it was a footpath! The path then lead to an old road area, which had been cut off from both ends, where I dropped down the kerb and was then stuck! I had to get out by mounting the kerb at the other end and driving over the lawn.

Liam came over this evening to work on putting up the new kitchen cabinet with me. It took us only 45 minutes, because once we got the momentum and had all the preparations done (Liam had pre drilled all the locations for the shelves) all it took as us to go around and drill and screw it all together. Liam brought over two drills, and I had my own drill and tools, and between us we managed to get the whole thing installed very quickly. The new shelf/cabinet is for the freezer, microwave and to keep our knives out of Thomas' reach - and Liam has made it so well that it is stronger and more rigid than all the rest of the kitchen cabinets.

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Tuesday 10th May 2005

Thomas has been developing on his talking skills. His vocabulary now includes "Teletubbies", which he calls out to make us put on the Teletubbies DVD for him - it seems to be on most of the day. He demands for it to be put on, and then follows Ann around the house and ends up not watching it. Thomas now knows where to point for his ears, eyes, chin, knee, foot, tongue, nose, mouth and socks. He also understands where all the rooms in the house are, and where many things are such as shoes and his toys.
Thomas also knows hello, bye-bye, car, cup, dummy, light, 'all-gone', clock, row-row-row, more(!), two (also used when he wants more), ta (shorter than thankyou), bath, shoe, no (but not yes yet), baby, daddy and of course mummy.

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Wednesday 11th May 2005

I took a day off work today to do some DIY. We also had the water heater replaced today, three plumbers and an electrician turned up before 8:30, and started work pretty quickly. Once they removed the old water heater (an outside unit with hot water storage), it had left a great big hole in the paving, as the previous owners had paved the outside area around the water heater. This had meant that some of the pipework was under the paving, and also that the entire bottom of the unit had rusted through. It took all three of the plumbers to lift out the old unit and get rid of it, as they could not put it down as the bottom was all rusted away.
We decided to site the new water heater on a different part of the wall, as we want to eventually put an extension on the house, and it seems like a good opportunity to put it in a new place. The plumbers then set about removing all the redundant pipework from the side of the house, and installing a new gas main to supply the new hot water service.
It took only one guy to install the new system on the wall, a small Rinnai Infinity 20 which does not store hot water, but is instantaneous constant hot water on demand. Once they had all finished and gone, Ann had a long hot shower, and I did too - a full 20 minutes of constant hot water.
I was amazed that they plumbers just lifted off roof tiles to get into the roof space and remove the old pipework and install the new pipes. There were three holes in the roof, a pile of concrete tiles and three heads occasionally popping out of the holes.

I needed to clean the gutters of all the eucalyptus leaves and boruganvillia flowers, and so I decided that as there were three men with ladders on the roof, it would be the safest time for me to get up there myself - more ladders to use, and someone to call 000 if I fell off.
I started to clean out the leaves, which took much longer than I expected. I then installed 'gutter guards' which is just a plastic mesh that keeps the gutters clear of flammable leaves and blockages. I think that I did a really good job, as it looks great now. Ann was a little bit disappointed about the mess that I made, but it's all dry stuff so can be swept up.

I went to Bunnings hardware to get some more tools and bits - and was trying to get some coving to match the decorative tops to the kitchen cabinets, now that we have a new cabinet in the kitchen. Unfortunately, the people at Bunnings looked at me very strangely, and said that they don't have anything even vaguely similar to it, but directed me to Pooraka Timber. There, an old man came over to me when I was looking around, took one look at the coving and said 'No'. He then took it from me, dropped it (damaging it enough that I cannot re-use it), and took it to his mate who also said that they had no idea where I could get some from. But then they recommended Tea Tree Gully mouldings, who have a warehouse full of every type of coving, except the one I want. They looked it up and down, called over other people in the warehouse to have a look at it, and then told me that they had never seen anything like it before. I left dejected and depressed, and so went home to get up on the roof.

Ann managed to sort out a whole load of cupboards and now we only a very few boxes left to unpack - I'm sure that one day I will come back home and everything will be done. Ann also managed to do all the ironing and cleaned most of the house.
I also managed to prune much of the garden, start a heap for composting, and put a sun shade over Thomas' sand pit.

I am very proud that I managed to re-pave the area that the old water heater came out of - it was a big gaping hole until I mangaged to find some extra paving slabs, scrape up some sand from the lawn, and lay the new slabs in the hole. There was one space that was ideal for a fresh slab, but the hole was just a tiny bit too small. I then had to get my hammer out and chip away on one of the slabs so that the new one would fit. It took me about an hour of tapping until it alll fitted in, and I was very pleased that it looks so professional and almost as if the heater was never there - except the space on the wall where the bricks are not painted the same colour!

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Thursday 12th May 2005

This morning the dawn chorus of the parakeets and parrots in the gum trees woke is a little later than usual - we must be getting used to the noise. Thomas is still waking at around 6:45, which is a little earlier than when we were in the last house.

I read in the news that South Australia is set to start manufacturing Marcos sports cars, a British car. It appears that they know that SA is the home of car production and motorsport, and that should be reinforced if Adelaide has the Grand Prix return to it's streets in 2010 when Melbourne's franchise is up.

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