I unpacked my sparkly (not really) new flannel sheets last night, and immediately understood why they advise you to wash them before use. It’s not the excess dye that’ll get you, it’s the Pakistani cloth factory smell that comes with them (and at no extra cost). So I carried them to the washing-machine, popped them in, put in some soap, started her up, then merely seconds later, spotted the pillowcase that had been dropped along the way. It’s a front-loading machine, which of course means that in this situation, swearing may occur.

Blarg. Swore a bit, set the machine to the spin part of the cycle, waited for it to empty, put the pillowcase in, a bit more soap, then started again.

To the ironing then. Set up the ironing board (it seems to make an inordinate amount of squeaky noise when I fold or unfold it), got out the iron, found my shirts for ironing. WTF? Two of the four had strange stains on them. But they had just been washed. Blarg. Swore a bit more, threw the guilty two back in the laundry pile, kept on ironing.

And got back to watching the Sopranos from last Tuesday night. I wonder if it was prompting me to swear more than usual?

Okay, three doonas is too much. Might keep me warm on a cold night, but I can’t damn-well move under the weight of them. The third doona is relegated to the cupboard, and I went and bought some flannelette sheets instead.

Meanwhile, you know that things are getting desperate in the public education sector when no less than three parents have fundraiser chocolates for sale in the office. With the Salvation Army’s quaintly named “Honesty Shoppe” in the game as well, it makes for a crowded marketplace.

People who wanted their supermarket transaction split-up into separate $30 bills just to take advantage of “spend $30 for 4 cents per litre off petrol” and other such deals would have to queue up again between dockets.

The expression “I’ll let you go”, which is meant to sound like the person is doing you a favour finishing up the conversation but in fact means “get off the damn phone, I’m tired of talking to you now, and have more important things to do” would be banned. A couple of my friends are guilty of using this.

Drivers who consistently fail to use their indicators; needlessly park in driveways blocking the footpath; speed at more than 20kmh above the limit; or deliberately stop at intersections blocking the pedestrian crossing (and may I add often consigning themselves to longer delays because their car is not on the traffic light sensor, so the traffic light may not know it’s there) would in the first instance have a large shiny “MORON” sticker applied to the front and back of their car. In the second instance they would be shipped off to re-education camps where they would face very stern Vicroads testers to try to convince them of why they should get their driver’s license back.

The world’s foremost ant experts would convene at my house one afternoon for a cup of tea and to give me their opinions on why ants are visiting my toilet.

People who complained about stupidly trivial things like the colour of their wheelie-bin would have their bins taken away for a month, to see how they liked it with no bin at all. I mean really, a line of yellow and blue rubbish bins in a street is no less or more ugly than a line of plain green rubbish bins. They’re rubbish bins. They’re ugly whatever colour they are.

I hate to say it, but school concerts can be just a little… boring. Even when your kid is in it. Seems to me that the teachers push the whole thing just a little bit too far, so it moves from the realm of cute (”oh, they’re playing that well-known song on their recorders!”) over the border into the kingdom of dull (”is this thing finishing soon?”)

Oh well, I suppose it’s primarily for the participants’ benefit, not the spectators.

I think it’s safe to say that I live in the Coldest House in the Universe(tm). In fact I’m thinking of getting Guiness to come down here and declare it to be so. This morning, for instance, I awoke just the wrong side of 6am, and despite the double doona deployment on my bed, felt too cold. One shouldn’t feel cold in the morning in bed. It’s meant to be a warm place, a spot you don’t want to leave in the morning. Not to mention that I could see my breath in the bathroom, before I’d sipped my first cup of tea.

The problem is insulation, or lack of it, and since it’s a rented house, there’s a limit to action to remedy this. I could leave the (very effective) heater running all night, but I’d prefer to avoid expending more expense and unnecessary fossil fuels, so what I’ll need to do is prepare to deploy the secret weapon: the fabled third doona.

Ultimately this will get fixed when I buy a house and move. When will that be? Uhh.. well, good question. An almost continuous number of depressingly expensive houses have been sold in the area in the last few months. Let’s face it, prime position in the world’s most livable city ™ doesn’t come cheap.

Why do I want to buy a house? I be in control of it. To be able to improve it and change it without having to ask permission, and to know that it’s me that benefits from improvements I make, not some unseen owner and subsequent tenants. To be able to have pets if I want them. To not have to listen to whinging about repair costs (other than my own whinging).

And I never want to have to move again. I hate it.

So, what do I want in a house?

