Couch update

We put some more thought into the couch situation on the weekend and visited a few stores. I'm much more positive about the whole thing. For starters, it looks like we could maybe still get the couch we wanted in the first place, but just in a slightly different configuration. Instead of the L shape with a two seater and a three seater arm, we could go down the parth of a three seater with a chaise on one site. This would still get quite a bit of seating (and crucially, allow 2 people to lie on it at the same time) and fit into our living room.

However, we also rather liked the alternatives available at King furniture as well. Those funky modular jobbies are actually looking rather attractive, especially with some of the cool fabrics they come in.

One thing is certain after the weekend's shopping - there are whole warehouses of terrible couches out there that I never want to go near. I think we've narrowed down the choices quite well, now it's just a matter of refining and ordering.

It has also not become apparent that there will be at least a six week wait between couch purchase and one turning up. This may put a crimp in our original plan not to order one until we move in...

Heh, crimp....

ELO rule

I was reminded at the pub the other night how much I love ELO. You should love them too.

Yeah.

Has everybody seen this or what? WHERE'S THE GODDAMN ARNIE AT?

I saw this in an ad this afternoon (well targeted, google ads) and it's blowing my mind. I don't know what to make of it.

I mean I'd heard they were remaking the original Predator with Adrien Brody instead of Arnie as Dutch, but had dismissed it as hyperbole. It seems like it's not a total remake, and I'm actually rather glad of that.

But holy crap! Lawrence Fishburn!? The "are you a mexi-can or a mexi-can't" dude (aka Danny Trego)? EPIC LOLS!

The best part? The cast list on IMDB lists characters called "Bezerker Predator Black Super" and "Dog Handler Super Predator".

HA!

PS: I'm a Mexi-can!!!

Couchy couch couch

The last time we were on site, we did some very rough and ready measurements of the living room to see if the couch that we'd picked out would fit - and woe! - it doesn't look like it will.

The Club Grand, from Bay Leather Republic, met my key priorities of being comfy to sit on, and long enough to lie down on. It met Dana's exacting standards of style and quality, and it wasn't too deep for her munchkin stature. It also gave us enough seating, which I worried about a little for the lounge room. That might sound a little silly - after all, there will be just two of us living there - but we like to entertain a lot, and we really need the extra seating. It also sorted out the worry of matching any other seating in the lounge room with the couch, as there would not really be room for any other seating anyway.

I should also point out that we do already have a few arm chairs, but they really need recovering, and we were going to retire them to the spare room anyway. The spare room was going to be a study/library/reading room. I'm really looking forward to that room.

But I digress. I've been spending some time tonight thinking about alternatives. I've got a couple of thoughts about it at the moment. The first is something that Dana and I both like, but I don't know if it would really work in our living room - a "chesterfield".

I really like these couches, but they really seem like something that should be in a bar instead of in front of a TV in the living room. I'd love to have one of these the study for example. However, it may encourage me to drink scotch on it, which I probably don't need.

The next option is something a little more modern.

This is the Kato, from King Furniture. You've probably seen some of King's adverts - they're pretty aggressive with them . Every time I go to their show room, I change my mind about them. For example, I usually end up hating the couch I went to check out, but having my world rocked by another one in the show room. I think the problem is that the colours and way they are set out can vary so much. Anyway, the modular nature of the King's couches gives us the ability to get more seating in with only the one couch in a limited space, which is attractive. I'm yet to fall in love with any of them yet though.

The other way to cut it of course, is just to go with a more standard route, with a (nice) couch. This route is a little tricky, at least with online browsing, because I can't seem to find anything that great! The couple of options that I have seen are, of course, in the US, and not Australia. Maybe there's more, and my web-fu is just to weak to find them. I don't know, it's getting late, and I'm getting tired.

Here are a couple that I did find. Unfortunately I have no idea what they're like to sit on, or where to get their equivalents in Australia. I can't help but feel the best thing to do will just be to take a big trip up to Sydney and check out what's available.

