My favourite eldest daughter suggested an Art Deco type look, with appropriate colours, so I did 🙂 She’ll collect her $20 when she passes “Go” (as in “go see your mother!”) tomorrow 🙂 I’ve done a dark(ish) “Ox-blood” (no, don’t worry, it’s not bright) coloured background as well, but I thought we could start off with a more “basic neutral” colour first – just to see what it looks like. I quite like it, but creating the header was… weird! Usually, when you make a header when you don’t really trust the dimensions that Word Press gives you, you go for “bigger”, rather than “smaller” – because usually things look too small on the finished product. This was the opposite. Remember how I said that some of the blog templates seemed to magnify (and muddy!) the graphics? This is one of them. The header dimensions are quite large, but I wasn’t sure if the finished header stretched right across the page (it does), or only took up the area immediately above the blog text. So I chose a small font for the quote (Verdana size 14) which in normal text terms is pretty small, and an appropriately large font for the “My Word!” text. It positively loomed at you from the screen – more than double its size! So I took the text down two sizes, and it was only a little on the large side. I think I’ve got it about right, but if it’s still too big or too small, please let me know so that I can adjust it some more – because different browsers display things differently. When I used to make my web sets, I had all the major browsers loaded so that I could make sure that the graphics looked “right” on all of them – some people only made their graphics to display properly on IE – all other browsers were “rubbish”, you see, and IE was the only browser worth designing web sets for! How unprofessional – so having said that, I suppose I really should get all the major browsers loaded onto my machine again so that I can check the way my graphics display on all of them myself, rather than ask you to do it for me! But until I do, umm… would you mind terribly if I asked you to let me know? Thanks 🙂
Well, I’m late again this evening – but it’s not my fault! We had an appointment with the Real Estate Agent to have a look at Chippendale Court at 1.30pm this afternoon, so off we went at around one-ish. We were early, of course – it’s less than two kilometers from here! The Agent was already there, so we went in and had a look around. For some reason or other, I’ve been terribly tired, as in sleepy tired, all day, plus the fact that I’ve had a very runny nose and occasionally, stinging and watery eyes, I think it’s Hay Fever – but I also suspected sinusitis and partially blocked eustachian tubes, because I’ve been waking up slightly headachy, and today I was even more wobbly than I normally am when I’m wearing shoes. Anyway, as soon as we walked in, I noticed that the parquetry floor was pretty slippery – I think they’d waxed it, or polished it, so I was extra careful. It wasn’t a bad house at all – but far too much emphasis had been put on dark-painted “feature walls”. Dark chocolate brown and dark raspberry were the ones I noticed most – both colours that I like, but there was just a bit too much of it. House is split level, sort-of, with everything on the ground floor, but stairs leading down to a rumpus room, the laundry, and an enormous storage area. There are 16 steps down to the rumpus room et al (I counted them!), so going down and up was like doing one floor down and one floor up, here. But the stairs are narrow, steep, dark, and have a rather nasty and difficult to negotiate “bend” in the middle. Even without my shoes on (I can go up stairs with my shoes on, but coming down I have to be barefooted, or I’ll end up in a heap at the bottom of the stairs!) it was quite scary on those stairs! The bedrooms are all a decent size, and all have built-in wardrobes, the bathroom is “serviceable”, but would need re-tiling, as would the en-suite and the kitchen. Apparently at some stage the floor has moved, and nearly all the floor tiles are cracked. The garden is ginormous (something that neither of us needs or wants – we just want enough room for a small veggie garden!) and boasts two olive trees and a grape vine. There’s also a beautifully made “cubby-house” with a sand-pit behind it, and an Olympic sized jacuzzi! The block is very steep, and is so crowded with trees, shrubs, and “jungle” that I doubt we’d ever need to have the grass mowed! Final verdict? A very nice place (if you don’t mind the parquetry) more storage than even the Vatican could use, and a lovely “English” type garden – but not, unfortunately, what we want for a home.
Weigh-in today. I went down two points, from 87.3kg to 87.1kg. Two points is good! One point is good, too. I can live with that! 🙂 Let’s see what happens tomorrow morning – after all, I did do an “extra floor’s worth” of stairs today! 😉
Oh, this afternoon we picked up our pictures/photos wot we had taken back in April! They’re very nice indeed, and I’ll put them all up for you to see just as soon as Julian shows me how to make an “album” available for public viewing on Flickr! I think they turned out brilliantly! Julian looks really good in all of them, but I was kind-a dreading seeing mine, because I always look terrible in photos – however, miracle of miracles, these ones actually make me look semi-human! 🙂 As well as the beautifully mounted photos, we also got their files on disc, which makes it a lot easier to put them online, rather than trying to scan them, and do it that way… anyway, ’tis almost news and dinner time, so….
+————————–+ * Dinner & Television Break * +————————–+
So, here I am back again. I’ll endeavour to get those photos online for you tomorrow, if possible. My favourite eldest daughter will be over, and no doubt we’ll spend an entertaining afternoon watching “Orphan Black”, if we have any more episodes to watch, or “The 100” – but I’ll tell you all about that tomorrow night. I’m glad we went and saw that house today – after slipping through the gigantic gaps in our current attention span, it’s now one less “candidate” to have to worry about – so we probably won’t be seeing any more houses now until Saturday morning. Vermont South is Open For Inspection again on Thursday night at 5.30pm – Julian thinks there’s very little point in going to see it again before Saturday morning, but I think we should. It would (a) give us a chance to see what it’s like in artificial light (but is that really going to make a difference? Who knows? It might…) and (b) re-affirm our interest in it with the Agents. Personally, I vote we ask Carmen whether she thinks it would be advantageous for us to go, when we have our little pre-Auction War Council with her that morning. And that’s about it from me for tonight – last night’s blog was a real mammoth of a day’s re-cap, so I’m making tonight’s entry a little bit shorter, to make up for all the reading you had to do last night 🙂 Don’t forget to let me know if the new header is alright, or if it needs adjusting, and do drop by again tomorrow night to see what we’ve all been up to! I believe we have a Valuer going through Vermont South tomorrow morning – heaven forbid that we should pay more than the house is worth! 😉 The April photos should hopefully be online by then, and they are worth having a look at. I’ll be able to tell you whether walking nervously (no, walking is the wrong word! “inching” works much more betterer!) …I’ll be able to tell you whether nervously inching my way up and down the equivalent of an extra floor today at Chippendale has increased my weight loss, and also whether I’ve chewed enough of my nails off (waiting for Saturday!) to make me any lighter! So never fear, there’ll be lots to entertain you here tomorrow – but until then, do try to bee good, remember that in the presence of a positive attitude and enthusiasm, anything becomes possible, and don’t forget to drive carefully, keep warm, and take care of yourselves… but above all… stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
My Word! 