Three bedrooms for preference, one to be a study, but could probably get away with two at a pinch if the living area is big enough that an area can be set aside for the computers somewhere. Especially if there’s room to extend later if I really need more bedrooms. The usual other requirements… you know the kind of thing, a toilet (indoors), bathroom, decent-sized kitchen (well, one I can shoehorn my enormous fridge into, at least), etc.

Has to be the right location. Within 10-15 minutes drive (or preferably walk) of my kids’ primary school. Within 30 minutes of work. And within 10 minutes walk of 7-day-a-week shops (supermarket, bakery etc) and railway station and a park — I firmly believe getting exercise as an incidental part of your lifestyle is the easiest way to stay fit, so I aim to leave the car at home as often as is convenient. If it’s too far, it’s not convenient, and it won’t happen. And not on a main road. If the location is no good, I won’t enjoy living there, and I might as well keep renting.

A garden big enough to for the occasional kick-to-kick in would be ideal. I don’t really care about undercover or off-street car parking, since I can never be stuffed guiding the car into the garage anyway.

And the clincher? Well I don’t want to be half a million dollars in debt. Tricky, that bit.

(By the way, passed my old place today. They’ve still only sold half the renovated flats. heh.)

PS. I see from looking back through the diary that it was equally cold last year.

You remember in Day of the Triffids, particularly in the excellent TV version, how the plants would eerily click before attacking. It’s a bit like that at my house, at night when the wind blows. The enormous bush next to the front veranda, the one that defeated Cable And Wireless Optus Corporation, moves around in the wind, and many of the longer reaching tentacles (okay, maybe they’re just vines) that are intertwined with the veranda cause that to move slightly, resulting in an eerie creaking noise.

Given Tuesday is the day I skive off work early, this afternoon I had a go at trimming the bush back a bit with the shears. The green colour, soft but painfully pointy spikes, and stickiness of the vines all add to the alien feeling. I tried to get at the bits getting into the veranda, but most of them were too high up, and many have stopped being green and are growing into fully fledged sticks of wood, too heavy duty for the shears.

Maybe I need to get one of those anti-Triffid guns.

I’ll look on eBay.

There’s been a lot of fuss in the blogging world over the last few days about Movable Type, and their new pricing. In a superb bit of customer relations, marketing and logic, they’ve bumped up their prices just a week or so after freebie tool Blogger delivered a big upgrade.

I looked around at various blogging tools late last year. I know MT has long been the titan among blogging tools, but I just couldn’t stomach it… it’s written in Perl (which is a pig of a language. I know it’s powerful, but it’s so damn ugly cryptic. Or maybe I’m just criticising because I’ve never quite got a handle on it); it constantly rebuilds pages; it doesn’t use a database (well, it’s optional. Keeping all that info in text files? Yeuch).

A lot of MT users are proclaiming they will jump to other products. Not that they’re being forced at gunpoint to jump off the version 2.6 cliff into the raging torrent of Upgrade Gorge, of course. But you don’t want to get stuck for too long on a product which has no upgrade path. It’s not like a kettle or some other domestic appliance that you can use until it falls apart. New emerging threats like Comment Spam and security vulnerabilities rear their ugly heads. They might not affect your kettle, but they do threaten anything online, including blogs.

WordPress, which I’ve been using for about six months, has been touted as a replacement for disenfranchised MT users, even though it doesn’t have some of the cooler features such as multiple blogs. But it is utterly free (open source under the GPL) and being actively developed and supported. Good to see the open source ideal working so well. The fabbo new version 1.2 is due out sometime this week, whereupon I might finally pull my finger out and fiddle the page design, fix the trackbacks and add navigation niceties like I’ve been meaning to do for the past few months.

Well, that is if I’ve got nothing better to do.

4 cloth bags for $72 of groceries tonight.

1 Mars Lava bar included in the aforementioned shopping, after the subject of this new flavour seemed to continually creep into the conversation over the weekend. Yum.

6 correct in the footy tips for the weekend.

103.9 cents per litre for petrol. Damn, that should be a radio station, not a petrol price. Thankfully I don’t need to fill up yet.

9 years of age Isaac turned on Saturday.

3 movies I have seen recently with Bob Balaban in them.

461 thousand that house I was looking at last week sold for. They originally quoted 390+. Ouch. I’ve got to find something cheaper.

12 plates, 10 glasses, 7 mugs, 2 saucepans, innumerable pieces of cutlery waiting in the kitchen to be washed. Better get on with it.