As a side note, looking at online shopping in the US makes it really obvious how much more we pay for things in Australia. I'd find it quite frustrating if I didn't love Australia quite so much.

As I've been writing this, some crappy E! special about the Kardashians has come on the TV. I've just learned more than I ever needed to know about these people, who's primary claim to fame seems to be that they knew OJ Simpson and his wife. I think it's time for bed...

ZOMFG they're painting!

Just a quickie to say that we popped past the house this arvo, after a lovely lunch at the Smokehouse Cafe at Poachers Pantry (and a visit to Clonakilla to pick up some vino), and the windows were covered up with black plastic.

This can mean only one thing - they're painting! I'm so excited!

Unfortunately, there were some builders on site, so we didn't go in. Apart from Esa - Old Father Time has no fear. The other interesting thing about the site is that the last couple of houses all have roofs on them now. Looks like we might just make the July completion estimation, which would hopefully mean a late August/early September occupancy. 

Adventures in trespassing...

Last weekend was a long weekend in Canberra, and I feel like I got at least three weekends worth of stuff packed in there. One of the things I got packed in there was a proper fence jumping and exploration of the site. While we were on site, we ran into another home-owner to be, doing exactly the same thing.

He was pretty keen to be friendly, but he did tell us a few interesting things, foremost amongst them, we don't actually have to jump the fence - there are a whole heap of places you can just lift a bit of the fence up. I felt a little silly when he pointed that out. He also gave us the name of an online curtain company, and showed us the cornice-less design (he called it square set) in his unit. The square set thing looks pretty cool, very modern.

Then he told us why he bought his unit (because of the view, that someone had since obscured with a house). Then he showed us the extra light fittings he had installed. Then he showed us the kitchen bench top that wasn't the one he wanted. You get the picture. Nice guy, very keen.

Anyway, there has been some more progress on the site. Most of it seems to be going on in other people's places - one of them has all the light switches installed, all the tiles, and most of the kitchen - but there has been some in ours as well.

Here are all the cabinets waiting to be installed in the kitchen. I think the big one in the front will be the bench.

There's also waterproofing around the shower and bath in the bathroom. You can also see the vanity unit that will eventually be installed in there as well.

Same goes for the en suite - waterproofing and vanity.

Its kind of interesting seeing how some really small things make the house look finished. The two pictures above show the newly installed cornices in the living room and the gap between the walls and the roof in the kitchen, where they will be installing the kitchen cabinets instead. It's such a small part of the room, but it really makes the living room look more finished compared to the kitchen.

These two pictures are not from our unit - they're from another one in the complex that is a mirror image of ours. I've just included them to show what the kitchen and lounge room will look like when they're a bit further along. You can see the light fixtures as well!

Anyway, new season of ER just started in GO, and you'd better believe I'm watching that shit! George Clooney AND Noah Wiley are back on it!

The Presets - If I Кnow You (Tania & Jori Version)

I started writing a full post on house progress last night, but it was defeated by TV and red wine.

Instead I present you with a track from a CD that someone lent me at work (MoS Uncovered 2) which is "chilled" remixes of the popular house that MoS like to push, interspersed with older tunes that someone who is clearly not me considers classic. Predictably, a lot of it was shit, but I really liked this track, maybe because I'm a sucker for the Presets.

Excellent music for a rough morning at work.

To follow on the "best of chill out remix '96" theme, here's another track I enjoyed - the Stakka and Skynet remix of Morcheeba's "The Sea", a prime example of what happens when dark side drum and bass producers go soft:

PS: Happy days, Blogger.com has reinstated the spellchecker! We will all benefit...

ABSOLUTE GENIUS!!!1!1!!eleven

The frequency of posts on here is getting rather low due to the new job - I actually turn the majority of posts out during my lunch time or other quiet periods at work, so being really busy taking new things on puts a real restriction on it.

