jeremy.id.au

The other day I was getting a box of Christmas decorations out of the garage, something fell onto my head and I brushed it off quickly thinking it was a spider. Though my sister thought it was a lizard. I wondered how a little skink could get up there in the rafters, well perhaps now that becomes clearer.

This evening I walked into the kitchen and through the corner of my eye I thought I saw a huntsman creeping across the wall. Nope, it was a gecko. Most people think of geckos as little green things, but no this one was brown; most likely a Southern Marbled Gecko. I never really would have thought there would be geckos in Melbourne, though these things are apparently quite common. However, they are apparently nocturnal creatures and as such, quite shy of the light.

Even if it is a bit creepy, at least it’s keeping the spider population down. In fact it’s probably feasting on some right now.

Edit: After all the rain and storms we’ve had, it may well have been looking for somewhere dry rather than being a regular inhabitant of our kitchen.

Update (27th Dec 2007): Our gecko friend was spotted again last night, above the same cupboards that he retreated towards last time. So seems he has made his home there! Being incredibly shy of the light, he only comes out when the lights are out and if the lights are turned on, he retreats back to his hiding place behind the cupboards. I suspect he also feasts on the introduced American Cockroach, which is at least nice to think.

Yeah I know, this blog has faced a bit of neglect over the last couple of months. Though now that I have a little more time, hopefully it’ll get some attention over the summer.

Speaking of summer, we decided to get a couple of portable air conditioners. One for my bedroom and another for the living room. However, these portable air conditioners come with a giant hose (or ‘elephant trunk’) in order to vent the hot air out through a window. Unfortunately the brackets they come with are no good with wind out windows (rather, they are designed for sliding windows) and it takes a lot of messing around to fill in the holes. Obviously they figure it’s too hard to have one size that fits all with these wind out windows, even though these windows probably make up 50% of household windows these days.

After a lot of messing around, we finally found a solution; Perspex. After getting a couple of sheets cut to size (one for each room), my brother cut out some holes with the jigsaw to match the bracket on the vent hose and lined the edges with an adhesive seal. The perspex just slots in place where the fly screen normally goes. As you can see in the photo below, you can hardly see it’s there, except for the trunk hanging from nowhere. While there may be some minor gaps around the edges, it’s not significant enough to pose any problem. Though if it is a concern, you could jam something in to seal up the gap completely.

Well we have just moved from the house that I’ve been living in for the last five and half years (since dad died), which is also the house that I grew up in. Though five and a half years is nothing; Mum had been living there for over thirty-three years!

Needless to say it has been a mammoth effort, with over a week of shuffling backwards and forwards. Emptying of the old house being only completed today. So goodbye to my childhood home and the house that I’ve spent almost twenty years of my life living in.

While now I endure the pain of dialup, as I wait to have broadband reconnected. So far ‘rejected’ by Telstra, though ‘correctable’. Also, many boxes remain unpacked. Though we have moved to an area that is greener and possibly more prestigious, it appears to lack the life that the old area had. Let alone, the selection of take away food and restaurants we had.

Yesterday morning I awoke to find tradies left, right and centre working on stuff in the house. A dust storm was brewing in the kitchen, the smell of paint was wafting through from the back room and plants that had been freshly planted on the weekend were being squashed as a brick retaining wall in the front yard was being bagged. Breakfast at home was not an option and while maccas breaky was over (yeah a slept in a little), fortunately I was able to get a bacon and egg focaccia from a local café (beats a maccas breaky anyway). So I ended up having take away breakfast, lunch and dinner!

Today was a little better, as I had devised a plan to have breaky at home this morning by having everything ready the night before. Although they were still doing work on the kitchen benches, they weren’t using the electric belt sanders anymore. A heap of other work was still being done, such as painting of the front door and some work on the front of the house. I decided not to hang around in it for another day and rode my bike into TAFE despite the 30 degree heat. Yes, despite the 20km in each direction, it was a good excuse to fit in a bike ride and get away from other menial tasks that need to be done around the house. Only because I was going to TAFE. That’s about the only reason I would cycle commute, to get somewhere and to fit in a bike ride at the same time. It’s the second time I’ve ridden into TAFE too, and quite a nice ride as a good portion of Box Hill to Brunswick can be done on bike paths. Being in at TAFE, I ended up having take away lunch again and the kitchen *still* wasn’t finished today so take away dinner as well. Hopefully it’ll be done by tomorrow.

In other news, I have been keeping the riding up. Did another trip out to the Dandenongs about two weeks ago, riding from Box Hill to Ringwood (because the train line was closed), train to Boronia, then we rode to Olinda via The Basin then down to Emerald via Monbulk before riding back to Belgrave. Then finally had to ride the stint from Ringwood to Box Hill again, bringing the total to almost 70km of riding for that day. Also did 55km of riding from Daniel’s place last weekend, from Montmorency - Plenty - Diamond Creek - Research - Warrandyte then back to Montmorency. A few photos (though not many) have been uploaded to gallery and flickr.

It seems to be Blue Tongue season as well. The other day while riding through Fairfield Park, only 5km (crows flight) from the city, I spotted what I had at first thought was a rather large lizard. I soon realised it might may have been a Blue Tongue, and after waiting around for a few minutes I was able to confirm that it was indeed. Unfortunately I didn’t have the camera on me that time.

Had to go to Bunnings for a few things this week and picked up a $30 el-cheapo drill while we were there. After all, it’s a pain not having a drill handy and when you can get a cordless drill this cheap, why not get one? And so gone are the days when you had to drape a great long extension cord to the place you were drilling.

Though having a new toy means you have to find something to do with it. Well one of those things was to cut hole through piece of MDF behind a desk/bunch for a power and network cable. For years the cables have come out from under the desk then back behind a filing cabinet in a little recess and back out to the power point. Now they can go straight behind the filing cabinet from under the desk. However, before the job could begin I had to remove the filing cabinet, including all four drawers. While I was at it, I was able to remove an old shelf which housed the old PC, just below the desk (no longer needed since the iMac G3 that replaced it is self contained). Finally, I was able to able to fix the network patch plate to the wall, after it had been hanging out of the wall for five years. So a few things that were waiting to have the filing cabinet temporarily removed!

None the less, with an old “hole saw” I was able to find in the garage it came out quite well (you don’t normally see it anyway because it’s under the desk).

In other news, this site is back online now having been down for a few days last week. Emails from my spam registrar were being caught up in my spam filter and the domain name expired! (Though it didn’t go back into the pool of available domains).