It?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢s unofficially an extra long weekend here in Australia, with the Anzac Day Public Holiday tomorrow (Tuesday) many, many people have taken the Monday off work. She who must be obeyed was one of them 🙂

So we trekked up to Mandurah today to shop for a new lounge suite. The last major purchase I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢ll be making from what?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢s left of The Blog Herald money (there isn?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢t a lot left now, but what is left goes against the mortgage next week). We visited a number of furniture stores there looking for a lounge suite.

In the first store, we found some quite nice lounge suites. The ones that looked the nicest didn?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢t have recliners (and I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢ve decided I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢m old enough now to want a recliner). Indeed, the nicest looking lounge suites, at least to our liking, also turned out to be the most uncomfortable. We found a few we liked (with recliners) but we didn?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢t like the look. We found one 3 seater, 2x 1 seat recliner set which was very comfortable, but we couldn?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢t justify it?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢s look.

We then visited a number of other stores. Either too much for what they wanted, or too cheap and nasty. The last store we visited was the premium store (for people in Australia Jason/ Ezeboy). The lounges: really expensive. The best one in the place was twice what we wanted to spend. But it was fantastic. We found one lounge at our limit (ok, a little bit more) which was their base model, but well?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?Ǭ¶..not only was it comfortable, it looked great as well. 1x 3 seater with recliners, 2x 1 seaters with recliners, and these guys make the best recliners in the market.

We?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢ve decided to save a little then go back later (maybe a month or two) and buy this one.

But whats the parallel with blogging?

Sometimes the best looking blogs don?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢t feel right. They’re uncomfortable to the reader.
Sometimes bad looking blogs can be really comfortable.
And sometimes you can get both.

Of course, I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢m not a blog snob, like I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢m a lounge snob, so I can take a bad looking blog if the content is right. Ultimately though, it?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢s not a bad thing to aim for both good looking and comfortable, or good design and content.

It’s 6:15pm at night. All the shops are closed. Gangs are fighting outside the closed shops in the main mall amongst themselves, screaming and kicking. A single police car sits at one end of the mall, two officers sitting inside watching but not acting. The few remaining office workers who dared leave their trip to so late scurry along the edges of the mall, try to make their way to the Cities major rail station without making eye contact with the clearly drug or alcohol affected gangs.

The City.

Me, I’ve don’t think I’ve been this sh*t scared in a long time (if ever to be honest). I scurried along behind one of the office workers at a brisk pace and despite initially intending on walking around a bit to find a decent feed, I noticed that the Hungry Jacks (Australian version of Burger King) was open, so I quickly made my way in their, to eat some crap food and wait for the gangs to pass.

For those of you in Perth, I actually felt safer when I got to the Blog Meetup in Northbridge….and that really says something doesn’t it.

Was it Skyhooks with the song “We’re living in the 70s”?.

Yesterday I had to fill up on my way back from Perth. I made the mistake (well I think it was a mistake) of stopping at the Caltex Woolworths outlet in Mandurah. It took me 40 minutes to get to the pump, fill up, pay and leave, all because with the discount voucher you get from shopping at Woolworths the price of the petrol was $1.27, where as everywhere else the price was $1.34. I felt sorry for the poor checkout attendant in the station. As I walked in an eldery customer was abusing him. It wasn’t his fault. People were panicing, rushing to save 7 cents a litre at the pump, and the local papers are predicting petrol will rise to $1.50 a litre….nuts. I can still remember when I first had a car griping when petrol got to 50c a litre. I can still remember filling up for 29.9 cents a litre, and I’m only 30. By the time my son gets to 17 and gets his first car, he’ll probably be paying $50 a litre!.

And then I caught some of the news last night. The Federal Treasurer is saying we are basically entering a similar stage to the fuel crisis of the 70s. Not good, not good….

The Times reports on the iTod, a iPod like device for toddlers. For me, it’s not quite there. First and foremost, I can’t imagine my 3 year old wearing earphones. He’ll rip them out in a second. After that, what’s the appeal? My son is obsessed with my main computer. He sneaks into my office and taps at the keyboard and the mouse. What we really need is a PC for 3-7 year olds. I’ve got one of those toy laptop things….they’re crap. My son played with it for about 2 minutes, then headed back for my computer. They need a real computer, but locked down, and with games 3-7 year olds can play…with a mouse. Linux would do it. When I find some time I’ve got an old P133 Laptop and I’ll do it on this. But why aren’t computer companies really catering for this market?

Part of the package I get in the new house, which is on a new estate, is TV through underground cable. We get the local channels, Perth TV (well depending on the weather) and a couple of free to air satellite channels thrown in for good measure. They are rebroadcasting ABC2 and Bloomberg, and a channel called NOW. Only thing is, I can’t find it on the net. Any one know what NOW is? seems to be out of England. They play some sort of Gaming Show, some sport, and bit of music, but I want to find out more about them.

Greetings and salutations….or something like that. I’m back online after a nearly 2 week hiatus having laid floorboards, decking, and moved into the new castle. Of course still lots of things to go. I’m unpacked only as much as my new, gigantic office currently has in it a desk and a computer….and nothing else. Telstra broke the phone line when they put the ADSL on, so I’m online but cant make landline calls (oh yeh, and this took a week in itself to even get on…) Theres boxes to unpack, beeding to be laid (I’m not very flash at cutting edges on floorboards so it would seem)…but I’m fighting fit, must have lost at least 10kg and the belly has disappeared and it’s actually starting to look like a six pack….nude bloggers calender here I come 🙂

I’ve been looking at my stats tonight. I shouldn’t, because I’m pretending not to care about them…but it’s like a drug really. I can honestly say I’ve never tried heavy drugs. I tried a little pot when I was (a lot) younger but nothing more than that. They say those heavy drugs are addictive, and so are stats :-).