Anyway, we had a "site visit" over the weekend and I do have lots more to say about the house, but I just don't have enough time to post it properly now. I'll get on to it when I have the time and inclination. For now, I leave you with a video that a mate forwarded on today.

It combines two of my favourite things - Streetfighter and white trash TV. Enjoy.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Of house interiors

Over the last couple of months, Dana and I have been thinking more and more of what we'd like to do with the inside of the house. This is coming home even more now that it's already completed. For example, we've started looking for curtains, we have a couch pretty much picked out, etc.

In light of this, I'm going to try and post a bit more about the thoughts we have and the decisions we make regarding the interior. Hopefully this will mean that I'm chronicling excellent choices that we will love forever, and not a whinge about not being able to find good things in Canberra or the exorbitant price of having things shipped here. I'm upbeat about the former, but there may well be some of the latter.

Anyway, to kick it off, we decided on the weekend we want to get a Chad Floor Lamp, available from Aero Designs. 

It's also available in black, which I think we'd probably go for. We saw it in an Inside Out magazine - I got Dana a subscription to it for our anniversary last year. While a lot of the stuff in it is totally not my thing, there's an occasional gem in there, and its quite good to get ideas and see what's available. 

Anyway, the lamp is supposed to cost around $340, which doesn't seem that bad after having a look at some nicer ones in the shops recently. I reckon it looks ace.

To end things off, here's a track I really enjoyed listening to at work today - "Angels and Fly" by High Contrast (feat. Nolay). It didn't help me concentrate at all, but it did bring a smile to my face and get stuck in my head all afternoon.

House update - blurry camera phone shots and exciting news

After a few weeks without a successful visit to the site, we managed to get a good look inside the unit again on the weekend. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera on me at the time, so I had to make do with taking a few pictures on my camera. As a result, the quality isn't too great on them, but you can at least get a bit of an idea about the progress.

Being a building site of a certain stage of completion, things are looking rather messy. The above shot shows our garage, which now has a back wall, and in this shot is housing some gyprock for one of the other units, two baths and a Dana.

Here's one of the front doorway, where things are looking similarly messy. Those with a good memory might spot that the supports for the porch roof now have concrete footings, which is good to see. They were a bit precariously sitting on random offcuts of wood before.

Here you can see the living room, with its newly erected walls. The second shot is where the kitchen will be eventually.

Here is the bathroom, and the vanity unit that will eventually live in it. The vanity is currently hanging out in the living room, with another vanity destined for one of the other units, and a laundry sink.

Here's the garage from another angle. Plenty of room for the car, plus bikes and the early stages of a classic Jones junk collection. Hopefully it will never be quite as bad as mum and dad's place - I think not purchasing a boat or a trailer for it to travel on will be an important part of avoiding this.

And finally, here is a picture of the courtyard with the final brickwork and cladding completed. While you can't really see it in this picture, it was good to see the final colour of the cladding.

So there are the photos; now on to the exciting news! We had an update from the estate agent and developer about the estimated completion date. The exciting part is that the estimate at the moment is that they will be done in July! I'm not entirely sure how - there are some units that still don't have roofs on them yet, and then there's landscaping etc to sort out. Its still very positive news. The only real dampener on it is that when it's finished, the plans have to be registered with the ACT Govt.

Those who recall the last time we had plans go through the ACT Govt may see the problem already.

Registration of the plan can take from three weeks, to three months depending entirely on how long the ACT Govt take to process them. I'm crossing my fingers that it will be measured in weeks, rather than months, but it's still a bit of a gloomy prospect. Its one thing to wait for them to be finished, but another entirely for them to be finished, and just be waiting around for the paperwork, especially when we will just have paid an exorbitant amount in stamp duties to the authorities processing the paperwork.

Anyway, I have more to say on the subject, and also a whole bunch to say on our plans for the interior, but I've just noticed it's gone midnight and I need to get some sleep!

Eat them up yum yum

Today's tune to get you through the morning is "Pacman (Power-Pill Remix)" by Power-Pill (aka Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin). There's a couple of different uploads of this tune on youtube, but only the one below features a mish mash of Tron clips.

