cjsimmons.net

In my last post I mentioned that my wife and I are going away on Monday for two weeks, so today we are celebrating Christmas with my family. As we look after my neice and nephew a lot, we decided to buy them a swing set for as their present. The only downside is that I had to assemble it myself. No worries, I’ve become quite the DIY expert since we brought our house.

It was rather easy to put together, but the trickiest part was the slide. It was just so awkward to work with, and I think that some of the parts are not aligned properly. Below is a photo of the finished product.

This coming Monday my wife and I will be embarking on our Christmas Road Trip to Mackay to spend Christmas with her family. Usually we would just take to 2.5 hour flight north, but this year we decided to drive the 22 hours 2000km trip. Lucky for us we have some friends in Brisbane that we will be stopping in at to spend a few nights with.

Personally I can’t wait. The longest trip I’ve made was 18 hours in one go th Port Agusta, but this time we are stopping half way.

If you want to follow me you can do so by following me on Brightkite, Facebook or twitter. I will endeavor to update these sites as often as I can. Unfortunately I wont be using any GPS tracking software as I have an iPhone and it’s restriction to not allow apps to run in the background will prevent tracking from working correctly.

First off, no I have not had a child. My wife and I have been looking after my 2yr old niece and 4yr old nephew for the last two weeks. As much of a delight it is to have them here running around, there have been a few ups and downs along the way. I can say that Lisa and I are all prepared for the day when we start our own family.

Dirty nappies are not fun, and like many fathers (I hope) I have almost thrown up a few times. That is one thing that I have managed to avoid changing so far, but I know that the day is coming where I’ll have to dive in to the soiled nappy and change it.

Discipline is so stressful, for me anyway. We have a count to three and then it’s time to sit on your bed for a few minutes. It’s very frustrating that they know then can keep doing something until you get to 3, so now I’ve decided that I’ll just randomly not count to 3 and just ask once which can be a surprise.

I love my niece and nephew and enjoy having them around, though at times it can get rather stressful, the end of the day is a welcomed with open arms when the kids head of to bed. I can say that we are well prepared for our own children one day.

A few posts ago I mentioned that my wife and I had brought a house, well, last weekend we finally moved it. YAY!!! We manage to move pretty much everything in one day which was a pretty good effort, 3 cars and 2 trailers.

The only problem we had was getting our phone connected. The order for the connected went wrong somewhere, not sure if it was my fault or Telstra’s fault, but I needed a wall socket installed inside the house, but Telstra only activated the phone line. Anyway, I tried to do the socket myself, but could not find the dial tone, so called Telstra and they said there was a fault on the line. The tech installed a new line from my house to the pit outside, and I asked him if he could put on a new socket, and he said ok. So I got it all connected for less then if it was done in the beginning.

Other then that, my wife and I now have the task of unpacking all the boxes and setting this house up. I love owning my own home!!

My wife and I brought our first house!! Yay Woohoo!!

It’s not a new house, probably about 40-50 years old, I’m not exactly sure yet, but we are both really excited about it. Now we just have to pay the loan back.

Anyway, it’s a nice small 3 bedroom home with a single car garage out the back. There is decent back yard space, and it has a brand new bathroom, and kitchen. So all the work it done, and we can just move in, which suites our busy lifestyle.

There are a few little things to do on the outside like re-coating the roof, concrete in front of the garage, and put up a fence to fence of the back yard to keep people out, and kids in.

Here are some photos of the house. They were taken from the real estates website.

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I’ve been pretty busy the last few weeks. I have started volunteering my spare time to my church in helping out with our Food Care ministry which provides very cheap food to low income families. On top of that I have also starting helping out with the IT equipment and other technical problems. As of this week I am now head of IT for the church, and I’m loving it, though this is not a real job, it’s still a voluntary position.

Almost two weeks ago I got my new HOYA Close Up Filter set consisting of +1, +2 and +4 filters. These filters are great and really help out with macro photos that I have been trying to take. Here is a shot of a seaside daisy from my front garden with the +2 and +4 filters attached, oh, and  this flower is approx. 1 inch in diameter.

All I have to say about these filters is that I’m going to have a lot of fun with them. I’m planing on one day soon going to the botanic gardens in Wollongong for a few hours and see what I can do.

What is the point of a blog these days? Unless you are an important person, tech person, or something else along those lines, there doesn’t seem to be much point these days. I personally use Facebook, twitter and flickr as my main source of social interactivity. For that matter, what is the point of even having your own website? I’m finding it harder each day to justify this blog. I’m not kind of person that can write a blog post about random things, just things that relate to me, and my everyday life, but if you want to know about that, then Facebook and twitter will do there.

So, now I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. Do I stop blogging? What am I going to do with this site? There is a part of me that wants to keep this blog alive, mainly due to the fact that it has given me a heap of exposure to web design, and further insight in CSS and PHP. One thought about saying bye is that very few people (if any) visit this site these days. Sure I still get a tonne of traffic to two very old posts, but that is it.

If anyone still reads this blog, what are your thoughts on having a blog these days?

Play with your iPhone!!

For the last few days I’ve been pretty sick with some form of a virus. It didn’t seem to be that bad, now a day later, I’m worse. I have no idea what I’ve got.

Today I have spent the majority of the day stuck in bed, and it only been in the last few hours that I’ve managed to stumble out and face the world. Though I’ll thinking if hearing back soon.

One thing that i’ve come to discover having an iPhone I’d just how awesome they are. I’ve been able to do just about all of my daily tasks, and discovered how some sites have been optimized for the iPhone. Site like Google Reader is one that i’m impressed with. Though it’s not as easy as using a desktop PC.

Another app that I’m loving is the WordPress app. It’s awesome and I’m using it now to type this post though some features like adding in links and things are impossible unless u know basic HTML.

About 2 weeks ago my wife and I went out and brought some DVD movies. One of them had a competition promoting the movie ‘AUSTRALIA‘. So my wife entered her unique code to the competition and won on of the prizes. The prize she won was 100 DVD from Twentieth Century Fox and/or MGM Studios and comes in a leather compendium.

Well, today it finally arrived in the mail. I wasn’t expecting it to arrive so soon, but I quickly worked out what it was. The box was damaged and I feard that it may have been tampered with, so I quickly opened the box, but it was all fine, and wrapped up in a stack of bubble warp.

So yes, 100 movies, most of which I haven’t seen. The oldest movie is Heidi (Colourised) from 1937, and the latest is The Last King Of Scotland from 2007. Here is a photo of the list.

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One that I have to do now is decided what to do with movies that I already have. Now, to get out the popcorn, and start watching all the movies I haven’t watched.

Yes, this is a blog post. I’m still alive and haven’t fallen of the fact of the Earth. Over the last day or so, I’ve been thinking about how this blog has been going to waste, so I’ve decided, over time, that I’m going to start to implementing some new things here. I’m not sure what, but something. Any ideas, would be great, but so far I’m liking the flow that Ben has.

I have a few sites that I’v signed up with like flickr, twitter, etc, that I don’t really use that much, so I’m planing on starting to use these services more, and possible try to integrate them here.

In other news, I’m now the proud owner of a Nokia N95 8GB. So far this is a great phone, and I’m loving what it can do, especially the inbuilt GPS and Wi-fi.