One night as we were getting out of our car, our next-door neighbour hurriedly approached us before we could close our garage door. We’ve seen her a few times before but our encounters were usually limited to hand-waving or casual exchange of greetings such as “good day” or “good evening” and so on. Not this time.

She basically just wanted to let us know that it was her 40th birthday and that she’ll be having guests on Saturday week. She warned us that it may get loud. We told her we don’t mind that at all and thanked her for giving us the heads-up. She also added that if we were available, she’s inviting us to come along to the party, too.

We didn’t really know anybody in our neighbourhood and I thought that this may be a good opportunity to get to know at least one of our neighbours. I want to go but I don’t know what the expectations are for guests in Australia. I mean, we don’t really know her that well and if we decide to go to the party, what do we bring along with us? A bottle of champagne? An actual gift? Should we only stay long enough to finish one glass of drink or should we stay for longer? Maybe it was just a courtesy on her part to ask us to come over but are we really expected to go at all?

I don’t know the answers so I’ll most likely consult my Aussie-born friends about the protocol involved in such a scenario.

I was reading Alma’s blog last night and found out that we’ve been tagged. The meme involves spilling the beans about eight facts about yourself and here are the rules:

• Each player must post these rules first.
• Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
• At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

So here’s mine:

1. I love to sleep. If you ask me what my hobby is, top spot would go to sleeping. Hubby calls it wasted time but to me it’s perfect for relaxation and recharging. I believe the world would be a better place if everyone gets enough sleep every night.
2. I like Indian food but it does not agree with me. I’d be happily having Indian food for lunch and be miserable for hours after with an upset stomach and reflux. I finally decided I’d rather skip the delicious curries along with the misery and just try other cuisines.
3. I once entered and won an essay writing contest in high school. The prize was a copy of Roget’s thesaurus, which I absolutely loved.
4. My family didn’t own a television for several years when I was growing up. Instead, I amused myself by reading old literature textbooks left behind by a previous tenant.
5. Teachers once entered me into a science and maths contest. The contest was only open to senior students who weren’t in the honour roll so all the smart ones weren’t able to join. I thought it very odd to discriminate against anyone on the honours list but I wasn’t about to tell the teachers how silly and stupid that rule was. I showed up without any arguments and got first place in the science category and second on the maths.
6. I don’t like hot tea. My maternal grandfather and my parents have been encouraging me to drink it since I was young but they haven’t succeeded so far.
7. I always thought I’d be with someone older than me but hubby is 1.5 years younger than me. He assures me nobody could tell anyway.
8. My dad is a heavy smoker and I’ve been a passive smoker for half my life. I’ve tried smoking, liked it and thought that there’s a very real chance of me getting hooked so I stopped after a few puffs. I can’t stand the smell of smoke now.

And now, I tag YOU! If you do decide to respond to this meme, please leave a comment so I know to read your responses.

I know, I know! I’ve been missing from this blog for over a month that you’d be forgiven in thinking that I’ve disappeared off the face of the planet. What’s my excuse? The weather of course! It’s the middle of winter here in Australia and like most everyone else, I’m sort of hibernating. It’s so cold outside on most days that all I want to do is stay at home and keep warm.

However, that does not mean that I’ve been idle. Staying at home gave me the opportunity to have a good look at our home. Since moving in about 2 years ago, we haven’t really done up the place, we basically just moved our old stuff in and forgot all about it. We still had our old mis-matched furniture, the living room was a drab place and every room is really very messy and cluttered.

The first step was to sell off some of our old furniture on Ebay. I’ve managed to sell a rug, recliner, a set of tables, floor lamps, an old TV and even the lava lamp from hubby’s bachelor years! I won’t get rich with the money I got for them but at least I’ve made some space, got some lunch money with the stuff being carted away by happy buyers at no cost to me and I was also able to help the environment in the process (less landfill). Not a bad deal overall, if you ask me.

Next, I had to go through our old clothes. We’ve been keeping tired, frayed clothing in the hopes of re-purposing them but I realised we’ve been keeping a lot of them and not going through them fast enough. We also had some clothes that were still in good shape but just won’t fit anymore (and probably won’t ever again). Most of them went to the charity bin with some pieces put away for use as rugs or work clothes. With less clothes in forgotten boxes and closet corners, I was also able to reclaim some closet space. I’m still not done re-organising the closet and yet it’s already starting to look neater and things are now way easier to find. This exercise also made me realise how much weight I’ve put on! And I thought I was fat then! What should I call myself now?!? Maybe I should watch what I eat this winter as I usually get bigger during the winter and never really lose most of it when warmer weather comes around.

Now, a clean-up won’t be really complete if it does not involve some papers. Bills, magazines, newspapers and even promotional materials are strewn about in almost every corner of our house. To tame the paper monster, I bought several binders from Officeworks and tried categorising them and organising the bills. Owner manuals and instruction booklets were kept together in a box for easier access and to avoid the ever-frustrating search for them whenever the need for them arises. Old magazines, newspapers and promotional materials went straight to the recyclable bin. The study certainly looked a lot less cluttered when I was done and I was able to free up some space in the bookshelves as well.