Ahhhhh yeah. Makes me want to go and watch the original Tron again. To help get you in that same nostalgic mind set, here's a blurry 1982 trailer of the original Tron:

For extra laughs, here's the description on the youtube post:

FrankSchenk6 — February 07, 2008 — Kevin Flynn is a former employee of the software corporation ENCOM, now running a arcade. Flynn has been trying to hack into ENCOM's mainframe computer to find evidence that ENCOM's senior executive Ed Dillinger stole four video games he created. But Dillinger's supercomputer "Master Control Program" foils Flynn's efforts and dictates and controls most of the computer systems. One night, Flynn's former girlfriend Lora and her boyfriend, ace computer programmer Alan Bradley helps Flynn break into ENCOM to shut down the MCP with Alan's security program "TRON". But MCP uses Lora's matter transmission program and converts Flynn into data and sends him into the computer. Flynn finds himself in a electronic world ruled by the MCP and his evil chief henchman Sark, where computer programs are the alter-egos of their creators and are forced to compete in gladiatorial games. With help from Tron, a heroic and fearless security program and his lover, Yori, Flynn sets out destroy the MCP and help Tron liberate the system from the MCP's control, by destroying the MCP is Flynn's only way of returning to the real world.

Gold! I have to admit though, I didn't realise this movie was quite as old as all that. If it came out in 1982, it's older than I am, which makes my nostalgia for it a little misplaced. Whatever, it's still awesome.

So awesome that Disney are remaking it in 3D. 3D!!1!1!11one!!1eleven

Stereo sound, straight to your earholes!

The trailer actually looks pretty good, despite the reliance on the 3D gimmick. Unfortunately embedding is disabled on the clip, so you'll just have to follow this link here to watch it. I recommend it. I really hope it ends up being good.

Edit: I'm totally going to make that pacman track my ringtone!

Digitized fart sounds

ZOMFG second post in one day!

Toooo much reading complicated things is doing my head in this afternoon. Then this track came on from a repository of drum and bass singles and VIPs I keep on hand for emergencies: "Move VIP" by Trace and Rymetyme.

I know what you're thinking, it sounds like digitized fart sounds. I don't care, it was just what the doctor ordered this afternoon, and I want to share it with you all.

That is all.

PS: if you followed a link thinking this would be about the house, scroll on to the next post. This is just an afternoon mind dump about music that I like.

PPS: We all know it's true that the best thing Goldie ever did was "Innercity Life". Starring in Snatch was a close second. I'm yet to see anything else particularly good come out of him. Some dudes on fb just (inadvertently) reminded me of this, and I thought that should be said.

Edit: The same dudes just reminded me that he was a bad guy in a Bond movie. I won't make the call that he was a really awesome one, but I would at least put it above nothing particularly good.

Ah yes, aint that fresh - everybody wants to get down like that

Good news house progress followers - the unit in our complex that went back on the market (for a substantially increased price - see previous posts) is now under offer! Hopefully this means it's selling for the ticket price on the site of $455k. This is pretty excellent for us, because ours is a slightly nicer place (on paper at least) and is a substantial increase in value from a year ago when it was first on offer.

I was fairly certain that the unit would sell for a fair bit more (given Canberra's crazy property market), but I worried that $455k was above what the market would pay.

In other news, there were some fairly fast paced changes at work last week that saw me start a new job on Monday morning, after finding out about it on Thursday. Its a position I had expressed interest in, so I see it as a positive move, but it's work that I've never done before, so I'm currently feeling a little out of my depth. This isn't aided by the fact that I don't actually have a director as yet (she hopefully will start next Monday) and that it is the first time I've moved to a completely new job since I joined the public service.

It does fulfill a personal goal I've had to be part of a "taskforce". Now all that's left is become a member of thinktank.

I'll leave you with a song that was stuck in my head and prompted me to listen to some hip hop today (and then go back to dark, dirty drum and bass).