But what do I find? After the United States, readers from The Netherlands are the next biggest readers. So G’day to The Netherlands. I’ve got a unique link to you guys, because my Mrs’s maiden name is De Boer (Dutch meaning The Farmer). My Grand-parents-in-law are Dutch. They moved out here after WW2. My father in law’s real name (he doesn’t go by it) is Jan. Now don’t say it with the J, but try it with a jcha. Similar to Juan. But of course if you’re name looked like a girls name you’d adopt another name, and he did, the English version of Jan. Now incase he ever reads this, Gday Jan. You’re a great bloke. Love my inlaws greatly, you really have done more than I can ever thank you for, for us.

But back to the story. My son is essentially part Dutch. Sure, he got an Irish name, despite the fact that my heritage is actually English (ppl said to me that Declan was very Irish, but I just loved it!). Would you believe that my line or Riley’s isn’t Irish!. I’d always believed for many years that the background was Scottish. Riley is generally the Scottish spelling of the name. My folks gave me a Scottish first name because of it. But get this. My line of Riley’s are actually English. The old spelling was Ryly, from the North of England. Later it became Ryley. They moved to Scotland in the 17th century and changed the spelling!. Can’t blame them really. Ryly is hard to spell.

So here we have it. The son of English descendants who people presume are Irish but spent time in Scotland. Of a mother who is half English stock, half Dutch.

Ain’t the world an interesting place. Multiculturalism at work, in a good way.

I’ve been thinking about the absurdity of the whole home ownership thing lately. I’m moving into the new house Friday week. I won’t quote the direct figures that it cost us, but suffice to say we owe the bank a whole pile of money, more than twice of what Jeremy will pay to buy a house in Canada. And yet I look at it now. We bought the block in October 2004. That block has now more than doubled in value. Indeed the block alone is now worth more than $80,000 AUD more than we paid for it (roughly $60k US). The replacement value of the house has gone up $100k AUD!. We’ve got a real estate friend who said he’d easily sell the house for us tomorrow at nearly 2/3rds of a million dollars. It’s nuts. Completely. In 18 months, a house we still can’t live in, has returned us, in theory, nearly a 100% profit. It would be, of course, tempting to sell, but we’d have to buy back into the market. As much as we could downgrade (when you are talking a roughly 340 sq m house with 4 bedrooms, theatre room, dedicated office (3 times the size of the bedrooms) and massive living areas) anything else out there is a downgrade, and we’d still be living in a nice house with a much smaller mortgage. I’d also have to give up a wired house, because the new house is totally network connected with Cat 5 cable 🙂 on the other hand, I could actually afford to travel if we didn’t have the house 🙂

We’ve been lucky, and silly along the way. My first house we bought back in 2000. It was a 3×1 ex-Miners cottage built in the 50’s in Mandurah. It cost us $120k. But it was on a block of roughly 1000 sqm and was literally 2 doors away from the water. We could see the estuary from our front door. Our little bundle of 3 year old joy was conceived at some stage in that house, and as much as I spent a long time painting and doing it up, we had to sell, because being Asbestos the house wasn’t suitable for a kid. We sold 12 months later for a roughly $60k profit. The 2 houses since we made a small amount of money on, but that first house today would be worth nearly a million on the land alone. It had to be sold at the time, and you can only do what you have to do at the time. I’m thinking now though that things have equalized, we’ve regained the money we should have made on that first house.

And yet I wonder about the kiddies. Or I shouldn’t really call them kiddies, call them Generation Y. Because starting off in the housing market here now for them would be nearly impossible. When we bought the first house we had to come up with a 5% deposit, and I can tell you know back then it was really, really hard. But we managed to do it. It was like $6,000. Imagine having to come up with 5% of $400k or similar, the base figure for most houses now in my neck of the woods. $20k is a lot of money to most people, a mortgage of $380k is just nuts. For a young person starting out, it’s a fortune. The next generation in Australia isn’t going to be able to buy into the housing market, unless they buy a house out the back of woop woop, or inherit a house (or fortune) from their parents.

Having said that though, housing in the Greater Bunbury Region, where I live, is now the second dearest market in Australia, only Sydney is dearer. It’s even cheaper to buy in Melbourne!. But that’s what you get when unemployment is 2% and the local mining companies are all taking on thousands of new people and spending billions in expanding. It’s like the gold rush of the 21st century, happening in my back yard. If you ever want to visit a place in the world where even the most lowly of worker gets paid a fortune, visit my neck of the woods. A while back, in my past job, I visited one of the local abattoirs. They’d received a $250k grant from the Federal Government to train low risk prisoners from Karnet Prison to work on the meat line when they were released. The starting wage for training on the meat line was $60k AUD. After 12 months, and being fully trained, the pay was $90k (AUD) a year. And they couldn’t find people to do it. Admitedly I couldn’t do it, the sight of the cows throats being cut on the processing line lives in my mind even today, but for that sort of money…..

food for thought.