Update on the theme front

Posted on August 20, 2007
Filed Under Australia - The land down under | 3 Comments

As you may have been able to tell, today I have been playing with my theme again. I have to admit to being a bit of a theme junkie. I started out trying to fix my original theme (or at least the one that I’ve been using for the past few weeks.) and therein lies my downfall.
It had started acting haywire and things weren’t lining up properly. After trying a few things, I decided that perhaps this theme wasn’t the one I really wanted, and I started looking at new ones. After playing around for a while, I found out what the problem was after all and fixed it. But now I had found several new themes that I really liked!

Purple is my favourite colour (don’t start on the sexual frustration thing… that’s a myth ;) ) and I had found THREE different themes that incorporated purple quite nicely.  Brian reckons that I’m confusing people by changing it too frequently but I would like to think that most people who know my site and read regularly would LOOK at the title before flicking off thinking they had clicked the wrong link, and those who’ve never been here before, well, they don’t know any different, do they?

In any case, I’ve settled on this one for the moment but don’t be surprised if the next time you’re here, it different again!

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Technical difficulties

Posted on August 20, 2007
Filed Under Australia - The land down under | 2 Comments

Sorry for the mess, folks. My theme is playing up and I just don’t have time in the morning to attempt to figure out what’s wrong and then fix it. Those of you that have done programming understand that nothing is ever simple, and even the smallest of changes can take hours to perfect.

So… for the time being… I’m messy and featureless. I’ll sort it out… eventually.

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He says, she says…

Posted on August 12, 2007
Filed Under Australia - The land down under | 5 Comments

Brian and I went shopping for a new car this weekend. It’s becoming quite pressing that we get a move on with this and I am definitely feeling the pinch. You see, I’m the one who will have to bus and train everywhere should we not have a second car. Brian drives a manual ute which I have no interest in learning to drive 1) because I am not comfortable with the ute being so big and 2) because I refuse to let that be an excuse not to get a new car (I.e. well we don’t NEED a new car becase I can just drive the ute when Brian’s not at work, or out or has need of it…BLECH!)

The problem is we like different cars. I like the Renault Megane Sedan as seen below

It is everything I have ever wanted in a car. Has all of the bells and whistles (like rear-parking sensors, automatic headlights and climate control) that make me very happy (as a woman) and the safety features are beyond anything else I’ve seen. It seems that European car manufacturers take safety very seriously and everything comes standard. Not so, in Australia. Lots of the features considered standard on the Megane are extra $$ in Aussie cars. On top of all of that, I very much like the size inside and out. It feels very comfortable to me, and I think it looks elegant and classic.

Brian disagrees. Though he can’t complain about the bells and whistles and safety features, he is insistent that the car looks “ordinary.” And on that note, he doesn’t really like it. This is what Brian likes:

The Dodge Caliber. Now, I didn’t particularly like it from a picture so we went to see it as well to get a better idea of what it looked like. When we got there, I could see that the picture I had seen didn’t really do it justice and I conceded that it was OK. The bells and whistles are comparable to the Megane but the safety features are not as impressive. On the overall it was pretty good BUT there was a few small things that made me slip this baby off the selection list.

1) I tried for about 10 minutes to get comfortable in the drivers seat and I couldn’t. I’m pretty short, so in order for me to see and feel like I am in control of the car I need to be high up. The only thing is, when I was high enough that I felt comfortable, my left knee was banging into the dash & steering wheel…no good. Brian INSISTS that if I test drive it, this will change my mind but I can’t see how.

2) This may seem niggly but I felt like my vision out the rear window was impeded by the rear headrests which were very high. Even sitting still I felt like I couldn’t see well. Brian also insisted that I would get used to this and that it was not, in fact, a big deal.

Now, as much as I value Brian’s opinion on most everything, in this case I feel like he’s trying to push me into getting a car that HE likes rather than listening to me about what I want..lol The plain truth is, I will be driving the car 95% of the time. Back and forth to work, shuttling the kids to all of their different practices and friends houses etc… Brian will of course drive it too sometimes, so I can see why he wouldn’t want a girly car (no pink VW Beetles..lol) but realistically, we should be looking for something most suited to me…that he is comfortable driving as well. After all… he still has the ute.

So folks, given that they are comparable in price, which would you want and why? Should I concede to Brian and take the risk of buying a car that I might not like and could end up resenting? Or, how do I tell Brian, without sounding like a selfish prat, that in this case, my opinion should weigh more?
I went back to work for sole reason of getting a new car…I don’t want to be bussing and training it because we can’t agree!

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The old man is snoring…

Posted on August 7, 2007
Filed Under Australia - The land down under | 1 Comment

Perth over the past few weeks has been reminiscent of a Montreal spring…rain, rain and more rain. The problem is, it never rains for very long.

“What?!?” You may ask.

When it rains here it usually BUCKETS down with gale force winds to boot. For a short period of time. Then the sun comes out and this happens…

Perth certainly is the city of rainbows. I see them all the time. This one was on the way to work the other morning. I had seen it while driving on the freeway in a clear blue sky but was only able to stop at the light on Wellington to take the photo. Unfortunately, more clouds became visible then but you get the idea.

The problem is the accumulation. It’s very little in a country that is experiencing some pretty serious drought conditions. So bad, in fact, that we are considering recycling waste water as a solution. Here in Perth we have a desalination plant to help us with our most precious resource. They say that the plant will eventually provide about 17% of Perth’s drinking water - directly from the Indian Ocean. A better option than recycled waste water I suppose but very, very costly.

The past two weeks however have been drizzly, misty, overcast and doing precious little to fill our dams, not to mention the effect it has on your mood. I don’t think it matters where you are in the world, a few weeks of overcast skies is enough to send anyone spiralling into depression…even if it is 20 degrees. It just makes me want to ….

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