The Chambers

After being on the road for quite a while we returned home to a house which had not been lived in for 6 weeks. There were some things which needed tending too, as I’m sure you can imagine. The lawn had been long, but was mown by dad just before we got back (thanks dad!), the house was a bit musty but we opened up the windows and let some fresh air in and the water tasted a little off. I thought it was just that no-one had run water through the pipes for six weeks….

I think the water tastes like algae. It smells off and tastes yuck, so I’ve been boiling the water and then cooling it in the fridge!

I thought it would pass…. I was wrong!

A little bit of google searching and I came across these articles:

ABC Article

Courier Mail article

Random blog post

Blech, apparently fluoride has been added to our water while we’ve been away and it makes the water taste disgusting!

Anna Bligh had this to say

Ms Bligh says it will take some days for the fluoride to reach household taps but there will be no difference to the taste.

rubbish! it’s disgusting…

I’m sure over time we’ll get use to it, but the time being I’m off to buy some bottled water today and starting to look into water filters… In the meantime, I’m drinking water from the pool.

a few quick hits…

the other day I was messing around on the ‘puter and have found this site www.tripit.com. It’s pretty nifty, allowing you to send confirmation emails of travel arrangements to it and then it somehow sucks all the information out of the confirmation and places it in a neat itinerary! The itinerary can have maps, notes, lots of details and allows you to also reference sites like google maps, seat guru (for making sure you get the right seat on that long flight) and other nifty things like weather and the like. It’s v cool. Even cooler was that it has an ical feed, which lets you sync the content in your tripit itinerary with the calendar on the mac, BUT, even better is that that calender then syncs with the calender on my ipod! which means that our itinerary for our next US holiday need not be the massive document we had last time around! I’ll put a link to our itinerary in the blog soon.

our bet on the spurs and mavs got up! we’re on the improve – actually our balance has more than doubled since we started punting on doubles and if we’d been a bit more disciplined in the amounts we’d bet we could be going a lot better…. we’re still down on our starting position (JUST!) but we’re doing much better now that we’ve started punting on the doubles.

I’ve succumbed to another online trinket… twitter. silly name huh? it’s like an updater on what you are doing at any given point in time and for posting random thoughts. It’s in the right hand navigation, but I’ll probably get sick of it in a week or so and remove it in a couple of weeks. i need to try these things for my job though, huh?!

oh well – time to get ready for work. have a great day!

cc

For Christmas, Jackson and I got a Nintendo Wii…. We do share and Jackson does get his fair share of play time. He is developing quite a knack for the ten pin bowling game, but isn’t all that crash hot on Guitar Hero. That does not stop Jackson rocking along to the tunes and playing the part…

here’s proof that I do share the Wii and that Jackson enjoys the game

a few quick updates, on nothing terribly exciting….

1/ on the weekend we cleaned out the fish tank. we put in some faux plants (i got sick of the “real” ones not growing). I cleaned out the filter which was disgustingly dirty and cleared out most of the “duck weed” which was growing in the tank. it looks 100% better & the fish are much happier.

2/ my post on boxedup appeared on technorati and someone from boxed up sent me an email to let me know that very soon they will be adding a feature to their product which will in fact allow you to pick an image to use if you aren’t presented with an image you like. It’s a great improvement to the boxedup tool and I’ll keep playing around with the site to see how it goes.

3/ i’ve spent a fair bit of time mucking around on facebook over the past few days. my page has been updated and I’ve added a few different things, including a sports betting challenge and a book case which can show the books i have & want to read….. chris’ page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=603703031, or linked in the right hand navigation in this blog.

over and out

the subject of this post bears no resemblance what-so-ever to to the topic at hand… however! it does sound better than general weekend update.

not much going down this weekend.

Kylie went into town with Mum yesterday to buy some comfortable walking shoes for the 5th ave assault.

Jacko and I hung out at home and did a lot of nothing. When I say a lot of nothing, I mean we did a lot – but not a lot of anything in particular. playing outside, playing inside, you know… kid’s stuff

Some exciting news is that Kylie and I are parents again! sort of…. My Scarlett Chested Parrots have babies, four of them to be exact. Jackson and I spent some time yesterday cleaning out the bottom of the cage and shoo’ing away ants – there’s lots of ants around at the moment. Lots of ants all around in the yard. not sure why, but there is – out the front, out the side and out the back. anyway, the reason for mentioning the ants is that two of the baby birds had left the breeding box – which I think would have involved a fall of about a meter and a half and were on the bottom of the cage and the ants were giving them grief, biting them and such. So, we pfaffed around and got them back into the box and then they fell out again. I’ll do another check on them and try and get photo’s later. v exciting!

We went out for dinner with Colin and Ju last night. To Thai Mali – it would HAVE to be Brisbane’s best Thai restaurant. I don’t know why we bothered with the menus, we ordered pretty much the same thing we always order! It was nice to catch up with Col and Ju, thanks for dinner! Col and Ju and the boys will be looking after the house and vegas when we’re on our holiday.

The US holiday itinerary is all but done! I’m so close now – i did a fair bit on it yesterday and we just need to tidy up Honolulu – which is our last stop – and we’re done. Only 13 sleeps to go!

This week looms as a busy one at work – with a trip down to Sydney Thursday afternoon for the Australian Marketing Institute Awards. TQ is a finalist in three categories – two finalists awards for the Where Else campaign (brand revitalisation and also for the digital campaign) and a finalist for the Whitsundays campaign. It should be a good night out hopefully. Back on Friday.

I bought Jacko a great little gift this morning – a raiders jersey! he’ll look v cool in that.

anyways, that’ll do it. aveagoodweekend

Today was a public holiday here in brisvegas! The “Ekka”, which is our exhibition, is running at the moment. The ekka has the all the usual stuff, including agricultural displays and other agricultural related “stuff”, side show alley, showbags, etc etc. I was going to go to the ekka one day with Jackson, which I wanted to start doing with him each year as a father-son thing – but with the flu “epidemic” hitting Brisbane / Sth East Qld, I (like many others) have decided to stay away this year. Jackson and will go every second year So, to the people at the Ekka – thanks for the public holiday and the chance to have a short work week. We didnt do too much today – just stuck around the house and went over to Carindale for brunch and some shopping….

I’m a fan of American Football – I started off enjoying the game itself, I enjoy the strategic side of the game, but now I more enjoy fantasy football than the game itself. Fantasy Football is defined as “A game played by football fans in which participants draft their own team and compete with teams built by others. Scoring systems vary among fantasy football leagues, but most are based on points accumulated by players based on their real-life performance in a game on the same day.” Kylie and I call it “ticks and crosses”, because of all the stats and numbers and lists which I print out to reserach. Anyways, it’s “drafting” season for fantasy football and I’m enjoying a couple of drafts now… i’ll post some updates through the year on how i’m going.

only 72 days to go until our holiday!