Purging our house of such unnecessary things has been quite therapeutic. It’s good to have a set place for things and looking at (or even admiring) the neat shelves after I’ve gone through them. Maybe I’m a touch obsessive compulsive, no? Nonetheless, I still have quite a long way to go since I haven’t even gotten to the kitchen pantry and cupboards, linen closet, bedrooms and the garage (where all our junk currently lives). As you have probably guessed by now, I have my hands full till summer comes around again.

I was going to blog about something else until I realised a big problem that suddenly cropped up on my laptop today. I was experiencing an erratic slow reaction from both the laptop’s in-built keyboard and the external USB keyboard I just recently bought.

Basically, when I type something short, it works just fine. But when I type continuously, after a few seconds of keys being pressed one after the other in non-stop succession, the text stops appearing on screen for a second or two before finally streaming the letters that should’ve been typed in one quick swoop. It’s as if the computer had to catch its breath for a second trying to keep up with my typing and then sprinting to catch up to where I was.

It wasn’t really such a big problem if I only wanted to type email or something similar. I don’t really need to look at the screen or the keyboard to type anyway. The main issue with this new problem was that I found it near impossible to play PC games that used the keyboard to navigate the character in-game.

Take Oblivion, for example. To move the character forward, I need to press and hold down the “W” key. With the current keyboard problem I have, what would happen was that the character would continue to run in a forward direction even after I stopped pressing “W” because the computer was still trying to play catch up with my keyboard movements. And then when the computer decides to catch up, the game beeps at me because the computer suddenly sent it a very fast continuous series of “W” presses as it tried to catch up.

The short of it was that I was stuffed unless I get the keyboard working again.

For one thing, I was certain that it wasn’t a hardware issue because the problem was occuring on both the in-built keyboard and the new USB keyboard. It had to be something I installed earlier today. I had installed a new version of the software for my laptop’s videocam and the software for my Sony Ericsson K750i mobile phone. One of them must have been the culprit.

I eventually uninstalled both in an effort to fix the problem. However, that didn’t solve anything. The problem persisted even after I tried reinstalling the keyboard drivers. I was at wit’s end until I rememberd that Windows XP has a very cool featured called System Restore!

Here is a short description of what System Restore is, as taken from Wikipedia:

System Restore is a component of Microsoft’s Windows Me, Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems that allows for the rolling back of system files, registry keys, installed programs, etc., to a previous state in the event of a failure.

System Restore periodically makes a restore point from which the user can restore from at a future date. One can also be set manually but I had never made one since I had my laptop. So, when I decided to use it, I was praying that there was a recent periodical restore point I could use. Fortunately for me, a restore point was created just two days ago.

Using the most recent restore point, I performed a rollback on my system. I anxiously waited for a few minutes as Windows XP attempted to restore my machine’s state to what it was like two days ago. Eventually, it rebooted itself and asked me to log in.

I’m very pleased to say it worked amazingly well! Everything was like it was before. I can type without the computer trying to play catch up. More importantly, I can play games again! All thanks to System Restore (and by extension, Microsoft, for adding this feature in its recent OSes).

We are big fans of Matt Groening’s The Simpsons cartoon series so we are looking forward to watching the Simpsons Movie coming out soon to cinemas. That might be a sign that the Simpsons are coming to an end (some would say “at last!”). That’s probably fine with me as long as they bring back Futurama, a funny sci-fi cartoon series also created by Matt Groening.

Back on topic, with a movie coming out, there is of course the obligatory website associated with the movie. I usually just ignore the official websites for movies but not this time. According to a podcast I listen to, you can make a Simpsons avatar on the movie website. To put it simply, you can design a version of yourself if you had appeared on the TV series.

Here are the avatars Raquel and I made:

The selection of facial features and hair was a bit limited to features found on current recurring Simpsons characters so it can’t be helped that the avatars created might end up looking like one of the characters on the show. Still, there are a lot of options to choose from to make your avatar unique (or at least different).

While waiting for the movie to come out, you can go to the movie site now and give the “Create Avatar” feature a go.

For the Queen’s birthday long weekend back in early June, Raquel and I returned to Ballarat to see Sovereign Hill again. We’ve been there once before when we had our honeymoon here in Melbourne (and only because we still lived in Canberra back then). Anyway, Sovereign Hill is a sort of cultural theme park. It’s a recreation of a Victorian mining town of the 1800’s.

Sovereign Hill has recreated buildings from 1800’s Ballarat and even had actors going around the town posing as town folk. It makes you feel like travelling back in time to the gold rush era. It has a very similar feel to an American wild west town and I suppose it should be expected as it was basically the same time period. So, these Australian mining towns would probably have similar clothes, tools and techonology to American wild west towns from the same era.

Last time we visited Sovereign Hill, we just took a tour bus and so we only got to stay and explore the town for maybe half a day. This time, we spent the whole day there and we also watched the town’s boasted night light show.

Instead of retelling the events of the day, just go to our photo album of our trip and read the captions there:

Ballarat 2007

Click here to view photo album

I’m so busy at work that when I get home, I just want to watch TV or play video games. Any mindless activity would do just as long as it doesn’t involve a lot of thinking. That’s how tired I was.

As you can see, we haven’t even been updating the blog for a quite some time now. Well, I’ll be posting something that I should’ve posted a long time ago. Come back in a few minutes.